It’s important to become proficient performing basic movement patterns (squat, hinge, push, pull etc.)  before progressing to more advanced variations. This is a lengthy process that requires hours of practice – repeating the same exercises over and over again. 

Thinking of movement as a skill will make this process more enjoyable and lead to more sustained progress. Jumping into advanced exercises without spending time with the basics won’t get us very far – and it could potentially lead to injury. 

Trust the basics, they work. Practice them with intent. Trying to perform them perfectly should keep you busy for a while.

Taylor Reuillard

@tailored_strength

To get the most out of our training it’s important to develop movement awareness. To improve this we need focus on what’s happening while running, biking, lifting weights, etc. Concentrating on technique will improve exercise effectiveness and promote progress. 

Think about when you first learned an exercise – you had to slow things down and think about what you were doing. This concept should continue well after the initial learning process – there are always ways to refine and improve technique. 

Going through the motions mindlessly can lead to sloppy form and potential injury. We want to own our movement, be in control and move with a purpose. 

Taylor Reuillard

@tailored_strength

We’ve all experienced failure – it’s an inevitable part of life. How do you respond to it? Do you give up and stop trying? Or do you reflect and learn from your experience.

In order to grow we must fail. We have to try new things and put ourselves in uncomfortable situations. It is in these moments that we learn and develop. 

We shouldn’t avoid failure. We should use it as a tool to improve ourselves and overcome obstacles. Your mindset is so powerful – a small change makes a big difference. 

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

-Henry Ford

Taylor Reuillard

@tailored_strength

We’re surrounded with technology. Our phones are wonderful but wreak havoc on our bodies. Constant light, small screens, push notifications and checking likes is wiring our brains to crave those dopamine hits each time we pick up our phones. It’s rare when we go a few hours without using it, never mind a full day or a week.

I’ll be checking out this week. I'm headed into the woods for a backpacking trip and I’ll be turning off my phone. I’m looking forward to some solitude and time away from my phone and computer. Taylor will be keeping the blogs going every day, so be sure to check back here tomorrow. 

Have a great week. Plan your trips to the gym, eat to fuel your body and if you get a chance, give yourself a mini break from technology and try to shut it down for an hour or two this week. I promise you’ll be happy that you did. See you next week! 

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Mastering the fundamentals is key for high performance teams and individuals. These masters, are able to understand the basics, not let it bore them and be okay with small incremental changes. This attitude affords high performers a better understand of what they’re doing, how it works and how it can transfer to other skills. 

In Atomic Habits, James Clear includes a line graph of how improving 1 percent each day or getting 1 percent worse every day will work out over a year. Turns out, if you get 1 percent better every day for a year, you’ll have improved 37 times better than then you started.

Realize that the small choices we make every day will impact us in the long run. Your mental battle whether to have a salad or a sandwich for lunch doesn’t matter today, but it will matter when you choose salad 100 times and sandwich only 5 times. We all want big changes now. We must realize that small decisions we make every day impact the changes drastically over time.

To be the bearer of bad news, your goal will take longer than you want it to. Focus on what you can do each and every day. Master the fundamentals, be okay with getting bored of doing the same thing. The small decisions and changes you can make will have a big impact in the long run.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

Regardless of your goal, better sleep will help. If you want to lose weight, build strength, get better grades, be more alert, be less stressed, more and/or better sleep will help. Don’t think sleep is a big deal? Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, says “the silent sleep loss epidemic is one of the greatest public health crisis we face in the 21st century.”

Walker makes arguments that lack of sleep makes us more vulnerable to caner, Alzheimers, depression, obesity, amongst a host of other medical conditions. It isn’t as easy as getting more sleep either. We need to get better quality sleep, especially if you’re someone who struggles to sleep at all. Use these tips below to upgrade your sleep hygiene and get a restful night of Zs. 

Establish a routine. Go to bed and get up at the same time everyday. Yes, even the weekends. It will help your body get used to the pattern and you’ll start getting sleepy around bedtime and pop out of bed ready to go in the morning.

Keep it cool and dark. Make your room as dark as possible. If light still makes its way in, try using a mask. Walker says optimum sleeping temperature is 65 degrees. 

One hour before your bedtime, shut down the screens. That means no phones in bed! 

Avoid using caffeine after 1pm. If you can drink a cup of coffee at night and still fall asleep, congratulations. It still messes up your sleep cycle even though you think you’re immune to caffeine’s effects. Same goes for alcohol. It blocks your REM dream sleep.

Sleep is the hidden performance booster we all have within our control. Establish a routine and work on building the habit. You’ll be glad you did. 

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

We’ve talked a lot on here about how you need to be consistent to make positive changes. We commonly hear people venting that their weight loss isn’t moving fast enough or they aren’t making strength gains. My question to you is, are you being as consistent as you think you are? 

We often think we’re doing better than we actually are. A nice way to find out is tracking your progress. For eating, I recommend people do a food log.  I’d like to see a week’s worth of eating, written down, in detail. 

When you go over it, you might start coming up with excuses. Well that night I had this event, and Saturday was a special date night and Sunday was so nice out I needed to have a couple beers outside and Monday was a crazy work day. The excuses start flying. I don’t want to bring this to your attention to shame you. Rather, I’d like to point out that you aren’t as consistent as you think you are.  That's the underlying problem. Not deciding between keto or vegan or paleo. 

If you’re in a rut and are unsure why, really ask yourself if you’ve been as consistent as possible. Track your habits over a week or two and you’ll see if you hit your macros accurately, aren’t over consuming calories and hitting the gym as frequently as you think you are.

Justin Miner

@portsmouthcoach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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