Legendary Weightlifting Coach Shares The 2 BEST Exercises For Knockout Power w/ Tim Swords (SSOF Ep 206)

Tim Swords0:17

But I mean, it just didn't do what Olympic lifting did for me. So once I started doing that, I just continued to go and go. And then I got involved with—played a little professional sports. After that I coached at East Carolina University as a strength conditioning coach. And I tell you what, I just—it just was the impact that it had on those guys.

Now also the impact that for me as a coach—I was working with some of the inner city kids and I was like man, this is really really where I think my passion is. I like the older guys, but when the kids—when I got involved with the kids in the community, that's when everything changed for me.

So, giving something back, seeing these kids accomplish your goals. Some of them did have—didn't have good role models. I've always felt myself to be a good role model. I've always cared and it didn't matter to me if the kid came into the gym and had a club foot. I've trained people with club feet. I've trained people in gangs. I've trained people with prosthetics, believe it or not. I trained people of all—they just wanted to get better.

And my background has been basically developing myself as a coach, working with a huge array of different people from different parts of society, and basically building relationships with everybody. I'm—I just do what I can on a daily basis to try to continue to build relationships and build self-esteem and discipline. That's what this little program has been all about. That's where—but that's what it's been about. Even when I was a college football coach, I'm always trying to do something.

Hey, I'm not—I'm not St. Michael here, but what I am is—this is my passion and it is something that, thank the Lord for something that I feel I'm fairly good at, and that is trying to get folks heading down the right path. And there's been hundreds of success stories. I'm just a piece of that puzzle, but it's one of these guys will tell you that I'm here because you believed in me and nobody else did.

So anyway, so it's been an ongoing process for five decades on trying to help kids. And sometimes kids grow up and sometimes they go and they play professional sports and sometimes they make international teams for the United States. And sometimes they become black belts and sometimes they win jiu-jitsu world championships and sometimes they do all sorts of cool stuff. Not does everybody do that? No. But sometimes you have somebody that reaches that goal.

And the main goal is that everybody is a decent person and that they care about other people. That's the main goal. But if you got somebody like Sarah Robles who goes and wins two medals in the Olympics, well shoot, how you gonna beat that? I mean that was—and it wasn't always her goal. But that was something that she was good at and it took some sports psychology to keep her involved in a game. But anyway, that's what I'm—that's what I'm trying to—I probably got off the subject a little bit there, but that's what I've been trying to do since 1979.

James de Lacey6:53

Well, when you say pro sport, American football, is that where you—

Tim Swords6:57

I played American football.

Yeah, I was involved. I was a four-year letterman at East Carolina University as a football player. I played in 40-some college football games. And then I signed a couple pro football contracts. Didn't work out for me too well, but it was okay. I mean, I proved myself that okay, well, I've worked real hard and then I proved myself that I could do it.

In that, when you're running into people at 20 miles an hour with your head, got people like Herschel Walker, and you're tackling that guy and you understand that all the training that you did was the reason that you could pull that off. He's pretty tough guy, but it wasn't just him. Everybody at that level is a tough guy.

James de Lacey7:15

I watch a fair amount of football now, so I can see that. But I wanted to go down the road of specifically in the sport of Olympic weightlifting. And then also we can look at weightlifting for other sports, but I mean specifically in the sport of weightlifting, I mean, you've coached a ton of different athletes. Right now you have Kobby Ferguson in your garage as you mentioned. You have Sarah Robles from earlier.

I guess the one of the main—well let's start this, it'll be a little more general, but how do you differentiate what goes into a program for these different athletes? Because weightlifting is a relatively, I guess, simple sport from the outside, but there's obviously little nuances in there. So how do you decide what someone needs versus maybe what someone else needs?

Tim Swords8:47

It's pretty complicated. It's extremely, extremely complicated. Especially as these people mature. But I'll give you a little history about Sarah. Of course, she was a fantastic athlete. High school national champion in the discus and actually went to college at Alabama to throw the discus.

But I coached her at the 2008 Junior World Championships in Cali, Colombia. And Sarah did—she was happy. She was really happy and excited to be there, but you could tell that was not what she really wanted. She was a thrower. And I kept on talking to her the whole time. I was there with Mike Tone, Joe Machella, and I think Cal Pierce was the other coach. So we were there together.

And I kept on telling those guys, I said, 'Do you see this girl? What she's doing?' And every basic—they said the same thing. She's going to go to—she's going to college to throw the discus. And I said, 'Well, I'm going to try to talk her into being a weightlifter.'

So to get back to her training, when she came here—when she finally came here—and well, she liked my attitude. But when she got here, she was already mobile enough. She was already explosive. We needed to work on her strength. She had a muscle imbalance, a terrible muscle imbalance on the right side as a thrower. She threw with the right hand. So she had a rotational—she had more ability to rotate obviously on the throwing hand.

No one's ever worked with her about that. So she had a—the shoulder would rotate forward, the medial trap would work more, the posterior deltoid was not stiff. So she always lost her lift by turning. So right off the bat, believe it or not, we did some bodybuilding. We did bodybuilding. We also did descending pulls. We did descending pulls for a while where she would—we would take weights off the rack, off the blocks.

We would do something as simple as just opening your body, like the Naniagans say, open your body big, body tall, military style type posture, and do a shrug. So I say shrug—I say a lot of things. My cues are different, but I think the traps should be lengthened. And then, as they said in Russia when I was there training—I went on my own dime, I went over there—they talked about, the translation came out to a tricep lat tuck. Now that's what the translation came to. And that wasn't exactly that, but it was tucking the shoulder with the upper back.

So basically just standing tall and tucking the tricep like tuck. So the arm, the tricep is not flexed and the head's flexed a little bit, but you're basically—it's just hanging. So we had her doing that and she caught on to that really fast. So for—

James de Lacey12:15

This is a descending pull or just a shrug?

Tim Swords12:19

We did everything. So descending pull, are you lowering it off like at top position and lowering it to the floor? Is that what you mean? We had three or four stages of painting home what the person needed, and one set was one rep in each one of these positions. So you did a shrug, you did a power position pull, you did below the knee shift pull, and you did a one inch off the floor shift pull it back in the blocks.

