Training with Others

Last week, Alex dropped into a gym in Boston. He made a comment about how it was weird to train with strangers. It caused me to reflect that I never lift in front of strangers and I probably don’t train with anyone besides Alex, Taylor or Hannah. If you were at the gym on Wednesday, you got to see me jump in with several others in parts of their workout.

An overlooked aspect of the gym is that very thing. Training with others, regardless if you’re doing the same thing, has this special camaraderie to it. Everyone is there to improve themselves for one reason or another and that unites all the members of a place like Gain. 

When you train alone, like I normally do, it can be hard to be motivated or push it sometimes. There’s no one for you to set a fast pace with or talk about how to make the next jump in weight. On Wednesday night the gym was busy, the music loud and I felt able to really push it- because everyone else around me was doing the same. It was a blast.

Consider this your open invitation to ask me to workout with you if you’re feeling unmotivated or not into it. I’ll be happy to hop in so we can push each other. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Hardwiring

I always tell new members at the gym, the first few weeks are a bit overwhelming. Not physically, but mentally. Gradually adding in the physical part is easy. We want the work to be digestible and not make anyone too sore just for the sake of being sore. On the mental side of things, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed. Not only are they learning new lingo, where stuff is, trying to remember a bunch of numbers and count but they also have to learn new skills in terms of how to move. 

When learning how to squat, you need to incessantly remind yourself to squeeze you butt at the top, sit back, not down, grab the ground with you feet, amongst other things. It takes up a lot of space in your brain. The point I’m getting to is that moving is a skill. Skills must be learned through practice and repetition to make them automatic. 

From Mastery by Robert Greene: 

“In practicing a skill in the initial stages, something happens neurologically that’s important for you to understand. When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex are recruited and become active, helping you in the learning process… The frontal cortex expands in size in this initial phase as we focus hard on the task. But once something is repeated often enough it becomes hardwired and automatic.” 

“This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tedious to remain rooted in the brain.”

Put simply, we must focus if we want to get better at things. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Cooling Down

We’re always tinkering with how we write programs to deliver you the best results. Back when we first opened, we had clients do a cool down after their conditioning. Before long, it became obvious that after a bunch of sled march or bike sprints, people just wanted to be on their way. A lot of people skipped the cool down. 

To counteract this, we placed the mobility work prior to doing your conditioning. It worked as a nice reset before you change gears and got sweaty. When we started working on the new template, it felt like the right time to get rearrange the order and put the cool down back where it belongs, post conditioning.

When you’re hot, sweaty and out of breath, the worst thing you can do is hop in your car and be on your way. Your muscles get stiff, you might get cold and it doesn’t give your body the proper time to down shift back to baseline. 

After each workout, you have one or two simple mobility drills that we picked just for you. It’s a chance to work on problem tight areas and even more so, gives you a chance to learn stretches you can do on your own when at home or traveling. Focus on your breathing, let your heart rate drop to normal range then walk out of the gym feeling better than when you walked in.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Cold Recovery

Colds and the flu have knocked a lot of you down this winter. Being sick is always frustrating. Not feeling like yourself, groggy and wrecking your daily plans.  An observation I’ve made over the past 5 years, it takes 2 or 3 workouts to feel like yourself in the gym. 

The first workout back will be tough. Mentally, you won’t want to go and there’s this nervousness of getting sick again. Everything feels hard during this workout. Weights that were light feel out of reach. You’re breathing heavier than normal and halfway through you just want to crawl into bed. 

The second workout back gets easier. You may have some soreness from taking a week off, but otherwise you’re ready for a full workout and are feeling a bit more motivated than the first session. After the workout, on your drive home, you’ll ponder whether or not you’ll ever full recover from this cold and if all your hard work in the gym has been a waste of time, now that you’re sick and never going to recover. 

Workout number 3. Back to normal. Feeling normal may feel so far off, but it happens every time. You’re going to need those subpar workouts to shake the rust off, let your body heal and get back into the rhythm of things, both physically and mentally. 

If you’re sick, or coming off a cold, don’t be discouraged. I promise all your hard work won’t be wasted, you just need a few days to feel normal. 

