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As a guy who has become quite familiar with the decor of the doghouse I may not be the most qualified to be handing out relationship advice so take it with a grain of salt.

However, when it comes to fielding questions of progress or adherence associated with exercise these days I cannot help but ask this question.

How healthy is your relationship with your exercise?

Looking back at getting started in the gym I am sure we can say we have all spent time fantasizing and romanticizing the ideal look and feel of our bodies. An image of a consistently strong, lean, healthy body to live in. An image that we grow an appreciation for.

Where I believe the trouble begins to expose itself however is how unromantic it becomes when the call to action is put into place. Soon the outcome that we romanticized as a sweet long term relationship with our body gets replaced with a call to action comparable to a one night stand.

While there may be some immediate fulfillment with that approach how often does it really last and how often does it remain fulfilling?
 

But sometimes there is a spark. Something that intrigues you and you just can't walk away from it. You put the time in and you are totally cool with it because your body is getting the love in return that it deserves.

The attraction evolves into infatuation, you are fully engaged and before you know it things get hot and heavy.

Like any flame however, it's not easy keeping the fire burning and this is where your relationship with exercise really tests what you're made of.

Which is why I believe it is vitally important for anyone at this juncture to get inside the minds of folks who just seem to have it figured out. The ones who make the hard work look easy.

Whether it is seeking out a respected trainer, or a well trained individual who has the ability to walk the walk, stay consistent, make it progressive and make it look pretty. They've more than likely been raked through the coals a few times before and have still found a way to make it work.

These are the people who have had their share of one night stands and walks of shame in the weight room. These are the people who have had wildly romantic early relationships with their workouts only to face further challenges, further frustrations, and unfortunately they may have gotten hurt along the way.
 

Mood Music For The Multitasking Mind

But through a lot of self analysis and self improvement they come back better. They grow to embrace the complexities of an enhanced relationship and they adapt to them. They know that the relationship is not a marked slot in the day planner but a lifelong process. They find a way to make it complementary to their day to day rather than contradictory.

The allure of the outcome evolves into the love of the game.

And at the end of the day with the iron game you've got to give a lot of love to get a little in return. 

But oh how sweet it is.

-JA 

July is behind us and personally what an action packed month it has been. From capitalising on the Wild West speed laws in Montana to collaborating with three other presenters who have rocked my world over the years to be a part of an incredible first annual Edmonton Performance Summit. Wrapping up the month by catching up with some great fitness friends that I have at the Okanagan Strength and Conditioning Conference and being able to hash it out with two good friends Sean Guevremont and Steve Saville. Both being coaches and absolutely brilliant at what they do it made for some especially memorable shop talking.

Not to discount the unbelievable time that I had throughout the month of July but there was one event in particular that rounded out July 2013 and well..... for me this one was a doozy.

The whole thing started with a story from a long time client. The type of story that as a personal trainer makes you wonder whether the title of personal trainer really validates what training has the potential to do.

The type of story that has taken a lot of my thoughts on the fitness industry as a whole and flipped them on their head and ultimately a story that I felt like I needed to share. I just didn't expect to be sharing it at something of this magnitude.

So when I was chosen to express my two cents on how we need to think as trainers at the NSCA National Conference my reaction was essentially a seated version of, well....

There is a special sense of nostalgia that I have with this event as it was back in 2009 that I had decided to attend this conference for the first time as well as take a kick at the can for my CSCS certification.

It was my first real taste of continuing education where I was able to hit the road and take in an education where I was completely starstruck by impact that the coaches, trainers, researchers, and practitioners presenting were making in the industry. They were and in my eyes still are some of the best on the planet.

It was also an opportunity for me to take in Las Vegas, a city that I have grown to love for a number of reasons.

The most profound being the vivid memory of silently staring over the strip post conference with a rooftop vantage point and a Boris Yeltsin BAC realizing that I truly found what I wanted to do and do well.

The Conference

Just like back in '09 the conference was held in the beautiful and very well situated Paris Las Vegas. Another piece of nostalgia added to the puzzle.
 