Now I tell you, I'm my own guy on some of this stuff. So I use the term towing the barbell. You're not pulling on the dang thing. Your arms are long. You hear it all the time. Well, my arms are like ropes. My arms are long. There, you this and that. But you are literally hanging on the thing, the way I think is once your body's braced and set and the back of the shoulder is controlling the weight, then your legs are doing all the work.

So, your engines from the hips down, that's the winch motor, and then your arms are the cable, and the weights obviously what you're pulling.

If you're pulling the car out of a ditch with a winch or something, but that's, we tow the barbell. And towing the barbell is we're not doing any arm work. If you're doing arm work, you're failing. If you're doing arm work, you're failing. If your shoulders aren't moving at all, you're failing. So if I'm bending over the bar and my shoulders do this, oh, if they move at all, that's failure. We're, you can't move. If you're concentrating, if your shoulders moving, then you are not using your body. You're concentrating on something else.

We need to tow the barbell. No one deadlifts by moving their shoulders off the ground. You can't do it if you're doing a max deadlift. We're trying to mimic what we learned in powerlifting or the Olympic lifting deadlift or anything. I don't care about you doing a deadlift with 600 pounds and rounding your back and fighting like heck and your shoulders in your bed. No, if it's not done exactly right, it doesn't count. Don't count it.

Kobe did a 600 pound snatch grip deadlift the other day. Well, about six weeks, about three weeks ago. And we counted it because nothing moved with his legs. But anyway, so you're talking about two different animals here. So Sarah, that's Sarah Robles. Sarah Robles also had a sweet spot when it came to that fixed her, by the way, when she, when that right there fixed her because along with that internal rotation of the shoulder, that moved her to the ball of her foot on the right side.

So she would push off balance and the hip would kick to the side. Now you got to look at people from a different angle in order to see that stuff. People go, okay, well, I'm looking at this angle. Well, you can't see everything from that angle. You got to set things up and look at different angles. You'll see what the body's doing or where they're applying more force or watch the feet. Watch the feet. Ball of your feet, the little knuckle under the toe, heel. Watch what the foot's doing. Watch if there's tracking.

It's hard to see. The complicated part of this is actually being able to have seen enough lifts and know your lifter well enough that this is what they're doing because I have seen this and I know this person and I've seen a million lifts over the last 45 years. So I know what to look for. You can look at someone's body just by their move and I can see what they're doing.

I can see if there's, if they're slang, I don't care if it's just a sixteenth of an inch. You could tell it if you've got good vision and you know what to look for. If you got a little bit of a sound biomechanics, you can figure this out.

Now, so Sarah Robles, now she got to the point where she was strong enough. Okay? And what I mean by that is she was a 260 kilo back squatter. Well, gee, how do you got to back squat more than 260 to clean and jerk 160-some? You don't. You just have to continue to work on skill and keeping her motivated and keeping her confidence.

Kobe Ferguson didn't have confidence issues. He'd go run into a Mack truck. I mean, that guy has no confidence issues, but he has to work on skill. So the programs for those two people, we started out originally a two-a-day stuff for Sarah. After a while, okay, it was beating her up. We didn't do it very long. Did it for about six weeks and it was killing her.

She was living with me for six months. She stayed here with me. She didn't have any means. So she lived here with me and so we did that. And then finally got her a job. But she didn't have to do anything but lift weights.

Kobe doesn't have to do anything but lift weights either. But his issue, he didn't have too many issues. His issues are technique. The guy's the strongest guy in America for his body weight for sure. He's stronger than all the supers either, any. So he's stronger than those guys. But there's a guy that we don't count his maxes.

Again, just like I said, if anything is not, it was perfect. You're dropping your chest or your shoulders are moving, your arms bending. We don't count it. You wanted to go a little heavier, 600 on a snatch grip deadlift? Well, you don't need to do that. You're not going to snatch. We hopefully we'll snatch 190 down the road.

But the athletes are, he's actually a better lifter heavier. Makes kind of sense. Sarah wasn't a better athlete heavier. She got heavier, she got slower. She got lighter, she got weaker. Kobe Ferguson gets heavier, he starts powering big weights. And because genetically his bone structure is that he can handle the load on his frame. So their workouts, even though it's only four days a week, they were, they're way different.

Sarah had to work skill. She had to work skill all the time. It got to a point there at the 2016 Olympic Games, her skill level, she'd been with me well over a year and a half at that point. We got her on a team. We got her in 2015 that actually represent United States, which put another woman on the team at the 2015 Worlds in Houston. Your lovely wife was in that meet. And that progressed USA Weightlifting, I think that helped USA weightlifting.

And then of course we all know what Sarah did down there and the story behind that. Basically is that she was there and I was in the training hall all the time watching people lift and I was thinking to myself, well, God bless Zygmunt, but he wasn't doing much. I don't know what he was doing. But Kyle Pierce and myself, I mean, we were watching what other people were doing.

I don't know what Zygmunt was doing, but I pretty much was watching the heavyweights. I was going and watching the super women lift. I was watching them lift and then I thought, oh, hell, Sarah, if you do this and this, you're going to win a medal. I said, let's just go six for six and I think you're going to win a medal.

Well, she did great. She went six for six. And on the last clean and jerk, I told her, I said, I asked her, I said, well, Sarah, can you give me the best eight seconds of your life? And she looked at me, she goes, yeah. I said, well, do it for yourself and your family and go do it for the country. You're going to make history here. You can do this. Give me the best eight seconds. And she went out and did it. And she won that medal. So that was the start of really good things.

And so what did she need to do? She just needed to continue to work technique weight. She was strong enough. Kobe Ferguson's been strong enough. Kobe Ferguson is a guy who has, he also had some imbalance issues being a thrower, being an American football player who carried the ball with his right hand most of the time. I'm telling you, it's plain to me as the nose on my face. I mean, it's easy for me to see.

It's easy for me to see when a guy like Kobe Ferguson reaches down to grab a hold of the bar when he first gets here and I can walk up behind him and take my foot and click his heel and move his foot. Okay, we got a problem, buddy. You're already pushing off the ball of your foot on this side and you're not on this side.

So it's knowing what to look for and knowing we got to fix those things, too. We got to fix those things. Well, the descending pulls are something that we had to do with both those people. The other thing with Kobe, Sarah did a better job of working her legs from the floor for the shift. And Kobe, we did it yesterday. So as a warm-up, we did, we're doing a deadlift from the floor to above the knees and then we engage and shift and get the knees back underneath the floor above the knees, shift the hips and then re and do it again.

