Do you struggle to increase your pull-up maxes? These tips are a proven strategy used by pro coaches to break through pull-up plateaus and ceilings.

Horizontal pulling is an important exercise for balanced strength and healthy shoulders. Horizontal pulling helps build strength in the lats, middle and lower trapezius, and rhomboids—key muscles that help you maintain good posture and stability.

To get the best results from bodyweight training you need to vary the exercises in your program. Thankfully, there are numerous ways you can load the leg muscles using your bodyweight alone. This blog will focus on 10 different variations of bodyweight leg exercises and cover three movement patterns: lunge, squat, and bend. 

If you spend enough time coaching functional fitness you are bound to come across a client with shoulder issues. This injury is commonly caused by too much overhead pressing with poor form and without prerequisite shoulder stability.

The goal of this article is to provide you with some basic tips to improve efficiency within training programs for busy clients. Ideally, every human being should move every day, but in today’s world that is easier said than done. These basic principles are a great starting point for clients who may have a hard time establishing a base of consistency, when it comes to hitting the gym. This can be applied to any type of client looking to improve their overall health and fitness. 

Before you can begin to write a program you must ask yourself why do we need to move? Asking yourself this question is a great way to center yourself back on the purpose of exercising.

We live in a world of instant gratification, Amazon packages show up at our door the day after they’re ordered, and meals are delivered to our homes at a click of a button. Clients are hooked on instant gratification and they bring this same mindset to fitness. You as a coach have probably seen the client James is referring to numerous times, clients that love fitness and want to perform intense exercise even though they do not have the prerequisites skills or strengths. You know as a coach they should not be participating in intense exercise but you feel the need to balance what they want with what they need. But, before you go begin to appease the client James prompts you to try to connect the client with their purpose for doing fitness.

Bodyweight training has become a dominant form of exercise in fitness while accessibility to gyms and equipment remains limited. If you are a coach you are most likely familiar with the basics of bodyweight training, but may not have experienced restricting your training prescriptions to movements without load. 

At the beginning of the year you had a detailed plan to progress your client towards their goals in the gym. Then COVID-19 spread, and before you knew it the gym was closed and your client’s ability to train was limited. You were forced to adapt and now find yourself coaching your client through home workouts. While this may have forced you to abandon your original program, it does not mean all hope for progress is lost.

The sagittal plane is an axis that runs parallel through the body extending through the head and tail. It is also the plane that most exercises in functional fitness take place. Over time though it has gotten a bad rap as coaches realized the majority of exercises they were programming took place only in the sagittal plane. 

Have you ever looked at a day of programming and thought, “Are all contractions (repetitions of exercises) contributing to the priority?” If you are new to writing individual programs, this may not be an obvious question to ask.

For some, it’s easy to write an exercise program, throw a bunch of workouts together within a certain time period and call it done. Others may spend hours on end painstakingly designing each rep and set. 

Exercise and nutrition go together like peanut butter and jelly. You cannot have a conversation about health without including the two. As coaches, it is our job to educate our clients about the relationship between the two. But more importantly, we need to understand it ourselves.