The week between Christmas and New Year’s I like to highlight a select number of articles featured on my site during the past 365 days.
First up were the the articles that resonated with you, the reader, as defined by analytics and what piqued your interest…HERE.
Next up were the articles that resonated with me and filled my writer’s love tank…HERE.
Today I’d like to direct your attention to the best GUEST POSTS of 2019.
Copyright: serpiandco / 123RF Stock Photo
Best Articles of 2019: Guest Posts
The State of Corrective Fitness 2019 – Kevin Mullins
This was FOUR part series DC based personal trainer, Kevin Mullins, wrote for the site that, if I were to be honest, is very much a Ken Burns’esque masterpiece.
As we grow older our fitness tends to get more and more robotic in nature. We sit in machines, performing endless, mindless repetitions, all while perusing our smart phones.
Shane showcases some ways to be less of a health/fitness zombie.
Today’s guest post comes courtesy of trainer, writer, and guy I hate because he is waaaaaaay too good looking, Michael Gregory.
Michael wrote an excellent post on nutrient timing for my site last year which you can check out HERE. He’s back again discussing an important topic: “reframing” injury and how to use (more) training to aid recovery.
Warning: Avengers: End Game spoilers ahead.
But come on: It’s been three weeks for crying out loud. If you haven’t seen it by now it’s your fault.
Let’s talk about acute injuries in your clients: those accidents that leave a scar in the shape of a teddy bear.
“Oh! What a cute injury!”
Allow me to elaborate, for those of you who aren’t a fan of Dad jokes.
If you hurt yourself, the best recovery plan you can follow includes continuing to train and actually treating the injury as if it is less egregious than it may actually be.
I’m not suggesting that you act as if nothing happened, but I am suggesting that you only adjust your training as much as you have to in order to work around the pain.
As a coach, you aren’t a doctor, so don’t act like one. You are, however, in the chain of recovery, and may be the only fitness professional around when an injury first occurs.
Know your role Snoop Lion
How you react matters to your client more than you realize.
The Assumption Is You Know What You’re Doing
You’re a shit hot programmer that doesn’t plan anything your client isn’t ready for because you follow the principle of progressive overload.
One-rep maxes are not a spontaneous event that you perform when the sunset is a particularly auspicious color. They are planned for and prepared for, for weeks or even months in advance.
Because you program smartly, you know that any injury a client sustains under your care isn’t going to be a career ender.
It’s simply a kiss from the weightlifting gods that initiates them into the barbell illuminati.
If you train hard you will have battle wounds. That being the case, it’s time you learn how to get your clients past their injuries in the most economical way possible.
The Biopsychosocial Model of Pain for Acute Injuries
This entire process is about facilitating the best environment for healing. That means not freaking out and quitting, but rather, changing training only as much as is needed.
Step 1: Reassure AKA “Don’t freak out.”
Even if someone’s eye is hanging out of their skull, the best thing you can do is keep your cool. The power of positive thought is a hot topic these days.
Even if those stories are only 10% accurate the power of the placebo effect is a wildy useful tool to have on your side. Keeping your cool and addressing unhelpful thoughts and fears are the first things you can to do to help your clients harness the effects of the placebo.
This is the psychosocial aspect of the model. It is the most important to get right the first time. Poisonous thoughts are really hard to uproot once they’ve been planted.
This whole step is the opposite of what my Junior Varsity football coach did to me and my relationship with the 2-plate bench press.
He told me I’d never be able to bench 225 with my long-ass arms unless I weighed 300+ pounds and the gravitational pull of the moon was twice its normal strength.
(Brief aside: Of course, the world’s weather and tidal patterns would be thrown into absolute chaos if all of a sudden the moon was twice as strong. So the joke’s on Coach J, because we’d all be dead before I could even make it to the gym. Try to remain calm after that sick burn.)
Regardless, I struggled for years with that negative reinforcement (nocebo effect) in my head. I could rep out 205 for sets of 5 but as soon as that second plate went on the bar “it was too heavy.”
Step 2: Assess the Situation
Like a good cub scout that just stumbled onto the remains of a deer that had been hit by a car, you’ve got to get your bearings.
Should you help it?
Put it out of its misery?
Add it to your Instagram story?
He already knows he messed up. Overreacting isn’t going to help the situation.
Start by asking the trainee what they were attempting and what they felt.
Remember, poker face: don’t let ‘em see you wince.
This is the first two “O’s” of the OODA loop, something that fighter pilots and military tacticians love to reference. Observe and Orient to the situation. (DA is Decide and Act, but you have to orient first).
No need to jump to any reactions here or start calling people lower life forms.
Be a professional.
Step 3: Move Forward by Reintroducing Movement in a Non-Threatening Context
Your special snowflake of a client is down, but not melted. You can still fix this and get them back to lifting heavy and kicking in doors faster than you can say “rubber baby buggy bumpers”.
