Those First Few Reps

When doing a new exercise, or even doing the first set of something for the day, you’ll notice that us coaches don’t say anything at least until you’ve done 3 or 4 reps. This is intentional. We’re trying to let you figure it out, get a couple of wonky reps out of the way. 

The goal is to help you develop a sense of what a “good” movement pattern is without immediate feedback, that would eventually become a movement crutch. Instead of over cueing, we’re going to let you figure them out. It’s okay the first few are a little weird, you’re learning and adapting. 

As a young coach, this was terribly difficult. I wanted everyone’s reps to be perfect all the time! As I’ve gained more experience, I realize you need those subpar reps to learn what a good one feels like. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Hidden Reps

Josh Waitzkin is a master of many things. A young chess prodigy, black belt in jujitsu, investor and now he’s pursing foiling, a high-speed version of surfing that requires a jet ski to tow you in. Waitzkin goes deep, and teaches people how to master things in unconventional ways, basically he teaches people how to learn better.

Last week I listened to him on the Tim Ferriss Podcast. The interview was full of insights, but one in particular stuck with me, because it’s an easy thing we can all apply in the gym. Find the hidden reps.

Waitzkin was referring to the easy things that you can be lazy about. Finding the hidden reps means taking those reps seriously, practicing them with effort and focus. These opportunities are abundant in the gym. 

Picking up a kettlebell for a one arm carry. It should look like a good deadlift when you get the kettlebell off the floor. Create tension, squeeze the handle and practice your deadlift, even though you’re just carrying the kettlebell. Taking the barbell out of the rack for a squat. Set your feet, get your breath. Don’t just walk out of the cage letting the bar push you around. Even getting up from the floor is an opportunity to find hidden reps. Are you moving smoothly and fluid? Or are you leaning on the wall just because it’s there?

Find more hidden reps in the gym this week. They live outside the gym as well, picking up the laundry basket, carrying groceries and doing the dishes. Hidden reps are everywhere, make sure you’re taking them.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

237

A year ago I attended a leadership workshop for business owners trying to level up. I learned a lot, more than I can wrap my head around really. The unexpected takeaway from the weekend was this blog. I needed a challenge. A way to share ideas, get out of my comfort zone and develop writing skills. I needed a new practice to commit to, stick with and grind through. Something to both love and hate at the same time. 

Sitting in LAX, early in the morning on March 10th, I wrote the first post, titled “Consistency.” It was a note to myself. Stick with it even if I failed, even if I didn’t want to continue. Well, here we are, 237 posts later. 

There were some thought provoking, conversation starting posts. There were some posts with too many typos to even bother editing. Sometimes the ideas flowed and sometimes I sat on the couch with my face in my palms, worried that this morning would be the morning I didn’t get anything posted. Through practice, grit and planning I posted every weekday for the past year.

Writing doesn’t come easy and my introverted tendency is to never share anything personal. But the words are starting to flow more, I can feel my writing develop and change and this blog provides endless conversations with you all each week. I hope by reading you’re challenged to try on different perspectives, evaluate yourself objectively and you learn something new every now and then. 

I’m proud that I did this for a year in a row, but I’m not pausing to celebrate, I’m keeping my head down and continuing the work. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain 

Springing Ahead

Our sleep is precious. If you ever had any doubt as to how precious, just talk to someone the morning after daylight savings. Yesterday, we all woke up a little groggy, confused as to what time it really was and we all missed that hour of sleep that was stolen away from us. 

In Why We Sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker explains that there are more instances of heart attacks and car crashes when we spring ahead. We’re such creatures of habit, no wonder fast forwarding an hour ahead throws us all off. 

This isn’t a blog about writing your congress person to ditch the outdated idea, instead, it’s an appeal that you just need to deal with it. Over the past decade as a coach and trainer, every time we spring ahead our clocks I notice the changes in people the next few days after. The people who groan about it, how it throws their routine off, are more disrupted than those who just accept it is 6am now and not actually 5am. 

If you’re still dragging and feel off. Be sure to expose yourself to morning and evening light to help regulate your circadian rhythm, your body can use the sun to wake up or wind down. Shut the screens down tonight and open up a book to try and wind down so you can get to bed at a regular time. Ridiculous idea or not, we need to be able to adapt to it. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Unplug

You ever have trouble with your iPhone or WiFi modem? You probably know the easiest solution is to turn it off and turn it back on. This reset works like a charm to fix funky electronics, a common problem we all run into. 

When I saw this quote in James Clear’s newsletter, I had to share it. 

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes , including you.”

- Anne Lamott

Unplug this weekend and hit the reset button.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Pace Boat

Alex has come up with a great way to make you push harder on the SkiErg and rowing machine, using the built in pace boat. 

