Category: fitness

Watch my client Jessie squat 70kg 20 times!

It’s stuff like this that makes me love training women for strength. I had no idea she was going to do 20. She did 10 last time. But she felt confident on that last set and just went for it. It was a max set after 2×5 at this weight so her depth is a little bit off but what a great set it was. I was so surprised that I stopped counting. Haha.

Women aren’t thought of as strong but they can be and often they are easier to train than men. One of the differences is that women are easy to coach if they are interested in strength training because they come with few hangups. So little of strength training literature is aimed at them that they haven’t read as much BS as the guys usually have. And they are much more open to training the all important posterior chain. Most guys in the gym want to train biceps, chest, and abs.

I tell ya — I love my job. 🙂

I’m posting this here so I can find it later. Smolov’s squat workout is famous but a real killer. this routine below looks to be a shorter, more doable version that I’ll surely want to try in the future.

Week 1 (SETSxREPSxWEIGHT)
Mon – 6×6×70%
Wed – 7×5×75%
Fri – 8×4×80%
Sat – 10×3×85%
Week 2
Mon – 6×6×70%+10-20 lbs (bigger increase for bigger lift like squats)
Wed – 7×5×75%+10-20 lbs
Fri – 8×4×80%+10-20 lbs
Sat – 10×3×85%+10-20 lbs
Week 3
Mon – 6×6×70%+15-25 lbs
Wed – 7×5×75%+15-25 lbs
Fri – 8×4×80%+15-25 lbs
Sat – 10×3×85%+15-25 lbs

The pic has nothing to do with the squat routine, I just want to look like that when I’m old. Heck, I want to look like that now. 🙂

This is my new deadlift personal record (PR) lift. It took a while to get away from 160kg, but I did it:

My form isn’t the best but that’s what makes it a true PR attempt. If your form was perfect then you should be trying to do more. This is how you get strong. Just to check, I did 160kg before this and was very happy with the form. I nailed it whereas before, my form at 160kg looked like it did here at 170kg. Take your progress as you get it!

Question from a reader: I have this sudden fear of hurting my back pushing for a PR without “perfect form”… what are your thoughts?

Answer: IMO there’s safe and then there’s perfect. If you look at my upper back, it’s a little rounded but my lower back is flat. So my lower back is very safe, no danger there. My knee buckled a little at the end and that wasn’t too good but it happened because I was really focusing this time on extending the hip. My 160kg PR attempt showed me stopping a little before hip extension. For a perfect deadlift, I would want to flatten my upper back and lock both knees, which I can now do with 160kg.

So I’d say you have to push it a little in order to get strong. In fact, you have to be a little fearless. If you’re scared of the weights, they can sense it and they won’t go up. Proper progressive training should help you overcome that fear as you get stronger but you also need to try to set a new PR now and then to face that fear head-on.

I’ve been wanting to start a porn thread for the longest time but be warned, this isn’t your usual porn. Aren’t they beautiful?

Now those are functional fitness gyms! One day…..one day soon………

99% of the fitness industry is stuck in a beginner fat loss stage. How to lose fat is a topic of nearly endless discussion largely because the process is simple, but not easy. One question most folks never ask is what happens if you do lose the weight? What then?

It’s an important question because many people at some point in their fat loss attempts might actually lose weight. But the chances of them regaining it at huge. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people that lose weight will simply gain it back and that’s a shame. But then the fitness industry doesn’t exactly prepare us for what comes next.

So what does come next? Performance.

If you’ve been training smart in your fat loss, you were training like a beginning level athlete and not doing something stupid like riding an exercise bike three hours a day while trying to eat 1000 a day. In other words, if you did what nearly everyone else on earth did and cardioed yourself to death while also killing off any muscle you might have had in the process, then you just set yourself up for serious failure. Because what are you going to do now? Keep cardioing yourself to death? Good luck with that. And come see me when your lack of any muscle causes you to slip a disk. I train many clients like that.

If you trained like a basic athlete because you’re smarter than the average bear then you’ve prepared your body to do more interesting training. At this point, you won’t get winded near as much as you did when you started. The weight is way down, your lungs and heart are strong, and you can push yourself. You can start chasing performance goals like bringing your running times down, lifting more weights, hitting certain rep goals in kettlebell lifts, or even join an adult or masters sports league. Yes, you could compete again (or for the first time) as an adult.

Powerlifting, amateur bodybuilding, racing, church league softball, adult Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes, etc. are all options once the weight comes off and your fitness improves.

If none of that floats your boat or you don’t have time, then your workouts need to change to being faster and stronger than you were before. And here’s a MAJOR difference: how many calories you burn is NOT the major concern of the workout. That’s no longer the goal. This is maintenance level. We are now looking at doing something long term, not killing it every time you go to the gym.

Be VERY careful with this! This requires a major shift in mindset for some people. When your only experience with exercise has been about burning calories then moving to an intermediate/performance level can really shake you up. But it’s also a more fun level where you no longer really worry about calories. Remember, athletes focus on winning, not burning calories. So go enjoy being an athlete!