Arnold said it first.
Your goal is to work your way backwards from the exercise that caused the injury in as short a distance as possible.
Start by asking these questions:
1st Question: Load. Is there a weight you can use that does not hurt?
If you can just reduce the weight of the exercise and the client no longer feels pain or discomfort then… do that.
If your client felt a “tweak” (technical term) in their mid-back while deadlifting, deadlift day isn’t over. Just take some weight off the bar. If it still hurts with 135, use the bar.
If it still hurts with the bar, use a PVC pipe.
The goal here is to show your client that the movement isn’t inherently dangerous at all weights.
2nd Question: Range of Motion. Where does it hurt?
If your client is still in pain conducting the movement with only their bodyweight, the next thing to adjust is range of motion.
In deadlifting, for example, if their pain is in the first two inches off the floor, elevate the bar until you are out of the danger zone.
No, this isn’t perfect form, for you deadlift sticklers out there, but your client isn’t going to be doing deadlifts from the rack or with the high handles on the trap bar forever. Pretty much as soon as you adjust the range of motion of a movement you should be planning for a progression to get the trainee back to the full movement.
If you haven’t seen it, consider this your warning.
Secondly, who the fudge decided what “full range of motion” is for any given exercise?
If your client isn’t a competitive lifter, it doesn’t actually matter.
I promise you won’t cause a rift in the space-time continuum resulting in an alternate timeline where Thanos succeeds in destroying half of all life in the universe and it stays that way. (Okay, that’s not really a spoiler so much as conjecture. Hey, spoiler warnings entice the reader to finish the article).
3rd Question (well, statement): Exercise Selection. If decreasing the weight and range of motion still results in pain, work your way backwards down the line of exercise specificity.
Only now should you be thinking about changing up the exercise entirely. This is assuming that you chose the initial exercise because it is the one which most completely trains you client to achieve their specified goal. If you just chose the exercise because it makes the vein in your biceps pop when you apply the Clarendon filter on Instagram I ask you the following question. How did you get this far in this article?
As an example, let’s say you were doing conventional deadlifts with your client. In my mind, the regression looks something like this:
Conventional deadlift
Snatch grip deadlift
Sumo deadlift
Straight leg deadlift
Romanian deadlift
Trap bar deadlifts
Rack pulls
Dumbbell deadlift variations
Single-leg DB deadlift variations
Single-arm DB deadlift variations
Single-arm single-leg DB deadlift variations
Good mornings
Cable pull-throughs
Hip thrusts
Okay, I digressed quite far there, but I think you get the point.
There are lots of exercises you can try with your client to teach them that they are not only not broken, but in fact still strong even with pain.
There is no excuse for the countless number of trainees doing leg presses and camping out on the stationary bike in the name of recovery.
Training is recovery.
It’s All Really Just Reassurance
This entire process of managing acute injuries is really just reassuring people that they aren’t fragile.
Some of our fellow humans, some of them your clients, have spent their entire lives avoiding pain at all costs. As a result, they’ve never had to learn how to overcome true adversity. By teaching this process to your clients, you are giving them the gift of self-reliance.
Resiliency is something most trainees are looking to build, mostly in the context of making their muscles more resilient. As far as I’m concerned, tenacity, fortitude, resilience, and mental toughness are all muscles. Each and every one of those is embedded in this process, and they are all made stronger every time someone learns to overcome something you or the barbell throws their way in the weightroom.
Does that tempt you to injure your clients on purpose now so that you can teach them about mental toughness?
Don’t do it.
But do be prepared to react calmly and with precision when accidents happen.
About the Author
Michael is a USMC veteran, strength coach, amateur surfer, and semi-professional mushroom connoisseur. As an intelligence officer and MCMAP instructor Michael spent the majority of his military career in the Pacific theater of operations.
He now lives in Bali where he writes, trains, and has had multiple near-death experiences in surf that is much too heavy for him.
There was a time in my life when what I ate (and when I ate it) ruled my clock. Now, granted, I wasn’t the guy bringing a cooler full of grilled chicken and asparagus to social gatherings, popping BCAA’s pills like candy, or injecting maltodextrin intravenously within 17 seconds of finishing my last set after a workout.
No, I didn’t take things to those extremes.
However I did place a lot of emphasis into my pre and post-workout nutrition, meticulously measuring my carbohydrate-to-protein ratios in an attempt to not turn into Christian Bale’s character from The Machinist.
Did it work? Sure.
Did it matter? Probably not.
In today’s guest post written by fitness trainer (and someone I hate because I am not nearly as handsome as he is), Michael Gregory, he explains how and why “nutrient timing” may not be as big of a deal as we’ve been led to believe.
