Where To Find a Good Trainer?
Bad trainers give a bad reputation to the profession. While a good trainer can be life changing a bad trainer can cost you results, time, money, and potential injury.
This is why It’s so Important that you choose wisely.
Good trainers and bad trainers can be found at any gym, but like any industry the best trainers often move up to find better work opportunities.
The result is that certain types of gyms will often have more quality trainers to choose from.
This article is a guide on where to look to find the best trainers in your area
Read More
How are some people able to gain muscle faster than other people?
Why is it that some people seem to build muscle so much faster than others?
This is a question I think we all have as we’re in the gym training working our hardest and yet still seem to not be seeing the same results as others.
I’ve worked as a trainer and wellness coach for several years. I’ve helped plenty of people of all different kinds achieve the body they wanted including adding muscle. Over that time I’ve observed 4 main reasons why some people add muscle faster than others.
Read More
Can Fashion Make You Fitter?
Briana was presenting a woman who chooses kale over cake, squats instead of sofas, and ambition over ambivalence. Clothes have always carried symbolic meaning and have long shaped the way others perceive us. However, many studies show that the clothes we wear can also affect our behaviors and performance. Which begs the question -Can clothes affect our performance in the gym? Can it help us make healthier decisions?
Can fashion ultimately make us fitter?
Read More
What Makes An Exercise Muscle Building or Body Slimming?
Woman - “My thighs are too big and I want them to be slimmer. What exercises are good for slimming a person’s legs?”
Man - “My upper body is well developed, and it makes it look like I have chicken legs. What’s a good exercise for growing my thighs?”
I answered both questions with squats.
Squats are an exercise that works a lot of muscle, has a strong metabolic effect, and builds a strong lower body. They’re an essential part any balanced workout program.
This begs the question -How can an exercise be both slimming and bulking?
Read More
Secrets of Success from the Wizard of Westwood
While his accomplishments are grand, what stands out most about Coach Wooden wasn’t what he did, but how he did it. Wooden was a driven but empathetic man whose background as a teacher allowed him to poetically articulate his ideas. The short, simple and inspirational messages that persist to this day are affectionately called “woodenisms”.
Today I’d like to share a few of these messages and how they're applicable to your own workouts and training.
Read More
Why You Should Hire A Trainer And How to Get Your Money's Worth
When there’s a leak, most people have no issue calling a plumber to fix it. You're willing to pay the plumber a 100 dollars an hour because you know it’s important that you get the leak resolved. So why don’t we give our bodies that same care?
When asked, “What is most important thing in life?” Health is always one of the top responses. Rightfully so, as without good health, all other aspects of our life will suffer.
I firmly believe that hiring a trainer is the best way to achieve any health or fitness goals you may have. I want to use this article to summarize how training works, what are the benefits and provide suggestions on how to make the most of the training if you’re strapped for cash.
Read More
Work Life Balance: Why It’s Important
I’m sure many of you have full-time jobs, families, and significant obligations to attend to on a daily basis. Today I’d like to talk about work-life balance, and why I think it’s important to a healthy life. The daily grind can be just that. A grind. What can we do to not have a mental breakdown day in and day out?
Read More
Making Sense of Diets
If you want to lose weight and drop fat, then you have to eat right - there's no way around it. However, with contradicting news headlines and new diet fads it can be difficult to make sense of it all.
Compounding this challenge is the sheer amount of choices we have. From the number of choices of food to the number of diets we can choose the options are numerous and overwhelming.
Each of us wants to make the right choice - to pick a diet that will help us feel better, look better, and enjoy our grandchildren when the time comes. With so many choices and so many diets each spewing their own claims the act of choosing can be overwhelming and impossible.
Diets need not be as confusing as they seem and In reality they aren't. In fact, all the diets you come across are all just different takes on the same 4 variables: Food quality, food quantity, macronutrient ratios, and food timing.
Read More
Why Diets Fail And How to Fix Them
Here are my favorite lines from the video that goes to the root of why diets don't work.
“Because a hundred and eight million people are dieting just in the US, and they try and fail, and they try and fail, four or five times a year. Then if you do lose weight 95 % will gain it back within 3 years.”
“We literally design our programs for failure. However, if you earn that weight back, It’s YOU who failed, not our program, never our program. You’re a failure because you can’t maintain an unrealistic masticating and exercise pattern for the rest of the time you spend breathing.”
Read More
How To Indulge Without Ruining Your Waistline
Much like Thanksgiving, Bastille Day is an annual day of indulgence for me. I will ignore all the advice of portion sizes, listening to your body, and eating in moderation, and if all goes according to plan, I will not gain any weight nor lose any progress. This is not due to genetics but because I had a plan.
All of us face days when we know we will be ‘bad’: Christmas, Thanksgiving, The Super bowl, Our Birthday, Saturday, or in my case Bastille Day. These days don’t have to mean gaining several pounds and losing all the progress you’ve made. If you know you will have a bad day, there are a few simple things you can do to help limit the damage while not compromising on the fun.
Read More
Avoid Pain By Changing How You Sit
Humans were meant to move, sit. So ill are the effects of sitting that it’s being deemed the new smoking. When you sit for long periods of time, the body begins to adapt to those positions. Muscles become short and tight while muscles like core and butt turn off. Eventually your body begins to mold itself into a chair and you lose your ability to move properly. What follows are issues such as lower and upper back pain, neck pain, knee pain, weight gain, and poor metabolic health.
