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Andrew Valentine trains, coaches, and writes about the mechanics underneath the body — author of The Grammar of Grappling, and once a Grandmaster-level StarCraft II player.

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Andrew Valentine is a writer and coach in Virginia Beach who treats training, nutrition and the rest of a life as one system to be designed rather than a set of plans to follow. He is the author of The Grammar of Grappling, a book about the mechanics underneath technique, and builds the strength programming he coaches with. Before any of that, he played Zerg at Grandmaster level on the North American StarCraft II ladder around 2015 and 2016.

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Most of what I do comes back to one idea: a body, a day and a decision all run on rules, and most people are following rules nobody bothered to design. Training is where that shows most. I write my own programming — explicit progression rules, the arithmetic done before I get under the bar — and I eat off a system rather than a meal plan I will abandon in week two. The Grammar of Grappling came out of watching beginners drown in technique lists when what they needed was the mechanics underneath: pressure, leverage, base — the handful of physical rules every technique is an instance of. It is in final revision. I played Zerg in StarCraft II at Grandmaster level around 2015 and 2016 — in and out of the top two hundred on the North American ladder, practising with a team, and finishing plenty of seasons at Masters. That is less a trophy than a long apprenticeship in reading a system under time pressure: economy against army, scouting against commitment, when to hold a decision open and when to close it. It is also where I learned to resent losing to a coin flip after out-playing someone, which turned out to be a design opinion rather than a complaint. I coach the same way. Training and nutrition, but also the parts of a life that decide whether the training survives: how you spend a day, how you carry yourself, how you deal with people — dating included. And I will argue about almost anything worth arguing about: moral philosophy, the case against religion and against veganism as a moral requirement, and what actually governs attraction between men and women. To pay the bills I help manage a bar in Virginia Beach. Before that I was briefly a hibachi chef, cooked at Virginia Tech's Owens dining hall, and sold cars and remodeling. On the side I am building two things that are nowhere near ready to show — a planning system called Homeostasis and a strategy game called Longbarrow. Otherwise I read — science fiction, philosophy, social strategy, inter-gender dynamics; The 48 Laws of Power, The Prince, The Art of War. I take photographs, and I am slowly working toward a boat that can cross an ocean.