The rudimentary graphics on the screen show two boats (or skiers). The top one is you, and it moves according to your pace per 500 meters. The bottom boat is the pace boat. We can set the pace boat so it’s just out of reach for you to keep chasing it to keep the intensity high, or we can set it at a reasonable pace if we want you to keep it steady and not come out too hot. 

I gave this a shot yesterday on the rower and it brought a whole new level of intensity to my interval workout.

Give it a try the next time you’re on the erg! 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

More Foot Stuff

Lots of good discussion yesterday about feet. Today, I want to provide two simple things you can do to treat your feet better.

Roll the bottoms of them a couple times a week. Two minutes per foot is a good start. This helps untangle the mess of being in shoes and boots all the time.

Walk barefoot. You don’t need to do anything crazy, but ditch the shoes, slippers and socks while you’re cooking dinner and pay attention to what your arch and muscles are doing while you walk and stand around. 

The only way to develop strong, healthy feet is to create an awareness around what they’re doing all day. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Foot Core

Our feet get no love. We’ve been taught that our feet are weak, that they need special orthotics, maximum cushion and we shouldn’t spend anytime barefoot. Our feet are complex, and have implications for so many other parts of our body.

You probably know that I’m a fan of minimalist shoes. I wear as little shoe as possible to help my feet stay strong and adaptable. It took years of building up their strength, but once I did, I realized how messed up my feet where from years of high heeled Nike sneakers and hockey skates. 

When I saw this concept of the foot core on Instagram and had to share it here. 

McKeon, et al. wrote a paper called "The foot core system: a new paradigm for understanding intrinsic foot muscle function.”  The paper gets into the mechanisms of the foot and why us humans developed an arch to begin with. It’s was to be able to run and carry loads. 

The foot core, according to the authors are the intrinsic plantar musculature. These muscles support and stabilize the structure of the foot and the arch. What the authors call, global movers, are muscles that originate in the lower leg, and cross the ankle joint. These muscles create movement movement in the foot and help stabilize the arch. 

All of these muscles work together to build a strong, well-functioning foot and lower leg. Having a strong “foot core,” can make your feet strong and resilient, just like training your core can make your spine strong, stable and resilient. Want to start working on your foot core? Ditch the shoes during your warm up at Gain, the more time you spend barefoot the better.

Justin Miner 

@justinminergain

More Speed = More Force

Strength is about how much force you can produce. Put another way, force is equal to how quickly you can move the mass of an object, you might remember that from physics class, F = Ma. 

So if force is the strength we produce and the mass is the load of the implement we’re using, whether a barbell or kettlebell or dumbbell, the “a” stands for acceleration. 

I feel bad for the poor small “a.” It gets no love in the strength and fitness world where more weight, or mass rules the concerns of coaches, trainers and fitness enthusiasts everywhere. If you look at the equation though, you’ll realize that if the acceleration improves, the force, or strength side of the equation will improve.  

Let’s take a push up for example. A push up is tricky to add external load. Assuming you haven’t done one on the floor, we can add more load by lowering the height of the bar. It would be in your best interest to also try to do the up motion of the push up with speed. 

This, in turn will help develop strength in that motor pattern, and all you had to do differently was push a little harder. We still want to be under control, don’t forget that, but trying to move a bit quicker will have positive implications for your strength gains. 

Justin MIner

@justinminergain

Training with Others

Last week, Alex dropped into a gym in Boston. He made a comment about how it was weird to train with strangers. It caused me to reflect that I never lift in front of strangers and I probably don’t train with anyone besides Alex, Taylor or Hannah. If you were at the gym on Wednesday, you got to see me jump in with several others in parts of their workout.

An overlooked aspect of the gym is that very thing. Training with others, regardless if you’re doing the same thing, has this special camaraderie to it. Everyone is there to improve themselves for one reason or another and that unites all the members of a place like Gain. 

When you train alone, like I normally do, it can be hard to be motivated or push it sometimes. There’s no one for you to set a fast pace with or talk about how to make the next jump in weight. On Wednesday night the gym was busy, the music loud and I felt able to really push it- because everyone else around me was doing the same. It was a blast.

Consider this your open invitation to ask me to workout with you if you’re feeling unmotivated or not into it. I’ll be happy to hop in so we can push each other. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Hardwiring

I always tell new members at the gym, the first few weeks are a bit overwhelming. Not physically, but mentally. Gradually adding in the physical part is easy. We want the work to be digestible and not make anyone too sore just for the sake of being sore. On the mental side of things, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed. Not only are they learning new lingo, where stuff is, trying to remember a bunch of numbers and count but they also have to learn new skills in terms of how to move. 

When learning how to squat, you need to incessantly remind yourself to squeeze you butt at the top, sit back, not down, grab the ground with you feet, amongst other things. It takes up a lot of space in your brain. The point I’m getting to is that moving is a skill. Skills must be learned through practice and repetition to make them automatic. 

