The guy that paints the picture, James FitzGerald is the founder of OPEX (Formerly OPT) and The International Center for Fitness. When not coaching, he’s a full time husband, father and fitness athlete. His 20+ years of experience and service as a strength coach/technician, tireless practice on refining energy system work, nutritional and lifestyle balancing techniques and training of other coaches has made OPEX a sought after method of bringing fitness to a higher order.

“The gym was making a profit, but I didn’t see a future doing what I was doing, knowing I had so much more to offer,” he said of his days owning and running a CrossFit gym that largely followed a group class model.

ROMWOD (Range of Motion Workout of the Day) has been and continues to be a craze within the CrossFit Community. Almost every major CrossFit Games athlete endorses ROMWOD in their social media posts. ROMWOD is even a major sponsor of the CrossFit Competition series now. But does ROMWOD actually work as it is advertised and sold?

In the Wild Wild West that is the fitness industry, there are now countless options for how you can design your coaching career.  You have the choice of selling products like supplements, you can be a the top one to one coach in your city, or you can build an online “empire” through Facebook and Instagram.  However you look at it, you have options.  But, for most coaches, the big fish in the pond is opening a fitness gym.  It puts your name on the map, it sets roots for you, and it allows you to potentially build a juggernaut.  

Energy System Training is a training methodology by which people do various levels of work to try to increase the overall ability to complete work. Energy System Training has proven to be effective in building people’s ability to continue to output power over longer durations of time via repeatable intervals.

The fitness industry is flooded with influencers, coaches, and gyms that claim to offer personal fitness training. They promise to help you get leaner, stronger, and fitter in a short amount of time. But these lofty promises often include an even higher price tag. 

Mixed Modal has become a popular style of training for metabolic conditioning workouts. Initially popularized by CrossFit gyms, the high intensity, time-dependant workouts involving multiple modalities can be found inside Globo gyms, athletic centers and fitness franchises around the world. 

Journaling is a relatively simple habit, despite the fact that there are hundreds of different methods to do it. The actual practice has actually been around since humans learned how to put their thoughts into words. All the great minds from history have journaled in some capacity including: Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marcus Aurelius, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Maya Angelou.

While these diets and hacks may work for a small percentage of the world’s population, OPEX Fitness Founder, James FitzGerald, believes that the majority of the population can achieve longevity through health and fitness. In this month’s knowledge series, a coaching resource available to all OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) students, James dives into the three areas that are key to increasing longevity.  

Have you ever created a training program for a client, who then follows through and diligently executes their sessions, but at the end of it their improvements are a lot smaller than you both had hoped for? Or worse still, your client end ups with some nagging chronic pain in their shoulder that wasn’t there before?

As a professional coach, your mission is to help clients achieve long term sustainable results, this weekly Ask Me Anything (AMA) session sneak peek, provides James FitzGerald’s seven tips for helping gain lean muscle mass and burn body fat.

The longer answer is that, as most things are, if you are fantastic at your job and if you market and sell yourself well, you can make good money. 

There’s a lot of factors an athlete can control to optimize performance and recovery: nutrition, programming, supplementation.  All this can be dialed, but if high-quality sleep is not there, almost none of the previous factors will even matter.  

Whether for charity, sport, or simply a hobby, 10k running races are a staple in athletic culture worldwide. It’s common to hear about someone either at your gym or workplace signing up for a race and beginning a rigorous 6-week training program in hopes of a good result. However, to truly participate in a 10k running race the training needed is a lot more rigorous. Here is how to train for a 10k running race in three phases.

Here are eight key performance indicators (KPIs) for competitive functional fitness coaches and athletes, pulled straight from James FitzGerald’s latest course Mixed Modal. Understand these KPIs and take your athlete’s performance to the next level.

The Strength Continuum is a traditional strength and conditioning philosophy upon which different kinds of strength activities are classified. The Strength Continuum was developed as strength training was compared to the force-velocity curve and it was found that different forms of strength training needed their own categorizations as they fell into different areas of the force-velocity curve. The development of the Strength Continuum led to specific training for maximum expression of the different Strength Continuum categories. At first, it was believed that that only specific sports could manifest these expressions because of the individual nature of each category.

But since we’ve begun using bodybuilding concepts to enhance functional fitness athletes specific sport performance we’ve discovered that this training methodology is incredibly effective. If not more so than many other training programs for preparing athletes for the rigors of their competitive seasons.

He held on to this goal through high school, which then led him to earn his degree in exercise science at the University of South Carolina. After that, he began a career as a personal trainer.