Same thing, loading up the quadriceps, because the testing they did on him at the Olympic Training Center showed that once the barbell came past his knees, he was a predominant lower back guy. The lower back, it clicked in and he wasn't even using his legs this. So you're cleaning 480 pounds by, hey, that's a typical American college strength and conditioning program type of pull there.

The legs aren't even involved. So you start using your arms and the traps. It's a premature pull and it just, there's guys out there that can do it. He can do it, but it's not, we're not skill, we're trying to work on skill.

And he just was not, he was not, he's a brute. He's a fast brute. That's what he was. Now he's becoming more skilled. And is he there where he needs to be yet? No, he's not. But he's smart. He's coachable. And hopefully we'll get there. If he gets there, he'll play a trick, 240 kilos. He'll do it. He's strong enough. He's another guy that's strong enough.

I was asked the other day, well, why is he only doing 330 kilos for a double in the back squat? What's he got to do? What does he have to do, 320 for a double? I mean, have you ever seen a guy and have a hard time standing up on the, let's put our effort into doing the things we need to put our effort into if you're already strong enough.

I only had like three or four, Hadassah Pong, he was strong enough. He was a world champ guy. And Cameron Schwab made the Worlds and he had an issue and he made several senior Pan Am teams. He was strong enough. He back squatted 330 and then he got slower.

So well, hell, let's not back squat 330. His body weight went up. He slowed down. Well, that's not helping us. I mean, everybody said 20, 25, 30 years ago, you'd have asked me that, well, yeah, we have to continue to get stronger. No, you don't, because personally I can say for myself as an athlete myself, as a football player, as I got bigger, if I wasn't careful, I slowed down.

Well, being an American football player, if I'm 117 kilos, which is where I played at, and I could run a 4.67, 40-yard dash, and then I got up to 130 kilos and I run a 4.9, 40, well, I'm not the player at 4.9 as I was at 4.68.

At 4.68, now I make plays because I got too big for what my bone structure could handle. Yeah, sure, I was stronger, I was slower. I was slower. So anyway, it, this stuff for me, I've been doing this stuff for so long. It's easy. It's really kind of easy. Now, we write things down. We've got this program for Kobe is, we have an eight-week, we do it a couple times a year and he's only been here for a year and we did some stuff every year before then.

But we do a strength program because if he doesn't have anything planned, now next year it's going to be a little different because he's got all these things he has to do for him to qualify. So it's going to be a little different, but we did the strength program for eight weeks and we did it to work on his posture. I, if you're, once again, I'm a stickler on this. If you're coming off the floor, if you're pushing off the floor and you got something, if anything, your bar trajectory is going to be screwed up.

You start moving things to different parts of your back. Different muscle groups have to work. We start doing things that don't help us. There's a certain way to do it for that individual. There's a certain way that that individual does it. It might be a little bit different than you or different from me, but this is what his leverage tells him to do. This is what's best for him. And if we change from that, well, I tell you what, we've changed a lot from that because we've had to relearn a lot.

James de Lacey27:33

Well, what might be actually interesting? Well, I was going to say, well, when we actually come by again, this might I'm going to have to get you to take me through that descending pull because that sounds legit. But the what might be interesting as well for listeners is I know it's very general, might be to the individual, but maybe just some common technical mistakes that you come across often and then kind of maybe how you potentially address some of them.

Tim Swords27:57

Okay. Well, all right. Well, one of the we talk about what was happening yesterday. Now, this is just about a couple of the females that work out here. Is that okay for you? Okay, just talk about the a couple of these girls that are doing a comedy.

Well, so I got a couple young ladies here and they're athletic. They're both lifters. One I think has an opportunity to go to some place like LHUS or Lenol or something. But anyway, they both have issues. They don't they're soft when they receive the bar.

Yeah. So it's almost like in a snatch, they're soft when they receive it. Clean seems to be pretty good, but now sometimes it's arm action. Sometimes it's just that they're just soft. So another one of my cues, and a lot of people disagree with this, but it seems to work for me, and these kids know what I'm saying. The queue I use, well, we actually do presses behind the neck now with them.

And we do some snatch balances. I used to call them drop snatches. We do snatch balances to work on that. But those are specific warm-ups of what they're going to be doing. And we don't spend a lot of time on that. But we warm the shoulders up by press and some snatch balances.

The other thing that I do with people who are lacking in some upper back strength and I do it a lot, I do it a lot for football players and wrestlers and these other people. We'll stand here and we'll take the shoulder. Now I'll talk about stretching the bar and tearing the bar in half. A lot of people don't use that cue. I don't like that cue. But I go like this. I stop. I'll stretch it. Then I'll go like this with the shoulders and raise it.

I do that and there's only really one other way to develop upper back strength as the trap does something differently and this rotator cuff does something differently is that that elevates the other things are tightening while this is lengthening. Well, that builds support. If as I'm as I'm elevating my shoulder, I'm building, I'm lengthening the back of my shoulder and the trap is doing something. The upper trap is tightening like crazy. The other trap is actually the rhomboid, everything. It's lengthening some.

So what else can you do to do that? Well, that's going to build support for what you're pulling the bar overhead. So we've started doing it with these girls now. They now they both PR in the snatch recently. But that is something that is it was a physical problem. They were not strong in that position. So we warmed up. We did a warmup in a way that's going to warm that shoulder up to do the presses. We did some drop snatches to get some positional stuff. Sometimes there's issues with them bracing when they're receiving it in the bottom. So, we got to brace.

I'm not a fan of wearing the belt snatch, but I got this one's real tall. I said, put a belt on. Doesn't matter to me. I don't care. I wear a belt. I think I'm no problem wear belt. Because some people say, "Oh, we don't wear belts. We can't do that. You go to 80%, we might let you wear a belt. Nobody wears belts on snatches. That's what they say." Why? Why not? You can use it. Put it on. What's your goal? Lift more weight in a competition. Put the damn belt on. So, but anyway, those things helped or are helping them.

The other thing is as you see when people kick that bar, they kick that bar forward. Well, we've done a lot of work from them in the out of the power position, too. And opening your body. Don't close your body up. It's open. Open the chest. Sternum up. Some people do well with their head in a neutral position. Some people do better when they go like this.