From what I remembered from four years back was that this conference was huge. Big attendance,
big exhibitor ballroom, and big conference rooms so naturally coming back to present at this thing I knew what I was getting myself into. It didn't matter. The room was huge and things went straight back to surreal but that certainly wasn't a bad thing.
 

Despite the nerves I was pumped. This has been a presentation that has been stirring in my head since October and it was a topic that hit close to home for myself and was beyond excited to get it off my chest. Add to it being able to hang out for a day prior to it and shoot the breeze with some very cool attendees as well as speakers. Despite the different backgrounds, levels of experience, brains, or abilities every one of the 1700+ people involved were there for the same reason.

To get better at better. That put my mind at ease.

I was one of three presenters kicking off the first day and for my first time at something of this magnitude I was happy about that. The only catch being when you are dreaming about sleeping in for the biggest speaking engagement of your life a good old fashioned Vegas loan shark beating wasn't going to put me back in dreamland.

So after an impromptu influx of time to get ready things got started at 830am and despite the nerves leading up to it all there was something kind of peaceful about being up there.

Not quite sure what I remember from the presentation itself as it was all kind of a blur but to give you the Coles Notes it would be comparable to the following statement.

Great personal trainers have outgrown the title personal trainer due to their understanding that there is so much more to it than that. I am uncertain of what the title of what these trainers do nor do I have an idea of what it should be but if you are a trainer and all that you believe you are doing is exclusively training you are not giving yourself enough recognition nor are you establishing yourself to earn it.

Professionally this was a big feat for me as it was something that I had aspired to do at some point in my career just not this early in the game. On top of it to have other fitness pros approach me with some incredible questions and provide me with some incredible feedback when it was all said and done. It's a surreal feeling that I am still trying to process. Particularly 2012 NSCA CPT of the year Robert Linkul for the kind words. Means a lot amigo you made my day.

I also want to say a big thanks to U of C Baseball head coach/boss/partner in crime for the week Colin Moro for making the trip down as having some professional support certainly helped. Beyond excited to be back for another year and do what I can do to put this program on the map.
 

The Debrief

Turns out there was some ulterior motive behind this professional support and it goes by the name of Las Vegas.

Rubber arm twisted. After stirring on this presentation for a number of months and all of a sudden it's over I would be lying if I said I did not have celebration on my mind. So after chatting with some very cool folks in the exhibitor hall and taking in some world class presentations it was off to see what any fitness professional would see after a day of fitness education.

Sink a cocktail and take in the smooth sounds of a supersized Elvis impersonator.

Big Elvis has been a strip favourite of mine for a few years now and despite the fact he has a custom built throne and he doesn't exactly move around much I will say this. The guy is good.... very good.

No I should not find entertainment in this man's size but I will tell you that he has the shtick absolutely nailed, the chops to back it up, he is making people happy and he enjoys what he does. Who am I to judge? Add to it he used to be over a thousand so props to the guy for dropping three bills.

Next stop was Cashman Field to slug it out in the minor leagues with the 51's.
 

I've always been a fan of baseball but I can't say I ever took it anywhere as a player. To say that I know the very detailed intricacies of the game would be a stretch of the truth so I do enjoy getting out to them when I can.

Not to mention I am hard pressed to find any Americana that I enjoy more than just sitting back and taking in minor league baseball. Not sure why I love it as much as I do but I just do.

Dollar beer night helps. Put another on the scoreboard for the Americans on that one.

Lesson 1: You Can't Knock The Hustle

Personally this was a big task. As a hard wired quiet kid public speaking was always something that I dreaded and to this day I still get that feeling of panic for events as simple as raising my hand and asking a question. The past number of years I have had to challenge and overcome those hesitations and to be able to work toward something of this size and get it done was a huge personal accomplishment.

Professionally this was something even more special. I had this love for working out for as long as I can remember but I never expected it to evolve into what it has evolved into. Academically I was told that I did not have the high school transcript to get into any physical education degree programs.

I finished my degree with some other plans in mind but went straight back to pursuing a training certification by failing the exam the first time. Second time around was a pass but attached to that pass was the sobering message from the instructor that she would never hire me as a trainer. A pass is a pass.