Justin Miner 

@justinminergain

Moving Dirt

There’s a new poster in the gym, and before you ask, no I didn’t draw it. I bought the poster from the Instagram account, @whiteboard_daily. He makes awesome stick figure drawings to illustrate movements, ideas and concepts. The poster, if you haven’t seen it, has 6 drawings portraying different training mindsets from being focused, setting a goal pace and leaving your ego at the door.

My favorite concept, introduced to me years ago by former NFL player, John Welbourn, is that training is like moving a pile of dirt. Some days you move shovels full, other days you move just a spoonful. Either way, move some dirt and you’re headed in the right direction. Not all training sessions will be heroic, so long as you moved some dirt, that’s okay. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Good

You may have noticed the board in the bathroom this week simply said, “Good.”

This comes from Navy Seal, Jocko Willink. In his book, Discipline Equals Freedom, Jocko explains that whatever bad thing happens to him or bad news comes his way, he always responds by saying “good.”

Whatever negative thing happened, there will be a positive because of it too, so long as you’re willing to see it. An opportunity to see a different perspective, a chance to redesign the plan. 

Got injured? Good. Time to revamp the training and address why the injury happened.

Lost the game? Good. Learn from loss. 

Missed two weeks of workouts? Good. Come up with a better plan to stick with your habit. 

One of our core values at Gain is “Leave better than when you came in.” I summarize this by saying we want to find the positive in anything. Something bad happened? Good. You’ll be able to squeeze some good out of it. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Quarterly Meeting

Those big wooden things behind the sleds are called jerk blocks. They existed so we can work on putting heavy stuff over our heads, called a jerk, and drop it and not have to pick it back up from the floor. It makes training the jerk at heavy loads much easier. In fact, since the blocks are such a pain to drag out, it only makes sense to move them when we’ll be training at greater than 90% of our best. 

Yesterday I joked with Alex that his has become quarterly meeting for us, since we probably bust them out every 3 or 4 months. We always train the jerk, just not typically at really high loads. Every few months seems to be enough to keep the strength and skill there. 

It got me thinking. Workout programs are usually in a weekly time frame. What are somethings that we should do once a month, or like us yesterday, once every 3 months? What about efforts you do once a year?

For someone who spends a lot of time writing workout programs, it’s a nice thought experiment. For you, you can think about mixing in unusual efforts to round out your fitness. Maybe you take a really long walk once a month or go on a big hike a couple times a year. Maybe it’s a bike trip or a ski trip, anything atypical from your everyday life. We view these things as disruptions to our regularly scheduled training, but perhaps it’s the perfect shake up that your body needs. 

Here’s your challenge: think about something physical you can do once a month, once a quarter and once a year. Let’s zoom out of our weekly training view and look at the bigger picture.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Turn up the Volume

Progress in strength is not linear, like they teach aspiring strength coaches and personal trainers in Exercise Science classrooms. If it were, if we could count on increasing weight every week becoming strong and fit would be easy. Just do a little more each week. 

In the real world, initial gains peter out and people go on vacation, get sick, don’t sleep and have to work and take care of kids. These disruptions in the training plan make it even more difficult to make those linear jumps week to week. 

At Gain, we like to manipulate the volume, or how many total reps of something you’re doing as a way to get stronger without actually increasing load. There’s endless ways we can do this, but for the purpose of the blog imagine doing 8 reps with something you normally only do 5 reps with. 

For example, if you’re goblet squatting 5x5 with a blue kettlebell for week 1 and 2 on your program, week 3 might be 5x8. Our goal for you is to keep the same weight used for 5 reps on your 8. The following week, your program might drop back to 5x5. The idea here is that we know you can do the blue for 8 reps, so you’d better use a yellow for this 5. 

This is a slow, sustainable way to build strength that dramatically reduces the risk of injury. There’s nothing wrong with heavy loads and low reps, that’ll get you stronger too. This is just a way to simplify the progress and play the long game. 

Justin Miner 

@justinminergain 

Program Format

It can seem a bit of a mystery as to how we write training programs. Our methodology is broad, strength and conditioning, which is an umbrella over many different training disciplines. Our programs don’t float down from the higher ups at chain gyms like Orange Theory or F45, we create our own using experience, science and creativity. 

