Geoff Girvitz

I don’t always find myself in a gym setting but when I do, it’s usually my own. I’m comfortable there because, unsurprisingly Bang Fitness is a training facility that makes sense to me. Metric tonnes of free weights? Check. Plenty of room to move? Check. A long line of ellipticals equipped with TVs. Not so check.

I do, periodically wind up training in other facilities. On one hand, it’s nice to be anonymous. I can simply walk in, grind things out and be done. On the other hand, sometimes get so surreal as to be distracting.

At a recent visit to a big box gym, the first thing that struck me was the diversity of groups present. John Hughes never directed a quirky 80s gym comedy but it wouldn’t have been hard. Swap out the nerds, motorheads and cheerleaders for 19-year-old bodybuilders, cardio bunnies, amateur bench pressing specialists and the odd athlete. Presto! Gym comedy.

There’s one more group that belongs in the above menagerie. These are the people that I think are the least successful and, as such, the ones I want to target this post toward.

Wheel Spinners

What’s a wheel spinner? Someone who does all kinds of work that is both of questionable value and that does not allow for meaningful evaluation of progress.

What did I see these wheel spinners doing? What didn’t I see them doing? The most common theme was to make an exercise as complex as possible. Improbable things were done with inflatable stability balls and BOSUs. Dumbbells were implicated in complex sequences of arm-flapping and barbells were used for anything other than such plebian pastimes as squats and deadlifts.

Movement quality took a distant second to getting from Point A to Point B.

I watched a lady who would have benefited from good old-fashioned P-ups eschew the ordinary. Instead, she planted her feet on a bench and her hands on a loaded barbell, only to perform awkward push-ups from there.

You can laugh at young bodybuilders if you want. Opening up a workout with a set of cable crossovers may not be your thing but guess what? This was the most successful group I came across. It exhibited the highest proportion of members actively achieving the goals they set out to accomplish. Like it or not, that’s meaningful. Wheel spinners … well, they all looked about the same. Not entirely out of shape but certainly not strong. They didn’t exactly radiate confidence either.

And why would they be confident? You can’t really measure progress by how quickly you pass a stability ball from your feet to your hands or how much spinal flexion you get out of a leg stretch.

A powerlifter lives and dies by three lifts. A figure competitor doesn’t care what they do as long as it works toward their body composition goals. Raw totals and bodyfat percentages are numbers. Numbers reveal trends can be studied and training approaches can be evaluated via their most significant metrics.

I’m not saying that the only meaningful training effects are the ones that can be quantified. I am, however, saying that you have to know whether you’re moving in the right direction or not.

In Dan John’s great book, Intervention, he makes it very simple. I can’t help you if you don’t know what you want.

Do you know what you want? Seriously. Write it down in one sentence. G’head. I’ll wait.

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Did you need more than two lines? That’s fine. Not everything in life is totally simple. But let me ask you this: If I’d asked you the same question two months ago, would your answer have been the same? Anywhere close? And if I ask you the same question two months from now, what will happen? 

If your answers don’t/won’t synch up, then I’m going to make a humble suggestion. Limit the number of times per year you can change your mind to six. That means, for two months at a time, you will single-mindedly pursue a single goal. You can use that whole two-month period to scheme and dream about your next goal. You can change your mind a thousand times. However, when that next two-month period arrives, you will have to make the same serious commitment from Day 1.

I hope that six different goals per year seems excessive to you. It is. If you can’t commit to six, though, committing to one or two will be impossible.

Most goals fall under the following categories:

• Health and everyday function
• Fat-loss
• Strength gain
• Muscle gain
• Specific performance

It’s really that simple. Think about what you want to accomplish and what metrics will reveal progress. The amount of weight being moved for one set might tell you everything you need to know. Or perhaps the total amount of work done during an hour. Perhaps you’ll look at qualities such as posture or energy level. And perhaps all you care about is how you look in the mirror. All of these things are legitimate.

Respect the process by tracking your weights, evaluating mood, taking daily photos or anything else you need to make informed decisions.

And if doing something wacky with a stability ball helps improve those metrics, go nuts. At least you know you’re not spinning your wheels.

GG

The Internet is filled with bits and pieces of information – none of which are particularly useful without a cohesive training philosophy. 