From Mastery by Robert Greene: 

“In practicing a skill in the initial stages, something happens neurologically that’s important for you to understand. When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex are recruited and become active, helping you in the learning process… The frontal cortex expands in size in this initial phase as we focus hard on the task. But once something is repeated often enough it becomes hardwired and automatic.” 

“This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tedious to remain rooted in the brain.”

Put simply, we must focus if we want to get better at things. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Cooling Down

We’re always tinkering with how we write programs to deliver you the best results. Back when we first opened, we had clients do a cool down after their conditioning. Before long, it became obvious that after a bunch of sled march or bike sprints, people just wanted to be on their way. A lot of people skipped the cool down. 

To counteract this, we placed the mobility work prior to doing your conditioning. It worked as a nice reset before you change gears and got sweaty. When we started working on the new template, it felt like the right time to get rearrange the order and put the cool down back where it belongs, post conditioning.

When you’re hot, sweaty and out of breath, the worst thing you can do is hop in your car and be on your way. Your muscles get stiff, you might get cold and it doesn’t give your body the proper time to down shift back to baseline. 

After each workout, you have one or two simple mobility drills that we picked just for you. It’s a chance to work on problem tight areas and even more so, gives you a chance to learn stretches you can do on your own when at home or traveling. Focus on your breathing, let your heart rate drop to normal range then walk out of the gym feeling better than when you walked in.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Cold Recovery

Colds and the flu have knocked a lot of you down this winter. Being sick is always frustrating. Not feeling like yourself, groggy and wrecking your daily plans.  An observation I’ve made over the past 5 years, it takes 2 or 3 workouts to feel like yourself in the gym. 

The first workout back will be tough. Mentally, you won’t want to go and there’s this nervousness of getting sick again. Everything feels hard during this workout. Weights that were light feel out of reach. You’re breathing heavier than normal and halfway through you just want to crawl into bed. 

The second workout back gets easier. You may have some soreness from taking a week off, but otherwise you’re ready for a full workout and are feeling a bit more motivated than the first session. After the workout, on your drive home, you’ll ponder whether or not you’ll ever full recover from this cold and if all your hard work in the gym has been a waste of time, now that you’re sick and never going to recover. 

Workout number 3. Back to normal. Feeling normal may feel so far off, but it happens every time. You’re going to need those subpar workouts to shake the rust off, let your body heal and get back into the rhythm of things, both physically and mentally. 

If you’re sick, or coming off a cold, don’t be discouraged. I promise all your hard work won’t be wasted, you just need a few days to feel normal. 

Justin Miner 

@justinminergain

Moving Dirt

There’s a new poster in the gym, and before you ask, no I didn’t draw it. I bought the poster from the Instagram account, @whiteboard_daily. He makes awesome stick figure drawings to illustrate movements, ideas and concepts. The poster, if you haven’t seen it, has 6 drawings portraying different training mindsets from being focused, setting a goal pace and leaving your ego at the door.

My favorite concept, introduced to me years ago by former NFL player, John Welbourn, is that training is like moving a pile of dirt. Some days you move shovels full, other days you move just a spoonful. Either way, move some dirt and you’re headed in the right direction. Not all training sessions will be heroic, so long as you moved some dirt, that’s okay. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Good

You may have noticed the board in the bathroom this week simply said, “Good.”

This comes from Navy Seal, Jocko Willink. In his book, Discipline Equals Freedom, Jocko explains that whatever bad thing happens to him or bad news comes his way, he always responds by saying “good.”

Whatever negative thing happened, there will be a positive because of it too, so long as you’re willing to see it. An opportunity to see a different perspective, a chance to redesign the plan. 

Got injured? Good. Time to revamp the training and address why the injury happened.

Lost the game? Good. Learn from loss. 

Missed two weeks of workouts? Good. Come up with a better plan to stick with your habit. 

One of our core values at Gain is “Leave better than when you came in.” I summarize this by saying we want to find the positive in anything. Something bad happened? Good. You’ll be able to squeeze some good out of it. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Quarterly Meeting

Those big wooden things behind the sleds are called jerk blocks. They existed so we can work on putting heavy stuff over our heads, called a jerk, and drop it and not have to pick it back up from the floor. It makes training the jerk at heavy loads much easier. In fact, since the blocks are such a pain to drag out, it only makes sense to move them when we’ll be training at greater than 90% of our best. 

Yesterday I joked with Alex that his has become quarterly meeting for us, since we probably bust them out every 3 or 4 months. We always train the jerk, just not typically at really high loads. Every few months seems to be enough to keep the strength and skill there. 

It got me thinking. Workout programs are usually in a weekly time frame. What are somethings that we should do once a month, or like us yesterday, once every 3 months? What about efforts you do once a year?

