Social proof is a powerful influencer. We’re wired to think whatever is common is normal and, therefore, can’t be all that bad. Pop-Tarts for breakfast? Why not?
Quit being such a buzzkill, Shane.
Read A Guide to Proper Footwear Selection for Athletes at its original source Breaking Muscle:
https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/a-guide-to-proper-footwear-selection-for-athletes
For more than 99 percent of those who participated in the 2021 CrossFit Open and the quarterfinals, it’s back to the drawing board: eleven months of training ahead of you in hopes of improving upon your efforts next year.
Have you spent much time thinking about the method you’re going to employ to maximize your performance in, give or take, 320 days from now?
Read How To Optimize Your Training for Next Year’s CrossFit Open With Former Champ James FitzGerald at its original source Breaking Muscle:
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.
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.
“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.
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.”
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.
This article is the fourth and final installment in the exercise recovery series.
I’m finally going to cover the sexy stuff. These aren’t cutting-edge recovery modalities that will supercharge your training, recovery, and results, but they are the recovery methods that all work. They don’t work as powerfully as the marketing machine would have you believe, but you are looking for marginal gains at this stage of the recovery puzzle—not game-changers.
The recovery strategies covered in this article all have strong evidence to support them.
I have not covered several other recovery methods because there is not strong enough evidence to be confident in recommending them.
There are two categories of recovery strategies; I’ll cover both:
A good target to shoot for with water intake is 0.04 liters per kilogram of body weight. For a 100 kg (220 lbs) person, that is 4 liters per day.
100 kg x 0.04 liters = 4 Liters
Your exact needs will depend on other factors like activity level, perspiration rate, and ambient temperature. Begin with the 0.04 liters per kg recommendation and adjust as needed. The following guidelines can help you to stay well hydrated:
Drinking water is the best way to hydrate.
Tea and coffee have a net hydrating effect, but they are not as effective as drinking water.
You do not need sports drinks for average strength and bodybuilding training. Only drink them before, during, and after strenuous exercise or competition for a duration > 90 minutes.
Proper diet planning takes care of adequate nutrients to fuel your workouts.
Massage: While there is some evidence to support massage’s physiological benefits, the real benefits appear more psychological.
There is strong evidence for the psychological and relaxation benefits of massage. These factors all play a significant role in your recovery and adaptation.
So, deep-tissue sports massage may not be the best approach since this is anything but relaxing. A gentler approach may be more beneficial for recovery as you can completely relax and enjoy the experience.
Light Days: Lighter training days can potentially improve recovery time more than a full rest day. Systematic decreases define a lighter day in training volume and intensity. Light days fall under good programming.
A recovery day increases blood flow and alleviates psychological stress.
These two things can boost the recovery and adaptation process. Low-intensity activities are suitable for recovery days.
A favorite strategy of mine is to get outside for a brisk 20-minute walk. Walking increases blood flow and will aid recovery, especially to your legs, but is still low intensity. It does not interfere with recovery from prior training or performance in subsequent sessions.
Another right choice is a mobility routine.
A whole-body mobility flow can be a productive strategy for recovery days.
The key is to remember that recovery days should involve more general fitness movements in a less-structured training environment at lower intensities than regular training.
Avoid any high-intensity style training, an excessive-duration or a novel activity, and anything strenuous. Recovery day sessions should be lighter and shorter than typical training sessions. They should promote recovery, not feel like a workout.
The clue is in the name—Recovery!
This article is the shortest one in this series by some margin. The reason is that these recovery strategies are less effective than the other factors I’ve covered.
If you find you are investing more time, money, and energy in the recovery methods in this article than those in the first three installments, then you’re missing out on a better recovery.
If, however, you’ve ticked off all the other elements from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our exercise recover series then, you can eke out some additional recovery capacity by implementing the strategies covered here.
Discover supplements that benefit your specific needs with Supplement Advisor
The supplement industry sometimes seems like the wild wild west, where you’re left feeling like there are more questions than answers:
Should I take fish oil? Isn’t it good for reducing inflammation and heart health? What’s better? Pill form or liquid?
Or:
I have recently started the Ketogenic diet. Is it true I should be taking multivitamins and a folic acid supplement because I’m no longer getting folic acid from grains?
Or:
I’m a menstruating woman who doesn’t eat red meat. Should I be taking an iron supplement? And doesn’t Vitamin B12 play a role in red blood cell health, too, helping fend against becoming anemic? Should I take that, too? Do I need a B12 supplement too?
Enter Supplement Advisor’s free assessment test.
Supplement Advisor is a web-based company designed to empower health-conscious people to improve their cognitive function, as well as emotional and physical potential through simple and personalized supplement guidance designed by their advanced AI, ultimately helping you navigate through the wild wild west of the supplement industry easily and quickly.
One way they do this is through their assessment tool, a tool that lets you to either take a full assessment, or select a particular area to see if you might benefit from taking a supplement. The areas include:
How it works:
Let’s say you’re curious if you might benefit from taking a magnesium supplement to help regulate your blood sugar levels and stop you from having energy crashes in the middle of the day. And if so, what products might be best for you.
Giving you these answers is exactly what Supplement Advisor’s tool is designed to do.
All you do is select energy, hit submit and answer a few questions, such as:
After answering the questions, the AI engine—which will continue to get smarter and smarter as more people take the assessment and the database grows—quickly analyzes your responses and offers various recommendations in terms of what products might be best for your specific needs.
Sleep
Because fifty to seventy million people in the United States suffer from some kind of sleep disorder—from having trouble falling asleep, to insomnia to sleep apnea—one of the most common reasons to take a supplement is for sleep.
On top of the natural products, nine million Americans take prescription drugs to help them sleep.Prescription drugs, however, can come with some side effects, including gastrointestinal problems, prolonged drowsiness during the day, daytime memory and cognitive performance challenges or various allergic reactions.
A better option for many is a melatonin supplement.
Why is it better?
Melatonin is a hormone the body produces naturally. It’s responsible for regulating your body’s internal clock by responding to lightness and darkness.
When it gets dark out, melatonin increases in your body and lets you know it’s bedtime by attaching to receptors in the brain that help you relax and feel tired. During the day, on the other hand, your body makes dopamine, which signals you to release less melatonin, thus helping keep you awake.
When you select sleep on Supplement Advisor’s assessment tool, it once again, puts you through a series of questions, including:
From there, you’re given a list of options of various products that might help your particular sleep concern or deficiency.
Giving it a try
As a writer, my focus needs to be one point to handle long days staring at a computer. I tend to be really focused and motivated in the morning, but fade after 2 p.m. before I have completed all my work for the day.
I decided to give the tool a try to see if there was something I could take to improve my focus.
The tool asked me:
I answered no to the first question, as usually being stressed out and overworked lights a fire under my bum. Similarly, I find it easy to ignore distractions and can remain focused on one task for a long time, so I also answered no on the second and third questions, as well. The final question was also a no.
Where I struggle is with focusing on more than one task at a time and definitely with shifting attention from one task to another without losing focus, hence I answered yes on the fourth and fifth questions.
What the tool recommended as the top product: A probiotic-fermented Vitamin B complex for energy, brain and mood support (it also recommended various other Vitamin B complex options).
(Funny enough, my naturopath also recommended I take a B Vitamin supplement. I’ll call that a win).
I decided to take it a step further and also selected the motivation assessment, as sometimes it’s not that I lose focus so much as I lose motivation in the final couple hours of my work day. I was then asked:
Supplement Advisor’s recommendation: Mane Brain’s brain-boosting power, a supplement is designed to help you feel more energized, alert, focused, and less forgetful.
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