Seven years after just squeaking through an entry level certification I never would have thought it would turn into the ride it has. Making a living doing something that has captured my interest since watching Body Shaping on ESPN before school when I was five. (Please tell me someone remembers this show)

It has been a great ride so far but its engine has been fueled by a lot of sweat and I see it no differently when it comes to moving forward.

Working with some incredible clients, hashing it out with some brilliant trainers from all over the globe, travelling, teaching and being a part of a young and very hungry baseball program.

Add too it presenting with the NSCA and it really has been an absolute blast now that I have had the chance to look back on it all.

Lesson 2: Man, I really like Vegas

Let me start by saying that. It has been good to me in the sense of fun, continuing education believe it or not, and there is just something about being in the desert that gets you thinking on another level whether Vegas or somewhere in the middle of the Mohave.

Vegas has evolved from a fantasyland to me and into a place where some of the most important components of reality are thrown at you at a profoundly accelerated pace. Elements like risk/reward, what hard work can provide you and how fast it can evaporate if you take it for granted, indulgence, romance, sleep deprivation, real and fake.

All of these can be found in Vegas and they are there to test you over a short time and the key questions being how well can you handle it and how can you do it better next time?

However you may interpret this city there is one very simple but profound lesson that Las Vegas allows me to remember every time I am there. A lesson that paved my own path back in '09. Whether reality is happening in real time or light speed and whether it is currently working in your favor or it is throwing a few jabs at you.

Sometimes you just have to sit back, stay silent, enjoy the view. Let magic happen.
 

Thanks to the NSCA for the incredible opportunity and for the chance to be a part of such a world class event full of world class people. To my clients it is hard to say where I would be if I haven't encountered every single one of you so thank you so much for making me better and driving me to become better than better.

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine
-Elvis Presley

I'll be the first to tell you that nutrition is a tough one for me. I do study it, I do discuss it, I occasionally write about it, but to say I know it would be a stretch of my imagination.

Add to it the fact that no matter how deep into it you can really get you will often end up obeying answers such as "yes, but", "well it depends", and "there are few ideal situations". Lesson 1, get friendly with these answers.

Personally, I can say that my own let downs with nutrition comes in both interpreting as well as expressing not what I would call bad advice but rather incomplete advice. More often than not this advice coming from those two words that I've learned to love to hate.

"Clean Eating"

If those of you reading this were to close your eyes and visualize what a dinner table full of poor eating choices that we would be able to share some commonalities.

Would you expect the same outcome when visualizing clean eating?

Personally, most of the mistakes that I have made over the years have been a direct result of this skewed visualization and the beliefs that came with them.

It started while growing up and I was very lucky to grow up with parents who were conscious eaters. It just so happened at the time that clean eating consisted of low fat, grains, and plant based foods. It worked fairly well but when it was time to start building upon my alien like frame at the time, I wanted protein.

When I became old enough to make my own purchases and decisions my clean eating mindset gravitated toward a lot of low carb, Paleo type eating where once again the bubble began to burst not because of clean eating itself but my misinformed interpretation of it. Bodybuilding precontest diets worked but it was miserable. General low carb high proein high fat diets also worked when it came to getting lean but once again where my output was high in my work and my lifts, I began to wear down and eventually got to a point where GAINING bodyfat became a necessary and difficult task.

However, with mistakes come lessons learned and I have learned this.
 

• I work and train a lot
• I am a natural ectomorph
• I am an omnivore
• I love vegetables
• I can eat a bit of wheat and not feel like there is a wildfire in my guts
• I drank Nova Scotia skim milk during my childhood and adolescence and did not develop asthma or a need to start shaving when I was nine. For that reason I still enjoy the occasional organic Greek yogurt.
• I drink coffee and my adrenals are still in the building
• I can consume carbs at night and not worry about waking up to a fresh set of cleaveage on my hips or lower scapula.
• I feel great!

But that's my story. And the problem with my story is that my story is not your story and if I had to end this post with one piece of advice it would be get to know your story don't just skim through the pages of it.

I am no nutritionist but being a trainer does teach you that the paths aren't all that different. It is skill acquisition and for me these were some of the skills that I suggest acquiring.