They look up. They look up a little bit. They're not looking here. They look up a little bit. Your center of gravity is going to go where your eyes go. I mean, if I sway my eyes to the left, your center is going to go. That's just that's subconsciously doing it whether you like it or not.

Just like a baseball player. Throw you a ball, keep your head in there. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the golf ball. Keep your eye, it's the same thing. It's the same and everything. Your eyes, the center of gravity will follow your eyes. So, some of that stuff and that's a huge problem that I have because I don't recruit anybody. People show up here, they want to lift weights, lift weights, come over and lift weight. We'll try to get better. We've had 64 national champions on that ground. Most of them were kids, but it's a good thing.

But that's the type of stuff that's something simple that we've been working on and it became fruitful yesterday when they both PR the snatch. Finding something it's it takes repetition. It takes you've got to watch a lot and I admit I'll tell you something. I'm pretty intense guy. I'm an intense person and I'm passionate. I'm not going to if we can't do it that day, if we can't do that percentage that day, yeah, we'll go down and we're going to do it right. Sometimes there's a lot of errors.

I like I say these kids all the time, "Hey man, if you're here, you're here eight hours a week, what are you doing the other 160 hours a week? What are you doing? Are you taking care of yourself? You being selfish?" They'd be selfish. You can be selfish. Eight hours here, 160 getting good sleep, turn your phone off, eat well, stretch, do the other things you need to do, be a good human being out on the street, make good grades, whatever. But that's the type of stuff that goes on all the time with what I do here because

Everybody is different. I had five kids here yesterday. I had four 12 year olds and I had a 10 year old and 11 year old and these guys are all different, different sizes. But they're all playing little league football. So what we did was working, we worked on skill. We worked on skill with lightweight. Some of them, two of these kids have been they lifted national, so they could actually do squat clean and jerks. They could do it. And so they were doing skill work. And after that we did a few other things for their shoulders.

And I do a lot of shrugs. I believe in shrugs. And we never had a concussion in my life after 14 years of doing that, hitting people. And so I think the neck and the shoulders need to be as strong as we could get them. And so always I believe fighters should have strong traps. My brothers and I, I mean, whatever you could hold on to as straps, you ought to be able to shrug the bag on thing 10 times.

And I'm sure you've heard of Dick Smitty Smith from York Barbell. He was Leo Totten's coach and he was Bob Hoffman's right-hand man up there in the Olympic team coach back in the 60s and Smitty helped me out quite a bit as a college athlete. And Smitty told me once he goes he used the term he said, "You need to stress the organism." I said, "Okay, as you get old you stress the organism.

Well what do you mean by that?" And he goes, "Well, you have to continue to, it's not like I'm try at my age that I'm trying to do anything extraordinary, but it's good to stress, it's good to stress your system."

So when I was a football player, we were at the end and we shrugged three days a week and like I say, I never had a problem. We getting, I broke my nose another five times, but never had problem. So, we would get to the point, well, we were shrugging right at 800 pounds 10 times. Sometimes the straps would break.

No, that's true. Sometimes the straps would break and it get ugly, but we would go, now, we wouldn't do that every day, but there'd be a time about once a month we would put up close to 800 pounds in shrug and that was very beneficial. Never had any problem hitting people.

Think about a boxer or an MMA guy. Think about how, and if you're if you're going, if you're doing a good full range of motion and you're doing pulls and you're doing power snatches and you're doing all this, you're going to you're not going to hurt your range of motion. I mean, people, "Oh, we're going to get tight. We're going to do." Not if you do it with proper posture and you tow the thing and not bend your biceps and premature shrug and have interior rotation of the shoulder and do all this other stuff. Do things right. I mean,

James de Lacey37:08

Funny enough, I had Bill Kazmi, the strongman legend, comment on one of my Facebook things about what he used to do for his traps. And like you mentioned, I think I have to find the screenshot, but he was doing like over 600 lb snatch grip shrugs with like for like 20, 25 reps.

Tim Swords37:22

Wow.

James de Lacey37:23

Crazy. Like,

Tim Swords37:25

Yeah, that's huge.

James de Lacey37:25

It's nuts.

Tim Swords37:26

Well, I mean, some people are just naturally going to be good at it. That's, hey, we'll start out with my father. That guy had like a Boston butt thing of meat on his. It just kind of carried over to the kids and we had no problem just picking stuff up and pulling it to our shoulder. We didn't know what we were doing.

But, I had another brother that hand cleaned 400. I power cleaned 418 as a football player. I mean, one of my other brothers, but this is back when Norbert Shamansky actually helped him. It's kind of a great story. Norbert Shamansky, he coached me at the National Sports Festival in 1981 and he actually remembered my brother.

My brother was a wrestler and a football player at Virginia Tech and he wrote Shamansky in the mid-60s and Shamansky wrote him back and gave him a program. Well, everybody's talked about what a maniac, how tough of a guy he was. He was tough. I remember one time I did something there in Syracuse at the sports festival when he grabbed me by my trap.

He started squeezing on my trap and I swear to God my traps were a whole lot bigger back then, I was a kid, and I swear to God it's almost like he could have taken it and touched fingers if he wanted to. The guy was a very strong man.

And he says to me, he goes, "Swords." I said, "Yes sir." He goes, "What are you, some type of a dummy?" And I said, "Well Norbert, if you think I am, I am." So don't argue with that now, because that guy at 50 something, there was no doubt in my mind that he was much, much more of a man than I ever thought about being at 23, 24 years old.

But being around, being blessed and being around people like Norbert Shamansky and Smitty. The other one was Tommy Kono. And for some reason or other, I tell you what, that guy liked me a lot. And every time I'd seen him, I've got stuff under, you saw it in the room. I got Tommy Kono memorabilia. I mean, this guy's giving me stuff. He was just because he knew I was passionate about the sport and he knew what I was doing with these kids.

I'm not going to tell you I've worked with more kids than anybody else in the United States, but I think Wesley St. Joe, Missouri State, and I guarantee he's worked with more, but I think I might be second, as far as working with children over the last 36 years. But this is what I like, and those guys like that and Joe Dube for instance, you remember Joe Dube, the heavyweight, the last American to win the world championships for United States. He won the world championships in 1968.

