This conversation with Coach Ethan Reeve — two-time NCAA All-American wrestler, five-time SEC championship wrestling coach, and one of the most respected strength and conditioning coaches in collegiate athletics — is a deep dive into density training, the partner-based training culture he built across multiple sports, and a mindset philosophy rooted in a Zen parable he has carried since he was sixteen years old.
Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page, or scroll back up to watch. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and iHeartRadio.
Density training is a method developed by Coach Ethan Reeve that builds volume through quality repetitions spread across time. Instead of doing a max set to failure, you perform submaximal sets at regular intervals — for example, three chin-ups every sixty minutes throughout a workday, then gradually condensing the rest periods as you get stronger. The goal is to accumulate high-quality reps without destroying your body so you can come back the next day and do it again. Reeve used this method himself as a collegiate wrestler, doing ten power cleans at body weight alternated with ten chin-ups in twenty minutes, seven days a week for two and a half years.
Ethan Reeve is a two-time NCAA All-American wrestler and four-time Southeastern Conference wrestling champion. He served as head wrestling coach at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where his teams won five of six SEC championships. He went on to become a strength and conditioning coach at Ohio University, McCallie School, and Wake Forest University. He also served as the strength coach for the US Women's Rowing Team from 1993 to 1995, a period that ended with four gold medals and one silver at the 1995 World Championships.
It is Reeve's core training philosophy, borrowed directly from wrestling practice. In a wrestling room, athletes train in pairs inside small circles on the mat. Reeve carried that structure into the weight room — every athlete has a partner, and that partner is responsible for coaching, encouraging, and pushing them. The idea is that training is never a solo activity. When your partner is lifting, you are counting reps, correcting form, and building them up. Reeve believes this practice builds better teammates, better coworkers, and better people.
Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, called Reeve directly and spoke with him for forty-five minutes about his training methods — the push-ups, chin-ups, Olympic lifts, and the density approach to programming. Reeve was doing body-weight calisthenics combined with power cleans and chin-ups in timed density formats decades before CrossFit became a movement. He was also the first strength coach to introduce kettlebells at a major university, bringing them to Wake Forest in 2001.
Reeve starts beginners with wide time intervals and low rep counts. If someone can do ten push-ups max, he has them do sets of five spread throughout the day. Over weeks, the rest intervals shrink — from sixty minutes between sets down to forty-five, thirty, fifteen, and eventually minute-on-the-minute protocols. His emphasis is on never crushing someone so badly they do not want to come back. He recommends keeping the first twenty-one days easy so the habit sticks before increasing intensity.
It is a story about a man chased by a tiger off a cliff. He grabs a vine, sees a second tiger below, and two mice gnawing the vine above. In front of him is a strawberry. He grabs it and says, "How sweet it tastes." The tiger above is the past, the tiger below is death, the mice are day and night ticking away, and the strawberry is the present moment. Reeve first encountered this parable as a high school sophomore and has told it to coaches and athletes ever since. The full telling is in the episode.
I have been following Ethan Reeve's work for years. I first came across density training through articles written by Pavel Tsatsouline, Zach Even-Esh, and Ross Enamait — all of whom credit Reeve as the source. I have a workout in my gym with his name on it. Ten power cleans at body weight, ten push-ups, every two minutes for twenty minutes. I have used his density method to increase my own pull-up numbers, and the guys in my five a.m. group have trained with variations of it for a long time.
When my friend Reggie ran into Reeve at NorthSpring and told me about it, I knew exactly who he was talking about. I wanted to sit down with him and hear the full philosophy directly — not the secondhand version I had pieced together from articles, but the real thing from the man who built it. I also wanted to hear how he thinks about mindset, because everything I had read suggested he was not just a strength guy. He is an educator first. Press play and you will hear that immediately.
Reeve used to jimmy a door at the University of Tennessee weight room at six in the morning. He put his body weight on the bar and did ten power cleans, walked to the wall for ten chin-ups, came back for ten more cleans, ten more chin-ups. Twenty minutes. Seven days a week. Two and a half years. The details of how that transferred to his wrestling — specifically his stand-up takedowns — and why metal plates made the movement harder than anything you would do with bumper plates today are worth hearing in his own words. Listen to that section.
Reeve told me about a wrestler at McCallie School who completed 600 chin-ups — overhand, chest to bar, long arms at the bottom — in sixty-three minutes. Ten reps every sixty seconds for fifty-seven straight minutes before hitting a wall. The way Reeve described the progression that got this kid there, and the density protocol behind it, is the clearest explanation of the method I have heard from anyone. I have shared it with my own training group already. The full breakdown is in the episode.
This one surprised me. Reeve is adamant that tumbling — forward rolls, backward rolls, diving rolls, cartwheels, crawls — is some of the best athletic development work you can do regardless of sport. He took it into tennis, soccer, rowing, every team he worked with. His reasoning connects kinesthetic awareness to grip strength to vision in space, and the way he explains it changed how I think about the warm-ups we do in my gym. Watch that part of the conversation in the YouTube player at the top of this page.
There is a story Reeve told about a baseball pitching coach at Ohio University who came to complain that his players did not understand why they were doing plyometrics and tumbling drills. What Reeve told the coach to say to those players is one sentence long. What the coach said when he came back in June is the payoff. I keep thinking about it because it applies to every person I have ever trained who questioned a movement early and thanked me for it later. Listen for that story.
Reeve used this phrase more than once during our conversation. It is not a slogan. It is how he identifies the athletes who will become champions versus the ones who will not. The Chris Artelone story — a wrestler who beat a national champion after being found asleep in the stands minutes before his match — is the moment in this episode where the idea crystallizes. The way Artelone answered when Reeve asked if he had checked the bracket is something I will not forget. It is in the episode.
Coach Reeve is one of the most positive people I have ever sat across from. He has coached at the highest levels of collegiate athletics for decades, trained a US Women's Rowing team to four gold medals, won five SEC wrestling championships, and introduced kettlebells to major university athletics before most strength coaches had ever touched one. He has earned the right to talk about what works.
What stayed with me most is not any single training protocol. It is the way he connects everything — the weight room, the wrestling room, the classroom, the way you treat the person standing next to you — into one philosophy. He is an educator who happens to use a barbell. The article gives you the topics. Coach Reeve gives you the conviction behind them.
Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page, or scroll back up to watch. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and iHeartRadio.
Greg Glassman · Pavel Tsatsouline · Zach Even-Esh · Dan John · Dan Gable · Nick Saban · Chris Artelone · David Levitt · LeBaron Carruthers · Cotton Cordell · Wim Hof · Susan Reeve · Reggie · Casey Middleton · Buschbacher
Ethan Reeve is a two-time NCAA All-American wrestler, four-time SEC wrestling champion, and former head wrestling coach at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where his teams won five of six SEC championships. He has served as strength and conditioning coach at Ohio University, McCallie School, and Wake Forest University, and was the strength coach for the US Women's Rowing Team from 1993 to 1995. He is certified in USA Weightlifting, Russian Kettlebells, and the Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association. He is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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