It's Not Just In The Kitchen

This photo teaches both a valuable lesson and a lesson that a few short years ago my path to purity as a fitness professional taught me to ignore. 

Here we have Andy Morgan, Rog Law, and four Cinnabons about to face a very fast and very ugly demise. While ignorance would have once led me to a question of how dare you trainers do this to yourselves I now look at this photo and realize that there is a lot to learn from these guys.

Both Rog and Andy coincidently both are both successful trainers in the gym and on the web particularly with people looking to achieve a smoking body because I believe they are on the leading edge of how fat loss should be coached for most people. Add to that they both posess the physiques of dudes who just killed a boar with their bare hands rather than a bunch of baked goods from the mall.

Because they are balanced. Their physique success is a balance of high professional output, training hard, eating well, supplementing accordingly, and constantly improving their overall lifestyle. They have also put the time in to know what they can get away with. Impromptu cinnamon bun crushing between amigos from different continents does not happen every day. Not to mention their routine of the everyday can wipe the slate clean very efficiently for that reason. At least I don't think it happens every day.

For that reason I believe that for a lot of us it really does not need to be all that sacrificial when it is integrative.

Rather than focusing only on what to lose in your situation in order to get to your goals, I suggest taking a good look at what is already missing.

Wait a minute......

Incomplete Advice Is Not Necessarily Bad Advice

Yes I have made my dietary mistakes but I have learned a lot from them. The golden lesson being that I understand why belief systems with nutrition become mainstream. They have worked for somebody at some time. Even with my own mistakes there was a lot of positivity that had initially fueled my nutrition decision making. There were key factors in each that remain universal.

• Protein
• Plant based foods
• Water

I would consider these three to be the staple of any long term positive dietary changes. Fat and carbohydrate consumption and how much you draw from each would be based on the desired outcome.

Nutrition troubleshooting for me was a lesson in acquiring some new ideas, but more than anything it was reiterating what I had already known without overcomplicating it.  

Make Your Own Rules

I am a firm believer in the idea that when I am about to train a client I have a plan in place but that plan can change profoundly depending on what went down for that person every minute leading up to that session.

What I am still trying to figure out is why I would not have adopted the same system of beliefs when it comes to nutrition. If training provides the best outcome when it is not standardized, why would nutrition be any different?

I just can't play by those rules anymore nor can I express them. I have tried the frequency thing and based on my day four of those six meals occurred while I was working. The problem for me is four of those six meals occur while I am working and moving around all day with four meals getting digested at a pace of a Canadian emergency room visit is not a great feeling.

Like fitness, I now believe that nutrition requires an element of self preference in order to get things figured out. Eat when the time is right for you, eat what is required of you and you can call it a good day.

Food Is A Hell Of A Drug

It is a performance enhancer at the same time can be a performance inhibitor. It is an antidepressant, hormone regulator/deregulator and stress outlet. It is something that can be wildly addictive and can also be stripped down from its purest form for the sake of profit. It can be hard to live with but in the grand scheme of things we cannot live without it.
 

The question is what side of the trip do you want to be on when it comes to what you're taking, where you're getting it from, and how much you are consuming?
 

BE A CONSUMER! Not just a consumer

The best nutrition advice I have ever received actually came from a Political Science professor and that lesson being that as people with purchasing power, we have a lot more infuence on our food options than we give ourselves recognition for.

Food production has not exactly had a squeaky clean reuptation these days as the organic/conventional, processed/unprocessed, GMO/non GMO debates continue to heat up.

I know there is a push to bring more transparency into food production but the power is ultimately in your hands as a the person with the purchasing power. We have rights as consumers but with rights comes responsibility and that responsibility requires that you do your homework and know where your hard earned dollars are going.

You don't like conventional production? Buy organic or go visit your local farmer's market and purchase what's in season. Or grow it. It may require some homework and some consciousness but what you ring through at the check out has a profound butterfly effect on what gets produced and how it gets produced.

A Side Of Truth

Exercise will always be the winner when it comes to what fascinates me in the fitness industry but there are certainly carry overs.

