Today many are accustomed to performing squats below parallel during their training, but there are still those who remember the old days when it was very common for both trainers and doctors to say that squatting below parallel was dangerous for your knees (to be totally honest, some still say this). I was asked by several of my clients to explain how this notion came about, and I wanted to get as much detail as I could, so I did some digging...
Even today, when people hear the word ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan,’ images of a pale, unhealthy, skeleton-like people are evoked. It's not clear if that was ever the reality of how most plant-based individuals looked to the public, but we now know it need not be a reality at all. So, let's dive in a bit deeper.
High intensity training (HIIT) has become extremely popular over the past 20 years. The main reasons are a desire to spend less time training and the high visibility placed on this training modality by CrossFit. Perhaps the most common HIIT modality is the Tabata interval. Are there any research studies supporting the efficacy of this training modality?
Some fitness goals can be complicated to achieve. For example, when I ask my clients to tell me their current fitness goals, I sometimes get a response of "I want to look shredded." This is no simple undertaking and in this article we will discuss the path to achieving this goal and the many obstacles that might stand in one's way.
There are a variety of situations where not feeling your best and/or having pain means you should skip training for a while (and possibly see a doctor), but where pain is concerned, in the vast majority of cases it need not be a roadblock to training - it can and should be something you manage and work around.
Bone fracture risk is higher for those with osteoporosis and a great deal of research is being conducted to diagnose, prevent, and treat fractures in the elderly. What you eat may be able to improve or maintain bone structure during aging.
When your strength training novice linear progression (NLP) ends you have some choices to make. One choice is to stop new progress and keep the progress (gains) you have made thus far. Said more simply, this is a choice to “just maintain.” Surely "maintaining" will be easier to do, in that it will require less hard work and less complicated training. Or will it?
After progressing with their NLP strength program for a few months many trainees will start looking to the future and begin prodding with questions that hint at "what next?" There is, of course, a time and a place for this questioning and in this article we take a closer look.
Before we delve into the meat and potatoes of this article, I want to make sure context is clearly established. The programming structure discussed in this article is not required everyone doing CrossFit® training. It is just one example of how programming can be structured for individuals who are no longer beginners.
For those new to health and fitness the link between lifestyle factors and chronic disease may be hard to grasp at first. Therefore, to lower the barrier for understanding and highlight the importance of this topic, we have created this primer.
When new clients reach out to me for a consultation on how they can reach their fitness goals, there are any number of specific things they would like to improve. In the rest of this article I will explain why focusing your training on strength is the most productive way to begin your fitness journey.
