I’ve seen a lot of weird things in the gym throughout the years. For instance last week, while making a cameo appearance at a local commercial gym, I witnessed a woman bust out some red curtain thingamajig and hang it from the pull-up bar, and proceed to give everyone what can only be described as an impromptu Cirque du Soleil show in the middle of the fitness floor. Half of me couldn’t help but watch; while the other half secretly wanted to see her fall on her head. It was completely, well, dumb. I’m sure she felt it was giving her a great core workout or whatever, and that she was “lengthening” her muscles to boot. But in all actuality, it was just making people uncomfortable and distracting me while I was trying to get my “gunshow” on. To each his own.
Anyways, after seeing her “performance,” I honestly thought I had seen everything there is to see. That is of course, till Lelli sent me this video:
I don’t know whether I’m watching an exercise video or an acid trip on steroids. Either way, I’m completely terrified at the moment. Someone hold me.
1. For those who have followed me for any length of time, whether it’s through reading my articles, my blog, or listening to me on The Fitcast, one of the things I am always stressing to other fitness professionals is the importance of continuing education. More specifically, making it a priority to attend seminars and conferences as often as you can. As such, I’d say that I try to make a cameo appearance to at least four events in any given year. In the past year alone, I’ve been to a handful of Perform Better’s seminars, Mike Boyle’s Winter Seminar, as well as Northeastern University’s Sports Medicine Lecture Series. Note to Self: Comic Con is next on the list.
Be that as it may, it goes without saying I always walk away with a ton of useful information that I’m able to apply immediately with the athletes and clients that I work with on a daily basis. While it’s always cool to learn things about retroversion and how it affects an athlete’s shoulder, or I don’t know, reciprocal inhibition (because it makes me sound smart), whenever I reflect on the day’s topics, there always tends to be one simple (albeit important) theme that reverberates in my mind over and over again. Which is———————-I need to stretch more.
While I do spend my fair share of time in front of the computer everyday- I also spend anywhere from seven to ten hours training clients. Which is to say that unlike you, I’m on my feet loading/un-loading plates, demonstrating how to squat properly, taking clients through their dynamic warm-ups, so on and so forth. Needless to say, if I feel I need to stretch more, then it’s a safe bet that you really need to stretch more.
Interestingly enough, within the past few months, I’ve FINALLY been making a conscious effort to stretch. Furthermore, to steal a term from Mike Robertson, I’ve been taking a “grenade approach,” and really making a point to be more thorough with my foam rolling- sometimes doing it twice per day. As a result, my knees haven’t felt this good in years, and I’ve been implementing squats back into my routine for the past few weeks with no resounding ramifications. Fingers crossed.
2. Knowing full well that we were going to be taping The Fitcast at 10:30 AM yesterday, and that I had plans later on in the afternoon*, my girlfriend and I headed down to the local BSC at like eight in the morning to get a quick lift in. We hop in the car for the short drive to Davis Square and this is the conversation that took place:
GF: “OMG, I can smell your knee sleeves from here.” Note: my Rehbands were in my gymbag in the backseat of the car.
Me: “Well, you know what? It’s pretty much an established fact that when you lift heavy stuff, things are going to smell bad sometimes.”
GF: “My armpits smell, you haven’t lifted me.”
Me: “That’s just gross. I’m totally going to make out with you.”
She’s a keeper.
3. *= we headed to Westford, MA to spend the day at Kimball Farm, which is pretty much the most awesome place on earth outside of Marisa Miller’s cleavage of course.
We spent the day playing miniature golf (in the rain) and followed that with some arcade action. Here’s me playing some pitching game that I totally dominated- highest MPH score of the day, thank you very much. I’m going to suggest that we get one of these for the facility in our next staff meeting. We need a new glute ham raise? Pffffft, whatever. What we really need is this thingamajig. Our pro baseball guys would never leave if we had this. Then again, it would get them out of Pete’s office. Hmmmmmmm………
4. Speaking of The Fitcast, check out this week’s episode. Kevin, Leigh and myself spent a good two hours talking about, you know, stuff.
5. I don’t know if this dog was dreaming about catching a t-bone flavored frisbee or running away from Bruce Willis’ latest movie. Either way, it’s freakin hilarious.
