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March 12, 2021

Embrace A Long-term, 3 Step Approach To Pain-free Fitness

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 7:58 pm

After 11-plus years of coaching, I have learned that pretty much every single person who shows up to train with me has some pain.

Pain is something to which we can all relate. For some, it’s an emotionally-rooted pain, and for a vast majority of adults, there’s a certain amount of physical pain they deal with every day. 

It can be tempting, as a coach, to want to fix this pain by writing the perfect training program. The OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) enlightened me to another idea. The training program is only a small part of helping your clients live without pain.

Shift Your Mindset

Most people are impatient and want results now. It’s why people try muscle ups when they can’t even do a strict Chest-To-Bar (CTB) pull up. It’s not their fault.

We have all been told we can: 

  • Get abs in seven minutes.

  • Lose 30 pounds in 30 days.

Unfortunately, the path to improved fitness and decreased pain is a slow one.

The key is to help our clients shift their mindset to embrace a long-term, patient approach to fitness and pain-free living. 

Here are three steps you may not have considered to change your mindset and get out of pain long-term.

Step 1: Many People Don’t Know Where They Are.

“Meet them where they’re at” is how OPEX CEO Carl Hardwick, a man with almost 20 years of coaching experience, often puts it. 

The basic idea is to get to know as much as you can about your client’s:

Then, you can design an effective program for them that considers their entire life and ultimately “meet them where they’re at” in all areas of their life. 

However, one of the issues with this is that many people don’t know where they are. They don’t even know what it is they want to achieve from working out.

Somewhere along the way, they decided that snatching and learning a muscle up sounded like a cool idea. Still, some clients have ignored the fact that they can’t put their hands overhead without extending their spine (or maybe they don’t even realize this is the case) and that they’re in physical pain every time they snatch.

This person keeps trying to shove a square peg into a round hole—Talk about pain!

Other people set arbitrary goals without really considering what it will take to achieve them. Have you ever had a client who says she wants to lose 20 pounds and get a pull up, but her actions don’t align with her goal?

She never sticks around to do the pulling homework you gave her, and she keeps admitting to her Taco Bell addiction. It’s frustrating as a coach to watch this person continuously fail, and it’s even more frustrating to be the person who feels like a failure. 

Much of sorting out of this emotional and physical pain stems from awareness. 

Helping clients figure out what they want—their intention or why—is the first step to uncover, work through, and eliminate their emotional and physical pain, explained Firass El Fateh, the owner of OPEX Abbotsford in British Columbia. 

You have to, “Dig really deep with their exact reason for doing this whole thing,” El Fateh said. This starts on day one. “It’s about setting expectations right from the start during the initial consultation. Going through the assessment together and giving the client a clear picture of where they stand physically,” he added.

Emotionally speaking, when clients are honest about what they’re genuinely willing to sacrifice, such as losing 50 pounds—they’re more likely to shed emotional baggage and work to fix their problem.

Practically speaking, putting them through a thorough assessment allows your clients to understand their limitations. 

  • For example, if your client knows they failed a shoulder flexion test, they’re more likely to respect the fact that maybe going overhead with a barbell isn’t a great idea just yet. Perhaps it’s even the reason they’re always in pain. From there, you can lay out a path that will help them fix this weakness and get out of pain.

The mindset change starts with awareness of what’s causing the emotional pain, physical pain, and understanding what they want to achieve. 

Step 2: The Beauty of Simplicity

Remember the saying in elementary school: Keep it Simple, Silly (KISS)?

As coaches, we’re always trying to reinvent the wheel to keep people interested and show off our knowledge. Another lesson I learned from the OPEX CCP was about the beauty of simplicity. 

This comes down to, as Hardwick calls them, the “Basic Lifestyle Guidelines (BLGs).”

Simply put, “Start with lifestyle,” Hardwick said. 

First, you have to look at what the person has been doing for fitness and whether they have been doing “a bunch of inappropriate (for them) contractions and movements,” Hardwick said.

Look at what they’re doing the other 23 hours of the day. How are their sleep hygiene, nutrition hygiene, and stress levels? Teach them how this contributes to their pain, lack of recovery, and fatigue, Hardwick added. 

