Slow Down, Take Your Time

It’s a well known rule that we’re supposed to brush our teeth for two minutes. This is a good reminder, that we need to spend time doing things for them to be effective. When we stretch or do mobility work in the gym, it would benefit you to think of this teeth brushing rule. 

The longer you’re able to hang out in a stretch, or create active movement in a mobility drill, the more effective it will be. People often rush through the mobility work or warm up drills at the gym. These things, while time consuming, are intended to slow you down. If we have a hip mobility drill paired with a deadlift, we want a couple things to happen. 

We want to let your muscles recover from your deadlift set. You may feel ready to go, but with a heavy weight, we want to make sure the muscles are ready to again to produce the most force. A mobility drill is a way to slow you down, because the more you hang out, the more change you’re going to see. Which is our second point. We want to slow you down, but also, we want to improve your deadlift position while you're working out. If you really take your time, focus on your mobility work, you’ll hopefully come back to the bar in a more comfortable position than before.

Don’t rush. Give your tissues time to relax. When we first get into a stretch, it can be uncomfortable and burn quite a bit. Get through that initial discomfort and you’ll notice a big difference. The longer you can last, the more results you’ll see.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Take a Walk

The least sexy, most effective thing you can do for you health is walk more. I talk to people wanting to make positive life changes all the time. Many people say they want to do more in the gyn or they’ll add pilates or yoga on their days off. What about going for a 30 minute walk every day? I often suggest.

No one wants to do it! There aren’t many people I know that can actually put their shoes on, get out the door and go for some low-level aerobic exercise. Walking moves your hips, pumps blood to your muscles and gets you outside. It will help with you recovery, your energy and might even help you sleep better at night. 

Walking more should be a priority for you. What’s stopping you? 

Justin MIner 

@portsmouthcoach

Breath Work

We’re pretty impressive. Humans I mean. What's crazy is we can go weeks without food, days without water but barely a couple minutes without breathing. Breathing is so important that we leave it up to our autonomous nervous system. This allows us to stay alive while using brain power for other things like scrolling Instagram, driving and not getting hit by a car while walking down the street.

Controlling our breath is powerful. Since we never think about it, we don’t realize that controlling it can have such an impact on our mood, or the state that we’re in. We can use different breath patterns to elicit different states. Many of you are familiar with meditation, which is concentrating on your breath to notice your thoughts and feelings. What I’m talking about is called breath work. It isn’t necessarily meditating, but can produce similar results.

We can do breath work in a variety of ways. As a dedicated training session, like pushing the sled using nasal breathing only, or using a certain number/types of breaths as a rest period. You can do it as a warm up, like we do at the gym. You can also do it post workout, to tell your body it’s time to calm down. Below, are a couple protocols you can try right now.

Feel Alert:

3 rounds of 4 second inhale, 8 second hold, 4 second exhale 

Then, take 15 breaths, full inhale, relaxed (not full) exhale

Then, hold your exhale for 10-30 seconds

Repeat 2-3 more times

Try this right now if you’re trying to wake up, or when you’re shifting tasks today

Down Regulate:

5 second inhale through your nose

10 second exhale through your nose or mouth

20-30 breathes

This is a good one to do post workout and if you’re feeling anxious or stressed.

Let me know how they make you feel! 

Justin Miner 

@portsmouthcoach

Single Leg Movements

We place an emphasis on single leg exercises at the gym. They’re a great functional strength builder, improve stability, and don’t stress our spine as much as heavy squats and deadlifts will with both feet planted. When we look into real life and sports, many of the tasks we do are from one leg. We rarely plant both feet and get ready to perform a movement.

Single leg exercises expose you. They show you where you’re weak and what your bad habit is to work around that weakness. They show us where we’re off from one side to another. Which leg we favor and obviously spend more time on.

The bad news is that we’re not symmetrical. At least not as much as we’d like to think. You’re always going to have a good one leg SLDL side and a not as good side. Reverse lunges will come easy on one leg while the other might make you fight for balance more. Doing movements on one leg, will help even it out. It will teach you how to stabilize, use the correct muscles and notice your poor movement habits. 