Here are the general principles of how we write a program: 

1. Hit most of the fundamental movement patterns each session

2. Do 2-3 core stability exercises each session 

3. Do some sort of conditioning, or cardio most workouts 

4. Do some mobility or soft tissue work to warm up or cool down

Over the next month, you’ll start to see a new program format. The font is bigger, so I hope you’ll have an easier time seeing it! We wanted to make it more educational for you. The new programs have labels where typically you would just see “A,”  or “B.” You’ll now see an outline of what constitutes a well rounded strength and conditioning program. Here’s what you’ll see.

A. Strength - this is an opportunity to stress your muscles and get your nervous system to adapt to a specific stimulus. On “A” exercises, we’re trying to get you to make a jump in weight every couple weeks or at least once a month. 

B. Accessory - This are movements like single leg exercises and rowing exercises. As Taylor said yesterday,  stuff that makes you better just for doing it. You don’t need to push it as hard here, they compliment the A. 

C. Core - While I’m often cited as saying all exercises are core exercises, we can get specific about challenging it too.

D. Conditioning - this is what you may call cardio. It’s to work on endurance and work capacity. This is where we try to manipulate your heart rate to get an effective response. Long and slow cardio is great, but when we’re trying to jam a 60 minute workout in, we focus on higher intensities for shorter duration. The good news, this will translate to the longer slower effort for you. 

E. Cool down - take a few minutes to stop sweating before you drive off. You’ll work on specific mobility drills to target an area that needs some love. 

I hope this gives you a little insight to our brains and the behind the scenes at Gain. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Reasonable or Tough

Dan John, strength coach and teacher has a great way to breakdown diets and workouts. 

If you’re doing tough workouts, a reasonable diet will probably do.

If you’re doing reasonable workouts, you need a tough diet. 

It’s hard and maybe you only do this once a year, tough workouts, tough diet. 

In times of high stress, reasonable workout, reasonable diet. 

Are you trying to tough diet and tough workout but just keep spinning your wheels? Maybe you need a reasonably good diet instead of the tough one you keep trying. If you don’t want to change your diet, but want to make some changes, perhaps it’s time to jack up the intensity of your workouts and make them tougher. 

Regardless of your specific goal, this is a way to get yourself organized and figure out what you need. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Addition vs Subtraction

The other day I was reminded of a principle Precision Nutrition uses to help their clients create new habits around food and living healthier. 

Instead of restricting bad foods, they want you to focus on adding good foods. It’s a simple mindset shift that helps you stick with something for a long period of time and avoid the downward spiral that happens when you eat something you’re not supposed to. 

Eat more of these, fruits, veggies and quality protein, hopefully you’ll eat less of the donuts, cupcakes and candy. 

Simple shift in perspective, but a nice frame work for you to have in your back pocket. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

One Hundred Percent

It’s no secret we love AirBikes. 

It’s also no secret that most people hate them. 

The reason we like them and clients hate them is the same: they’re incredible hard. As coaches, our job is to get a good training response from you. Sometimes that means going 100 percent. On an AirBike, finding 100 percent is easy and safe. It’s low skill and self regulating. 

We probably won’t have you deadlift or squat 100 percent of what you could handle. You can get all the strength benefits minus the risks hanging out at 80 or 90 percent. On a rower or SkiErg, 100 percent requires a high degrees of skill and with that probably several months of practice. 

When you have that 10-30 second interval on the AirBike though, let loose, go 100 percent and don’t hold back. It’s one of the safest ways we can get maximum effort out of anyone. It’ll help your endurance, power output and mindset. Let it rip the next time your program calls for some AirBike intervals. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Exercise and Don't Exercise

One of the presentations I went to last weekend was about health from an evolutionary perspective. You’re familiar with it. We used to be hunter-gathers so we walked a lot, moved a lot, slept on the ground and constantly worried about predators. It was a high stress lifestyle.

The presenter said something like this:

Exercise, it will save your life. Don’t exercise, it will also save your life.

What he was referring to was that early humans usually had periods of rest after a big hunt or travel day. Resting allowed you to hide from predators, recover, stuff your face and get ready for the next big day. 