“If the client isn’t sleeping well, drinking enough water, getting enough sun, there is no point of diving deep into the program design part of it,” El Fateh added.

Beyond sleep, stress, sunlight, nutrition, other basic lifestyle guidelines, Hardwick asks coaches to consider how many steps the person is taking each day, how much water they’re drinking, and what kind of bowel movements they’re having.

As OPEX Founder James Fitzgerald put it, if you don’t feel comfortable talking to your clients about their poo, you’re missing out. “It’s an indisputable barometer of health…You need to talk about it with your clients,” he said. 

“Identify the lowest hanging fruit lifestyle habits,” Hardwick said, “and tackle them before you bother writing a fancy training program that promises your client the world.”

Step 3: Teach Them Why.

Anyone can teach someone how to squat, press, hinge, pull. While useful, for people to indeed be on board with a long-term path to better health and pain-free living, they need to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Doing this fosters that all-important buy-in explained Hardwick.

“It has to start with having the ability to educate our clients,” Hardwick said, not just through “principles and science,” but also through your own and other clients’ experiences.

El Fateh agrees. Once his clients have a clear understanding—based on the OPEX assessment he puts them through—he can now “tie in how their program will take them from where they are to where they want to get,” he explained.

He added: “Explaining the why behind the program is important…When people know why they’re doing something, they are much more likely to keep doing it.” 

The more self-sufficient and autonomous your clients become, the more likely they’re going to make decisions when you’re not looking (which is most of the time) that are smart for them and ultimately help them get out of pain long-term.

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March 2, 2021

Midline Rule: Simplify Your Stance

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 5:40 pm

Does original thought exist? Have we covered everything, or are there thinkers out there who aren’t in the box? I know my friend David Weck down in San Diego is changing the game when it comes to running, but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of strength training, we all regurgitate the same things while adding our particular flare?

The reason I ask is that working with my population (13-18-year-olds), I have needed to simplify and streamline much of my teachings to get what I need from them. Any of you who work in this demographic realize that the young ones will tune you out if you get too sciencey. I’ve learned this the hard way.

Therefore, my job has been to distill the big words, find ways for the kids to understand and create rules around the larger concepts. Then, the young ones can skillfully navigate a training session and think independently.

Before we begin, I want to acknowledge you smarties out there reading this. What you are about to read applies to most.

Yes, due to something unique to them and them alone, there will be those who make this coaching inappropriate. Someone with an anatomical issue that forces a degree of change to the rules presented might not be the perfect person for this.

But, this teaching is for the masses.

This technique is for coaches like me, who coach large groups at one time and see between 60-150 kids per training session every hour of every workday.

It’s rarely under 60 bodies, and I will coach up to eight groups a day.

  • I need to be efficient.
  • I need to be precise.
  • I need to simplify things where the vast majority can understand what I’m asking.
  • And I need them to problem-solve independently.

Simplicity is the recipe.

Don’t Share Everything You Know.

Look, I know you are not a child, but you would be lying to us both if you didn’t still require permission on a few things. We do it with our government, our jobs, the law, even within the confines of our own homes. So what I’m going to say to you might liberate many of you.

You have my permission, while coaching, to not share everything you know.

“I see this in young coaches all the time. They are so fired up about all the science they consume and all of the new technological know-how that they want to peacock and word vomit everything at their clientele.”

And what I’ve learned after almost 25 years of doing this is to tell them only what they need to know to do what you want, the way you want, and nothing more.

If I need one of my high schoolers to pry their knees out when they squat or pull, I don’t have to give them a dissertation as to why.

  • Yes, I could write books about why it makes everything better, safer, and more powerful.
  • I could give them the anatomical ins and outs and explain why structurally it’s a superior approach to others in clinical-level terms.
  • I can give detailed reasons and justification that innervating the glutes first protects the spine and then drives the work into the hip’s engine.

But why should I do that? Just pry your damn knees out—every rep.

If I can simplify, qualify, and streamline things, so my kids know what I want and apply it at the right time, then why go any further? This article is precisely that.

It’s boatloads of experience and over two decades of painstaking distillation into the most straightforward explanation that works 99% of the time.