We had an exciting morning today at Cressey Performance. I managed to get through an entire session with the women’s group without being called an a-hole (no small feat by any stretch of the imagination), and Chris Frankel from TRX was gracious enough to stop by and bust out a quick two hour staff in-service for us.
As some of you may recall from earlier in the week, I blogged about the TRX Trainer, and while I went in with some hesitation, I have to say I was thoroughly impressed with a lot of the stuff he showed us. Which is to say, it was rather eye opening to see how much I sucked. Needless to say, we’re definitely going to be incorporating more of this stuff into our programming. Consider this a fair warning CP clients. *strokes evil strength coach beard*
As you can surmise from the title, Cassandra is preggers. As such, she’s making it her mission to prove to women everywhere that even if you’re expecting, you can still train.
I’ve dated a girl or two (hundred*), and Steph isn’t one of them. You’ll have to click the link above to figure out what the heck I’m talking about. Anyways, Steph often writes about her experiences training with us, and this was a nice post discussing what it takes to be a CP intern.
I’m sure many of you have already seen this, but just in case you haven’t:
And in case you think it’s fake, here’s the same shot from the field:
I can’t even imagine how many attempts it took to pull this off, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Kind of reminds me when I was kid, sitting up in my room with my Nerf basketball set, conjuring up trick shots myself. Bounce pass off Mariah Carey poster, with a 360 jump from the bunk bed, over Thunderpunch He-Man——–SWISH, count it. FIST PUMP!!
*= anyone get the reference? Anyone? Bueller, Bueller?
Q: What is your take on these TRX trainer things that keep getting all the press lately? I notice many fitness professionals in the industry pushing them hard, and I’ve also seen them in the MMA scene, etc. I was wondering what your take was?
A: First off, is it me or does it seem like anything developed by the Navy SEALS turns into straight up cash-money? First there was The Perfect Push-Up, and now there’s the TRX Trainer. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if next year they try figure out some way to market, I don’t know, water boarding as the next big fitness craze. Hahahahaha. Just kidding. No, but seriously, what about live grenades?
Like anything “new” or unique in the fitness industry (kettlebells, anyone?), I think we have a tendency to over-blow things to the point where we oftentimes fail to realize that, you know, barbells and dumbbells do still exist. Now before I get the hate mail, please understand that I am in no way suggesting that the TRX Trainer doesn’t have it’s place in the proverbial “fitness toolbox.” On the contrary, as I type this blog, we have two pair at Cressey Performance no more than 50 feet from my desk, and we actually have a TRX representative traveling to Hudson this Friday to take us through a staff in-service.
Furthermore, I think they’re absolutely awesome for those people who travel a lot for work and otherwise have limited access to a gym. Too, outside of the athletic realm, I’ve found them to be very useful when training overweight clients, in addition to the elderly clients that I work with on a weekly basis.
That said, what really gets my goat is when people in the industry try to pass them off as the panacea of fitness- much like what happens whenever you hear someone talk about yoga or pilates. I’m not a TRX guy. I’m not a kettlebell guy. I’m not a powerlifting guy, nor am I an Olympic lifting guy. I’m a results guy- albeit I do incorporate components of all the above into my programming.
Personally, I think it’s a bit shortsighted whenever someone latches onto ONE concept and that’s all they preach to their clients.
In short, the TRX Trainer definitely has several legitimate uses. I mean, it wasn’t named Best New Fitness Gear by Men’s Health for nothing. It offers a unique twist to training that not only offers variety, but versatility as well. They’re just not the end all-be all of training that some professionals in the industry make them out to be.
1. Most know Anthony Renna as the guy behind the guy, behind the guy of the strengthcoach.com podcast. I’ve had the pleasure of crossing paths with Anthony on a few occasions, whether it be a Perform Better conference or during Mike Boyle’s latest Functional Strength Coach seminar- as was the case several weeks ago. Needless to say, Anthony is a really innovative guy, and he was kind enough to offer me a free subscription to his Strength and Conditioning Webinars site. It’s only been within the past two weeks or so that I’ve been able to play around with it, but I have to say that it’s pretty kick-ass.