But this isn’t an article on the misery and misfortune of excessive sitting. While it's true we sit too much, it would be unhealthy to stop sitting all together. Instead let's go over a few ways you can make sitting less detrimental to your health.
Read More
Managing The Vicious and Virtuous Cycles of Wellness
You were eating well, sleeping well, training well, and your goals felt inevitable.
Then a missed meal or a late night at work throws everything off?
That night of missed sleep leads to a missed morning workout. That missed workout stresses you out and leads you to poor food choices. Those food choices leave you tired and sluggish which makes you less productive at work. Now you have to stay late to work again...and the vicious cycle continues.
Our wellness often bounces between these vicious and virtuous cycles. The goal is to spend as much time as we can in a virtuous cycle where everything’s going right and to minimize the vicious cycles when everything is going wrong.
To achieve this goal and to put your wellness and results on the express track lets first begin by learning how these cycles work, and then how we can manage them.
Read More
How to Individualize Your Training and Diet for The Best Results
To succeed in bodybuilding or in any sport, you need to learn to think. You have to understand what you’re doing... find out what really works for you...Sure you have to train hard, but it won’t do that much good unless you also train smart. “
Arnold knew each of our bodies is different and hence each will respond differently to training.
To Arnold working smarter meant learning the Principles of Training that apply to all of us and then figuring out how to apply those principles in a way that worked best for the individual. Smart training involved learning about these differences and tailoring your training accordingly.
Read More
Is it best to suck your stomach in while working out?
No. The “pull your navel to the spine” cue given by many Pilates and Yoga instructors is often not fully informed.
Learning to lock the rib cage on to the pelvis is essential for injury prevention and performance. But there is a difference between a proper abdominal brace, which activates all the muscles in the core and abdominal hollowing which describes the drawing in of the naval.
Here is an excerpt from renown low back expert and clinician Dr. Stuart McGill's textbook Low Back Disorders explaining this difference.
Read More
Overcoming Gym Intimidation
The gym can be a scary and unsettling place. Full of strange medieval looking equipment and big intimidating weights being thrown around by even bigger intimidating people. It's no wonder people feel uncomfortable.
My friend and colleague Dave Herbert has been writing a series for the website based on his experience joining a gym and lifting weights for the first time. He writes from his first day of joining the gym:
“I was nervous. This wasn’t my area. I was intimidated. I didn’t belong there. Was I going to be shunned? Made fun of because I’m weak? "
In this article I would like to share a few of those lessons so you can overcome gym-intimidation.
Read More
Meal Audibles: Preparing For The Unexpected Meal
In football this ability to change the play on the fly is called an audible. It’s a backup plan from when situations on the field are not as expected.
For diets, these unexpected situations come up frequently. I'm sure we can all recall a time when we had a well-planned diet thrown off by an unforeseen situation. Maybe it was a birthday party, maybe a late night at work, or maybe your dog learned how to open the fridge.
Whichever the situation you need to be able to adjust and act decisively.
Read More
How to Progress a Workout
Milo was the most renowned wrestlers of his time. He was reported as a 6 time Olympic victor, and over that 24-year span, he was one of ancient Greece's greatest athletes.
Milo’s story begins as a young boy when a calf was born in his town. As the legacy goes Milo would pick up the calf and carry it around town every day. Each day as the calf grew, Milos strength would grow with it.
After 4 years Milo was carrying a full-grown bull and one of Greece’s strongest athletes.
Milo’s methods form the foundation of modern weight lifting and training - Progressive Overload.
Progressive overload is the gradual increase if stress placed upon the body during training. It is the key to building muscle, gaining strength, building endurance or any similar athletic feat
Read More
Filling in the Gaps - Finding Whats Stopping You From Achieving Your Goals
Not long ago I wrote an article on the training process. I described that to be successful you need to first identify where you are now, where you want to be, and then create a plan to get you from point A to Point B.
Today I want to go into how to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.
A gap is what is preventing you from taking your current situation and doing what you need to in order to be successful.
When it comes to fitness, the keys to success involve exercise and nutrition. When we speak of gaps today, we will be speaking about what is preventing you from exercising and eating right.
Common Gaps include knowledge, skill, motivation, habit, and environment.
Read More
9 Lessons of Longevity from the Blue Zone
Following in the footsteps of the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon and his search for the Fountain of Youth, Journalist Dan Buettner set out to find the secret to maintaining your youthfulness.
He along with his National Geographic team visited several of these blue zones to study their behaviors, actions, and culture to find the secret to their long-lasting lives.
He did not find a magical fountain or any special food that boost longevity, but he found a set of common behaviors and actions that combined may offer the true secret to longevity.
Here were the 9 lessons of the blue zones
Read More
5 Methods to Use Exercise As Part of Addiction Treatment
If you’re struggling in your journey to addiction recovery, you aren’t the only one. You might want to look at alternative addiction treatments. According to the New York Times, alternative addiction treatments can be a suitable alternative to traditional 12-step recovery programs. Some methods include psychotherapy, relaxation training, mindfulness meditation, and exercise. Exercise, in particular, can be a healthy supplement to addiction treatment. Here are a few methods you can easily incorporate exercise into your daily life and help you on your road to recovery.
Read More
