by Donny Shankle

2 Chopped Whole Yellow Onions

½ Minced Head of Garlic

12 Peeled Tomatoes (give or take depending on size)

1 Chopped Handful Fresh Basil

1 Chopped Handful Fresh Cilantro

2 Tablespoons Crushed Red Pepper (rub in your fingers to release heat)

4 Bay Leaves

2 Cups Diced Mushroom

Juice from ½ an Orange

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

2 Pinches of Salt

3 Tablespoons Louisiana Hot Sauce

In a large crock pot set on low heat put in your olive oil, onion, garlic and salt. While those ingredients begin to sweat put your tomato’s (a little at a time) in boiling water until the skin breaks then transfer to cold water so you can easily peel them. Add your peeled tomato’s to the pot with your mushrooms, cilantro, basil, red pepper, orange juice, bay leaves and hot sauce. Let cook covered for 6-8 hours stirring every hour. You may have to gently break up your tomato’s with a fork when finished. Serve on pasta or roll out some dough and bake a pizza. Also great just spooned over a grilled chicken breast. For best tasting sauce I would use your own garden grown tomato’s  or at-least organic grown tomato’s.

Thought I might briefly explain what will be going on in our training over the next three weeks.  First of all, we are going back to something that is not part of my “normal” strategy but it seemed to work 4-8 weeks ago, and I hate to argue with success.  Instead of squatting every or at least most workouts, we are doing the vast majority of our squatting on  Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings.  This is because it is something different that we tried for a change of pace, it worked, and therefore its worth trying again.  Wednesday afternoon and Saturday mornings will be devoted to squatting, nothing else.

On everything else the main thing I am trying to do  this next 3 weeks is do as high a workload as possible.  Most of the time we will be going up to a maximum for the day on each exercise, but the emphasis will be to get as many doubles and triples as possible each week on the snatch and clean and jerk and related exercises.  We might even get crazy and try odd stuff like a set of 5 or 6 on hang snatches here or there, just get the volume up.

Well this is the plan for the 21 day period starting Oct 4th.  We shall see how it goes…

The last 3-4 weeks have been a little strange.  Caleb hurt, Donny getting ready for worlds, Jon training for a meet Oct 3rd.  As of Monday Oct 4th training will begin for the American open, and will look like this…

Mon AM

Snatch

Power clean

Neck jerk

Mon PM

Clean and Jerk

Hang Snatch or snatch from blocks

Tue AM

Clean and Jerk

Power snatch

Tue PM

Snatch

Hang clean or from box

Wed AM

Snatch

Power clean

Neck jerk

Wed PM

Squats

Thur AM

Clean and jerk

Hang Snatch

Thur PM

Snatch

Hang clean

Fri AM

Light snatch

Light clean

Fri PM

Max snatch

Max clean and jerk

Sat AM

squats