It can be easy to mail it in on these important movements because they’re typically not the main event of your workout. Be sure to focus and concentrate on what you’re doing. These single leg exercises won’t get easier without more reps.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

A New Metric

We like metrics. They tell us how we’re progressing, if we’re stalling and provide data to see specifically how we can improve. We can see numbers on the bar go up, numbers in our bank account change and a whole host of others.

With running, I can look at weekly mileage, heart rate, average pace, elevation gain and time on my feet. What I’ve noticed though, that gets me in a training groove more than any of the previously mentioned metrics, how many times I get out on a run when I didn’t want to. 

You can measure the same thing. How many times do you show up to the gym when you don’t want to? Afterwards, like me, you probably feel better than before, accomplished and happy that you forced some time for yourself. 

There will always be reasons to skip training. There will always be days when we don’t want to. I’m challenging you to ask yourself, can I do it anyway? If you do, I know two things will happen. You’ll be happy that you did it and you’ll build resilience in the process. There will always be a work thing, traffic, appointments, bad weather and stuff to do. Can you measure how many times you still get it done even when you don’t want to?

Justin Miner 

@portsmouthcoach

Refresh Button

Happy Tuesday. I hope you had a great long weekend. As you’re waking up, reading this and maybe drinking some coffee, I hope you’re prepared for the week. Ready to give it your all, work towards your goals and have a fresh start.

A slight schedule shake up, like having a Monday off, can really work in our favor. It busts us out of a rut and makes us feel rejuvenated. While we’re all going to have a difficult time remembering what day it is this week, we’ll all be better off because of it.

We’re creatures of habit, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it allows us to be autonomous and make decisions easily. It’s bad when we try to make every decision autonomously and we get out of whack and spiral through day after day.

Today's your chance. Don’t cling on to weekend feelings or talk about Tuesday Scaries, get back on the wagon and get back in the groove.

PS - Two announcements

May Beer Night is Wednesday 5/29 @ 6:30

June Group Community Workout is Saturday 6/1 @ 9am

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

What is Functional Fitness?

Functional fitness gets thrown around a lot these days. Recently, the meaning of it formed into weird movements on unstable surfaces and choreographed flows that require intense studying to understand. Today, I want to give you my definition.

Functional fitness is the ability to do a wide variety of physical demands with ease. That means you can move a couch, mow your lawn, go on a hike, kayak, paddle board, get off the floor, stand up from a low seat, grab a something from the top shelf and take a long walk.

Strength and conditioning, the broad definition of what we do at GAIN, will improve your functional fitness. We hit basic human shapes like squatting, hinging, pressing and pulling. These have a direct carryover to performance and function.

You’ve probably noticed some small wins. Things like carrying groceries in the house, walking up stairs, mulching your garden, shoveling snow and long days of walking are becoming easier. This is huge. It doesn’t seem like it, but too many people lose these capabilities and therefore, lose their independence.

While you're out enjoying this holiday weekend, take a minute to pause on your fitness. I bet it’s helping more than you realize.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

We will be closed on Monday May 27 for Memorial Day. 

Do it Forever

We start and stop a lot. We get excited, ride the momentum wave for as long as we can and then find the next thing. What I love about strength and conditioning is that you can do it forever. Your program and sets and reps and exercises should change but the principles stay the same. Use as much range of motion as you safety can, create stiffness using your core and develop robustness in fundamental human positions.

It’s one of the things I like about running as well. I’m in it for the long haul. I want to be able to run, in some capacity, forever. There isn’t an end date that I’ll give up or stop trying to improve. A lot of the time, injuries get in the way of sticking with something like this. The doing it forever mentality can help. Maybe you don’t need to go so much or so hard. Maybe slow down and think the long game.

It’s freeing in a way, knowing that you’re going to stick with something no matter what. Taking care of your body should be a top priority, and many people struggle to make positive changes in their life. If we all slowed down, realized there is no where to get, that you need to keep training, keep trying to eat better and move more, we’d all be better off. Both short term and long term goals can help motivate and guide us, but when there’s something greater than crossing a goal off as motivation, we’re going to be more likely to stick with it. You’re in total control of how this plays out, keep going, forever.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Napping

I’m a total pro at taking naps. Anywhere. Anytime. I can fall asleep and wake up recharged. In fact, it’s necessary for me to get through long days. Many people report that they aren’t nappers. Today, I want to let you in on my secret nap sauce. This is what has worked for me. As you read this, remember, learning to nap is a skill, it may take time to develop.