And I can remember a kid, I mean I remember as a kid, I was at a drugstore with my mom and my two older brothers were gone and they were doing their thing and they were in college playing sports and whatnot. So I'm in this drugstore and I go by, there's a strength and health magazine sitting there. Back in the old days they had soda fountains and they had candy. That's what they used to be back in the day in the United States.

So I saw this magazine there and I said, "Well, can I have this magazine?" And the magazine was like 50 cents or something. And she said, "Sure." So she bought me this magazine. Well, I took the magazine home and it had Joe Dube on the front of it doing a press. I think he was pressing, I think the world record at the time was Olympic press was like, I think 470. It was 215, I think, 215. So he's pressing 215 and I read this thing, I read this magazine three times.

Well that was a great revelation for my mom and dad because, being mildly dyslexic, I didn't like to read, but I read the magazine three times. My dad goes, "Oh, make sure he gets that magazine every month. He's going to read that magazine three times." And having a weight room in our basement in West Virginia, probably the best weight room in the entire Ohio Valley. It was, I'm telling you, big guy, you wouldn't believe the weight room we had.

Of course, when you got all these guys from one family that are going to school, playing major college football, and one of my brothers had 70 football scholarships. 70. When you have all these guys and he was knowledgeable, Shamansky was the one that helped him, and it kind of brought people together in that basement. And so we had a platform, a huge power rack, pull-up bars, squat bars, dip bars, like, we had two benches, we had it just with 11 foot ceilings in a basement in West Virginia.

And whatever we needed, my dad would, he could afford it, but most of the time he was down at the foundry having things made. He might have a 45 pound plate. He's got a 46 pound. He might have one that's 43 lbs. But he made it possible for us to train and the community, the kids in the area.

Oh, it just kind of opened up, people, our house was like a mecca for strength training for five or six years until finally the first gym came, first gym came involved. But anyway, I don't even know how I got off on that. But that's it. That's more that's more

James de Lacey43:31

But now it's your house.

Now it's your garage. Now it's in your garage where

Tim Swords43:38

That was the first thing.

I've never had anything. It's never been a fancy place. I don't know anything about fancy. Now look at me. Nothing about me is fancy. You were here. You saw it.

James de Lacey43:54

Yep. Well, no. Odin loves all the fish there. So, we'll be back soon. Odin loves all your fish.

Tim Swords44:03

Oh, yeah. Okay. Well,

James de Lacey44:06

That's Odin's favorite.

Tim Swords44:08

I just bought some more. So, Odin, come check them out. I bought some more for a big tank.

James de Lacey44:14

Nice. I think what would be interesting as well, you obviously mentioned you talked a lot, you've trained a lot of wrestlers, jiu-jitsu guys, and you talked a lot about the traps for fighters, even just athletes generally. It might be interesting to go like how does weightlifting or how does the training differ or change at all for you training Olympic weightlifters versus sporting athletes like football, wrestling, etc.

Tim Swords44:36

Okay. You know I tell you everybody, if I heard you correctly, everyone here learns how to do Olympic. If you have mobility problems, that can be an issue, but sooner or later you can learn how to power and you can learn how to do this stuff from different positions. So we, and it takes time.

Like I said, I had those younguns out there yesterday and it's amazing how some of these kids that are 10 have poor ankle flexibility. Some of them, like I said, the two kids that have been here that competed in the nationals a couple years in a row. And then you got these other boys, some of them could do it naturally, some of them can't. Some of them explosive, some of them aren't.

But once again, it's just so we're doing different things at different levels. And these kids are all little league football players, which I'm not a big fan of, and they're all baseball players, and one other one plays soccer. We all Olympic lift. We all learned how to extend violently. And I say violently because there's a certain exercise I do and it completely changed my life for Tim Swords as a football player.

And I had opportunity as a teenager to do some pretty cool stuff. But the evolution of me as a player because of these two different exercises and the fact that I started to squat deep, that's the third exercise, completely changed me as an athlete and gave me, I was just really hitting people really hard and you, being a having a rugby background, there's, I tell you something James, it feels good to be able to put that type of effort into, it's a controlled violence type of thing, and then the person that you are interacting with doesn't have a good day and you're okay.

So in other words, the training really changed, these two exercises really changed me as an athlete. The first one is, and I show it all the time on the internet and people like, "What are you doing?" I hear, I especially hear it from Eastern Europeans and some of the guys that are from some of the Muslim countries and stuff and we use straps. People go, "Oh, well, we don't want to use straps because we want to have a strong grip. We don't want to do that."

And I'm like, well, okay, I got a kid here is playing football for Stanford, and he can take, he can use those straps and he can take that bar down to the top of his knee and he can shift and he can jump five to eight inches off the ground with 450 pounds and with a violent shrug and then he kept, I tell you what, I swear to you, buddy, this

James de Lacey48:16

This is a jump shrug then, right?

Tim Swords48:18

But yeah, you're bending over the bar. You're getting the stretch of the hamstrings. The knees are unlocked like they are, but we're not worrying about shifting and brushing. We're going down and going.

This is not an Olympic lift. This is a, you're coming towards me with a football or you're going to try to two single leg tick down me and I'm not having it. I'm not having it. Or I'm going to, you'll be dunking a basketball in three months. We do those things with straps. We do them every day for football contact sport athletes. We do them every day. These kids don't get hurt anymore.

Okay, where do you get hurt? If you're weak, you can get hurt by producing force if you're weak. I've seen people hit people so hard they get hurt. But if I could put 500 pounds on the bar and put that kind of force, that type of G force and land. Well, I don't know how much plus my body weight plus 500, I don't know what type of G force that is. But we get hurt when we absorb force.

We don't, basketball players don't get hurt when they're jumping. They get hurt when they're landing. Football players don't get hurt most of the time when they're hitting. They get hurt when they're being hit. I mean, if you're not, you as a rugby guy, if you're not trying to run through your opponent, you let him take the shot to you, you're the one that's going to absorb the force. That's where we fail.

So it's not like we have to be super brave out here when we're jumping and shrugging, but you have to be brave on the rugby field or the football field. You got to be brave there. You're going to have a different attitude out here. We'll train it. We're trying to build confidence so you can be brave out there. Well, shoot, we just had our 66 teenage kid out here cleaned 300 pounds the other day. 66 teenagers out this garage. You think that kid is lacking in motivation?