Why did you get into this industry? What is the greatest value you can hope to impart? For some, it’s strength measured only by three or four lifts. For others, it’s the broadest possible array of competencies. 

What is most important to you? WAIT! Don’t tell me! No, I’m not trying to guess – I just don’t want to hear about it. 

If it’s important to you, it should be unshakable. And if you don’t have any beliefs that are unshakable, I want you to consider shifting over into the advertising industry.

Once you know what destination is most important to you, begin developing training systems to bring people there. That is the framework you need to create before information becomes useful.

This article was originally written for the Personal Trainer Development Center

If you’re in the business of helping people, your job has just as much to do with pulling them back as it does driving them forward. By being selective about where a client develops strength, you’ll be able to accelerate their progress and minimize the likelihood of injury.

In this article, we’re going to focus on people with little to no training experience. Not superstars. Not athletes. Newbies.

When you help someone achieve things that they never would have even considered trying – let alone thought possible – it’s an amazing feeling. That’s one of the joys of working with the general population.

Working with beginners is also something that forces you to hone your skillset in a way that training athletes never will. They simply do not have the motor fluency that athletes do. Demonstrate a movement to a talented athlete two or three times and they might perform it better than you. Demonstrate a movement a 100 times to a beginner and you might still find them struggling.

This will force you to break each movement into its parts before teaching the whole thing. It will make you better.

Another benefit is that newbies will get stronger from just looking at a weight. It’s easy to help them progress. Some argue that it doesn’t matter what you do because they’ll enjoy a training effect from anything.

It does matter, though. Newbie gains don’t last forever. That’s why we have to be sure to focus on mechanics and strengthen the postures and patterns that they’ll need to perfect. Yet we also have to keep them weak in some areas.

Sound contradictory? Let me explain:

To apply strength, we have to be able to direct it from one place to another – easing off the throttle in some places to facilitate movement, and tightening it up in others to prevent movement.

Too much strength and you become a statue. Too little and you become a puddle of goo.

OMG, this guy hates yoga

And this poor blob can’t even stand up straight

Neither situation is optimal. We want enough mobility to go through a complete range of motion but enough stability to maintain structure at any given point.

So how can we take someone who has never trained before and ensure that their strength development takes place in the right sequence? We squeeze it into narrow corridors.

The Corridors of Strength has a 1950s feel to it and should

probably be read aloud with a full echo effect. However, all it really refers to is the process of carefully selecting what patterns and positions we strengthen.

At my facility, one of the things that I’m proudest of is how quickly we bring a beginner to a relatively high skill level. We do this by selectively channeling strength into only the right places.

Let’s take a plank as an example.

Set up the position and hold it. Simple, right?

Rocking the plank

Simply holding a position is not enough. To plank properly, we have to be sure that stability is coming from the right places. Compensations might include the following:

• Overly protracting the shoulders
• Falling into full scapular retraction to rest on soft tissue structures
• Hyperextending the lumbar spine to rest on the bony approximations
• Anteriorly tilting the pelvis
• Flexing any part of the spine
• Hyper-extending the neck
• Rotating the hips
• Elevating the shoulders
• Breathing with the chest/upper traps/scalenes instead of the diaphragm

Don’t reinforce hunched over desk posture with hunched over shoulders in the plank.

You certainly wouldn’t be the first to say that I’m being picky about how this simple position is held. But consider the needs of your clients. More specifically, consider what their default postures might be.

Someone who spends all day behind a desk with their shoulders hunched forward will be stronger in this position than they will be with good posture. If they protract their shoulders when they plank they’ll be spending even more time in this position. They’ll be also be getting stronger (remember those newbie gains?), but not in the right way. This makes correcting posture an even bigger fight.

Apply this lesson to the other compensations above and you’ll see that postural issues take an even bigger foothold when strength is added to them. That’s why it’s important to develop strength properly – to keep compensations weak and make proper posture and mechanics strong.

Cleaning up these issues early in training will take days or weeks. Waiting until further down the road might mean months or years.

To make the process stick, use whatever tools you’ve got, from soft-tissue work to reactive neuromuscular training. Break things into simpler positions.  Squeeze those developments narrowly down the right corridors without allowing strength to overflow into the wrong places.