Set a timer. Keep it under 20 minutes. My standard issue time is usually 12-15 minutes. When we get 30 minutes or longer, we’re risky that potential groggy need to keep napping feeling, we want to avoid that so we wake up ready for action. When you set your timer, have a task to do immediately upon waking. This will get you moving right away. Maybe it’s dive right back into emails or start working out. Whatever it is, have something planned and ready.

You want to be flexible with your napping environment. Don’t take it in your bed, you won’t want to get up. I like a couch or chair or even the floor. Some people prefer to cover their eyes to help black everything out. A t-shirt can work great for this. For sounds, I like to put headphones in and listen to some sort of white noise. My go to is usually a babbling brook sound track. I use an app that has sounds to help you fall asleep. 

I’m a fan of napping and take one on most days. It can help you recharge and refocus. If you’ve always tried to nap and it never happens, keep trying. You can lay there, eyes closed, and take 10 minutes to shut down and try to relax. If that’s hard for you, think of it as developing a skill. Eventually, you’ll be able to fall asleep.

Justin MIner 

@portsmouthcoach

Trade-offs

Last week Clementine and I were at one of our favorite spots, Mount Chocorua. While running down the mountain, I slipped on a rock and landed on my butt. I didn’t get hurt, just wet. It made me think about the different trade-offs we make. This day in particular, it made me think that my lightweight trail running shoes are a trade off of a more traditional hiking boot. I probably wouldn’t have slipped in a more rugged boot, but the trade-off is having the ability to move faster through the varied terrain.

You can make a lot of trade-offs in the mountains for the ability to move faster. We make trade-offs in the gym too. If we want to get really strong, we’re going to trade-off some aerobic capacity or how lean we are. If we want to get really fast, we may need to give up some top end strength. If we want to get flexible, we may need to back off heavy strength training. If we want to get really lean, we need to give up the occasional nutritional slip up for our pursuit.

For some, particularly those who want to get really lean, or get a 6-pack, the trade-off of social norms usually aren’t worth it. To get body fat so low that you have a six pack, you need to give up staying up late, drinking alcohol and skip all the treats loaded with sugar. If you’re willing to hang on to a little more body fat, you can probably to all those things and still get pretty lean, but not as ripped.

No matter what it is, there’s going to be a trade-off. Good programming can help mitigate this, but we aren’t able to optimize something if we’re trying to hold on to something else at the same time. This can be a good thought experiment to try: what are you willing to give up for your goals? 

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Goal Responsibility

When we set goals, we imagine the end. It sparks the feeling of joy that checking the goal off our list would bring us. It gives us hope and inspiration. We all face the problem of missing key steps in light of imagining how we’ll feel once we cross the finish line.

We set a lofty goal, think about what it’ll feel like to get there, but don’t realize that’s just the start. Motivation isn’t going to guide you through this. For example, if I want to build 15 pounds of muscle, a lofty goal, it would be in my best interest to control a lot of variables. I can make sure I’m getting enough sleep, recovering from exercise, planning out my meals. What I never thought about through this goal setting process is that about when I don’t feel like pursuing it anymore? 

What happens when my motivation to improve goes away? Usually, we give up on the goal all together. You have to take responsibility for difficult changes. You need to be responsible for all the little processes you need to create along the way. You must be prepared to face adversity.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Going Pro

Today is the 50th blog post in a row. Every weekday for 10-weeks. A challenge I once thought impossible. I came up with endless excuses as to why I couldn’t write everyday (or even at all for a few years). I was scared of the pressure, the feedback and mostly scared of the commitment.

Those fears materialized into excuses. I’ll write blogs when I’m motivated to write. Never happened. I’ll write a bunch at once and release them slowly. Never happened. What clicked? I realized I needed to become what I wanted to be. I needed to actually write if I wanted to get better at it and I needed to do it consistently. Regardless of motivation or fear. 