The Midline Is Where All the Goodies Are

The midline is where the goodies are located—your eyes, throat, lungs, heart, diaphragm, guts, and reproductive equipment.

Any structures that are worthwhile and responsible for keeping you alive run along your midline.

The further you move away from the middle, the less critical it is.

If you have spent any time training martial arts, particularly any Chinese styles, you quickly learn to attack the midline.

If you want the fight to end, immediately crush anywhere on the midline.

Remove an eye, crush a throat, slam your knee into their diaphragm or rake some testicles and watch how fast your opponent retreats.

The midline is also where movement originates, particularly athletic movement.

The best movers have uncanny control of their core (as much as I hate that word). Again, I default to martial arts. Watch high-level fighters kick, throw punches and engage their opponent. If you slow down the video, you will see how the midsection initiates the coiling and spiraling to generate speed, power, and precision.

I spent a long time training the Chinese internals.

“The movement is based on the notion that an etheric pole runs through the body from the center of the top of the head down through and out the perineum—the Taiji pole drills to the center of the earth and anchors in the heavens.”

Woo, woo sounding, I know. Once you get a sense of this and understand it’s much like one of the horses on a merry-go-round and that you are effectively a kabob with a pole going through it, your movement becomes cleaner, and your root becomes sturdy and powerful.

This control is why, when you see high-level Tai Chi players move through their sequences, one of the things you notice is how balanced they appear, how marvelous their posture is, and how they seem to have otherworldly control—it’s because they do.

If that is too fanciful for you, consider your center of gravity. As long as you own your center of gravity, things like balance become something more under your control.

It’s why we hinge, squat, push and pull in the manner that we do. Think about catching a clean. Why is it so important that we get our elbows through and up when we catch a clean? People in the know understand there are likely dozens of potential answers.

Still, the best one is to get your elbows up with your humerus parallel to the floor. Functionally, this puts the load of the bar directly in the center of your body.

However:

  • In 90% of clean misses, the load is to the front.
  • In 90% of those misses, it can be attributed to the elbows being down-ish.

The bar itself is to the front of the body’s center, effectively moving the lifter’s center of gravity forward of the body. The entire event leads the lifter to either dump or to lurch forward to reclaim balance.

It’s a hot mess that the lifter could have avoided if the lifter would have shot the elbows up as quickly and as high as possible.

The Importance of Feet Biomechanics

I’m not a guy who has taken any real deep dives in learning the foot’s intrinsic workings, but I know a few things. Anyone who disregards their feet, glazes over their role, or is ignorant to how important the feet are, is handcuffing themselves in any training situation.

I’m not saying that you need to buy those creepy-toed minimalist shoes or take a course on foot anatomy and biomechanics, but there are a few things you need to concede if you want the most from your training.

Yes, it would help if you considered your footwear for the job in front of you.

No, you wouldn’t wear ice skates to run sprints, so you shouldn’t wear the new balloon shoes by any of the top dog shoe manufacturers to lift.

Any closed chain exercise requires that you and the floor work together. The ground is your partner, and the more fluff you have between the ground and your foot, the more disconnect you have between the mover and the movement.

Taking things one step forward, the position you choose for your foot for a given exercise sets the stage for the entire body moving up the chain.

Toes out, toes in, toes dead straight all impact the structures, muscles, and joints up to and probably beyond the thoracic spine. So, having a whimsical approach to where your feet are in space is like wearing swimming fins to go hiking. Okay, I’ll stop with the dumb analogies.

Your Feet Relate to the Midline

Over the years, I have had to simplify things so my lifters can get moving and problem-solve and answer their questions. Sure, I don’t mind my athletes’ questions, but I will not be standing next to them for every rep throughout their lives.

Therefore, part of my job is to help them develop a tool kit for problem-solving for themselves.

“Coach, how much turn out can I have for this exercise?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

The midline rule is simple when standing with your feet on or as close to your midline, where both feet touch; the toes should be pointing dead straight.

The further away you get from the midline, the more turn-out allowance you get.

A great way of showing them this is actually with your arms.