Insufficient mobility should not be ignored. It should be addressed separately from the primary movement. If someone is unable to perform a hip hinge with full range of motion, they have no earthly business deadlifting from the floor. Instead, strengthen the movement only within the range of motion they can demonstrate competency. Attack the remainder of the ROM separately until you’re able to bridge the gap.

Insufficient stability will make a higher level of strength impossible to develop. If a person cannot perform a single push-up beautifully, the answer is not more push-ups. It is to force them to spend some quality time in the most challenging part of the movement.

Modify planks and other isometric movements to ensure optimal posture in the most challenging places your client can handle. Attack scapulohumeral rhythm or any other needs in tandem.

When your client is ready, put it all together and you will find them moving beautifully and without strength in the wrong places disrupting movement.

Not all strength is created equal. Build it selectively to create a framework for future success.

The question was straightforward: “What is dysfunctional movement?” It made me pause for a second, though. I’ve been steeped in the details of classifying it and cleaning it up since the beginning of my career. I did my first Functional Movement Screen (FMS) certification almost five years ago and have been integrating it into the thousands of programs I’ve written ever since. It’s been a while since I’ve asked the question from an outside perspective, though. Again: what is dysfunctional movement?

The FMS is a great place to answer that question but not everyone agrees with it. To me, though, that’s like disagreeing with the metric system. It’s not about the units; it’s about what we’re measuring. If you have a better way to quantify movement, then use it. The point is to be able to compare empirical data consistently. Apples to apples, dust to dust. Something like that.

When we use the FMS, we gain the opportunity to quantify movement. This isn’t in the same sense as busting out a goniometer and measuring joint angles. It means looking at movement out in the wild … without a therapist to rotate your leg or apparatus to stabilize you. It looks at the movements that you generally should be able to demonstrate freely. The kind of stuff babies and toddlers do automatically. Are You as Smart as a 5th Grader? Whatever. Here, we only need to know if you can move like a 1^st grader.

From the FMS, we begin to break things into numbers that essentially represent the following questions:

• Does it hurt?
• Is it asymmetrical?
• Does it suck?
• Is it ok?
• Is it great?

We typically refer painful patterns to clinicians out and worry about asymmetry, followed by suckage. Just ok is good enough and great is gravy. All things being equal, we then prioritize things according to their order in the developmental motor learning process.

Ontogeny provides us with the most fundamental version of periodization. You need mobility before stability, after which the development of competency in one area will support the next major sequence of motor development.

While research is inconclusive, it’s as elegant a theory as I’ve heard. In other words, the kind of stability you need to crawl will also impact how you walk. Good at crawling but bad at walking? Work on walking. Bad at crawling and walking? Improve crawling first and watch what happens.

With everything organized and prioritized, you can then go to work. There is a world of difference between something that is not ok (painful, asymmetrical or sucky) and something that is ok or better.

The FMS approach assumes basic competency in a given movement before you start to progressively overload it. That’s pretty tough to disagree with. If I told you that you needed to bring your French up to at least a conversational level before entering a French-language debate, you’d be hard-pressed to argue with me. Especially in French. Well, movement is a language too.

So is this how we differentiate between functional and dysfunctional? No.

I think that we miss a very important distinction when we define things by FMS scores. The screen exists to quantify movement and give us a rough map of ability. The map, however, is not the territory and the score correlates with ability but does not define it.

The real question we need to ask is this: “If I progressively overload this movement pattern … If I take a straightforward approach to strengthening it, will it improve?

My argument is this: if progressive overload does not make it better, we can then classify a movement as dysfunctional.

 FMS scores will strongly correlate to which side of the fence a movement falls on. It’s still the best way I know to differentiate things. However, the goal, as Dan John says, is to keep the goal the goal. Our goal is to make things better. When we are able to do so by simply challenging movement with resistance, we can rejoice. And when we can’t, we need to clean things up. The goal, in this case, is not to use corrective exercise for its own sake but to use it as a tool to transition into meaningful strength as soon as possible.

 At the end of the day, the distinction between clearance via the FMS and actual readiness for progressive overload may be subtle but important. If you were a sea captain, strength would be your north star and dysfunction would be the occasional iceberg. Deal with dysfunction accordingly but don’t forget where you’re ultimately headed.

This question came from a current Bang Fitness member:

I met up with my friend today… Who is a light-weight body builder, and will be competing in May… (he’s a big muscily guy).  

