There are a variety of situations where not feeling your best and/or having pain means you should skip training for a while (and possibly see a doctor), but where pain is concerned, in the vast majority of cases it need not be a roadblock to training - it can and should be something you manage and work around.
Bone fracture risk is higher for those with osteoporosis and a great deal of research is being conducted to diagnose, prevent, and treat fractures in the elderly. What you eat may be able to improve or maintain bone structure during aging.
When your strength training novice linear progression (NLP) ends you have some choices to make. One choice is to stop new progress and keep the progress (gains) you have made thus far. Said more simply, this is a choice to “just maintain.” Surely "maintaining" will be easier to do, in that it will require less hard work and less complicated training. Or will it?
After progressing with their NLP strength program for a few months many trainees will start looking to the future and begin prodding with questions that hint at "what next?" There is, of course, a time and a place for this questioning and in this article we take a closer look.
Before we delve into the meat and potatoes of this article, I want to make sure context is clearly established. The programming structure discussed in this article is not required everyone doing CrossFit® training. It is just one example of how programming can be structured for individuals who are no longer beginners.
For those new to health and fitness the link between lifestyle factors and chronic disease may be hard to grasp at first. Therefore, to lower the barrier for understanding and highlight the importance of this topic, we have created this primer.
When new clients reach out to me for a consultation on how they can reach their fitness goals, there are any number of specific things they would like to improve. In the rest of this article I will explain why focusing your training on strength is the most productive way to begin your fitness journey.
When I train my clients one of the questions I often get asked by them is, when performing a pull-up, does the grip (or orientation of the hands on the bar) matter? Specifically, they are asking the difference between having their palms facing away from them versus having their palms facing them.
After all these years, one thing I constantly find myself saying to my clients/athletes is, “Get a notebook.” I want them to have a permanent record of what they are doing when they do sessions with me. Even when I give explanations as to why it’s important, my conversion rate is low …
The terms physical activity, exercise and training get thrown around a lot, but their uses are not always consistent. This inconsistency of use makes it hard to assign value to the activities we choose as tools to improve our fitness. Since fitness is multi-faceted and requires optimization of both our health and resilience, the distinctions are important.