In Atomic Habits, James Clear has a formula for Going Pro (which, by the way, is also a great book by Steven Pressfield). 

How to Become a Pro:

1. Decide what you want to get good at. Have purpose you’re chasing.

2. Set a schedule for your actions.

3. Stick to your schedule for one week.

I wanted to share thoughts and ideas and build the GAIN Community in more ways than just good training in the gym. I wanted to become a better writer. I decided that I needed to write every day. I’ve tried 3 days a week or 4 days a week or once a week. I wasn’t able to stick with any of them. I needed to do it everyday.

I knew if I made it through the first week, I would have some momentum behind me. In Habits, he says sticking with your schedule for the first week is the most important. “Setting a schedule doesn’t make you a professional, following it does.” It took a lot of time that first week. It was all I focused on. I told every one I could that I was going to publish a blog every day. Instead of fearing the pressure, I made sure that I had pressure.

Now, I’m not a professional writer by any means and that isn’t the goal. I needed to pursuit it as if I were a professional in order to get better. Now, I write everyday without thinking twice. If you want to be or do something, you need to get fear out of the way and approach it like a professional. Put the work in, regardless of motivation.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Dopamine

Our brain and nervous system is good at getting us to do things over and over again. They make an action feel good by releasing dopamine. New evidence shows that scratching an itch feels so good, and is hard to stop, because the brain releases dopamine. Dopamine, to oversimplify it, makes us feel good when released.

We get the same dump of dopamine when we check our phone and see that little red heart on our Instagram feed. Someone liked my post! It’s why it’s hard to put down, easy to constantly check and hard to stop checking even when we know nothing new is there.

Exercise can create the same feelings and so can a certain food we love. There’s a lot going on subconsciously that's hard to be aware of. If we aren’t aware of it, we can let these things run rampant and take over our life. Ever hear your phone ding and feel the sudden anxiety of not checking it immediately? Yeah, me too. 

While there’s nothing we can do to control our brains, creating an awareness around these habits and the tricks we can play on ourselves can pay off. 

Justin MIner

@portsmouthcoach

What Are You Becoming?

This question was first prosed to me at the Hold the Standard Summit back in March. The speaker told us to perpetually ask ourselves this question to analyze how we're doing. It forces you to reflect upon your actions and decisions you’ve made. Think critically about what your habits are leading to. It had such an impact on me, I wanted it to be the first thing people see when they walk in.

I hope as you enter and leave the gym it gets you to think about who you are and who you want to be. Getting fit in the gym is just part of the conversation we’re having at GAIN. We want our members not only to get better physically, but let that improvement bleed into other parts of your life. The gym is a gateway to an improved lifestyle. Our brain is as much a part of that as our body.

If you feel defensive when reading the quote, you have some reflecting to do. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, figure out why. If you do some digging, you may figure out that you aren’t becoming who or what you want to be. Remember, that’s up to you. So, what are you becoming?

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Cognitive Fitness

When we think of improving our health, the big 3 come to mind: movement, nutrition and recovery. Movement is what we’re doing physically. This can be lifting in the gym, spin class, going for a run, etc. We’re familiar with the kind of work we need to do here. Nutrition is a tricky one, but one we all understand. We know that we need to fuel ourselves for performance or intake less calories to lose weight. Recovery is about getting enough sleep, managing stress and includes soft tissue work and stretching.

The missing piece to get all these habits to stick, or the piece that allows you to continue to progress is your mindset. I heard this recently described as cognitive fitness. It’s not flashy or something that you can implement right now to feel stronger or lose more weight. What it does though, is give you the tools to continue to progress and stick with and form new habits.

If you need to improve your recovery habits, let’s say by getting more sleep, your mindset is the key to unlocking a new behavioral change. Without the mindset part, the recovery part, movement part and nutrition part doesn’t matter. The key to a nutrition change is implementing a plan and having the ability to stick with it, being flexible and changing your relationship with food. It isn’t just about eating differently. Eating differently without a mindset shift leads to crash diets and inconsistency.

