Grant Brown

My name is Grant Brown. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area playing a lot of sports, ice hockey and wrestling in particular. While I had some very brief exposure to lifting in high school wrestling, it was mostly running and calisthenics. It wasn’t until college for strength and conditioning purposes that I started lifting more consistently to put on good weight for ice hockey. I was a late bloomer and getting checked by somebody who weighed 60 pounds more than you wasn’t something I wanted to deal with anymore.

At first it was starting strength, then Pendlay’s 5×5 programs. After college I kept weight lifting to keep myself busy and remain sane and floated through a large number of variations of 531 until eventually I decided to try getting a coach. I signed up for RTS to be coached by Mike Tuscherer where I was exposed to RPE and yet another style of programming.

While I had a number of minor injuries during my time playing sports it wasn’t until my second year working with RTS that I seriously injured my left lower back and SI area. It took me a year to fully get back to where I was, but the process of healing and resolving the underlying problems with how I trained, how I moved my body, and the injury itself, sent me down the path to chiropractic school. I had a number of very positive experiences with a few different chiropractors that influenced this.

I was first exposed to the garage gym community during the COVID lockdowns as my long time girlfriend started being involved with them. I don’t compete in powerlifting anymore myself (though that may change if the bug catches me again), but she has participated in the competitions and still does all the way up to the present. Since she started we’ve collaborated on her programming and steadily evolved a program that has taken her up to being a top 5 national lifter while minimizing injuries. While helping her and some local lifters get over injuries I’ve slowly started coaching more people, mainly with an eye to keeping them healthy so they can enjoy lifting and make progress.

In recent years we don’t lift at home as much but as we generally lift late we have both kept up with the GGC as a community because we are often the only two people at the gym together so it has been nice to have a bit of a community around.

We’ve also been acquiring a number of pieces of strongman equipment over the years as I’ve moved away from powerlifting personally. We are hoping once we can move into something other than a 3rd story apartment we can start up our own home gym again.

My current personal lifting goals are to improve enough as a Strongman that I can perform well at amateur nationals to put up a good performance. In particular I want to get to the point where I can overhead press roughly 300lbs as well as consistently deadlift over 600lbs. However in many ways I also share my partner’s goals and I want to help her continue to improve and move into the top 3 in the country for her weight class as well as continue to help the athletes that have trusted me to help them hit their own goals and stay healthy getting there.