  • Put your arms out in front of you with your thumbs touching, and then slowly move your arms out to your side without moving your wrists.
  • At the beginning (*on or pressed directly into the midline), the fingers are dead straight.
  • As you slowly move your arms out, the more your fingers begin to angle (from your perspective of where they are in space).
  • And, by the time you get your arms straight out your side (iron cross style), your fingers should be pointing directly out to the sides.

This is, in many ways, the same thing with your feet. If I have you stand feet together, your toes are virtually straight ahead.

  1. If I move you out to where we teach RDL’s, the feet are directly under hips, nearly straight, and with minor angling.
  2. When you move to a squat stance, the feet are just outside the hips but inside the shoulders and widen a little. We allow some more toeing-out to happen—10-30 degrees is the allowable range.
  3. Then leap to a sumo stance. The feet are extensively wide apart with considerable toeing-out.

From feet together to the other end of the spectrum into sumo, the stance the exercise demands instructs the lifter on how much toeing out is allowed.

What I tell my kids as it relates to which stance to set up for a given lift is as follows:

  • If you hear the word sumo in the exercise’s name- it’s a broad stance toe out a ton.
  • If it’s a kettlebell ballistic- it’s in between your sumo and your squat stance, toes angling out for comfort.
  • If you hear the word squat in the exercise’s name, your stance begins in your preferred squat stance with the toe rules already stated above.
  • If it isn’t a kettlebell ballistic or you don’t hear the word sumo or squat in the name of the exercise, you will almost always be right to use the narrow, feet under hips stance with toes nearly dead straight. This applies to RDL’s, cleans, deadlifts, and lunge variations.

It’s that simple. I give the kids enough information to navigate a lift. They have some firm but straightforward rules to remember.

I engage them in the idea that “I’m going to tell you this once, and then you are going to be expected to apply this to everything.”

So, if they come to me and ask me where their feet should be, my answer to them is, “What’s your midline rule?”

If they paid attention to the explanation the first time and know that the name of nearly all the exercises gives them the answer to their question, they can answer it for themselves.

I know, I know, it seems like a lot as you read this. But once you understand and buy into the midline rule, you can get in a room with 125 14-year-olds approaching each set of each lift in the correct stance—just like me.

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February 11, 2021

I Was Wrong

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 7:18 pm

When strung together, we should say these three words with our tail between our legs and a strong shimmy to our confidence. I’m not going to get on my high horse and go through some Pinterest list of virtuous bullet points on how personal growth starts here and how courage is found in these moments, blah blah blah.

My reason for writing this is because I have been wrong a lot.

I know what it feels like to be a young coach/trainer who has one of these epic moments where the thought, “Ohhh shit, I think I’ve screwed up,” races up your spine like an alarm going off at a firehouse.

And in that bone-chilling moment, you see your career, your approach, and your entire belief structure go flashing before your eyes.

It’s a gut punch, for sure, but one that comes with a ton of upside.

I hope you can set your ego aside and admit that some of your tried and trues might be what is holding you and your clientele back.

Toes Up

My career started in the springtime of 1999. I was a card-carrying meathead by the dictionary definition of the word.

I loved the weight room, started my collegiate strength and conditioning career, and could not have been happier. I thought beginning work at 4 am was terrific. Less sleep meant I could be in the gym longer. When I shut down training at 7 or 8 pm, it was perfect.

I didn’t want a relationship or a family anyway. I was that guy.

One of the coaching cues that we used for years was toes up! Toes up in our squats, or deadlifts, basically any closed-chain exercise.

The intention was a good one (sort of), in that we were trying to get the lifters to shift their weight back. We knew that much of the posterior chain appears online when the heels are dug-in.

It was the day and age when all problems were blamed on posterior chain issues.

“Do you have chronic migraines?”

“It’s because your posterior chain is weak.”

“Breaking up with your wife?”

“It’s posterior chain issues.”

“Do you have erectile dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic nosebleeds, sleepwalking or severe acne?”

“A steady diet of RDL’s should fix it all.” – Yeah, so we preached.

And we preached it. And then something funny started to happen. We were getting a lot of low back issues, particularly when squatting. These ailments were also during the last few years where political correctness wasn’t a thing.

