What the hell is Iron Dog?

Q: What the hell is Iron Dog?

A: It is a site where I shall discuss, comment on, make fun of, recommend and otherwise review various products in the fields of Strength & Conditioning, powerlifting, personal training, weightlifting, bodybuilding, etc...I will also reserve the right to talk about anything that strikes my fancy. Luckily, my fancy is not very fancy and probably won't stray far from those topics.

Q: What kind of products are we talking about?

A: Anything and everything really. Training manuals, Dvds, weight-training equipment, powerlifting gear, supplements, rehab stuff, articles on the internet, websites, anything related to training that I use, read, eat, drink or otherwise consume.

Q: What qualifies you to provide these reviews?

A: Well, mostly the fact that I'm poor from buying all sorts of training shit and spend copious hours of my time reading about training. I've been training for going on two decades, I've used many of the products and systems that have come and gone over the years, and I've learned some hard lessons along the way. I'm a certified personal trainer (NSCA) but frankly I don't think that matters. There are plenty of folks with no letters after their names who are absolute experts at what they do. I'm not an expert, but I am a thoughtful, open-minded sort of guy with some opinions to share. Usually I offer legitimate reasons for my opinions. I also don't make the mistake of thinking that just because I don't like something personally that it must suck. Or vice versa. I'm pretty fair in my judgments and will freely admit it when my opinion is purely subjective. Feel free to disagree with me.

Q: Why "Iron Dog"?

A: Well, originally I'd thought about something like "gymrat," in the sense that I'm just an ordinary schmoe who loves to go to the gym and train. But I realized that's not really true. All I had to do was look around at all the schmucks at my horrible, horrible gym. They are the gymrats of the world: bicep day is three days a week and the days in between are bench day. Little or no work involving their posterior chain, little leg work unless you count leg extensions and the Smith machine and I don't. No rhyme or reason to their training, in fact, they don't train, they "work out" and they haven't made any progress at all in the two years or so that I've been watching them flounder around in the gym. Iron Dog is committed to sniffing out superior training information and products. You can lead a gymrat to knowledge but you can't make him think. But if I can lead a few to some good stuff then I've done my part.

Also, and this is where the name literally came from, I am told that Iron Dog is my chinese astrological sign or some nonsense like that. I have little patience for astrology and other hippy-dippy bullshit, but I am more inclined to tolerate it when it gives me a really cool name like Iron Dog.