I am a big fan of unilateral training, both for upper and lower body exercises. Especially for lower body. I also work with bilateral exercises as I believe they are also an important part of a balanced training program. But I think a program without unilateral training is missing something.
The primary reason that I love unilateral training is that it helps to identify strength and flexibility differences from side to side. I see these across all types of people, but especially among those who play a sport that uses one side more than the other. If you think about it, this is almost every sport with the exception of running, swimming and cycling (If I missed one please let me know in the comments below). Even those sports will tend to have a unilateral element to it: Read more…
I love the Olympics. I know it’s still a few months away, but hey, if this was the US Presidential race we’d be talking about it for a few years in advance. I was looking at the London 2012 website to see when they actually start, and it turns out they are only 23 weeks away (July 27th), and we are 25 weeks from the closing ceremony (August 12th). Then I started looking at the events, and thinking that one of the things I love about the Olympics is that we get to see elite performance in a variety of sports that we often don’t have access to on a regular basis. Like volleyball – such a great sport, but rarely televised.
As a personal trainer and strength coach, the Olympics hold an extra attraction for me. Yes, I love the competition, entertainment, and the hope that the athletes representing my country will take home a medal. But beyond that I love the individual displays of athleticism. I love to watch an athlete and think about the training they did to help get them to that level, and about what I would have done if I was training them. Read more…
Functional training is all the rage (do the kids still use that expression?). It is also often misunderstood. Are squats on a Bosu functional? What about deadlifts? Bicep curls?
I have previously written my take on what functional training is, including a definition and examples of exercises that are functional for different activities like serving beer or tennis balls.
I have also stood on my isoap box on various fitness and skiing forums, sharing my theory about other training approaches that I believe are not functional (dysfunctional even). Read more…
When it comes to exercise, most people either do too much or too little. I think this applies beyond exercise, but let’s stick with that for the moment.
Those of us in the fitness and nutrition fields write a lot about those who do too little, in the hopes of helping fight the growing obesity epidemic. Today, however, I am going to talk about the other end of spectrum: too much exercise.
We laud those around us who maintain a healthy lifestyle, and are motivated by, and impressed at their the feats of strength and dedication. I recently read about a man who has run everyday for the past 40 years. I’m sure most of us who read that were inspired, and impressed. But is that actually a good idea? In his case, he seems to be enjoying a great and long life, which is all we can really ask for. But is it because of his excessive dedication to running, or in spite of it? Read more…
This article is part of my blog-series: My Favourite Training Tools (For my American readers, please excuse the ‘u’ in favourite. It’s a Canadian thing). There are probably thousands of tools out there for fitness. Some are ridiculous fly-by-night items, others have been mainstays for hundreds of years, and now and then there is a new kid on the block that is clearly here to stay. Through this blog-series, I’ll share with you the tools that I think are worth including in your home or commercial gym.
Number six on my list of favourite training tools is the chin up bar. As I write this, I wonder how it only made it to number six. If this was a “top 10 exercises that make me feel awesome” list, pull ups (palms away) and chin ups (palms toward you) would probably rank number one. But in reality, most people can’t do them (yet!), so we need other tools to be build up our strength so you can do them. This is where things like free weights (#1 on my list) and the TRX (#5 on my list) come in handy. I use them for building overall strength and stability first, and then I also use them to help clients progress to pullups. Here are a couple of how to exercise videos showing the pull up progressions that I use to get clients to be able to do pull ups: Read more…
If you’ve read my stuff before, then you know that I am, well, a big geek. I think I probably took fitness geek to a whole new level with my bench press assessment article, talking about the work value of a bench press based on arm span. I think this article will further raise the bar on geek in the fitness industry.
This article is about what typical problem areas I see based on the Functional Movement Screen (FMS for those who like to keep things short) assessments that I perform. Not familiar with the FMS? Check out functionalmovement.com, or read on for a brief overview. Then follow the article to see an overview of the results I’ve seen in terms of what functional movements tend to cause the most problems, and how the results are different based on gender and whether someone is an athlete.
Lastly, I’ll share my take on what this should mean for your training (or programming for trainers) if you do not have access to the FMS or other assessment options to help guide you. Read more…
Bench press is a great exercise, but for anyone with a shoulder issue, it may not be ideal. How do you know if you should bench? Well for starters, if it hurts to bench, you probably shouldn’t bench. What if it doesn’t hurt during the bench, but it hurts later, you ask? Same answer. I suspect you knew that but were hoping for a different answer. Sorry.
If the bench press is painful for you, you should probably be seeing a manual therapist (athletic therapist, chiro, massage therapist, osteopath, physio…) to help get you to pain free state. But once you reach that point, then what?
Ideally you would switch to other exercises, at least for a while. I want my clients to be able to do at least 10 proper bodyweight pushups (Click here for an article all about pushups) before I will have them bench press, and then I get them to do the Bottom Up Kettle bell (KB) bench press before moving to “normal” bench pressing.
I love it because it requires a lot of stabilizing to be able to do it, which means my clients literally will not be able to do it if they lack strength or stability in their shoulders. If they can’t do the bottom up KB bench press, they are not ready to bench press. Period. Read more…
I have become fascinated by the effect of different body size and shape on performance, both in sport and in the weight room. It is pretty obvious in some sports – the tall person is almost certainly going to do better in a sport like basketball than the short one. Not only is he taller, but she’s got a better reach. Height rules in many sports. But what about the weight room? Read more…
When I first saw a video of someone doing a pendulum with a TRX, I thought it looked
Amazing but also very challenging. Here is a video from Experiencelifemag.com showing what it looks like:
Right away I wondered how someone who didn’t’ already have a strong core would do it. For some reason I think this way a lot. Maybe I’m going to my engineering roots here; trying to re-engineer exercises. There was the stability ball roll-out progression, the new approach to pullup progressions, and a look at pushups, including progressions that I did in an article with Bret Contreras (I’ll post once the article gets published). Whatever the reason, I like progressions!
But I digress – back to the story line…I didn’t really think further about the TRX pendulum until yesterday when it hit me: Start with a half-pendulum. Read more…
Raise your hand if you’ve seen people do pullups and thought “pft – what a stupid exercise; nobody wants to be able to do that.” Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? (If you don’t know this reference, then it’s time to catch up on your 80s pop culture movies. Or time to say “wow, she’s old”. Either or.).
