Alright friends.  Time to lust over some serious fitness glory. 

The biggest and most consistent mistake I see from people is equating the perceived difficulty of the workout with its effectiveness. At the end of the day, your body doesn’t care what it “feels” like. It simply adapts to the stimulus you provide it.

In the world of human movement, there are few patterns more fundamental than the hinge.  You know how everyone always talks about lifting with your legs and not your low back?  That requires executing a proper hinge.  Essentially, hinging is … um… uh… hinging from your hips and NOT from your low back.

So here we are, about four weeks out from Halloween!  And as we’ve all come to appreciate, Halloween is the time of year when it’s totally culturally acceptable to show an unseasonable amount of flesh.  Although it may also be associated with candy and sweets and nutritional choices that don’t serve our health and hotness, folks sure do like to flaunt their physique goodies to the world. 

Anyone who has worked with me knows that this is one of my all time favorite metaphors in the training world. In a society obsessed with instant gratification, physical organisms remain stubbornly committed to the principles of farming: plant the seeds, feed and water properly, and be prepared to wait for results.

One of my favorite parts of my job is that I’m always learning.  And while much of that learning comes from my readings on training, nutrition, and psychology, a lot of what I learn comes from being in the trenches day in and day out making people healthy and hot.

The longer I’m in the health and hotness game, the more I appreciate the infinite detail of the basic human movements: the subtle nuances of the angle of the knee in relation to the foot in a lunge, the various versions of an anatomically neutral spine in different people, the wrist alignment in a dumbbell press.   There are entire universes of complexity in the simplest movements.

If there’s one thing I can tell you about the fitness industry, it’s this: there are very few things everybody agrees on. From training modalities to nutrition strategies - even to specific foods - you can usually find folks who passionately support or vilify pretty much anything.  So I decided to make a little list of the things on which there’s actual agreement.  It’s not long… but it’s something!