About

Meet Don Wright

John “Don” Wright is a strength coach, veteran powerlifter, musician and advisor to Tony Huge. He has 25 years of martial arts experience and served for 25 years in the Royal Air Force. His studies include Aikido, Jiu-Jitsu, boxing and Tai Chi, alongside Taoism and Tantra. His May 2026 biography records FRSA and LGSM credentials and describes his PhD as pending.

In September 2026, Don said he would turn 70 in 2027 and was continuing to pursue strength goals. He reported an assisted 180 kg front squat and a Smith machine bench press of 220 kg for three assisted negative repetitions. These are his training reports; assistance, equipment and range of motion matter when interpreting the numbers.

His training background

I came up watching Arnold, Frank Zane, Franco Columbu, Serge Nubret and Sergio Oliva. Beautiful men, and a completely different set of principles to what you see now. I lifted through all of it — powerlifting first, then Olympic lifting, which is what eventually cost me. In my early sixties I damaged my shoulder snatching, and I went through every conventional option I could find.

I never really took anything in all those years. Not out of virtue. I simply did not know anything existed.

What changed

I met Tony Huge at Muscle Factory in 2025. I had seen some of his clips and I was curious, because I knew nothing — I genuinely thought MK-677 was a machine gun. I walked up to him with one question: how does an old bull like me improve his game and keep going?

I ended up as the editor of his books. That is how I learned this — not from a sales page, but by reading manuscripts line by line looking for the holes, which is the most sceptical way there is to read anything. I came out of it convinced, and I have been learning since.

What I actually believe

There are no shortcuts. A lot of people take them, and they do not do the work. You will not get the density by just hacking yourself. If your joints and tendons are not ready for heavy weight and you load them anyway, you will damage the joints, you will damage the tendons, and you will pull things.

I had forty-five-odd years of hard graft before I touched anything at all. That is the only reason any of it does anything for me now. What I found multiplies work already done — it does not replace it, and it will punish you for skipping the groundwork.

Continuing to train

Why get to this amazing age only to find you cannot do anything? Whatever the problems are, most of them can be overcome. Everybody has a choice. Why be miserable?

I took a conscious one, and from my own empirical evidence it was among the best I ever made. But I took it standing on fifty years.