And plus the fact that I'm going to sit there and look in the eye, go, "Hey, man, what are you going to do? I mean, are you a man? Are you a mouse?" I mean, what are you going to do out on that field? You're strong enough now. Are you a coward? I mean, I don't think you are. You're here. You're trying to get better. Go be the aggressor.

This is a violent movement. That's violent. That's as violent as you can do with a barbell. You are, and you are boom with your traps. You are finishing them powerfully. That's one of the reasons we don't wear straps. We don't want straps. We want that body to move as fast as possible with good posture. If the posture sucks, we're not putting the heavy weight on. Through the hips, lower back, stable spine, extend, shrug. There's no brush, I don't care. There's no brush. This is not Olympic lifting.

This is developing pure raw power to block and tackle and throw people on the ground and run through them as a rugby guy and duck basketballs and jump to catch line drives and all that other stuff. The other one that was a game changer for me was the power jerk. Not the squat jerk, the power jerk was a game changer. And I tell you what, I probably couldn't split jerk my grandma. I mean, I got power clean 418 at my best as a football player.

I just was too slow with the feet. I just never got, I was always trying to, okay, I'm a guy stronger body, man, I'm going to push this over my head. Nope. Sorry, buddy. No, gravity whipped my butt. But in a power jerk, I could extend and push myself down fast. I could use the way the bar push myself down.

Split jerk, I was never really good at. So when the power jerk, when we first started doing them, day one I could probably do 100 kilos and that's, I was a college football player but I was bench pressing 465 or set. I mean, I was strong but 100 kilos wasn't, I get military press more than 100 kilos.

And so it just took time to relax the hands. I say soft hands, hand, relax, hand, whatever, and to let the body do the work and right back under the bar. Well, when I got to the point where I could really use the body properly and once again, I'm going back to posture again and be able to brace and do the things and keep the feet flat and don't doing any of this business where you're, I always had my feet where they were tracking with the joints and this is where I sprinted. This is where I jumped.

I didn't have anything too wide or anything too narrow, which I see all the time. And the posture was good. And then at the end of the day, I was doing, I did a 205 kilo power jerk as a 24 year old or 25 year old guy and I know it helped me. I just didn't, I'm not, I wasn't a big guy. I mean, 117 kilos. I mean, that's fairly big, but it's not like what you see nowadays.

So these things that made me explosive and, genetics, I was, we're all explosive in my family, but these things made me better. They made me better. So that power pull where you're jumping for height with straps. And once again, I know this is probably a weighted thing, but these things are tremendous for fighters. I'm telling you, if you want to get separation from someone, not only if you're bringing those hips, okay, that's vertical and it's the same thing in the power jerk, too. 117 kilos, I didn't have any problem dealing with people that were 140. And plus, I can outrun them. And that's the truth.

You're not going to give me a hard time about being slow. And that wasn't my issue. So and I worked myself into that. And I was a guy that did honestly big guy. I had to, I couldn't do it like some of these people go, "Well, put 20 pounds." I never could do that. I was a, okay, I was a 251 pounder. Then I went to 254 the next year. Then I was 257. Then I was 261. And that's it. Anything more than that and it was like, okay, I'm slow as pond water. I'm not slow as pond water, but I was slower.

And slower doesn't work. Slower doesn't work. It doesn't work out here for weightlifters when they get too big or if they're not strong enough. Whatever it is that makes these people slow or maybe they just don't have the type of muscle fiber they need. Well, I've got kids out here like that now. So what are we doing with those kids? Well, we're doing a heck of a lot of active rest. As we're doing a lot of speed work and then when they're, once again I go back to that you're here eight hours, you're home 160. What are you doing 160?

I got a kid, I got a kid that's 10, okay, no, 11. And I said, "Do you have an upstairs? You have a two-story house?" He says, "Yes, I do." I said, "How many steps does it take to get to the upstairs?" He says, "We have 18 steps." A guy said, "Okay." I talked to his dad and dad was here. I said, "Are the steps carpeted?" So, if it's wood, you might bust your butt. Jump three steps. Boom. Boom. Boom. Totally a double stretch reflex. Heads up, down, stretch reflex of the hamstring. Jump, jump, jump.

Every time you go upstairs, do six broad jumps. So do six vertical jumps. And then the dad told me goes, "Well, he's doing that all the time." I said, "Now, don't do any more than three steps." Well, I mean, okay, so he's 11. Well, if you do that three times a day because you're going upstairs. Okay, so you do 15 reps. If you do that every day of your life, 365 times 15. What is that? 10 times that by nine years. No, by nine years, you've done a heck of a lot of jumps.

It's this stuff might say it's just consistency and you're also, what I'm doing is this is bonehead stuff. This is bonehead stuff. You're probably thinking, man, Coach Tim, he's a little goofy. But I tell you what, it works. And it's like jumping rope. I got these football linemen.

You jump rope. You go home and you jump rope 15 seconds as fast as you could jump rope 15 seconds. You take 45 seconds off. You grab that rope and by the end of the week, how much rope jumping have you done? And how much better are your feet getting?

Man, geez. I've had guys go to Texas A&M, University of Texas. I mean, shoot these linemen and they train. They did that and their feet are so much better. You got a size 18 shoe and you got good feet. I mean, gee, that's pretty good. But anyway, this is just, I can't, it's not a cookie cutter thing here with me. This is not cookie cutter.

It's all different stuff for everybody. I mean, those kids out there, they all got two arms and two legs and everything, but it's not the same. Some kids are doing a little more reps. Some kids aren't. Everybody does a skill. Everybody did some form of squat cleaning yesterday, whether he did it from the hanger or they did it from the floor.

And some of them during the season, depending upon when they play, we might do some doubles on the back slider. Everybody squats deep. No, that's parallel. I'm not doing that. We might pull from the floor to above the knee. That's a Kobe Ferguson win. That's what he did. And that's helped him out more than anything. It's the descended pulls too for him also.

But those are things that, okay, well, is he going to have to continue to do that? Yeah. Yeah, he is. So we're going to do it as a warm up. We're going to do it as a warm up. Warm the body up.

