Thank you for 20 years. Here’s a look at the past, present and future of Catalyst Athletics.
Twenty years of Catalyst Athletics.
If you’ve spent any meaningful amount of time around Olympic weightlifting, CrossFit, or strength and conditioning over the last two decades, there’s a pretty good chance Catalyst Athletics has influenced you somehow, whether you realized it or not.
Greg Everett founded Catalyst in 2006, and what followed became far more than a weightlifting gym.
Catalyst became a team. A methodology. A library. A publishing platform. A coaching resource. And, ultimately, one of the institutions that helped make quality Olympic weightlifting education accessible to athletes and coaches around the world.
Long before every coach had an Instagram account and every training question returned a thousand competing answers, Greg was doing the decidedly less glamorous work of teaching.
Writing, coaching, filming exercise demos, developing programs, publishing The Performance Menu back in the day, writing Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches and building an enormous free library of weightlifting education.
And, in 2013, producing American Weightlifting, a film he conceived years earlier and essentially wrote, filmed, directed, edited, produced, and even scored himself because he believed the story of American weightlifting deserved to be told.
Catalyst itself evolved along the way. A commercial gym and a competitive team. From Cali to Oregon. Different athletes, different eras, different challenges. But the underlying commitment to the craft remained remarkably consistent.
And I think craft is the right word.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Greg’s work is that it reflects something I believe deeply about coaching: principles matter, but principles still have to be applied to an actual human being.
Technique matters, strength matters, programming matters, assessments matters and experience all matter. And eventually, the coach has to take all of those things and decide what this athlete needs right now.
That’s the art.
It’s one reason Greg and Catalyst have found their way into my own writing on programming and coaching. When discussing the people who helped shape modern thinking about weightlifting and strength and conditioning, Greg belongs in that conversation, not because he invented the snatch or discovered progressive overload, but because he has spent twenty years organizing, refining, teaching, documenting, and sharing the craft.
And that’s a contribution worth recognizing.
Greg has now released a documentary telling the story of Catalyst Athletics, and if you’ve ever learned from one of his articles, watched one of those exercise demos, followed one of his programs, read one of his books, listened to him talk weightlifting, or simply benefited from the broader weightlifting culture Catalyst helped build, it’s worth taking the time to watch.
Twenty years is a hell of a lot of reps.
Congratulations to Greg, Aimee, the athletes, coaches, contributors, and everyone else who has been part of the Catalyst Athletics story.
Here’s to the next chapter. The principles remain constant. The application is the art.
And few people have spent more time documenting and developing that art than Greg. Cheers to another 20 years!
Matt Shannon, Security Pro 