Like training, I believe that it does not only boil down to what is being programmed but what goes on during the process of improvement. It requires changes in behaviour, it requires consistency, it requires education and it requires getting to know yourself a little better.

It takes time, and it can be frustrating but it all serves a higher purpose and it is a purpose that you, your family, your performance, and your planet will not regret.

-Jeff

There is something oddly special about what a May trip to Kansas City does to the human brain but the accumulation of great information, great people and great times overall. A place where "coregasms" can be both brought up laughingly and discussed logically could very well have something to do with it.

Add to it a day in the air where it is just a man, a pen and paper and an overstimulated brain running wild and things get productive, creative and just plain wierd (may also have had something to do with the good times).

Quite shocking sometimes what comes up and this scenario would be no different. But in the midst of looking back on all the good memories of an incredible summit there was a point where I decided to travel back further in time and the outcome ultimately turned into me having a song stuck in my head for the rest of the flight.

At least it was a good one because more often than not it is some overkilled Pink track or Zoot Zoot Riot as a result of daily overkilled health club music loops. This was actually a real feel good track that came from one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons growing up only to be covered by one of my favorite bands growing up. Still brings a smile to my face.

Pair my short spans of misplaced sanity with a much more down to earth post summit processing way of thinking and it suddenly dawned on me that the magic of three has a pivotal place in training concept.

For three can't you see is a magic number
A number for strength and positioning wonder
A number to see as a number no longer
But as concept and thinking to help you get stronger

Takes Three Legs To Make A Tripod

Explained very well by training neighbor in Edmonton Dean Somerset, the tripod concept is something well worth drilling into your head if you are seeking better stability in the foot, mobility in the ankle and in the grand scheme of things anything that requires the foot to strike the ground in order to produce force.
 

Three Rep Sets

I will be the first to admit that I do not pursue it with the same aggression or frequency that I used to but strength training for me is still where I feel the most at home and three rep sets have always been where I feel I can get things done well.

Three rep sets have also become a staple for a lot of my clients looking to develop strength. Of course the 1RM is the norm of strength testing but for those who are apprehensive of the risk/reward or those who want to get strong but don't regularly engage in max squat conversations with their families at the dinner table then three is where it's at for me.

Trunk Trifecta

If there is anything that I can reflect on the past few years and say that I am proud of is that I was asked to help out in what I consider very cool training environments that have been both high output and high fulfillment.

One of the key factors being the diversity.

Everything from hip replacements, people with MS, physique athletes, cancer survivors, NHL linesmen, musicians, college baseball players, and people who flat out like to train.

While the diversity has provided a lot of fun and specific learning curves along the way, it has also reinforced a very key point that often gets overlooked within the context of specifics.

We are training human beings. And when you train human beings for a living you will notice certain aspects of mechanics that need to be addressed with specific loads, volumes, and exercises but addressed universally nonetheless.

For me, one of those key universal aspects is making the most of the trifecta of the hips, abdomen, and thoracic spine. For some it could come in the form of breathing, for others it could come in the form of mobilization/stabilization, strength, or hypertrophy. Regardless of the goal, your ability to hack into these big three both individually as well as a unit will have profound effects on your desired outcome.

Every Triangle Has Three Corners Every Triangle Has Three Sides

One of my favorite ways to make the most of the hip, abdomen, t-spine trifecta also lies in the number of three. Whether open or closed chain, engaging in three points of contact with the hands and feet provides some very good corners for the sides you are looking to strengthen.

You can call it whatever you would like to call it but for the sake of justifying the title of this paragraph lets call it triangulation. To put it simply, for the sake of hip, trunk, scapular strength and stabilization, rotary, and antirotary strength this stuff is good stuff as it can be prescribed specifically and applied universally.

 
Windmill from Move Improve on Vimeo.

Rocking Out

And this concludes my case for the number three. What started out as a song burned in my brain on a flight back from Kansas City evolved into too way more cartoon watching on YouTube than a grown man should go through in a week and then into this.

Good things come with three in the equation
For strength, stability, and anti rotation
Remember that answers can come from right braining
And good ones exist outside of just training

Knowledge Is Power

-Jeff