For someone who spends a lot of time writing workout programs, it’s a nice thought experiment. For you, you can think about mixing in unusual efforts to round out your fitness. Maybe you take a really long walk once a month or go on a big hike a couple times a year. Maybe it’s a bike trip or a ski trip, anything atypical from your everyday life. We view these things as disruptions to our regularly scheduled training, but perhaps it’s the perfect shake up that your body needs. 

Here’s your challenge: think about something physical you can do once a month, once a quarter and once a year. Let’s zoom out of our weekly training view and look at the bigger picture.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Turn up the Volume

Progress in strength is not linear, like they teach aspiring strength coaches and personal trainers in Exercise Science classrooms. If it were, if we could count on increasing weight every week becoming strong and fit would be easy. Just do a little more each week. 

In the real world, initial gains peter out and people go on vacation, get sick, don’t sleep and have to work and take care of kids. These disruptions in the training plan make it even more difficult to make those linear jumps week to week. 

At Gain, we like to manipulate the volume, or how many total reps of something you’re doing as a way to get stronger without actually increasing load. There’s endless ways we can do this, but for the purpose of the blog imagine doing 8 reps with something you normally only do 5 reps with. 

For example, if you’re goblet squatting 5x5 with a blue kettlebell for week 1 and 2 on your program, week 3 might be 5x8. Our goal for you is to keep the same weight used for 5 reps on your 8. The following week, your program might drop back to 5x5. The idea here is that we know you can do the blue for 8 reps, so you’d better use a yellow for this 5. 

This is a slow, sustainable way to build strength that dramatically reduces the risk of injury. There’s nothing wrong with heavy loads and low reps, that’ll get you stronger too. This is just a way to simplify the progress and play the long game. 

Justin Miner 

@justinminergain 

Program Format

It can seem a bit of a mystery as to how we write training programs. Our methodology is broad, strength and conditioning, which is an umbrella over many different training disciplines. Our programs don’t float down from the higher ups at chain gyms like Orange Theory or F45, we create our own using experience, science and creativity. 

Here are the general principles of how we write a program: 

1. Hit most of the fundamental movement patterns each session

2. Do 2-3 core stability exercises each session 

3. Do some sort of conditioning, or cardio most workouts 

4. Do some mobility or soft tissue work to warm up or cool down

Over the next month, you’ll start to see a new program format. The font is bigger, so I hope you’ll have an easier time seeing it! We wanted to make it more educational for you. The new programs have labels where typically you would just see “A,”  or “B.” You’ll now see an outline of what constitutes a well rounded strength and conditioning program. Here’s what you’ll see.

A. Strength - this is an opportunity to stress your muscles and get your nervous system to adapt to a specific stimulus. On “A” exercises, we’re trying to get you to make a jump in weight every couple weeks or at least once a month. 

B. Accessory - This are movements like single leg exercises and rowing exercises. As Taylor said yesterday,  stuff that makes you better just for doing it. You don’t need to push it as hard here, they compliment the A. 

C. Core - While I’m often cited as saying all exercises are core exercises, we can get specific about challenging it too.

D. Conditioning - this is what you may call cardio. It’s to work on endurance and work capacity. This is where we try to manipulate your heart rate to get an effective response. Long and slow cardio is great, but when we’re trying to jam a 60 minute workout in, we focus on higher intensities for shorter duration. The good news, this will translate to the longer slower effort for you. 

E. Cool down - take a few minutes to stop sweating before you drive off. You’ll work on specific mobility drills to target an area that needs some love. 

I hope this gives you a little insight to our brains and the behind the scenes at Gain. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Reasonable or Tough

Dan John, strength coach and teacher has a great way to breakdown diets and workouts. 

If you’re doing tough workouts, a reasonable diet will probably do.

If you’re doing reasonable workouts, you need a tough diet. 

It’s hard and maybe you only do this once a year, tough workouts, tough diet. 

In times of high stress, reasonable workout, reasonable diet. 

Are you trying to tough diet and tough workout but just keep spinning your wheels? Maybe you need a reasonably good diet instead of the tough one you keep trying. If you don’t want to change your diet, but want to make some changes, perhaps it’s time to jack up the intensity of your workouts and make them tougher. 

Regardless of your specific goal, this is a way to get yourself organized and figure out what you need. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Addition vs Subtraction

The other day I was reminded of a principle Precision Nutrition uses to help their clients create new habits around food and living healthier. 

Instead of restricting bad foods, they want you to focus on adding good foods. It’s a simple mindset shift that helps you stick with something for a long period of time and avoid the downward spiral that happens when you eat something you’re not supposed to. 

Eat more of these, fruits, veggies and quality protein, hopefully you’ll eat less of the donuts, cupcakes and candy. 

Simple shift in perspective, but a nice frame work for you to have in your back pocket. 

Justin Miner

@justinminergain