Structual balance for posture and performance
The most absurd example is when we look at the typical commercial gym, where we often see many guys focusing on their “beach muscles.” Their exercise selection is often limited to the muscle they can see in the mirror - bench press and bicep curls. The overtraining of the anterior chain often leads to an imbalance that can cause frustration, pain, and injury.
This can also be seen in gymnastics when athlete focuses on pushing exercises like planche, dips, and handstand push-ups while neglecting pulling exercises like pull-ups. This is a recipe for creating a structural imbalance in strength and flexibility that will induce shoulder pain.
Understanding Insulin - The key to staying lean
We say insulin and people think: diabetes. And yes, it’s true that insulin is very important to diabetics because their pancreas no longer makes enough of it (and so they must inject it) but in fact, anybody interested in looking good, feeling good and living longer should educate themselves about how insulin functions in the body.
For those who have been following me on Instagram (@stretch_rayner) you might have seen me measuring my blood glucose levels and ketone level during my KetoDiet experiments.
On the learning process
A painting at the National Gallery: farmers working in a field, they are busy reaping the wheat and don't notice a passing comet.
A picnic with friends: no-one cares about the guy in the distance holding a perfect one-arm handstand. "Anyone can do that", they cut short dipping their breadsticks into the hummus.
An afternoon in the gym: an invisible man doing 25kg strict bar muscle-ups.
These scenes got me thinking about the causes of indifference. We are all very busy with our own lives, we need to rush and accomplish, be focused on the task at hand, and yet I have the impression that our blindness might not depend on an exaggeration of focus but on blurred vision. We are willing to pay to see performances but can't stop and appreciate performance when it's in front of us, not even in a context (like in the last example) where we ourselves are working to improve. Missing an extra-ordinary event can happen: it could definitely happen in the 16th century when no previous notice was available to the public. Art doesn't need to be understood to be appreciated: to say it with Adorno, the German philosopher, it is just participated.
My Deadlift mantra v2.0
All humans should possess the ability to lift stuff from the floor, our survival depends on it. If squats are the king of gym exercises, deadlifts are the queen. One thing to love about the deadlift is the fact that there is no way to cheat in this movement. There is certainly room to seriously hurt yourself if you don’t understand how to build tension and lift a weight safely. Generally speaking, if you are not strong enough to pick it up, it's not going budge. I’m no deadlifting champion, but the tips I share here are some of the things I think about on deadlift day.
Win eight weeks of remote coaching
How would you like to have a coach designing all of your training sessions? A coach to answer all of your health and fitness questions? A coach to help you train smarter, eat better, improve your sleep and energy levels? To celebrate the launch of our astonishing new website we have decided to give away eight weeks of individual design programming to three lucky winners.
What is remote coaching and why do you need it?
Lately, the fitness community has had a growing embrace for remote coaching and individual program design. Remote Coaching refers to any coaching interaction that doesn’t take place face-to-face, though where possible it starts with a meeting in person to build rapport. Remote Coaching can include video coaching, phone coaching, email exchanges and any mentoring managed through technology, including state of the art online applications. For people who travel a lot and/or have a changeable and demanding work schedule, having a face-to-face Personal Trainer or class-based gym membership simply doesn’t make practical sense, whereas Remote Coaching can offer the following benefits:
Deadlifting blueprint
The Sustainable Training Method (TSTM) will be working with System 5 (S5) in delivering a deadlifting workshop. StreTch (TSTM) and Roman (S5) both have over 10,000 hours of personal training and coaching experience under their belts. Over the years they have worked with a variety of clients from rehabilitation, general population, and professional athletes. They plan to share their skills and knowledge with FitPro's, coaches, personal trainers, and anyone who is interested in learning about the deadlift.
This workshop will focus on the deadlift and cover the following topics:
One of the best supplements
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and just by taking a supplement you can never balance out a bad diet, your nutrition is important, just like exercise and sleep. We’ve spent years learning about health, fitness and nutrition by listening to experts, continued the study, asking questions, reading and researching to build our own opinions, you should do the same. There are many conflicting views in the nutrition industry, and we need to find what works for us. We like to practice what we preach, and we never take one person's word as fact. Do the research, and everything you hear is bullshit until you can prove otherwise….
Conditioning is nothing more than an extension of movement.
Is this the year when getting strength, improve your conditioning, or simply become a better version of last years model? Speaking with many of our clients, some have set goals to become better at CrossFit with the idea of competing in competitions and pushing themselves to achieve a higher level of conditioning. However, many of us don’t have a plan or know the best way to reach this goal? Where do you start?
How to read the TSTM programme?
This post will be an ongoing blog post which we plan to update on a continuous basis. We hope this page will help those who are new to training to understand the gibberish that is the strength and conditioning programming language. Geek time!
When we all first start training with an experienced strength and conditioning coach we can get a little confused with the program format. If we are going to be working together on a remote coaching basis, it's critical that we speak the same language.
Let's take a look at an example program: