"Buy my template, and you’ll not only get stronger, but it’s all you’ll ever need." Have you ever heard a popular coach or trainer say this?
Templates are for sale, usually as an ebook or a PDF downloadable file with illustrated instructions. The pitch includes that it’s easy to understand, to do, and promotes consistency. It’s often a twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four-week program that you can repeatedly do without much change.
We have high standards at Gym Jones. I don’t just mean the strength and fitness standards that so many people associate us with. I mean it more generally. When we train someone here, we expect effort and intensity, of course, but we also expect them to meet us halfway. We will give you our time, our energy, and all of the training knowledge we’ve accumulated over the years. But it’s what the trainee brings to training that is, in many respects, the much more important contribution.
Fitness has reached worldwide popularity. The need for classes, personal training, and of course my favorite, semi-private training, has exploded with the rise in popularity of fitness. Many people and businesses have stepped up to fill this need.
This is a great thing, but buyers beware. Not all fitness professionals are created equal. I believe there are three major categories of fitness professionals: coach, trainer, and entertainer.
As I sit here writing in this cold, empty bathtub, listening to my thoughts echo off the smooth white porcelain cocoon I have built, I am reminded of warm memories from my childhood home. It was a place where my only responsibilities were to create mud holes, burn anything I could find with a magnifying glass, and take care of my butterfly who couldn’t fly.
I believe that a few other people have had their say, and expressed their opinions about CrossFit's recent issues on these pages. As someone who enjoyed CrossFit when I first founded Breaking Muscle, and as someone who believes that you should be open to all training modalities, remaining curious about all disciplines and not trying to find supremacy in any one, I think I need to give my perspective.
There's no way around it: chronic pain, whether due to an illness, persistent injury, or an acute incident, sucks.
When strung together, we should say these three words with our tail between our legs and a strong shimmy to our confidence. I’m not going to get on my high horse and go through some Pinterest list of virtuous bullet points on how personal growth starts here and how courage is found in these moments, blah blah blah.
My reason for writing this is because I have been wrong a lot.
Does original thought exist? Have we covered everything, or are there thinkers out there who aren’t in the box? I know my friend David Weck down in San Diego is changing the game when it comes to running, but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of strength training, we all regurgitate the same things while adding our particular flare?
After 11-plus years of coaching, I have learned that pretty much every single person who shows up to train with me has some pain.
For more than 99 percent of those who participated in the 2021 CrossFit Open and the quarterfinals, it’s back to the drawing board: eleven months of training ahead of you in hopes of improving upon your efforts next year.
Have you spent much time thinking about the method you’re going to employ to maximize your performance in, give or take, 320 days from now?
When it comes to strength training, most coaches and even clients understand the concept of progressing in a structured and systematic way, using percentages to build strength slowly over time.
But, for some reason, when it comes to metabolic conditioning, fitness becomes a free-flowing ocean of random, high-intensity efforts, filled with varied, whatever modalities are en vogue that week:
The training session is over, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you got any better.
Whether you meant to train:
My dad began waking up my older brother and me a few days a week to practice karate and lift weights in the basement in elementary school. While I wouldn’t recommend starting eight-year-olds on weights, these experiences had a lasting impact on me.
A new article in the New Yorker, Does CrossFit Have a Future, sounds like a comeback tour of sorts for Greg Glassman, CrossFit's controversial founder. Glassman tells the article's author, Matt Horn, unapologetically as is his wont, that he has no regrets.