The take away message was that our urge to sit on the couch and eat a whole pizza comes from a long time ago. That primal instinct to overeat easy calories and to not move is built into our software. In modern times we have the luxury to ignore these primal signals since we have things like refrigerators, cars and iPhones.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

It's About the Wires

Flex the long head of your biceps muscle. Now, turn on sartorius muscles in your thigh. You likely have no idea what I’m talking about, and if you do, you probably had a difficult time isolating specific muscles and getting them to turn on. 

Why is it whenever we teach someone a new exercise, their first question, “what muscles does this work?”

Strength training is about improving movement quality. Learn better patterns to get stronger in more beneficial shapes that will become your default in the real world. What muscles you’re working is much less important than the positions and shapes and movements your body makes. 

It comes down to this. It isn’t about firing muscles, tendons or ligaments, it’s about the wires. Your nervous system is what makes movement happen, it teaches you what feels good, what feels bad. Your nervous system adapts to build strength, improve range of motion and increase power.

Don’t worry about getting your pec minor to fire on a push up. Instead, make sure your shoulders are moving in a safe, productive shape. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Some Days Off

I got to see Dan John speak this weekend. He is a legend in the field of strength and conditioning and I saw him speak once before, way back in 2012. Dan John made things like walking around the gym carrying heavy kettlebells popular. He even coined the term goblet squat. 

One of the slides near the end of his talk dropped the jaws of most attendees. See, Dan John has this great ability to simplify complex things, like health:

Floss

Go to the doctor 

Wear your seatbelt

Eat Fruits and Veggies 

Go heavy sometimes 

Go long sometimes 

Go medium sometimes 

Have a group to belong to 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Dragging

Stoic Philosophy can teach us about attitude and mindset. I’ve been dragging a bit this week and I’ve pulled up this quote several times to check myself. Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, had trouble getting out of bed 2000 years ago, just like we all do now.

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’”

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?"

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Done

I was dragging my feet yesterday before my workout.

I wasn’t excited about it. I considered changing my planned workout, but couldn’t get excited about anything else either. I figured I would give it my best attempt. After a 15 minute bike ride to warm up, and further delay putting a barbell in my hands, I loaded the bar a did a few power cleans. 

Blah. 

They just didn’t feel great. I managed to get to my working set weight and after doing two sets, I called it a day and took Clem for a long walk instead. 

No matter how good your plan is, sometimes you just don’t have it. It can be frustrating, but it happens to all of us. Move on and come back ready for the next one.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Heavy Goblets

We’re doubling down on the goblet squat and their effectiveness as a strength, stability and stamina builder. 

We’re on a mission to get more people squatting heavier kettlebells. It’s a skill on it’s own to pick up a heavy kettlebell and get it into the goblet position. It takes practice. Without any technical breakdown, the best way to practice, pretend light kettlebells are heavy.

This way, when you’re faced with the difficult task of getting a 53 pound kettlebell from the floor to your chest, you’ve had practice reps with the 26, 35 and 44 pound bells first. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Slow Down

We recently had a team meeting about programming and our big focus was slowing down.

Getting people to use control to show us they own a movement.

Can you stay balanced? Feel it in all the right spots? Express strength or speed or power after a long pause or decent?  What happens to breathing? 

Tempo is progress. 

Slow down.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Time and Organization

Nothing makes you feel more overwhelmed than not having enough time. Enough time to fit in work, exercise, walking, reading, seeing friends and all the other things we juggle in life. I use the calendar on my iPhone, and it syncs with my laptop so I’m always aware of meetings I have or hours I‘m on the floor coaching. 

Nothing helps me get organized like a notebook and pen though. I lay out my running sessions for the week, which days I need to pack lunch and bring extra clothes and any big projects I’m working on.  None of that makes in to the formal calendar, but it’s the stuff that makes the wheels turn.

If you need to workout more, eat healthier or give yourself more free time, maybe it isn’t a problem of having enough time, maybe it’s a problem with organization. Maybe you aren’t prioritizing the way you need to. For me, 15 minutes on Sunday morning gives me an outline of each day and gives me a game plan heading into the week.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain