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I stopped wearing a fitness watch years ago and never looked back. I’ve talked about my personal experiences with exercise in the “How to internalize you’ve done enough” podcast, but let’s just say that I was obsessing over exercise and my goals were on how many calories I could burn. This was at the cost of my mental health, sleep, joint health, and sometimes even my performance at work because I was exhausted, overworked, and under-rested. During this time where I was working out a ton and had a focus on burning calories, I actually had very little muscle. It’s hard for me to gain muscle in the first place, but I think I felt and looked frail. It wasn’t effective for me to focus my attention on burning calories. Choosing to no longer wear my fitness watch was a cascade of decisions that ultimately changed how I view exercise and really turned my health around. 

Ditching my fitness watch wasn’t some “magical...

This blog is going to be a bit nerdy. We’re talking about 4 cool nervous system “hacks” that can improve the results of your workouts. 

We implement these things in my classes, which is one of the more unseen or unrealized reasons my classes are so effective. I also hear often from the members that this is the first program they look forward to and enjoy, and they may not know why. I think these are some of the reasons why - because we are using their nervous system to create an environment that doesn’t feel like a threat. When your brain thinks something is a threat, it will avoid it. And we know consistency is super important in your workouts, so we have to train our nervous system that our workouts aren’t a threat to our safety. 

Your nervous system is extremely important in driving results from your workouts because it will dictate how easily you will recover and lay down new muscle. Because of this, we have to work WITH our nervous...

This week, I want to talk about overtraining, undertraining, and how you can have both simultaneously. All three of these cases will frustrate you and can be a big reason you’re training consistently but you’re not seeing muscle growth.

We tend to believe that if some is good, more is better. And that’s just not true when it comes to most things, including exercise. 

I know I’m a broken record with this, but I think it sometimes needs to be said in many different ways for you to understand and let it sink in fully. 

There is a dose-response relationship with exercise. A certain dose will yield positive results, but too little or too much will either do nothing or yield negative results. 

Exercise is medicine, yes. And any medicine can be overdosed and see adverse side effects, or underdosed and see no changes. Exercise is no exception. 

Let’s talk about the signs and symptoms of overtraining, undertraining, and undertraining...

Hormones are incredibly complex, and it's difficult to talk about one hormone without talking about other cascading hormones. Today, I want to break down what cortisol is, what can happen if you have too much of it and how to tell, and my recommendations on how to keep it in check. 

Before we begin, remember that this is not medical advice, and to seek advice from your doctor or functional medicine practitioner if you are having severe issues. This post is for informational purposes only. 

If you feel like you're doing everything right - putting in work at the gym, you're trying to eat less, and still not seeing results - it could be because of cortisol imbalance. Often, too much exercise and too little eating can have the reverse effects that you're hoping for because they can mess with your cortisol and hormonal balance. 

One of my goals, which I hope is evident by my content, is to encourage people to get away from the damaging "grind yourself into the ground if...

Many medical and sports groups suggest intense interval training shouldn’t be completed more than three times/week to avoid these negative metabolic side effects. And from a joint health perspective, I agree that HIIT should not be used more than a few times/week, if at all. 

So if we can only gain the benefits of HIIT 2 to 3 days a week, are we just sedentary on the other days? Should we train in different ways on the days where we aren’t working out intensely? 

Another study that looked at the benefits of short, intense exercise vs. longer, more gentle workouts provides us with another interesting finding. 

The study took overweight men, divided them into groups, and had them exercise on a bike for a different amount of time and intensity. 

Group 1 performed short, all-out workouts on the bike such as 30-second sprints with minimal rest in between. This group only exercised 3 days/week. 

Group 2 exercised more moderately: 30-40 min on the bike...

HIITing the Books

Over the next two weeks, I want to talk about cardio: what it is, how much you need, and, most importantly, how much is overkill and could be setting you back. 

Most people agree that cardio is anything where you elevate your heart rate. When I was looking at the formal definitions, most will say that this requires rhythmic, repetitive movement of your limbs. 

Because most people consider cardio as repetitive/rhythmic moments, when most people think of cardio, they think of activities such as running, cycling, and swimming. This is also why most people don’t include weight lifting when they think of cardio. 

Therefore, it’s commonly thought that you need to do both: lift the weights and add on the running or biking. 

But do you really? And if so, exactly how much should you do? 

These are the questions I want to address over the next couple of weeks. We’re going to talk about the benefits and risks of different dosages of...

It’s a norm in the fitness industry to try to fit your body to fit a certain exercise. I often get asked “Can you help me with my deadlifts?” or “How can I do planks without shoulder pain?” or “How can I strengthen my core so squats don’t hurt my back?”

And there are so many fitness professionals and PTs out there who will help you achieve these goals. And there absolutely are ways to improve your form and strengthen and stabilize these muscles to feel more effective and safe in an exercise. I think if your goal is to do that one exercise, KEEP ON KEEPIN ON!

Before we dive in, I want to caveat with something. I’m not saying that there isn’t a time and place to learn and hone in on a new skill or movement. Sometimes you have to learn a specific movement for a sport or job. So perhaps your fitness program should be tailored for that.

But I think if overall fitness is your goal, there’s another perspective that I’d...

On Tuesday, we talked about ways to change up our workouts to see better results.

But the other piece of this puzzle that many people lose is that the key in any fitness program is to use the mechanics to your advantage!

Let me explain. 

Our bodies work as any other machine does, and we have hinges and levers. The longer the lever, the more work to a muscle. So if you choose an exercise with an effective lever, you can use less weight to get a lot of work. 

Let’s say you’re holding an egg with a spoon. Your hand and wrist have to work harder when you are holding the end of the spoon, whereas it gets easier to hold if you are holding closer to the egg. These are the levers at play - which can (and should) be applied to exercise. 

In fact, choosing a bodyweight exercise can sometimes be more effective at targeting a muscle group than another exercise that doesn’t use the body’s ideal levers. 

Breaking it down

Let’s compare a ...

As we discussed in the podcast a few weeks ago, everyone wants to be able to spend less time working out and still see great results. 

And while many fitness enthusiasts may believe that we need to be killing ourselves with our workouts, the amount of time you spend working out has very little to do with the results you will see. 

What is more important is what you are doing with your time. 

Time Well Spent 

If you are strategic in selecting effective movements in your workout, you don’t need to spend longer than 45 minutes at the gym, and oftentimes, longer than 30 minutes. 

Rather, the reason people aren’t seeing the results they want, even after working hard for an hour, is because they are overloading joints and underloading muscles. 

Many individuals are choosing exercises that are only part-way effective for creating change in their muscles, which means they have to spend more time doing more...

Now if you’ve read or listened to any of my other blog posts or podcasts, you’ve probably heard me talk about loading your muscles again and again. But, what does this really mean?

Muscles are loaded best when a few things happen:

• The movement brings the origin of the muscle towards the insertion
• The force (weight/cable/ band/gravity/whatever) is actually loading the muscle 
• The strength profile of the muscle and the resistance curve match (check out last week’s podcast to learn more about what this means!)
• Surrounding structures (like cartilage/discs/ligaments/bursa/rotator cuff muscles) are at little or no risk of rupture or damage

Muscle strength happens when the muscle is progressively overloaded using these principles to create optimal change. When a new movement is introduced that does not follow these principles, less optimal change will occur. 

What truly works for improving your fitness is progressive overload and intentional exercise...