James de Lacey59:21

I do want to ask you one more, no, you're good. I want to ask you one more thing to give you a little controversial rant for you. I know a few maybe a month or so ago when you reposted a clip of I think it was the Florida Gators

Tim Swords59:41

doing their zer squats out of Iraq and you

James de Lacey59:44

and you had a little bone to pick there. It be interesting to kind of go into like what you're seeing. Like is it zeres in particular you don't like or is it the way they're doing them and then maybe just generally on college sports Olympic weightlifting or college football doing Olympic weightlifting?

Tim Swords59:44

Yeah, I mean, I didn't like the way they were doing them and I also don't like the lift. I don't like the lift because it, in my opinion, it promotes bad positions. I had people who are my friends jump on my butt about that. Bo Sandival for one. He's my friend. And I

James de Lacey1:00:23

I even coached his wife in World Championships once or twice back in the day.

Tim Swords1:00:23

But he was telling me that you're just talking and you don't know the history and I was like well that's not true. I was doing zer squats before you were born. I mean, I tried, I was doing them at 13. Okay. And my brother had me doing them and he told me, we were using a towel and we weren't doing hardly any weight, but it was tearing me up and what only thing it did for me being a person who has lordosis pretty bad is that my lower back started burning.

Of course, I was young and immature and all other things. But if you're doing things with a rounded back like this, I'll tell you something. Let Shaquille O'Neal bend his knees and look like a, here we go. Here's Shaquille O'Neal. Here's his head round. He's going to, and here's his legs.

Let him put his position in a body like that and I'll walk up there to Shaquille O'Neal and push him that direction and he's 7 foot 350 lbs and he's not going to be able to withstand that. I don't care how big he is. He's not in the position to use leverage and use strength.

So don't tell me for football players, and that was my point, is that don't tell me for football players that this is a good position because I played and everybody that ever gets put in that position is knocked directly on their back now. And I was just saying that, I was saying that for football there's benefit to these things. I think these are great for like Greco Roman wrestlers and wrestlers and jiu-jitsu people and stuff like that, but not for people that are trying to produce force that direction.

I mean, look at the pressure on the guy's lower back. Well, so that might be controversial. That's okay. I'm not mad at anybody, but I tell you what, I don't want to see that stuff. Don't tell me that's the greatest thing for combat, for football players since they invented wheat bread. I mean I'm not buying that crap. It's not, that is a terrible position for contact athletes. Is that a good position for a rugby guy?

James de Lacey1:03:02

I mean don't, don't rugby guys have to be

Tim Swords1:03:04

you get taught from the get-go that that back does not round an attack.

James de Lacey1:03:09

Yeah, I don't, you guys have to be, don't you guys have to be like that, like this? Don't you guys have to be in here when you're, what's even more, even more staggered towards the front than that?

Tim Swords1:03:09

I mean, I understand. Let's do a clean grip. Let's do that deadlift from the floor, but or hey, if you want to get strong, let's do a 10-second deadlift up.

James de Lacey1:03:30

10-second deadlift.

Tim Swords1:03:30

Or let's just do deadlifts from the floor above her knees. 10-second deadlift up, 10-second deadlift down. If I remember, my memory recalls me recall. I think that's a Jim Schmidz thing that he shared with me. Oh my, like 1981 when I was, me and Mario Martinez, if you remember him, he won the, he won the bronze, the silver medal in 84 Olympics. The Lucan Dean Luca, I believe he's an Australian guy, was the one that beat him but in the 84 Olympics.

Anyway, but coach Schmidz gave me some of those exercises to do and we still do some of it today. We do some of that in Kobe Ferguson strength program. You don't do a lot because that 10-second deadlift up and down, that's pretty rough. And once again, you can't do it. We're not doing this with max weights. We're doing this with, if he, Colobby, we go maybe a little more than what he can clean it.

Sometimes if he's just tired and I, if he's failing says, "Nah, we're done. We ain't doing anymore." But yeah. Okay. Controversial. All right. And I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm just trying to use common sense.

Now my common sense, maybe people think I'm an old 70-year-old man who's, but we've been pretty successful out of this garage. And I'm not saying that I'm, oh, I know. Oh, I got a lot to learn, man. I'm learning. I'm learning all the time. And I'm learning from the people that I'm coaching on a daily basis. I'm learning what they need.

And there's occasions, there's an occasional time when I got to bring something out of that toolbox that I hadn't brought out of the toolbox. And I'll tell you a short story here in a minute. I know you're probably tired of me rambling, but sometimes you have to bring something, got to bring something out of that toolbox.

Well, I had a kid there about a month ago that was, he couldn't get down to, he couldn't get down to grab the bar. He couldn't do it. He was losing his balance. He was losing his balance for, so I gave him an old Tommy Kono trick. We hadn't used this thing in years. Said go down. Brought his feet in a little bit. We opened up his toes a little bit. So I opened up his steps. I let him help him out a little bit with hip mobility.

And then I said, "Take your toes and pull them down against the shoe, the front of the shoe. Raise your hips. Get yourself wedge yourself down there. And if you have to keep them flexed slightly, but if you can relax it. So now you're in a position where you weren't able to get in before by pulling your toes down, you're not losing your balance forward."

And so that's just stuff that, you don't have to do that very often. Like I know last time we used that was like, I say about 10 years or 15 years. I don't know. But certain things like that. And then there's so much stuff. I mean gee whiz, I could probably bore people to death for hours and hours, but it's, I've been blessed right that have this opportunity. I'm still being blessed.

I'm going to do the best I can as long as I can and I'm going to do the best I can for your father-in-law because I promise that and I want to do that. I mean, I want to do these things. I want to help people

James de Lacey1:07:17

and

Tim Swords1:07:17

and if I say something that sounds a little bit controversial. I don't mean it to be mean. I just, how I believe and then prove me, prove me what I'm saying is wrong.

I've been in Texas 38, almost 39 years and in that garage we've had 45,000 hours plus of training over those almost 39 years. And we've had four injuries. And the injuries,

James de Lacey1:07:52

Wow.

Tim Swords1:07:54

Four injuries. Two sprained wrists from that elbow hitting in the plane. Two sprained wrists.

