Article Submission

Application to Write for StrongFirst

A defining feature of the StrongFirst organization and our educational content is the collective contribution made by our leadership, SFG/SFL/SFB certified instructors, long-time fans, and other strength professionals across the globe.


  • Your areas of specialty and what makes you and your approach unique.
  • How your expertise and knowledge will provide value to our StrongFirst audience.
  • An outline or draft of your article for consideration.
  • Before an article enters the editing  pipeline, we will need to have a complete file that includes: the article, your author bio, a profile picture, and all supporting images, charts, and graphics saved as individual high resolution jpgs or pngs.

Note that we do not accept or respond to general “expressions of interest.”

Things to Consider About Writing for StrongFirst

  1. Before submitting an article, please familiarize yourself with the type and depth of content that our audience has come to expect. We are the School of Strength and are committed to providing excellent content that supports our mission to pursue, practice, and promote strength. We do not entertain generic or pop-fitness types of banal articles. Please do not submit them.
  2. Your content should be relevant and useful for our StrongFirst audience while showcasing your unique voice and philosophy. What do you have to share that no other person can share the same way?
  4. When formulating and proposing ideas, consider how your ideas contribute to StrongFirst’s mission and what the actionable takeaway will be for the StrongFirst reader. Sample training plans and skill troubleshooting/demonstrations/progressions are popular topics and prioritized for publication.
  5. When planning your content, consider that our approach tends towards an “inch wide and a mile deep.”
  7. We expect every author to fact check references, confirm the spelling of names, and provide working links as appropriate.
  8. Target word count: 1200 to 1600 words. Longer pieces may be considered providing the value of the content warrants the length. They could also be split into several parts.
  9. Every article gets edited—do not submit if this offends you.
  10. You will need to provide high-resolution photos (and/or video, if applicable), a short biography, and profile picture along with your article. Please send the photos separately rather than included them in your article body.
  11. To be published on the StrongFirst website, you must provide and monitor a working email address—ideally, the one linked to your forum login. We expect that you will respond to reader comments and questions on both our blog page and Facebook for at least 14 days after being published.

The Editing Process

Please understand that not every article submitted to StrongFirst gets published. We take our content strategy very seriously and only publish articles that we feel deliver value to our audience.

Our rhythm is to publish one article per week, usually on Tuesdays. This means that it can take several weeks before our Editing Team begins the review of your article submission. We appreciate your patience.

Note that even the most stellar content gets edited for content, structure, copy, search engine optimization, etc. This is done to help better communicate your ideas and the spirit of your piece, as well as to help readers find your article. We do expect that authors submit “final” articles, not draft versions that rely on our editing process. Draft versions will be returned to the authors.

In general, our editing process goes through five major iterations (inspired by NY Book Editors):

  1. Content editing. In this initial stage, we evaluate whether we want to publish the article. We decide if it delivers value for our readers as is, if it could benefit from an author review, or if we respectfully pass on publishing it.
  2. Structural or line editing. A structural edit addresses structure, flow, creative content, writing style, and language use at the sentence and paragraph level. Its purpose is not to comb your article for errors—rather, it focuses on the way you use language to communicate your story to the reader. An editor may suggest adding context to improve readability for an unfamiliar audience.
  3. Copy editing. Edit for consistency, punctuation, and search engine optimization. Corrects spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax; ensures consistency in spelling, hyphenation, numerals, fonts, and capitalization.
  4. SEO editing. Reviews sentence and specific word use against targetted keywords to improve search engine rankings and visibility. This can include adding an introduction paragraph and section headers, and editing sentences for “natural search syntax.”
  5. Proofreading. The pre-publishing review done by an independent reader, looking for any misspellings, broken links, lost punctuation, etc. This is the finishing touches to every article.

Please submit all articles to