When I told him of my 5lb muscle gain and 2lb fat loss.. He said that it’s not possible to lose body fat AND gain muscle at the same time…  He said it isn’t possible because to gain muscle you are in a caloric surplus, but to lose fat you’re in a caloric deficit.  

Any merit to what he is saying?  

Let’s break it down a bit:

Your metabolism equation is made up of a few different pieces, including total body mass and composition; exercise; spontaneous movement and even the process of metabolizing food.  Let’s say that, factoring exercise requirements, a person requires 2,000 calories per day to sustain their current weight. 

If you add calories, they will definitely experience gains to their total body mass. These may be fat gains or they may be lean tissue gains. This is a factor of both the quality of food they’re consuming and the type of exercise they’re performing. Makes sense, right? Bodybuilders “bulk” and couch potatoes just get fat.

If you take away calories, (assuming that endocrine function is decent) they will experience a decrease in total body mass. Again, this may come from fat mass or lean tissue. And again, this is a factor of both the quality of food  they’re consuming and the type of exercise  they’re performing. Bodybuilders “cut” and regular folks diet (or increase exercise).

So far so good. Nobody has violated any laws of thermodynamics.

So let’s take a person from the above example. We’ll say that she has 50% bodyfat and burns her calories through hours of slow walking. Again, she requires 2,000 calories a day. 

Now let’s say that we maintain that exact caloric balance but we shift her training to a combination of muscle-building activities and high-intensity interval training. Remember, even with the change, she still requires 2,000 calories a day. 

Let’s also say that we replace the two bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and litre of cola she regularly consumes with a piece of grass-fed beef, some free range eggs, a giant pile of vegetables avec olive oil dressing and a delightful smoothie. Same calories, different quality.

What can we expect to happen?

Thermodynamics predict that this woman should neither gain nor lose any weight. However, we can very realistically expect her body composition to shift fairly radically. In other words, fat goes down, muscle goes up. This is neither bulking nor cutting; it’s recomposition. We see this every day.

It’s important to distinguish between weight-loss and fat-loss. It is very typical for us to see someone maintain the same weight while their body composition shifts. It is most common in detrained individuals because it is relatively easy to increase lean muscle mass.

As a person progresses and gains in lean tissue slow down, we will need to ensure that there is some degree of caloric deficit if we are to expect continued fat-loss. 

This question came from a personal trainer about workouts I designed for Precision Nutrition’s Lean Eating program.

I notice that the core elements of the workout are in the first exercise grouping. As a coach I have always been advised to programme the most challenging exercises first as the body is stronger at this point and better able to execute the exercises with great posture and technique because the core and stabilizing muscles of the shoulders and hips are not fatigued.  I am not saying that this is the correct way and I am open minded and will try whatever is thrown at me, but I wanted some clarification on this as it goes against what I have always learned. 

Core work comes early because any dysfunction is far more likely to come from postural issues or compensation strategies than it will from muscular fatigue. Enabling someone to practice posture (i.e. an  isometric hold with minimal confounding factors) early in should make it easier for them to reproduce that feeling in action. Mental fatigue is a bigger deal here because motor control is probably the limiting factor.

When we look at the musculature of the deep core (diaphragm, pelvic floor, TVA and multifidus), we’re never really going to create fatigue — these guys are always on. This leaves us with the superficial musculature of the core. Can it be fatigued enough to create performance detriment? I  have certainly never seen this play out in real life. I think that there are really only two possibilities:

1. An individual is relatively untrained/weak and displays poor neurological efficiency.

In this case, true, localized fatigue will be very difficult to create and increased training volume will only lead to increased motor practice. 

2. An individual is relatively trained/strong and displays good neurological efficiency.

In this case, the gap between full ability and the low-level stimulus of a plank (or equivalent) should help core training serve as a post-activation potentiation tool. In other words, I just don’t see someone with a 300 lb. deadlift over-fatiguing their lats on a bodyweight plank.

Although an argument could be made for lower-volume core work if a person were going for a PR on a specific lift, submaximal loading parameters render the issue is moot.

