Put Your Shoulder Blades In Your Pockets.

The best cue I've ever heard for how to prepare for many lifting, pulling, or pushing movements is to put your shoulder blades in your back pockets.

This is important because it gets your back and shoulders set and ready to do their job. On these movements, the arms and legs are what should be doing the moving. If you are doing a pushup and your shoulders are moving around a lot they are doing a job that isn't theirs. It is like a workplace in which somebody never does their job, and so the people around them have to pick up some of his/her responsibilities. Just as this leads to a dysfunctional workplace, allowing other muscles to take over the jobs of the prime movers leads to dysfunctional fitness.

When adopting a new exercise, or program it is important to know which body parts should be doing the work as well as to make sure that those body parts are actually doing the job rather than other parts.

A big part of my job as a personal trainer is to make sure my clients are doing their exercises properly. Doing the exercise correctly strengthens the right muscles and avoids injury from contraindicated movements.

How You Need To Train

How You Need To Train

Also known as, my philosophy on personal training.

The question comes in many forms:

If I want to lose weight, how should I train?
If I want to tone up my (body part), how should I train?
If I want to run faster, lift more, run further. . . how should I train?

A lot of people will give you "the" answer. Usually it is either, "Train the way I train," or "Train according to the method I am selling."

While I will be the first to say that there are definitely certain training modes that are best for achieving certain objectives, I'm going to say it's not so simple as just saying, "do intervals," "do crossfit," "tabata" etc.

Here is my personal opinion as a personal trainer.

There are lots of ways to improve your fitness. The best way to train, the way YOU should train, is unique, and if you haven't trained with me yet, I don't know what it is yet.

If a trainer tries to answer the question, "How should I train?" without asking lots of questions first, don't hire them. My goal is to find out your goals, to find out what sort of exercise you enjoy, to find out what has worked for you before and what has failed for you before. I'll need to know whether you like working out in the morning or in the evening. I'll ask about your family support system and if you have friends who are into fitness. I'll want to know which side you carry your child on. (It's important, feel free to ask me why.)

I need as much information on what working out is for you to find out what will work out for you.

I don't even own a cookie cutter, so you won't get a cookie cutter workout.