Well, one broken wrist because a kid held on to it and it hit the platform. It broke. And we had a kid that was a baseball player at Old Miss. He dropped the snatch and the knurling on the bar grazed his tibia and it scratched it, little abrasion, and he moved his feet and the thing started, it just opened up. It was amazing. So we called 911. So they just basically stitched up.

But four injuries, four injuries is, you know, in almost 46,000 hours of training. And now you can't be a fair-weather guy. You got to be watching everybody all the time in a housekeeping nightmare like that. You've seen it and you haven't seen it when we got 25 people training. But even Gaton goes, he says it's crazy out here. How you pull this off? It's not that hard. You are what you do and we've been doing this for a long time. I got a plan.

But anyway, going back, Zerchers, Kobe, sir ropes, once again, I've been blessed. We've had, I think I told you and your wife the other day, we've had 18 people out of that garage that have done over 400 pounds. And we've had four, no, sorry, we've had five, that's clean and jerk over 205. And they sound like a lot, the neighbors don't like that much. But you know, it's pretty loud.

But anyway, I don't know. I'm just enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. I hope my health hangs in there. And hopefully I've answered your questions. I have a tendency to get off the subject some. But I tell you what, you're not going to find anybody, not going to find anybody on this planet more passionate than me. Maybe they are, but I feel that I'm one of these guys that I told my two brothers on the phone yesterday, we're talking. I said, you know, they're both intense individuals. Both of them were great athletes.

And I said, you guys are not going to outwork me. You're not going to outwork me. Not going to. I refuse. I refuse. You're not. You will not, till the good Lord takes me. I'm going to wake up, I'm going to wake up fired up and just be, just get ready, because I'm going to work hard. And I'm going to continue to work hard to make people better and to build self-esteem and discipline and to accomplish your goals.

If I, if you have another minute, can I share one story with you?

At the, we were at Copacabana Beach in 2016 and we rode the bus down there with multiple American athletes, US athletes had won medals, and Sarah and I were going down and some Marine actually wanted to interview me. So I went and the guy from, I think it was, yeah, Good Morning America was there and he interviewed me.

And he said to me, he said, "Coach Swords, is this the most exciting thing that's ever happened in your coaching life?" And I thought for a minute I said, "Well, you know, I can't honestly, I can't honestly say that." He looked at me like I was, okay, okay, what else have you done? You lift the weights on the moon or something or what have you done? I said, I said, I remember a time when we were at the Texas State Weightlifting Championship in like 1999.

He was looking at me like what? And I had a little 10-year-old girl that was lifting and she was in a class with three women. And we knew she wasn't going to medal, but she was there and we, she was excited, little 10-year-old girl. Oh, one of the women bombed. Well, hell, I said she's going to medal. She didn't even know it. So she's going to get that bronze medal.

So we're standing there and then they announced her name and she just lit up like a torch and she went flying up there running as fast as she could to get to step up on that little podium and put that medal around her neck. And she was crying, crying like a baby. The tears of happiness from her, it was just, it was magic. It's freaking magic. And you know, I went up there, I'm going to tell you something. You know, I had, I'm emotional too. I'm saying this is good stuff. Okay.

And the guy said, "Well, did she, did she go and become a great athlete?" I said, "No, she didn't." But what she did do is she became a registered nurse and had two kids and had to have a good wife. That's what it's all about. You know, it didn't matter. You know, you should have said nationally, you know, as a kid, but it's the human aspect of this. It's about being a, about being a good, it's like your father-in-law, it's like you guys, it's the human, it's the human part of this.

You take, do something to make something, make people better. That's what it's all about. I mean, geez, how can you beat that? You can't take that award from her. Can't take it. She earned it and she earned more. And she just turned out to be a heck of a, heck of an adult, heck of a mom, good wife, two great kids. Anyway, I don't know if what I said made.

James de Lacey1:14:02

That's awesome. It's a good look into actual coaching versus what's all over social media. But well, where can people find you, Tim? Can people keep up with what you're doing?

Tim Swords1:14:02

Well, I mean, you know, I guess Timothy Swords Facebook, if they want to do that. Swords Timothy on Instagram. You know what? I, it, this isn't about, this isn't, I don't know. This isn't really about me. I, it, I don't, I mean, I put stuff on, I put stuff on Facebook. And people ask me, "Why do you put stuff on Facebook all the time?" And my own brother did one.

We put it. I said, "Well, because I'm trying to promote the sport." And I've never, I don't recruit people out here. People call or they get me on Messenger. This is how I promote the sport. If I'm not doing something like that. You know, I'm not going to, you know, I got a list of people that by the end of November the list will be completely full out here. I don't tell anybody until somebody quits and then that's how it works. It works that way every year.

So if they, you know, if they wanted to get a hold of me, they'd have to be Facebook or, or that, or I mean, heck, I don't even care if someone wanted to call me. Shoot, they'd have to leave a message if I didn't understand if I didn't know the number. But yeah, they, I've had people, a lot of people just send Messenger and I'll look and I look at it and they'll go, "Oh, well, this person's from here, they probably know them." And then I'll say, "Hey, K, we met." And then I've, four or five, six people from that are K's people, and you know, I don't know anybody from Lincoln or Georgia, but they've contacted me and they want to see, they ask questions about their own kids and they also want to see what he's doing. He's, you know, he's a pretty special guy.

But I mean, if people want to try to contact, I mean, I'm happy to talk to anybody. I'm happy to help anybody. I think, you know, that right now, well, we're just going to do our best, to do my best. I mean, I don't care. I'm, that's, I got zero, zero, I'm a Christian guy, I got zero prejudice about anything. I'm on this planet a very short time and I'm going to do what I can to make, make things better while I'm on this planet, to the best of my ability.

And that, you know, like the bunch over there in South Africa, if I can do a small piece of that to help those guys, even if I never meet them again, that's a good thing. I've done things like that before. I'll just do the best I can. And I promise I'll do the best I can.

James de Lacey1:16:55

No, I appreciate you coming on, Tim, and we'll catch up soon as well.

Tim Swords1:17:01

Okay. Yeah, in closing for me there, James, I hope that, I know I got off the subject a lot. But you know, sometimes my brain is not, I'm active and I think of something and I'll think of something else and I think. And I need to calm down. I've never been a calm person and I apologize for that.

James de Lacey1:17:28

It's good. It's all the wealth of experience and knowledge that you've gained.