I’ve noticed more than ever recently that about 90% of people sit on their phones between every one of their sets in a hunched-over Gollum-like posture, staring at their screens while waiting to do their 10 seconds of reps a few minutes after their last set. Now, sometimes I’m guilty of this, but it drives me absolutely insane. Simple fix: put your damn phone down and focus on what you’re doing, even if you absolutely hate the music the gym is playing. Longer answer: you need to be putting some…

Let me make something clear right off the bat. I am not a physical therapist or a medical professional. Do with that what you will. However, I have helped people through countless nagging injuries over the years, and the most common ones are a slight muscle pull or the classic “I woke up and this hurts, and I have no idea what happened” phenomenon. The biggest thing I’ve learned is that movement is almost always the answer to these things. It’s not medieval times. We aren’t supposed to strap ourselves…

I was talking with a member of the gym the other day who had recently hurt his back squatting. He was frustrated. He didn’t want it to happen again, so like every other dude who goes through something like this, he started spiraling and grasping at straws for solutions. His immediate thoughts included never back squatting again and completely revamping his program to be more… Dare I even use the word? Functional. I seriously hate this term. Why? The fitness world is full of buzzworthy, vague concepts that end up…

I’m coming to you hot off the gym floor today with something that has irritated me for years. I was training a client who is significantly overweight, and as he asked some thoughtful questions about weight loss and nutrition, he asked me a simple question. He asked me if I had ever been overweight. Now first off, people’s definitions of overweight are different. Anyone who is fit will understand what I mean by this because the people who have never quite gotten there yet will sometimes look at it with…

I recently was in the market for a new car. I had driven my Nissan to almost 200,000 miles, and it didn’t make sense to put much more money into a car that was on its last leg. So I started looking for something that would fit my budget. When I was younger, this process was a lot easier. I was excited to buy something new. The car that was all black with black rims and was fast immediately grabbed my attention. Did I do any extra research? Nope. Did…

I’ve been training people for a long time. At this point, I can usually tell how a client is feeling within a few sentences of them walking through the door. Sometimes they’re stiff and beat up. Sometimes they’re actually injured. Sometimes they’re feeling great and have a ton of energy. Sometimes there’s something deeper going on in their life that’s affecting them. And sometimes they’re stuck in what I call the negative rain cloud. It’s not like I have some magical power. Although, if you ask me, some of it…

I talk a lot about life being like an RPG. You build your skills. You choose side quests. You play with a team or by yourself. You encounter enemies and bosses. You learn, evolve, and build toward a main mission. Your main mission is the overarching theme that everything else builds toward. You can think of it like the final boss, except it isn’t actually the end of the game. It’s the big goal you’re working toward, and once you get there, it simply becomes another goal. And then you…

One of the biggest things I’ve seen over 17 years of training people is that the people who struggle the most are often the ones who are constantly ready to complain about the results they didn’t get from the work they didn’t do. They’ll say all the right things when they start. They have all the motivation in the world. They tell you they’re going to do whatever it takes. And after doing this long enough, you can sometimes hear it in the ones who make it sound too good…

When you look back at your upbringing, you start to see how much of who you are was shaped by your environment. For the first years of your life, you’re basically a clone of your parents. You follow them around. You do what they tell you. You watch how they interact with the world. You pick up their likes and dislikes while mixing in some of your own. Then you go to school and learn what school tells you to learn. You make friends and start adapting to fit in.…

I’ve said it several times already, so I hope it’s starting to stick in your mind. Everyone thinks they’re eventually going to get to a point in the fitness and wellness game where they’ll be traveling along this slightly inclined linear line that’s always improving, with no setbacks or dips along the way. That simply isn’t realistic. To be fair, there are people who build their entire lives around literally never missing. They can show you logbooks from ten years ago and tell you they didn’t miss one workout, one…

This is a powerful concept that a lot of people don’t treat with enough respect. People can be really good at keeping their word to other people. Especially because we live in a society where a lot of people care deeply about how they look to everyone else. We have these fabricated Instagram lives where everything looks perfect from the outside. But in my time training people, I’ve noticed something: People starting their fitness or mindset journey often have a really hard time keeping their word to themselves. They make…

When you walk into a restaurant and order your food, imagine if the second the waitress finished taking your order and took two steps away, you asked: “Hey, is that steak done yet?” What kind of look do you think you’d get? She’d probably be completely confused. They haven’t even put your order in yet. Now imagine you waited five minutes and then walked into the kitchen to ask the cook if your food was done. Everyone would be furious. They’d very politely, I’m sure, tell you to fuck off…

You have access to more information than ever. But more information doesn’t mean better results. Stop searching for the perfect answer, start running the experiment, and learn how to figure yourself out.