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In a world full of online coaches, athletes, clients and influencers what we currently have in the training landscape is the reality that there are a lot of people looking to help as well as people looking for help. It's really easy to put a program out there with little in the way of consideration and immediately people will be looking into it and training with it. The wild part is that it could be the dumbest program in the world and people will try to run it for months a

When learning to do deadlifts, good mornings, kettlebell swings and many other hip dominant movements what becomes important to learn first are the best positions to train with. Ideally, the vertical shin is the critical component to learn. It doesn't matter if you are swinging, doing good morning variations, deadlift variations or other hinge movements. The vertical shin or "L" position is the first component that is critical to the development of these patterns. If we c

When you are looking for people to learn from in a field rife with phonies it always is refreshing and invigorating to learn from those who have done way more than most. It was my privilege earlier in my career to be able to learn from and spend some time with many great powerlifters and powerlifting coaches. These included but were not limited to Matt Wenning, Donnie Thompson, Boris Sheiko, Mikhail Koklayaev, Andrey Malanichev and Richard Hawthorne. There are always inter

When we look at training programs of powerlifters, bodybuilders, strongmen/strongwomen and many other kinds of strength sport athletes what you see is a wildly diverse amount of training. Some people approach their training from a higher intensity, lower volume perspective. Others have a training program that revolves around greater volumes of work with less intensity baked in week after week. Ultimately what matters most is the reality that the training and recovery proce

Strength coaching as well as personal training in the United States are relatively young professions. If we can use Boyd Epley as the first example of what it looks like to have a codified program at the University of Nebraska in 1969 we start to understand that the profession as a whole is still relatively young. This is why it is not abnormal to run into a lot of training programs that very much have a wild west style. What happens on Monday has nothing to do with what h

The reality of living on earth is that the brain and the body adapt to the stress of gravitational constraint. Since gravitational force is a constant 9.8 mps what occurs pretty early on in childhood is that the development of the motor system encounters this stress and is influenced by it in significant ways. The challenges of this are that the adaptations are not always the most favorable. Since the body and brain are linked in function and dysfunction what we can not gu

For many people the landscape of training is highly nebulous. Are we training like bodybuilders, powerlifters, olympic lifters, swimmers, triathletes........and what does that even look like at year 5? 6? 10? It's hard to give people answers beyond the things that I have experienced as a coach. I literally don't know what it's like to compete in a triathlon so I don't know what that is going to feel like in year 5, 6, 7, 8. What I can advocate for though in any athletic

One of the biggest and most important jobs of the personal trainer/strength coach is to assist their clients in identifying muscle imbalances. Now in some cases the imbalances are so great that pain is normal for their gait and general movement outside of training. This is one of those indicators that the musculoskeletal system is severely imbalanced. The length tension dynamics are so at odds with each other that the body is sending the brain a signal that the system is i

The squat in strength and conditioning is probably one of the most debated, researched and dogmatically approached movements. Just in a couple of sentences you could pile up tons of different topics upon which to silo yourself. Do you squat full ROM or partial? Do you let the knees go over the toes? Do you keep your back upright or do you lean over? Do you put the bar in a high bar or low bar position? Do you use Olympic Lifting shoes or do you squat in Chuck Taylors? S

The fitness industry is full of quick fix short term solutions that are cheap. The problem is that they are not legitimate in either their ability to create adaptation or influence the capacity of the body to change in any way. This is because your body has a weight. You weigh something and in order to change the dynamic capacity of that structure it's necessary to lift things that are relatively challenging to that structure. Pile after pile of fitness gadgets are not go

From the time we are born we are given certain physical problems to solve. Coming out of the womb is a harsh and stark shift in reality. By contrast the womb is a warm, dark and protected environment. The lights aren't too bright.....the temperature is pretty consistent.....it's kind of like being in a hot tub while being fed nutrients through an IV. Could be worse right? But then inevitably paradise is lost. We are evacuated from the womb violently! The world is brigh

One of the big concerns for many people engaging in strength training is that they are going to look different. Which is ironic because for a lot of other people that is why they are starting in the first place. They want to look different. The subtleties here are abundant and profound. What becomes important to understand is that no one starts training and in a very short period of time becomes a version of She-Hulk/Hulk. Biological adaptation on the muscular level does

Often I feel like the reality of why people pursue a lot of different personal training and coaching services is wrapped up in the desire to appeal to some aesthetic improvement for themselves. While I believe this is most often well intentioned and not severe enough to become referred to a psychologist for diagnosis what I try to do is guide them towards performance oriented metrics and long term physiological adaptations. The flighty subjectivity of aesthetics I have alwa

There are many coaching parallels that I love but probably one of my favorites is that of the bartender. Not just because of the excellent Dad joke potential but also because it translates pretty well to the actual job responsibilities of responsible coaches. Now I hope that most coaches aren't actually serving up spirits as part of their duties but I do know there have been precedents like this in the past within certain powerlifting populations. I have never done laps in

One of the more recent hillarious attempts at making athletics more entertaining has been the entry of the Enhanced Games. The hillarious part? Athletes have been ducking, dodging, diving and otherwise evading testing for performance enhancers in all different kinds of sports all over the world for a very long time. The silliness of these games in particular was the assumption that we were going to witness outright wildness. Super peaked feats of freaky strength and athle

When I initially began the coaching profession one of the difficulties I ran into was that my background was in athletics. The vast majority of my training consisted of sprints, jumps, hurdle hops, gymnastics, lifting heavy weights and doing relatively challenging conditioning work. Unless you somehow magically land yourself right in a perfect S & C or pro sports athletics coaching job the reality is you are most likely going to be working with the general population. This

One of the common compensations you see when people are lifting barbells to significant fatigue is lateral spine flexion, rotation and a lean towards one side. It is very normal when attempting rep maxes or pursuing the almighty 1RM to see this movement occur. The question is why? Why does it happen and why does the body move in this fashion? When put to the test and when working on creating more strength from your body your brain gets very invested in recruiting the stron

Everyone agrees that if we are to make legitimate progress with your strength training then progressive overload is the non negotiable practice to engage in. What this means is that at some point along the timeline of your training you are going to have to increase the stressors of training. Now this can be done through intensity(increasing of the weights lifted) volume(increase in the total amount of work), density(more work done in the same amount of time) or frequency(mo

Developing the lat muscles is highly valuable for sports performance, physique enhancement and also for preventing spine injuries. The difficulty of the development of the lats is that it involves the shoulder which is a joint that has very little in terms of an actual structure. Most often when people try to develop the lats they end up developing some shoulder dysfunction because they do not work on all the muscles around the scapula. If we think of how to make just the

Training the human body to respond positively to stress is a challenging endeavor. Often what seems like a simple task reveals itself to be much more complex than it was perceived to be. If all we think about is perform exercise "A-F" with the prescribed sets, reps, weights and using the appropriate rest periods then yeah this is pretty straight forward. However, the reality is that engaging with the dynamic adaptations to the human nervous system, muscular system, aerobic