Without changing your mindset, you’re going to have a hard time making real positive change. It’s why our first Core Value is “Have a Growth Mindset.” We think that’s the most important piece of trying to improve. How do you develop it? Lean in to things that are hard or that you’re bad at. Don’t give up out of frustration and remind yourself that you’re in this for the long game.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Stick with It

Improving mobility, flexibility or posture takes time. More than you want it to. As we approach our 5 year anniversary, it’s hard to not reflect on the journey of many of the clients. The ones that stuck with something, for a particularly long time, are now reaping the benefits.

It’s one thing to say you want better hip mobility, but another thing all together to take 2 to 3 minutes to work on it every single day. The progress may be so slow that you don’t even notice it. There isn’t a quick fix for more robust, more flexible shoulders than using them safely and stretching/mobilizing consistently.

You should have something you want to improve. Maybe it’s touching your toes, getting you arms over your head, improving your hip mobility to relieve stress on your lower back or regaining lost ankle range of motion. Whatever it is, it would benefit you to work on it in small chunks every day. There won’t be a magic moment, when it all of a sudden it became better. Instead, you’ll barely notice the change. Movements will gradually become more comfortable and you’ll be more confident in different positions and shapes.

Whatever the thing that you want to improve is, it would benefit you to work on it everyday. 

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Building Mental Representations

As most of you have seen, the wood working, which historically brings out my impatient side, hasn’t slowed down. It always made me frustrated, I realized, because I had no mental representation of really building anything. I was making cuts, unsure how it would all go together. Meanwhile, my friend had to take a few measurements and put it all together in his head.

Once I noticed my frustration I leaned into it hard. I knew it was coming from a lack of skills and knowledge. I needed skills to cut and measure with exact precision. The knowledge to see a sheet of plywood and understand how it would all come together. The ability to confidently improvise. Instead of being frustrated that I didn’t have these things, I needed to take advantage of a weakness. 

I had a skilled teacher at my disposal. I was just outside of my comfort zone. If we were making finished cabinetry, I would have been way out, because the level of precision needed is much higher. I got feedback immediately. Was the cut just too short or a little too long? Is it straight? Does it fit where it’s supposed to or did I measure inaccurately? These are the principles of deliberate practice. Teacher, feedback, just out of my comfort zone and reps after reps. Each time, trying to be more precise. Each time, I was building my mental representation. 

Over the last few weeks, I can say my skills have improved. I understand wood working a little more now. More importantly, I developed a better mental representation. If I made a wrong cut I needed Patrick to tell me I cut it wrong by having the blade on the wrong side of the line. Now, if I make a cut too short, I know that I cut on the wrong side of the line and didn’t account for the width of the blade.

As we develop mental representations, we can more accurately give ourselves feedback. Clear mental representations give us the ability to self correct and realize what went wrong. Imagine a high level tennis player missing the line on a serve. They’re able to calculate what happened based on how the serve felt and where the ball landed. We do the same thing in the gym. At first, hinging is awkward. You need a constant reminder to stick your butt back and let your chest fall towards the floor. After you stick a few solid reps, you’re able to conceptualize what a good rep feels like. You’re able to self correct.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Bracing

When we lift something, particularly in the gym, we want to create full body tension. Creating this stiffness, not just in our abs, but everywhere in our body, is an upgrade to movement quality, strength and will aid in protecting our lower backs.

A common question around the gym is to do more “core stuff.” While the intention is there, the person is mislead in believing only core exercises that make your core sore are effective in creating strong abs. I want you to think of your core, not just as your abs, but your entire trunk. Everything that isn’t an arm or a leg.  Whenever we are creating tension and stiffness in our bodies while moving is a core exercise. It’s an opportunity to practice using it and therefore strengthening it.

Bracing is using your body in conjunction to create rigidity. Basically, trying to hold a plank with your mid section while you’re doing something like a reverse lunge, sled march, squat or deadlift. Most of you know what a plank feels like. The disconnection is that we need to apply that feeling to most exercises we’re doing in the gym.

Let’s say you’re going to do a goblet reverse lunge. Once you pick up your kettlebell, take a big breath in. When you exhale, prepare for someone to punch you in the stomach. This should feel like you’re holding a standing up plank. From here, a take breath in and breathe into the brace. Use the tension in your trunk as feedback for a good breath. It’ll be hard to maintain. You’ll need to keep reminding yourself, every rep, until it becomes natural. 