We blamed every injury or chronic problem on the kid’s lack of toughness or inherent softness.

Then, seven years into my career, I heard a friend of mine give a talk at a kettlebell course I attended on the big toe and how it has a direct neurological relationship with the glutes:

  1. The big toe
  2. Knuckle down
  3. Glutes come on

Wait, what?

The glutes are part of the posterior chain, but it’s like the most posterior of the posterior chain.

Oh shit, I think I’ve screwed this up.

After experiencing this myself, the kids I had coached up to this point, including the soft-ass ones with the low back issues, raced through my mind. Have I been holding my athletes back (by this time, in the thousands)?

Could I have been the reason all those kids ended up with low back issues? The cold hard truth is, very likely yes.

One Message

I’ve told this story before on this site, but it bears repeating. While this comes up time and again, I was hell-bent on becoming the second coming of my mentor, Mike Kent.

Coach Kent is a national coaching treasure. There’s no one like him, and every athlete he’s ever come across loved him. I was one of them, and I was desperate to be just like him.

The problem is, I couldn’t see how adaptable he was to different groups.

I became the football version because I played football for Coach Kent, and I thought that version was the silver bullet to get any athlete to work.

Was I right? With football, I was golden:

  • They loved the way I coached them.
  • I was hard but playful when the time was right.
  • I pushed them and wouldn’t for a second listen to any bitching or complaining from anyone.
  • I challenged them as men and asked them to reach outside of themselves during every training session.

In retrospect, I was a bully of sorts, and they ate it up.

Insert our Women’s Soccer team. You can guess what is coming—same recipe. I coached hard, took no excuses, refused to let them complain, and pushed them harder than ever.

And, I lost every single one of them. When I say lost, I mean I earned the nickname The Weight Room Nazi.

They hated me.

They hated coming to the weight room, and I got to the point where my skin would crawl, knowing they were on the docket for the day.

Instead of inspiring them or showing them how to dig deep, they descended further into disinterest and lack of care. It was the worst.

Was the reason that:

  • They were a bunch of spoiled rich kids?
  • They had some weak coaches before me, who let the athletes walk all over them, and now they finally had someone who demanded hard work?
  • I was dealing with young women who were relatively new to weight training?
  • They didn’t believe that blood makes the grass grow. And, perhaps the ladies thought saying something like that makes you sound like a moron.
  • These 25 young ladies, most importantly, weren’t football players, and my approach was what was failing?

Oh shit, I think I’ve screwed this up. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Death of the Ego

There is being right, and then the insecure, desperate, and manic need to be right. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us dwell.

And the entire reason for writing this article is to challenge you to do some soul searching.

I promised no Pinterest moments, but I’m almost 22 years in the game, and I welcome the whoops-a-daisy moments. I’ve learned enough and seen so much that there are those times when I feel like I’ve seen it all.

And then, I realize that I don’t know everything.

Our egos are functioning for a slew of reasons. Some are productive, but most are toxic. And as a coach or trainer, we have chosen a significant decision-making profession. We are the final word, the long arm of the law.

Most of us have a ton of education (degrees and certs) and are confident in our thinking. Because of the physical nature of what we do and the nervous system’s incredible adaptability, even when we are wrong, the body adjusts and gives us credit when we aren’t deserving.

I Don’t Know

Dr. Susan Puhl (may she rest in peace) was my Advanced Exercise Physiology instructor and my thesis chair during my graduate work. She was as smart as they came and was a hammer in the classroom.

I love to tell this story about my first group presentation in her class.

We had taken the topic of altitude and its effects on the human body. The instructor broke us into small groups, and we spent an entire evening presenting our sections.

Each group had 3-5 people, and we were responsible for a few minutes individually for each section. We were all a tad nervous, and then the first student gets up and starts her portion.

Within the first couple of minutes, Dr. Puhl asks her a question. At that moment, the lady gave an answer that she thought might pass.

Dr. Puhl commented, “Wrong—try again.”

The young lady made another attempt at talking her way through the answer.

All we heard from the back of the room was, “Nope, the wrong answer, try again.”

