*There should be an even push and pull to keep balance. There is nothing controversial about pointing out the sh*tty posture most people present. We spend 90 percent of our day with our arms out in front of us, whether we are seated, driving, shopping, watching TV, pumping out badass blog posts. This throws off the push/pull balance we need to keep the shoulders happy and your posture somewhere north of a hunchback.

 Spend more time in the gym pulling than pushing. Rows, when executed properly with the right amount of tension and the proper amount of volume will help you here.

 But lets be honest, 10 sets a week isn’t going to carry you too far. You need to spend some time each day in a pull posture with the shoulder blades pulled back and down. We need to lightly load that pull posture and build up some daily volume. This is where exercises like band pullaparts, facepulls and Y-W-T-Ls come in handy because they require minimal to no equipment or space.

 If you are in pain, go get yourself looked at by a PT. Otherwise, perform some daily pull work. Your shoulders will thank you.

 *Just one of those days. If you are a human, you will have those days where you drag yourself through a workout. Here is how to make progress without burying yourself even deeper!

 You haven’t slept well, your spouse/kids/boyfriend/girlfriend are being total knobs, your warmup sets just don’t feel right, you aint ready! First, forget about trying to set any PRs, your goal is to perform every rep with perfect form. Second, you want to stay far away from failure while still accumulating the muscle building reps I mentioned in last weeks post. You do this by stopping 3-4 reps shy of failure while performing more sets. So instead of 3 sets where you push close to failure, you are going to perform 5 sets and leave a little extra in the tank.  

 This accomplishes two objectives; it will not beat you down and it will still allow you to accumulate some of those all-important muscle-building reps.

 *You cannot “spot reduce”. I had a young client ask me about this and apparently there are some scumbag fitness professionals on TikTok spreading misinformation about it.

You cannot chose where your body stores fat or where it takes it from first. There is no science behind it and in my 15 years in the biz, I have never seen anyone actually pull it off. Patience, exercise, patience, mostly clean eating, patience and patience will always get the job done. Oh, and patience.

 By the way, if there was such a thing, I would have absolutely no problem displaying a 6 pack every Sunday on the beach following a Saturday night cheat feast including cookies, ice cream and sushi. 

*Online training is not as easy as you think. I currently have three online clients and it’s challenging to provide quality training when you can’t actually be there with the person. There’s something to be said for the unspoken information you pick up just from observing someone lift. I can confidently say that if your online coach has “hundreds” of clients, there is a good chance they all have the exact same program!

*Just wanted to give a special shout out to a client I can’t name because she wouldn’t like that, let’s just call her Book, for completing 24 push-ups in two minutes. This is a requirement to get her career started and she has worked her butt off the past few months to get to this point. Not even a 2 month COVID sponsored vacation from the gym could hold her back! We are all very proud of you!