The premise is simple. Get some of the top names in the industry. Have them make a PowerPoint presentation. Hook them up to the internet. And BAM- you sir, have yourself a Webinar. It’s kind of like that scene in Eyes Wide Shut when Tom Cruise shows up to that mansion in the middle of no where, opens up the doors, and finds himself smack dab in the middle of some secret mask society gettin their freak on all over the place. Except, you know, it’s nothing like that.
Nevertheless, Anthony has developed an awesome resource. and I highly encourage any fitness professional to check out Strength and Conditioning WebinarsASAP.
2. Along similar lines, I listened to Charlie Weingroff’s webinar on Knee Pain Considerations in Training and Rehab, just the other day, and was blown away by what he had to say about the hip internal rotation paradox. In a nutshell- and without giving away too much- he said:
“……the joint system can not stabilize unless it knows it HAS to. We must have full mobility at ALL joints before we have a prayer to stabilize.”
In other words, our joints are kind of like a pendulum.
The only reason a joint “knows” to stay in the middle, or stabilize (position #3), is because it recognizes what it’s like to be either to the far left (position #1) or far right (position #5). If a joint lacks sufficient mobility- as is the case when someone demonstrates HIRD (Hip Internal Rotation Deficit)- then it lacks the proper proprioception to stabilize. As a result, position #2 is now considered “normal” to the body, which will obviously wreak havoc on joint function and cause a myriad of musculo-skeletal issues in the end. Charlie discusses it more thoroughly than I do, but I felt it was a pretty cool concept nonetheless.
3. Here is a great three-part series written by John Izzo on how to fire a client. We’ve all had clients where we’d rather swallow live bees, or worse, attend a Celine Dion concert than spend another hour listening to them bitch and whine about whatever it is they’re bitching and whining about. In this series, John discusses how to go about bringing out the inner Donald Trump in all of us.
4. I’ll end with this. I’m literally speechless*
* and by speechless, what I really mean is Christmas shopping is totally done this year.
This one’s going to be short and sweet this morning. After training the women’s group, I’ve been sitting here at CP for the past two hours writing programs, catching up on e-mails, and watching Youtube videos of comedian Bill Burr, who’s going to be performing at Boston University this weekend. A bunch of the CP crew are going to be attending his show tomorrow night in Agganis Arena, and I’m pretty stoked about it. And yes, I just used the word stoked in a sentence. Deal with it.
Nevertheless, I’m all Spiked up and about to get ready to train myself- which should be interesting given that I’m sprinting with one of our athletes who played professional football over in Europe this past year. However, before I go and embarrass myself, I wanted to post a quick blog.
What Does It Do: Just serves as a nice and convenient progression from a regular ol’ x-band walk, which is generally done in a lateral fashion only.
Key Coaching Cues: Chest tall, scapulae retracted AND depressed. Pretty self explanatory really. Which is to say, it’s fairly idiot proof. I like to use this as part of a general warm-up/dynamic flexibility circuit. You can either go for time or just do 2-3 sets of five reps per direction.
NOTE: Even though I took the day off from work yesterday, I did happen to post a blog-albeit later in the day than usual. Who’s been a blogging son-of-a-bitch lately? Me, that’s who. Sha-ZAM!
When it comes to politics, I’m about as non-political as they come. While I try to keep tabs on the important topics, and like to think of myself as having a subjective viewpoint, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m far from an expert and really only get my news from the following sources:
1. The back of a cereal box.
2. Talk radio to and from work everyday: personal favs include Michael Graham and Michele McPhee of WTKK, 96.6 here in Boston.
3. The occasional episode of The Daily Show.
4. And whatever it is that’s coming out of French newswoman, Melissa Theuriau’s mouth.
Jesus, she looks intelligent. You gotta give the French credit. If it were at all comparable to mid-90’s tv shows that kicked ass and took names, not to mention included one of the most underrated badonkadonks in U.S history (Jenna von Oy, aka, Six)- the French would be the Blossom of getting hot chicks to read news.
Moving on, I’ve generally made it a personal rule not to talk politics with people given that it usually does nothing but result in heated debates and/or knife fights. However, given the recent uproar about universal health care, and rightfully so I might add, I wanted to share a really great article written by Michael Pollan that appeared in the NY Times last week titled Big Food vs. Big Insurance.