The student’s portion was to be a few minutes. But, the exchange turned into 20 minutes with her sobbing in front of 18 strangers.

Round and round, they went. The more this girl tried to bullshit, the more Dr. Puhl wouldn’t let her off the hook.

Halfway through this debacle, I began to sink in my seat because I was up next and feeling the doom that might come my way.

Another guy named Victor in my group was already terrified about presenting, so I’m pretty sure that he was sitting there, in a puddle of his urine.

Right before this poor girl’s soul was about to leave her body for good, Dr. Puhl called off the dogs.

Dr. Puhl said, “Do you know why I’m not stopping?” And the wet mess of a human in front of us said, “No, why?”

Her answer was straightforward.

“It’s because you clearly don’t know, but refuse to admit that you don’t. So you would rather make up answers than admit that you don’t know. I would have happily accepted that and let you move on, but instead, I wanted to see how long you would rattle off guesses than swallow your pride and let us all know you don’t have the answer. In the future, the answer is simple; the answer is, I don’t know.”

– Dr. Susan Puhl

From that moment forward, things changed for all of us. As you might have figured, when I was to get up and answer questions, I was tripping over myself to give the reliable and bulletproof answer, I don’t know.

I appreciate the need to be right. I understand the image we are trying to uphold, and we don’t want to look unprepared. But know when to stop talking in circles and attempting to pull an answer out of thin air.

And never, ever, bullshit. Let them know that you don’t know, but will find out and get back to them with an answer as soon as you can.

What We’ve Always Done

  • Do you know how many studies were in the first-ever edition of The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research? Four.
  • Do you know how many studies were featured in the last edition of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research? Nineteen.

What the hell does any of this have to do with this article?

When I was on my come up, I used to, like a nerd, spend my evenings and weekends in the library at Eastern Kentucky reading all the research I could get my hands on. I have read every word of the first five volumes (currently at 34) of that publication.

Due to this journal and other scientific journals like it, the profession has accelerated discoveries and improved old ones.

When I got my start, the profession was in diapers. Now, I mean, the evolution of strength science is like a rocket ship. We are evolving at a breathtaking rate.

The reason I bring this up to you is that I’m guilty of this myself, perhaps more than anyone.

The phrase, “What we’ve always done.” rolls right off of your tongue.

It’s also the biggest cop-out answer of them all. It tells us that you are lazy. It gives me all the information I will ever need about you.

I’m experiencing this as we speak, a professional night of the soul. I’m on the back nine of my career, and what we’ve always done doesn’t make much sense.

Yes, there are mainstays in my system, those exercises or groupings that would be the hill on which I would die. But many of the things I have preached for two decades are losing their shine. Why? Because I’m tinkering with other things.

I’m listening to fresh voices and watching some brilliant people do some unconventional things that are downright better at producing the results that I want. This openness is in contrast to what I’ve always done.

To give you a glimpse, much of the traditional exercises, like squats and deads, and how we’ve executed them, don’t work.

I’m a big carryover guy. If we do this in the weight room, then we do this on the field. And to be honest, I’m struggling to lie to myself that the carryover is there in the way I need it to be or how I have fantasized it to be. Has it all been a lie? In real-time, I’m telling you, oh shit, I think I’ve screwed this up.

I am standing on the mountaintop of epic proportions in the world of admitting I was wrong. I’m questioning the very fabric of my system.

Not because I have been wrong the whole time, but that there are now better choices.

You can’t be wrong when it’s the best choice available, but when a better alternative has shown its face, It’s a real crossroads.

I’m not exactly sure where I’ll be a year from now. Stay tuned and find out.

Look, we all have to face the music at some point. The day will come when you realize that something you are prescribing to your clientele isn’t working. And that is okay. It’s pretty liberating, to be honest.

I’m too old to waste any more time.

My reputation has never really been a thing for me and certainly isn’t something I’m afraid to tarnish now. So admitting when I’m wrong and saying, “I don’t know” (big love to you, Dr. Puhl) is easy for me. It gives me room for something better.

I want to be excellent and don’t have any more time to throw away.

Embrace being wrong. It happens. Do what is required of you, and then move on. You’ll be better for it.

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