Here’s all you need to know about timing your nutrient intake:
At some point in time, you need to eat food, or you will die.
“Nutrient timing” is one of those things people love to nerd out on. But the truth is, the timing of food consumption doesn’t matter if you aren’t already doing a whole host of other things perfectly first.
With such a large window of time to play with, you may start to wonder how the timing of your meals affects your workouts. Essentially, if you eat anything within the six hours before your workout, it is somewhere in your system being actively absorbed while you are working out.
This is good news for the normal trainee. As long as you eat a meal comprised of adequate amounts of protein, carbohydrates, and fat sometime within the six hours before you workout, you will have fuel to support your training.
Why You Need Each Macro
Protein: Your body is literally built out of it. Stressors like exercise break the body down. This means that without a new supply of proteins running through your system, your body is breaking down and not repairing itself.
Carbohydrate: Carbs are what give us energy. Without them performance takes a nosedive. This is a fact. By fueling up with carbs for a workout, you elevate your work capacity and can make more gains in the gym.
Fat: Fats also give us energy, and our nervous system is composed of them. Fats make and balance our sex hormones and other crucial steroids that we need in order to function normally, they transport certain vitamins around our bodies that would otherwise just get excreted. With so many necessary functions for our bodies, fats are a vital part of our diets, and we certainly can’t perform optimally in the gym without them.
Regardless of current training status or experience, research has shown repeatedly that the number one most important dietary concern is total caloric intake with appropriate macronutrient ratios.
Just about everyone is deficient in some aspect of their diet, be it protein, fats, or some specific micronutrient.
If you are deficient in any aspect of your diet, nutritional timing will be a waste of your time.
The most common example of this I’ve seen are gym bros supplementing with protein pretty much constantly, but they haven’t touched a vegetable or a quality source of fat in a half decade. When your main food groups are protein, Red Bull, beer, and sugar it doesn’t matter when you drink that shaker cup of powder.
That’s the closest alligator to your boat. Shoot that dinosaur first.
But Wait; There’s A Catch
If you are 100% dedicated to hitting your nutrient targets and are trying to maximize gains, then you may fall into the very small portion of the population that can benefit from some nutrient timing-based practices.
Here are the categories of human in question:
Endurance athletes who train multiple hours at a time
Bodybuilders who train multiple hours and are trying to maximize body composition.
Athletes in weight class-based sports who train multiple hours or multiple sessions and are trying to maximize body composition.
Military athletes who train multiple hours or multiple sessions. (This often doesn’t get mentioned, but I come from that world and know what it’s like to cramp out in the middle of a 20 mile hike or watch someone slip into rhabdomyolysis.)
That’s four categories of 1%ers.
And this isn’t the rich kind. These are the apocalypse survivors: people who know what it means to accept struggle to accomplish a goal.
Again, notice that there are two major reasons that you would need to worry about nutrient timing strategies.
If you are training multiple hours or multiple sessions in a day.
If you are trying to maximize body composition.
Future Apocalypse Survivors
Congratulations, you are officially in the small pool of individuals who are ready to apply nutrient timing protocols to your workout schedule.
In three simple steps, here’s how it goes.
Step 1: Pre-Workout Nutrition
Consume a normal high protein meal with a solid source of starch or carbs, some good fat, and plenty of micronutrient-containing veggies 2-3 hours before your workout.
Protein before a workout, even hours before a workout, can help maintain and increase muscle size, reduce and prevent chronic muscle damage, and put plenty of amino acids in your bloodstream when your body is most apt to use them.
Carbs before your workout will fuel your training by putting glucose readily in your bloodstream and by topping off your muscle and liver glycogen stores. In addition, carbs stimulate insulin, which is good if you are consuming protein. Insulin prevents muscle protein breakdown and promotes muscle protein synthesis to help your muscles grow.
Fats, although they don’t seem to directly impact performance, do slow down digestion. This means you will have more energy longer because your body is slowly burning the fuel from the rest of your meal.
. Bottom line: No need for fancy sports gels or drinks here!
Have a real whole food meal 2-3 hours before. You could also opt for an easier-to-digest shake with all the needed essentials.
Step 2: During-Workout Nutrition
Protein during a workout prevents muscles from breaking down and aids in quicker recovery. For people grinding out multiple hour runs or multiple workouts a day, this is imperative.
Carbs keep your energy substrate elevated during a workout. Once you deplete your glycogen stores, you need to refuel them to stay at a high level of performance for anaerobic activity. This is key if performance is a high priority for you.
Fats aren’t really necessary during training. Plus, they could hit your stomach like a ton of bricks. Stick to protein and carbs. Ensure you are getting your fats in your other meals of the day.
You’ll notice a sports drink here. The ONLY time you need one of these sugar bombs is when you are training like a maniac. Otherwise, it’s just destroying your teeth and body.