“Functional training” became a dirty word for me for a couple of years back there. It had become associated with all kinds of shenanigans, from an overemphasis on stability training and circus tricks to an under-emphasis on the cardinal virtue of getting strong. I felt that it had been hijacked by smoke and mirrors personal trainers without the simple grace to get good at the basics. The nomenclature was distracting, not clarifying. The original intent, of course, of calling something functional was to emphasize the carry-over to athletic performance or real life … the important stuff. That somehow got lost in the shuffle. When people asked me if we offered functional training at my gym, I told them, “We just do training.”

 Fast forward a few years and the jokes about squats on stability balls and 1-legged Bosu juggling have moved from novel to cliché; everyone gets it. The question is whether or not we want to resuscitate “functional”. Do you want to know what I think?

Good.

 My vote is yes. Beyond that, I’d like to see the use of the word expanded into some of the other areas that strength coaches and personal trainers deal with regularly.

 Chris Frankel recently spoke on the Strengthcoach.com podcast on what he termed “functional conditioning.” This was another reminder to focus on the important stuff. In other words, an increase in stroke volume or lactate tolerance may be terrific. Then again, if it doesn’t translate into relevant performance improvements, we’re spinning our wheels.

 The way we’ve put the concept of functional conditioning to work at my facility is to evaluate intensity and effort based on perceived time parameters. Energy system theory sets the basic structure for this but the application is much more subjective. Heart rate and perceived exertion factor in but the real question is: “How long could you maintain this pace if you really had to?” There is a spectrum that ranges from a few more seconds to five minutes and beyond. This allows us to make more informed decisions about how we’re working (and for how long).

 In the context of athletics, we also have to examine the repeatability of efforts and what range of recoveries will be available. Without that information, none of this is meaningful.

 Imagine, for example, if only 2 seconds of recovery were allowed in between shot put attempts.  Or what if only punch per round could be thrown in boxing. Would one sport begin to look a lot more like the other?

 At a minimum, we need to respect work and recovery parameters. And in a perfect world, we can use this information strategically. Although there is room for this in team sports (a full-court-press in basketball is a good example), there is arguably the most room in combat sports. MMA athletes are a great example, as they often have the option of dictating pace in a manner that maximizes their relative recovery. Those who pay attention to the sport know that MMA is less about absolute ability and more about exploiting relative differences.

 The degree of flexibility available in terms of strategic use of conditioning can be broken down hierarchically (as follows):

 “Functional nutrition” isn’t a term that has seen much use yet. There’s room to grow, though, because a small minority of nutritional experts seem to be actively bridging the gap between what works on paper and what works on people.

 I’ve taken most of my cues from the good folks at Precision Nutrition because they’ve had the insight to focus on behavioral change. Nobody would argue with you for suggesting a simple habit, like having a full serving of protein at every meal, would be beneficial. However, a much smaller percentage of would-be experts have the restraint to spare you a 10-minute lecture on protein absorption or nutrient timing when all you really need to know is what, how much and how often.

 Honestly, if the next important thing for you to do is a hockey puck sized piece of protein three times a day, just do that. The details aren’t really that important. Just use a modicum of judgment … As Dan John would say, just eat like an adult.

 Let’s put it this way: nobody would argue that throwing an out-of-shape beginner into an Olympic-level program would be doing them a disservice. So, why is it different to give someone an Olympic-caliber meal plan when they’re struggling to perform the nutritional equivalent of tying their shoelaces?

 Functional nutrition isn’t about overloading someone with information. It’s about placing them at the edge of ability – the same concept that minds like Gray Cook have helped popularize. Instead of applying the concept to movement, however, going to the edge of ability, in this context, means a nutritional habit that a person can be consistently successful with.

 We’ve learned from experience that small, consistent successes have a cumulative effect that is far more powerful than the extremes of success and failure that diets tend to characterize.

 Coming back to functional training, the industry is sitting in a funny place. The past few years have ushered in a strong upswing in corrective exercise – largely because some of the brightest (and most novel) new voices have indeed come from clinical backgrounds. Their impact has been widespread. It’s fair to say that the average personal trainer or strength coach is now far more likely to be able to speak – at least generally – about concepts that, a short decade ago, only clinicians at the vanguard knew about. This is a double-edged sword.

 On one hand, greater attention to corrective exercise and movement preparation is fantastic. On the other, some people have taken things too far. In a worst-case scenario, a strength training session might be made up of 45 minutes of corrective work and 10 minutes of actual strength training. This might be the right formula for someone who has recently rolled out of the hospital but not for a healthy athlete. Especially when people begin to think of themselves as delicate or irrevocably broken.

