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Join us July  9th, 2016 for Bring-A-Friend Day!

Open to anyone who wants to come see what we are all about !

What if I told you that your stress is ruining your training? You do everything you can to recover…or do you? If you find yourself in an over-trained state, it isn’t the stress of your lifting, no that stress if from your LIFE.

To demonstrate the idea of how mounting stress can cause turmoil on the body, he pulled out a jug of water and several glasses of various sizes, each representing a person’s stress tolerance. Think about the size of your internal glass and consider that every aspect of your life is a potential stressor. Can you identify where your spill over point will be? Are you a coffee cup or a Big Gulp?

From an evolutionary standpoint the only thing we needed to stress about was the threat of an attack from an animal. Our natural fight or flight response was our survival mechanism when things became dangerous. Put yourself into today’s society and that is very different Have a confrontations with something that might eat us are few and far between, but our fight or flight response is running at a continual low-level hum. Stress from work, money, relationships, the kids, the in-laws, or your favorite team losing all contribute to keeping the system in a constant state of agitation. Even low-level stress tells the nervous system to be on alert.

Your body releases cortisol, which is a nightmare for someone who is trying to put on muscle. Even stress at a level of two on a scale of 1-10 forces your nervous system to adjust to the proposed threat. A continual state of stress fatigues your nervous system, and sooner or later overtraining occurs and results decrease.

The human body is the most adaptable organism on earth, but years of low-level stress can only be buffered for so long. Many of those tight muscles that you spend time stretching are a result accumulated stress. That tight low back or stiff neck that you battle every morning are very likely your nervous system’s response to your stress level, not some gross asymmetry in your muscles.

If you are in a major training rut, step back and take inventory of your life. What is causing you stress? How can you eliminate it or decrease it ? No one is exempt from stress. Our ability to get strong in the gym correlates directly with our ability to cope with life going on around us. All chronic illnesses have stress as one of the prevailing causes. It can no longer be ignored. Find the thing that gets you centered, calms you down, and allows you to breathe easy. Once you have, your progress in the gym can get back on track.

What is ONE piece of exercise equipment that I do feel is a great addition to training ? The rowing machine ! Why you ask? The rowing machine uses your own body to create power. With modern populations suffering from inactivity and lifestyle disease, movement is more valuable than ever. Machines at the gym are not really designed to make you work very hard. Just think of all the people you see casually sitting on the bike or walking on a treadmill holding on. Not that any of that is bad because ANY movement is better than none however, make your movement worth it and efficient!

I believe every human is an athlete, and every athlete should row. Rowing transfers well into anything that demands extension of the knees, hips, and elbows, meaning it makes you better at pretty much any sport.Rowing is a time-efficient workout that uses almost every muscle in your body. How to you become a better rower ? I am going to give you some tips to do just that !

1- Find YOUR rhythm. Rhythm is the most important driver of performance in rowing so you need to find one that works for you specifically then we can work on the more technical aspects.Your body works on natural rhythm from your circadian rhythms to your oscillating heartbeats, rhythm is an important aspect of human survival and performance. Rhythm is that focus to block out pain and keep pushing through that threshold.

2- Keep your rowing patterns continuous and moving. A lot of athletes will have a quick pause after they pull. Minimizing this will make you more effective as a rower. Watch any Olympic rower, you shouldn’t be able to tell where one stroke ends and another begins. This is a big task for you to try to tackle in becoming more effective!

3- Row with a purpose and celebrate the small wins ! Whether in rowing, sport, or life, focusing on the things we do have only leads to greater achievement. Ambition is a great asset for long-term improvement, but it has the potential to suffocate short-term success. When you can’t hit your desired pace or start to deviate from your race plan, the rowing machine lets you know instantly. One of the biggest mistakes we make is to frame that instant feedback negatively. Change this mindset and be proud of your smaller achievements like staying on pace, rowing continuously and smoother pulls!

4- The rower is a journey ! Your rowing journey should be focused on the progress you’ve made and not how close you are to rowing perfectly. You have between now and the rest of your life to row better, move better, and get fitter. Enjoy your rowing journey and play the long game. Set smaller obtainable goals and you will see that your rowing skills will get better overtime making you more efficient !

 Thursday June, 30th will be the last day to pre-order the NEW Fitness Heroics  T-shirts !! 

NEW LOGO on Front and Back of T-shirt ! 

Sign up on the whiteboard in the gym with your size – they run a little small ask a coach for sizing!

Price: $25 ( cash or payment method on file )

COLOR– Light Blue

How bad do you want to see changes? Let me ask you a question: if you had to choose from the following, which would you choose?
1-Do the right things?
2-Work really hard?

This is to raise the more important question of “How important is hard work relative to everything else?”

So many athletes I come in contact with each day are all pushing and striving for the same thing, to become a better athlete. So what is this missing ingredient?

Hard, consistent work. Here’s how it breaks down:

-If you’re doing things completely wrong, no amount of hard work will save you. It might even make things worse.

-As long as you’re doing things reasonably well, that is enough, as long as you’re working hard.

-If methods are 100 percent dialed in but you’re not putting in the work, it simply won’t pan out.

Hard work is ALWAYS an option for everyone, you just need to be willing to do it! We tell ourselves the more complex and profound our programming is, the more complex and profound our results will be. But this is rarely the case, particularly where strength is concerned.

Some days you’re going to ache all over, and other days, weird muscles are going to be sore. If you’re like most people, you probably won’t ever hit a point where training hard doesn’t leave you feeling a little beat up. You will, however, hit a point where being beat up just isn’t that big of a deal. Part of evolving as an athlete is realizing being strong is not for the faint of heart.

You can build your work capacity fairly quickly, given proper dosing and a reasonable timeline, but you need to use a practical progression. I realize doing a certain workout and steadily progression on your training load to increase adaptation without crossing the threshold into un-recoverable territory isn’t exciting. Complexity for the sake of complexity doesn’t add anything of value. Your programming only needs to be as complex as the task demands.

Fitness is a journey.” It’s probably one of the biggest clichés in the industry. And like many clichés, it happens to be true. Over time, consistency and effort applied in a wise and realistic manner will outweigh pretty much everything else. You cannot cheat this basic truth of training with secret programs or shortcut protocols.

Train HARD and Train SMART !