With three quarters of health care spending going towards treatment of preventable chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity- all of which, not coincidentally, can be correlated to the typical Western diet- it’s not unreasonable to surmise that the most powerful “fix” to this whole issue could simply be what we put on our plates.
Yet another reason why Michael Pollan deserves the Pulitzer Prize for being Michael Pollan.
He may only post once every blue moon, but when he does, it’s a classic. Here, Jonathan discusses why taking the easy way out or leaning towards the “quick fix” is exactly what you shouldn’tdo as it relates to your fitness goals.
I think it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of people who read my blog also read Eric’s blog/newsletter too. As such, while I’m sure many of you have either already read his latest newsletter or about to find it in your inbox (surprise!)- for the select few who haven’t, I highly encourage you to check it out as he discusses the pros and cons of CrossFit.
On an aside (and this is strictly my opinion) this is one of the pros of CrossFit:
Not too long ago I reviewed the documentary Food, Inc. Coincidentally, as I was perusing the local bookstore a few weeks later (and by perusing the local bookstore, what I really mean is using the free WiFi), I came across the companion book as well. Highlights include chapters by Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation and film co-producer), as well as a chapter by Robert Kenner, the film’s director. Suffice it to say, anyone who’s remotely concerned/interested about the food we put down our pie holes on a daily basis should read this book.
1. As someone who trains his fair share of women, I’m always curious as to what other professionals in the industry are doing with their female clients; not only from a training perspective, but from a psychological perspective as well. Without coming across as if I’m tooting my own horn too much, I feel fairly confident I have the training component down pat. Week in and week out, the women that train at CPget leaner, stronger, drop f-bombs like sailors, and undoubtedly learn to have an appreciation for what it’s like to train in a conducive environment along side other women who are equally as likely to vomit a little bit in their mouths at the mere sight of a yoga mat.
As it is, I’d be remiss to suggest that I’m less than thrilled by the fact that the likes of Oprah, Tracy Anderson, Jillian Michaels, or any infomercial touting the latest mircle gadget/pill that will allow you to shed 22 lbs in three days all seem to have more “staying power” with the general public. To me at least, all the above do nothing but perpetuate many of the myths and fallacies that keep women from getting results in the first place. High reps/low weight, toning, don’t eat past 6 PM, toning, copious amounts of cardio, toning, dietary fat needs to be avoided at all costs, toning, strength training will make you “big and bulky,” toning, blah blah blah…………….excuse me while I’ll go bang my head against an ice pick. BRB.
Alas, it’s an upward battle and I’m totally getting away from my original thought. As I was saying, while I feel I have a firm grasp on the training component, it’s the psychological aspect of training women that sometimes mystifies me. Which is why I really liked this blog post by Rachel Cosgrove from the other day.
2. This is what happens when you’re a CP client and we send you to go see John Pallof and he says you have the tightest adducors he’s ever seen. Hello Graston………..
3. I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to go right out and say it. I went and got a pedicure for the first time in my life yesterday. Now before all you guys start passing judgement, you should know that I was forced, really. And by “forced,” what I really mean is that I was bribed with a meatloaf later on in the day. Either way, I guess that’s what I get for agreeing to spend the afternoon on Newbury Street in downtown Boston. *shrugs*
I’m not going to lie, I was absolutely terrified at first. Especially considering that I had just recently removed a plantars wart the size of Nebraska from the bottom of my left foot. Seriously, it was almost as if a meteor from the planet Krypton smashed into it- and there I was, letting this complete stranger go to town. Alas, it wasn’t that bad, and to make a long story short, afterwards, I redeemed my man-card by catching a fish with my own hands while we strolled through the Boston Gardens. It was prety much the most amazing thing ever.
4. This is the type of text message, Pete, our business manager, gets from some of our athletes who go off to college to start their freshman year and realize that their school’s gym isn’t CP:
No trap bar, no foam roller, and about 40 (expletive) that think they’re strong. Sweeeeet. I’m Spiked and ready to show these (insert expletive here) up.
I wonder what’s going to happen when he realizes that Monday is “National Wear Your Wife Beater While Bench Pressing with Your Fraternity Brother’s Day?”