 If a substantial ratio of a person’s potential strength is unavailable to them due to protectively-motivated neurological inhibition (approximately 30% in an untrained individual), you have to acknowledge that there may be psychosocial factors that will impact these numbers.

 To make training functional, we need to see all knowledge focused into translatable performance improvements. What is often left out of the discussion is how vast quantities of dysfunction are corrected through the simply development of strength.

 In working with both athletes and the general population, we’ve learned that screening movement and understanding dysfunction is essential. However, our goal is not to add a vast quantity of esoteric work to anyone’s program. It’s certainly not to focus on what they can’t do. Rather, it’s to ask whether there are any specific barriers to getting them strong immediately, address those barriers and then – without reservation – aggressively pursue strength. That’s functional.

The following article was originally published on StrengthCoach.com

 While the focus of this site is on strength and conditioning for athletes, I know that many of the coaches on here also work with the general population. I have for several years and it’s often been the most rewarding part of my job. 

I’ve seen a lot of people go through our facility and I can tell you that there are telltale signs within your own client population that indicate you’re doing a good job – above and beyond producing short-term results. These are badges of success and any coach who has most (or all) of these should be proud of them.

 Lifers

Training success has a lot less to do with novelty or constant change and a lot more to do with keeping people engaged and focused. At the end of the day, training residuals don’t last that long and the people who continue to train – week in and week out – will have the most to show for it.

 If you are able to teach your clients that training is a marathon, not a sprint, you will be able to produce great long-term results.

 Late Bloomers

This is an extension of the category above. You will periodically encounter people who start working with you before they’re really ready. They like the idea of getting fit but are not prepared for the amount of change truly required to make their goals a reality.

 Let’s be honest, we’re describing most people. Much of the fitness business banks on the fact that people won’t use their gym memberships. It’s an unfortunate reality.

 For someone not yet ready to change, the limiting factor may be nutrition. It may be outside stress. It may even be the fact that hard training – to the neophyte – causes their nervous systems to scream, “Stop! It feels like you’re killing me!” There may be a whole stack of obstacles in the way. This is common and may take months (or years) to fully deal with.

Taking somebody from this category and keeping them in the loop for more than a 6-8 weeks can require diligent work. Having them stick things out for several months means that you’re doing something really right. However, the real (and some of the best) success stories come from those who required a much longer timeframe to begin to make significant change.

If you’ve helped people reach their goals after an extended period of training, it means that you were able to gently build the foundation they needed and provide support– even when nothing was going right. Most importantly, it means you’ve taught them the cumulative value of hard work.

I have a soft spot for late-bloomers because I think that they’re the first people to slip through the cracks.

Iron Butterflies

Aside from being a nod to a long-faded band from the 60s, this badge refers to female clients who have emerged from the training process with very different goals than the ones they brought in.

One of my biggest complaints about the industry is how females are consistently given low expectations about strength and training potential. Women, to be clear, are very competitive with men with you compare strength per lb. of lean body mass. However, maniacs like Tracy Anderson continue to be influential enough to hold back many females from exploring rewarding strength work.

If a woman comes in with a fear of becoming too “bulky” and you are able to progressively alleviate that fear and replace it with a love of strength and hard-won lean muscle mass, then you have done her a great service.

This doesn’t mean being dogmatic about strength or forcing people to do things they don’t want to do. That’s called being a jerk. You need to address a client’s goals while gently nudging them in the direction of their true potential.

When a female client approaches me and says, “You know, I think I’d like to focus on getting really strong,” or even “Let’s pack some more muscle on!” I feel like we’ve expanded her ideas of what fitness is and helped her take pleasure in legitimate work without fear of what other people might think.

Whatever the Opposite of a Purple Heart is

The army doesn’t give out medals for not getting injured but perhaps we should. As Coach Boyle has pointed out many times, if a client gets injured while training with you, that’s your fault. Every program has to weigh benefit with injury risk.

It isn’t complicated to get people working at high intensities while keeping the risk of musculoskeletal injury low. The trick is to remain flexible and not be married to any single approach. This brings us to our next badge.