Step 3: Post-Workout Nutrition
A meal that looks pretty much just like your pre-workout meal is spot-on for post-workout nutrition, consumed within 2 hours after your workout.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to throw a protein shake down your throat the minute you stop working out. Relax, go home, have a shower, cook a nice meal, and enjoy it.
You easily have up to 90 minutes, maybe even more, after a workout to get the nutrition your body requires.
Besides, the protein you ate before your workout is still peaking in your system. Having a full meal rather than a pure protein shake also helps slow down muscle protein synthesis, which is a good thing. It means your body will have more of a chance to get those amino acids from the protein to where they are needed most in your body.
Pre-workout and BCAAs
The bottom line on both of these is that they are unnecessary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they are both a complete and total waste of your money.
Pre-workouts are one of the biggest scams in American History, right behind medical circumcisions. You would receive more pre-workout benefit from flushing your money down the toilet and then subsequently unclogging the toilet (plunging a toilet is a full body workout.) The only “pre-workout” that is worth the money in my book is caffeine.
Everything else is false positives and fancy marketing.
NOTE From TG: CAFFEINE!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhh.
Nutrition Timing Is Actually Quite Simple
Chances are the time of the day in which you eat a certain food item is not what needs to be fixed in your diet.
Late night carbs, the anabolic window, butter coffee, second breakfast are means to an end if they work for you. Maybe you need help putting on weight or getting adequate protein, then these methods may help in various ways.
Only if you’re a hobbit trying to put on some mass.Just remember, your body is not some precise state of the art machine that will self-destruct if one microchip is a nanosecond out of time. Your body is the result of millions of years of evolution, in which there was no guarantee of a fresh Brontosaurus steak within 20 minutes of running from a pack of Velociraptors.
In 99.9% of clients I’ve personally worked with timing related eating tactics have functioned merely as methods to get people to eat more or less of certain foods, not because some eating protocol is actually optimal for your body.
About the Author
Michael Gregory is a fitness professional and former U.S. Marine Captain who helps weekend warriors and fit pros get ready for their next challenge be that a fight, an intense military school, or beach season. You can find him in the real world on a wave in Bali or eating a cheesesteak in Philly. For more by Michael check out his Instagram @composurefitness, or his website www.composurefitness.com.
….It’s the (Even More) Complete Shoulder & Hip Blueprint.
A bunch of wordsmiths we are.
With this iteration, though, we’ll be going a bit deeper into the coaching and programming side of things:
How to program around common injuries.
How to “connect” the appropriate exercises to the client/athlete.
How to squat and deadlift like a boss.
Ljubljana, Slovenia – October 20-21st. (<— EARLY BIRD rate still in affect)
Los Angeles, CA – November 17-18th. (<— EARLY BIRD rate still in affect)
All registrants to this course (as well as future dates in Detroit, Philadelphia, Minas Tirith) will receive a free download of CSHB 1.0 so that you’re up-to-speed on the content Dean and I will be covering.
I’ve had to decline speaking at this event in the past due to prior engagements, but I’m headed to San Jose this year baby.
And I…..am…..pumped.
I’ve never been to the Bay area so I’m excited for that. But I’m even more excited for the THREE days of melt your face knowledge that’ll be under one roof.
The line-up is spectacular and I’m honored to be included amongst such esteemed company – Pat Rigsby, Mark Fisher, Molly Galbraith, Kellie Hart, Craig Ballantyne, and Scott Rawcliffe, to name a few.
I’ll be speaking about shoulder assessment.
If you’re a fitness professional looking to take his or her’s career to the next level this is an event you won’t want to miss.
Last weekend Dean Somerset and I were in Houston, TX to put on our (Even More) Complete Shoulder & Hip Blueprint workshop.
Of course the first thing we did was hit up some BBQ.
Immediately after that we recorded this episode of Saved By the Barbell hosted by Kevin Warren.
SOCIAL MEDIA SHENANIGANS
Twitter
If YOU (the fitness professional) can’t explain the “why” behind an exercise or modality in a program how in the heck do you expect your client/athlete to buy into it much less understand it?
In my experience working with women on body image, I have become convinced that complimenting and praising a woman’s appearance in today’s social atmosphere actually does her — and all women everywhere — a disservice.
Michael is a USMC veteran, strength coach, amateur surfer, and semi-professional mushroom connoisseur. As an intelligence officer and MCMAP instructor Michael spent the majority of his military career in the Pacific theater of operations.
Michael Gregory is a fitness professional and former U.S. Marine Captain who helps weekend warriors and fit pros get ready for their next challenge be that a fight, an intense military school, or beach season. You can find him in the real world on a wave in Bali or eating a cheesesteak in Philly. For more by Michael check out his Instagram 
