Can You Go?: Assessments and Program Design for the Active Athlete and Everybody Else

Training people in sport as a coach or in fitness as a personal trainer is certainly rewarding work. But there’s a problem: What do we do next? There are countless books on diet and exercise, hundreds of machines, devices and gimmicks to train people, and new gadgets and gizmos are popping up with every passing day.

Can You Go? answers this question: What do we need to do next?

Appropriate assessment leads to an appropriate answer. When we find a mobility issue, let’s focus on mobility work. The same is true for both body composition and strength—we focus on what we need to do, not what we want to do. For the performance athlete, sometimes assessment can be the short, brutal and harsh question, “Can you go?”

Lessons from this frankness can be learned by both the coach and the trainer. The deconditioned and the elite share the same basic human body. Our job is to enhance performance and quality of life with every training situation.

Dan John has spent his life with one foot in the world of lifting and throwing, and the other foot in academia. An All-American discus thrower, Dan has also competed at the highest levels of Olympic lifting, Highland Games and the Weight Pentathlon, an event in which he holds the American record. Dan spends his work life blending weekly workshops and lectures with full-time writing, and is also a religious studies instructor for Columbia College of Missouri. As a Fulbright Scholar, he toured the Middle East exploring the foundations of religious education systems.