Keeping Things Simple

“When in doubt, strength and conditioning.” There are any number of tools out there, from Olympic lifting to kettlebell work that tend to get people wrapped up in one school of thought. If you’ve opened up an Olympic lifting gym or a kettlebell gym, ok. Just do that. However, if your goal is to get the best results possible, that’s different. See what you assimilate quickly and easily from different training methodologies. Put these methodologies to work for your clients (and not vice-versa).

Self-Efficacy

A tai chi teacher once told me this story: his grandfather traveled to Malaysia in the 1970s to start up a new tai chi club. Since his stay was not very long, he prepared a voice recording to walk people through the 108 movements of the tai chi form. And every day for 35 years, the group would wake up early, put on the recording and diligently follow along.

When this teacher visited the club himself a decade ago, he took a look at the group’s movements and said, “That’s actually very impressive. Now let’s see how you do without the recording.” What he saw caught him off-guard.

Nobody could remember the movements. After practicing several days a week for over three decades, many of these people had never learned to follow the form from pure memory.

Your clients should want to train with you and benefit a great deal from your expertise. However, if you’ve truly coached them well, they’ll be able to train independently when necessary.

Fun but Focused

There is a delicate balance between dedicated, focused work and having fun. When people visit your club, they should see a group of people that are continually in motion. Clients should support each other, cheer each other on and even joke with each other. However, you’ll know that you’re promoting the right atmosphere if most exchanges take place while people are still trying to recover their breath.

 Humans have a finite capacity for change. So, with that in mind, it seems wise to limit the amount we throw at you when it comes to exercise and nutrition. Pretty obvious, really, when you think about it.

 I often write about doing less – easier workouts and simpler nutrition – and I suspect that a few people imagine that I just don’t have the guts or the know-how to really push people to the brink. Trust me; it’s not that hard. I’ll add a workout to the bottom of this article to assuage any doubts.* 

Periodization is a concept that is usually reserved for the development of biomotor abilities in such a way as to produce peak performance on a specific day and time. Most people, however, need to periodize other qualities.

Maintenance of Current Lifestyle – 0 pts.

Learning New Movement – 1 pt.

Improving Nutrition Quality – 1 pt.

Intensifying Movement – 1 pt.

Improving Nutrition Consistency – 1 pt.

Low-stress Outside of the Gym – 0 pts.

Lifestyle Change and Moderately High Stress Outside of the Gym – 1 pt.

Lifestyle Change and Very High Stress Outside of the Gym – 2 pts.

Frequently, the final box is checked by default.

 For 10 months out of the year, spend two points as you see fit. For two months out of the year, spend three. For more information on why, check out Dan John’s thoughts on park bench vs. bus bench workouts. 

 Typically, the periodization of change should appear in roughly the order presented above.

You probably noticed that high stress outside of the gym costs two points. That was not a typo. That means those with a high-stress lifestyle can choose from the following options:

1.  Find a way to reduce stress in order to spend those points elsewhere
2.  Engage in a month-long period of more intensive change, choosing one (1) of the other options, such as the beginning of a new exercise program or an improved approach to nutrition

After completing this month-long process, maintain the same lifestyle until:

•  Revisiting Option 1
• Waiting at least three months before revisiting Option 2 

I hope you’ll forgive me if all of this this seems a bit like Richard Simmons’ Deal-a-Meal.

Can you do more? Of course. That just depends on whether you want the changes you make to stick for a month or two or if you plan on maintaining them for the rest of your life. Take your time … No pressure.

Change is just as significant a factor as piling weight onto a barbell. The sooner you can respect that, the better you’ll do.

* The GG Really Means Business Workout

 10 kettlebell swings

10 push-ups (clap if you like, but you have to be able to clap for all of them)

10 kettlebell swings

10 pull-ups

10 kettlebell swings

10 goblet squats

10 kettlebell swings

10 bent-over kettlebell rows

—

10 kettlebell swings

9 push-ups

10 kettlebell swings

9 pull-ups

10 kettlebell swings

9 goblet squats

10 kettlebell swings

9 bent-over kettlebell rows

And so on. Continue without stopping until you’re down to 1 each of the movements (swings notwithstanding). 

Rest for 10 seconds between sets.

That’s 55 reps for each exercise and 400 total kettlebell swings. If you perform this three days a week for a month and don’t lose a dramatic amount of fat then there is something dramatically wrong with your nutrition or recovery (or both). That will be $3,000, please.