This will make you stronger and safer in the gym. Questions about bracing or strengthening your core? Let me know in the comments below.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Mental Complexity

For a long time, we thought that once adults hit 25 or 30 years old, they were done developing. We’ve talked on here before about neural plasticity and our ability to learn and develop new skills. Not long ago, this was thought impossible. Mental complexity is developing abilities to look at the world more abstractly. The skill to understand things from many different perspectives.

In Immunity to Change, Harvard researchers on adult development and leadership, Robert Keagan and Lisa Lahey, argue that in order for us to compete and survive in our world, we need to develop this mental complexity. The world around us is getting more and more complex. Things are moving faster, more information is available and things are clearly different than they were just 20 years ago.

The authors claim there’s two ways to deal with the complexity of the world. We can decrease the complexity of the world, which, seems unlikely. The second, is to develop our own complexity, which until recently was thought impossible for adults.

How do we do this? We continue to learn, think, apply and adjust based on experiences. We learn how to analyze our own thoughts and actions and create an ability to learn from seeing things in a different perspective. To use the term from the book, we must transcend and include our former selves in order to grow.

Recently, while talking about training and playing baseball in college, Taylor mentioned how he wished we knew what he knows now about practice, nutrition, mindset and improvement. I often think the same thing about my days playing hockey. The problem with that thinking is we needed those experiences to learn what we know now. We have transcended our former thinking, but are also able to include it in our training principles today. 

What can you do to increase mental complexity? You can continue to try to learn new skills, push your limits and develop the ability to look at things from many different perspectives. It’s a moving target. You won’t wake up one day and feel more complex, but small changes in thinking will add up over the years to come. 

Justin MIner

@portsmouthcoach

Can Numbers Lie?

Last spring, I was making the final climb up the Stone Fence Trail. My quads and calves were locking up. I was quietly screaming at myself to keep moving. I was about 6 hours and 30 minutes into the Big A 50k. Each 10 mile lap, this final climb to the top of Mount Agamenticus gets harder and harder. That day, I ended up crossing the finishing line under my goal time of 7 hours. Barely sneaking by at 6:58.

This past Saturday was this year’s running of the Big A 50k. I had the same goal, under seven hours, but I really wanted to beat my time from last year. To me, that would show a year of putting in the work and taking care of my body had paid off. How could I get worse? I run better, I move better, I’m stronger and more confident about running all day.

As I was making the climb up the Third Hill on loop 2, I realized there was no chance of under 7 hours. There was nothing I could do but stay focused and keep moving. I came into the summit aid station, restocked on water, ate some Swedish Fish and headed out for my final 10 mile loop.

Last year, the third loop was mentally debilitating. There’s still 10 more miles! This year, I was calm. Just another loop I thought. I didn’t feel overwhelmed or stressed. I was able to focus on running, even though my legs were starting to scream at me. They weren’t cramping like last year. I stayed focused, moving as quickly as I could, and chugged though the last loop.

I crossed the finish line at 7:18. I was pissed. Instead of seeing a year of work paying off, I was 20 minutes slower. It’s taken a couple of days for me to realize this, but even though I was slower, I had a better race this year.

On Sunday, I painted and mowed the lawn. I handled going up and down stairs with grace and continued to feel better the more I moved. I realized, I’m much stronger and have more muscle mass than last year. I’m able to handle more training volume, keeping up strength and recovering quickly. What’s there to be upset about? 

By all accounts, I had a worse performance this year compared to last year. But when I think of other factors besides the race clock, I’m doing better. Numbers can skew our perspective. It's common for someone to confess to us Gain Coaches that they feel amazing, they’re sleeping better, watching what they eat, seeing their strength improve,  but it’s all worthless because they scale said they’re 5 pounds heavier. We need to take in all the data, not just the scale weight, not just the time elapsed. They’re making us feel like we failed, when there other markers saying we’ve improved.

I’m going to make some adjustments on my training moving forward. When I get frustrated with my apparent lack of progress, I’m going to remind myself of the things that are getting better and update my processes to keep improving.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach