Do the Math

I posted this video on Instagram yesterday, announcing the October Habit Challenging and laying down some ground rules. I wanted to expand on one of the points from the video. I mention zooming out and trying to see how the habit can positively compound over time. The best way is to build perspective, and you can do that by doing the math.

Let’s say your habit is to do the couch stretch for 2 minutes per leg each day.

Four minutes per day sounds unremarkable. Maybe even so unremarkable you’ve already written it off as too easy for your habit challenge. But, let’s say you listen to my advice, and take on the challenge of 2 minutes per leg per day.

The first week, you do exactly the minimum amount.

7 days x 4 minutes each day = 28 minutes of stretching in one week!

But here’s where it gets interesting.

The next day, day 8, you feel great. And your body is actually feeling better after the stretching session, so you start to look forward to it. On day 8-10 you end up stretching for 4 minutes per leg. Doubling your original habit time. Days 11, 12 and 13 are back to normal, just 2 minutes per leg. But on day 14, you have some extra time and end up doing 5 minutes per leg!

7 days x (8+8+8+4+4+4+10) = 46 minutes of stretching!

On week 3 your body starts to crave it. You aim to do 5 minutes every single day. Expect that you miss two days this week, you had some travel and it just didn’t workout. But instead of quitting, you get back on the wagon because you’ve done the math, and realized, even though you missed a couple days, you’re crushing because you beat last week’s total stretching duration, without even trying!

5 days x (10+10+10+10+10+0+0) = 50 minutes of stretching!

Do the math on your habit. Build it out and see how it looks in two weeks, four weeks, or a couple months down the line. Expect mishaps, they happen. It’s important to get back to it the next day. I should note, this is another reason why lowering the bar, and starting with a small habit, pays in the long run. It creates momentum and before you know it, your 4 minute stretching session is a 10 minute stretching session. Let’s get to work!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

October Habit Challenge

On October 1st we will be starting a daily habit challenge. You will choose one new habit to add to your daily routine for the entire month. The goal of this challenge is to kick start an improvement in some area of your life - physical, mental, nutrition. Creating a new habit can be difficult, but taking on the challenge with others with provided accountability will improve our chances to make a lasting change.

Selecting a specific and measurable habit is the most important aspects of this challenge. We want to avoid choosing vague habits like “eat healthier” or “workout more”. The more specific the habit is, the better. A few examples include walking 8,000 steps, eating 2 servings of vegetables, or reading 10 pages - these are clear and concise, realistic and achievable. We recommend choosing from these 3 categories: physical (steps, reps of an exercise, mobility, etc.), mental (meditation, reading, breathing, etc.), or nutrition (servings of fruits/veggies, multivitamin, hydration,etc).

It is important to remember that this a challenge that is meant to test you. You will have to make changes and plan ahead for this habit to become part of your daily routine. If you miss a day, the challenge is not over. We want to encourage everyone to give their best effort for the full 30 days. Oftentimes when the motivation and excitement of the challenge wears off you may want to stop altogether. But the days when you complete your habit when you don’t to are the most important. Meeting that resistance and continuing on is where changes are made. It teaches discipline.

To take part in the challenge, sign up on the sign up sheet located on the whiteboard near the coaches’ desk. From there, the we will let you know if you habit is approved and will provide accountability with weekly check-ins. There is no cost to join and the more people who get involved the better. Remember, no habit is too small.

Taylor Reuillard

@tailored_strength

Stroller Running

I originally posted these tips earlier this year when I was getting out for some runs with Nolan in the stroller. Yesterday, I had my first stroller race-setting experience, and I figured it would be a good chance to post a refresher of my favorite stroller running tips. It was cool seeing so many other families out with their strollers yesterday at the Seacoast Cancer 5k. Both Nolan and Elliot has a great time zigging and zagging down the race course.

• It’s much harder. Pushing that heavy thing down the road is hard. Don’t underestimate it. Our neighborhood is full of subtle ups and downs, and with the stroller they are much more noticeable.

• One hand only! In order to keep that fluid and smooth stride, you’re got to have some arm action. I place one hand in the middle of the stroller handle and pump my other arm, trading frequently. Avoid running with both hands on the handle if you can.

• Side by Side. If I’m really trying to open up my legs and get moving, I run adjacent to the stroller. If I don’t, there isn’t enough room for my legs to open up.

• Walk it! The goal of my stroller run last week was some easy volume. I threw my chest strap on to monitor my heart rate. I wanted to keep it under 150 beats per minute. This meant, I walked much more frequently than I would have had I not been pushing the stroller. Those slight climbs added up. Instead of feeling frustrated, I plan on that happening when stroller jogging.
  

Stroller running ins’t ideal. A little awareness of your position and how you're moving can make a big difference. Get out there!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Friday Thoughts #4

Welcome to Friday thoughts, where I piece together half-formed posts, share ideas, or anything else that’s on my mind this morning.

• Secondary Goals. The best goals are multifaceted, and that’s what’s going on with Easy Strength for me. The main gain is to do 40 squat workouts in a pretty short period of time with the intention of hitting a big lifetime PR before the year is over. But that goal has presented opportunities for other things. By filming all my squats I can play with my camera settings, try different angles I hadn’t thought of and tinker with editing them. A few days into this squatting and posting challenge I created for myself I realized it would be a good chance to get better at filming and editing, because just like the squats, I’m doing it everyday.

• I enjoy challenges like this. Doing something everyday. It’s how the blog started. I was inconsistent for years until I committed to posting something on here 5 days a week. Practicing a daily habit, even if only temporarily, jump starts your skills, creates motivation and discipline, and hopefully, kickstarts other positive habits that are part of a healthy lifestyle. WIth that being said, keep a look out for GAIN’s upcoming habit challenge.

• The two best books about habits are: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear.

• The two simplest, most accessible, most life changing daily habits are stretching or rolling while watching TV at night instead of slouching on the couch and getting more daily steps. Simple but not easy.

• What is one thing you could add to your life everyday? Remember, it needs to be hard but not too hard, ultra specific, and you should probably cut in half whatever you initially thought of. Meaning if you jumped right to, I will walk ten thousands steps everyday, but currently don’t even know how many steps you do get, you should “lower the bar” and create and more realistic target, relative to how much you’re currently walking, not just a nice round number, (which is where the whole 10,000 steps thing came from, it just looks and sounds good).

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

My Foot Journey

originally posted 9/24/2020

I recently listened to a wonderful podcast all about the evolution and subsequent devolution of our feet.  In the episode, Dr. Peter Attia interviews Dr. Irene Davis, a researcher and expert in all things feet and running mechanics. I’m also on my third (or fourth) reading of Sapiens, which I can’t recommend enough. It’s a deep dive into the origin of humans. All of this of course, coincided with the birth of my son. This got me thinking about his development, and specifically, what kinds of footwear we’ll put him in as he’s growing up. Shoes have barely been around for most of human history when you stop and realize that we’ve been walking around on two feet for almost two million years. 

The podcast recommends minimalist footwear, more time barefoot, and staying away from maximally cushioned running shoes. Today, however, I want to share with you my foot journey and how I curated my healthy, resilient feet and why I’m not always so fast to recommend a minimalist shoe for everyone. 

It all started in 2010.

I was in college and I was spending the summer interning and training hard for the upcoming hockey season at a strength and conditioning gym.

One day, someone brought us in a copy of Born to Run. If you’re not familiar, McDougall’s book is a wonderful exploration of running mechanics and history of human beings using running to survive. 

I was anti-running at the time. I was bad at it, it always hurt and I found it incredibly boring. I did however appreciate the ancestral perspective of the book. Of how humans needed to run in order to track down game to eat. Something Harari talks about in Sapiens as well. Back then of course, there were no Nikes, no Hokas, no shoes at all. Just bare feet on earth. That made sense to me. I found it fascinating at how adaptable we were.

Throughout the book McDougall makes reference to a Vibram Five Finger shoe. 

Training barefoot was not a new idea to us at the gym. For years we had been doing our deadlifts in socks and squatting exclusively in Converse Chuck Taylor’s. We didn’t do it for health reasons though. We did it for performance. We knew that if our heel was on the ground, instead of raised up by a sneaker, we would transfer force better, and therefore lift more weight. 

Now, let me back up just a bit. 

While we were spending time training in the gym barefoot, my feet certainly were not in good condition. I had spent most of the past 18 or so years jamming my feet into hockey skates. My little toe had disappeared under my foot, and my three other toes had wedged themselves together. Like most other hockey players, I had developed bone spurs on my heels, aptly named Bauer bumps after a brand of skates. 

As I read McDougall’s case against modern footwear, I couldn’t help but feel singled out. His argument made sense to me. I needed to get myself a pair of these five finger shoes. 

If you’re not familiar, the Vibram Five Finger shoes are exactly what they sound like. A glove for your feet, if you will. Comprised mostly of neoprene, each toe has it’s own individual sleeve, forcing them to spread out. On the bottom is only a thin slice of rubber there to protect you from hot surfaces, but if you stepped on a small jagged rock, you would really feel it. 

After I found a pair, I did something unintentionally intelligent. I only wore them while coaching, probably just a few hours a day. My toes hurt and my arches were sore but I was committed to doing the natural human thing. I only wore them while coaching because they’re silly looking and smell bad.

After a while I started deadlifting in them and then before I knew it I was doing all my training in them. 

Fast forward to that winter and I couldn’t stand putting them on they smelled so bad. It was just my luck that New Balance came out with the first shoe in their minimus line at the time. A new concept, this shoe was designed for strength and conditioning, had a wide toe box to let your toes spread, had no arch support, and had only a few millimeters difference between the heel and the toe of the shoe, something known as drop, which I had learned about in Born to Run. 

Since these looked like normal shoes, I wore them much more often than the five fingers. To my luck, my feet were ready to spend more time in this style of shoe since I had spent the summer building my tolerance.

Over the years, my toes continued to spread out, my bone spurs have completely disappeared and I try to exclusively wear minimalist shoes, which were barely a thing back when my journey started.

Nowadays, footwear is swinging the other way.

It’s common to see maximally cushioned, high arch, high heeled shoes, and I think we’re missing the boat. Born to Run is to blame for this too. See, after the book, thousands of other people were inspired like me and went out to get themselves some five finger shoes. Runners everywhere ditched their traditional shoes and went right back to training with a less protective, much less forgiving shoe and all of a sudden, minimalist shoes had a bad reputation because so many of these people got injured.

As the shoe’s popularity was grew, Vibram did something stupid. They said their shoes will prevent injuries. They didn’t recommended starting slow, building your tolerance and not trying to do too much too soon. Remember when I said I did something unintentionally intelligent? That was starting slow, only wearing the shoes for 12-15 hours a week at first. I didn’t do any running in them and also worked on stretching, rolling and improving mobility in my feet and ankles. 

This led to a somewhat-famous lawsuit, which in my opinion is why maximalist shoes have now become so popular.

People wanted to throw these Five Finger shoes on and expected their running technique to transform into a fluid natural stride like the Tarahumara Indians in Born to Run. It’s not that simple though. Just like it took my feet years and years to start looking more like hockey skates than feet, it takes years of dedication to bring them back to a more natural state.

The reason I’m not too fast to recommend a minimalist style shoe nowadays is because I worry people will expect too much from them too soon. An ideal way to dip your toes in the water is to wear them just at the gym. They’re better to train in. Period. You’ll be more stable, have better balance and wearing them for 3-4 hours a week will slowly let you build up a tolerance to more barefoot time. If you’re a runner, it may take even longer since you’re not going to want to start over. I think running in a shoe your comfortable in while spending some time with shoes off when not running is a good start.

When you’re home, I recommend making sure you get some time with nothing on your feet and you’ve probably seen a lot of people walking around the gym in just their socks, another great way to start rebuilding your feet. 

The key point is that your feet were designed to be barefoot. Humans walked around with nothing down there for far longer than Nikes have been around. We’re really good at adapting, which is why it might take you a full year or two until you start feeling more comfortable in a more barefoot style shoe. Expecting too much from your feet is what gets people into trouble and, as I mentioned above, led to the pendulum swing of ultra cushioned shoes that do the exact opposite of what we need. 

Today, I still spend as much time in a minimalist shoe as possible. In the podcast, Dr. Irene Davis defines a minimalist shoe and something you can fold up and put in your pocket and has zero difference between the height of the heel and the height of the toe. I realize there’s utility in other shoes and don’t spend all my time in a zero drop shoes. My trail/mountain running shoes have a bit of a lift (4mm) and I even have a cushy pair for days on the trail when I’m feeling beat up. I also wear high heeled olympic lifting shoes when practicing my cleans and snatches.. 

In summary, your feet are important and jamming them into dress shoes, high heels and traditional sneakers will slowly deform your feet and transform them into something different. Remember, don’t drop your current footwear and go total minimalist yet. Start slow, a few hours a week is enough to build your strength and tolerance. If you play the long game with this I promise it’ll be worth it.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Team Cupcake Seacoast Cancer 5k

The Seacoast Cancer 5k is this Sunday at 9am!

If you haven’t already, you should sign up for Team Cupcake.

Kendra, who created the team and is an exceptional baker, is a long time member of the gym, and one of the strongest people I know. She’s been having breast cancer treatments for the past year and this is her team.

Even if you can’t run, you can still sign up or make a donation on Kendra’s behalf.

Hope to see you out there on Sunday!

SIGN UP FOR TEAM CUPCAKE

Justin MIner

@justinminergain

How Power Relates to Strength

I came across this passage in the Easy Strength book, and sharing it here will be a good opportunity for us to go over power, and how exactly it’s different, but related to strength.

The following quote is from researcher and professor Vladimir Zatsiorsky:

“It is impossible for athletes to generate a large force in a fast movement if they cannot develop similar or even greater force values in a slow motion. But don't overemphasize the role of maximal strength in power production [either]. To be a strong athlete does not mean to be a power athlete. It is true that all elite power athletes are very strong people. On the other hand, not all strong individuals can execute movement powerfully when combining large force and high velocity.”

In other words, you can’t be powerful without having requisite strength and technique.

Here’s how power is defined:

Power (watts) = work (joules) / time (seconds)

This equation states power is the rate of doing work.

Imagine you’re deadlifting at the the gym. The first lift, you just bend over a pick it up slowly. You have the strength to do it, but there’s no urgency to the lift. On your next attempt, you brace hard, take a deep breath and turn on every inch of your body. You drive your feet down and the bar is moving 5 times as fast as your previous lift. That’s power, and you can try to add power to most of your lifts in the gym. Adding intention and speed to push ups, ring rows, bench presses and squats will likely make them feel easier since you’re recruiting more muscle fibers.

Why is thinking about power important? In a seminar a couple years ago I learned that after the age of 40, power declines nearly 2% every year and strength declines 1%.

That means you lose power twice as fast than strength as you age.

Then best way to not lose it is to use it frequently. Do those medicine ball throws hard, move the barbell quickly and be snappy on your kettlebell swings. Not only will your technique and abilities likely improve, but you’ll also be exposing your body to rapid, explosive movements more regularly, and maintaining your power with your strength.

In closing, here’s one more quote from Easy Strength, from Thomas Kurz:

“Slow squats with huge weights will increase the athlete's maximal strength but they will not develop explosive strength. For someone with insufficient maximal strength slow squats may increase explosive strength but then the weight will not be huge.”

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

When Momentum Becomes Destructive

It’s remarkable how much your body can adapt to training stimulus. The key to the whole thing working though is recovery.  That’s where the adaptation actually occurs, and without adequate rest and recovery, you’re leaving performance on the table.

That’s why yesterday, even though I was on a hot streak, and I really wanted to keep my streak going, and film myself doing some easy squats, I knew a rest day would be more beneficial. It had been 12 days straight of squatting, and my body was quite used to the stimulus and volume, but I was thinking ahead.

Even though I felt good, by the end of this week, my body could have started feeling too fatigued or sore and achy. To hedge against that, I decided to skip the squats yesterday.

I’ve learned my lesson from riding the momentum too much with running. There’s been many times I’m having a great training week, I roll it into the next week without skipping a beat, to only end up taking 4 days off the following week cause I’m trashed.

Going into this Easy Strength, I wasn’t sure if I would take a rest day or not. Rest days, are of course an integral part of the plan as written, but I like to dabble in the extremes. After all, each of the 12 workouts has taken me less than 10 minutes start to finish and I always have the equipment readily available. Making it a daily practice was part of the appeal for me.

In closing, I felt like if I had squatted yesterday, I would have been doing it only to keep the streak going. The real goal here is to get freaky strong, so in keeping the goal the goal, and not letting momentum become destructive, I broke the streak and took and rest day, and today, I feel invigorated because of it.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Friday Thoughts #3

Here’s this week’s list of random thoughts on my mind.

• If you didn’t know, my son Elliot turned 3 yesterday! The old cliche, the days are slow but the years are fast totally rings true.

• Speaking of years going by fast, there are only 108 days left in 2023.

• It’s hard to imagine you’ve made it all the way into the third bullet point of this blog without having seen my video about Easy Strength and what it’s all about. But on the chance you haven’t, check it out HERE.

• If you have been following along, today is day 11. I haven’t squatted yet today, but my body feels like I’m going to stick with 225 pounds again. I’m feeling good about this because last week I had to take two “deload” days and only squatted 135. I expected the same to happen this week but I’m responding to the load and volume differently already. I may go a little heavier today with a rep scheme of 5-3-2. This would give me the opportunity to figure out an appropriate weight jump to use for next week. In other words, should I jump to 250, or would I be able to handle 275?  Either way, I’ll only do the weight if it feels easy, that’s the whole point.

• I saw this term, principle based creativity, and it perfectly sums up my program design process. I have certain principles, rep schemes, movement patterns, loading strategies, etc. Working within those principles allows me to be more creative because it provides constraints and direction. I’m of the belief that program design is both an art and a science. Having principles guides program design and through that you can develop your own style.

• That’s all for today, see you next week.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Subscribe to GAIN on YouTube

Earlier this week, as I was uploading 18 new video demos to the YouTube page, a client approached me saying, hey you should make a print out sheet with like 50 warm up exercise demos on it.

I said, all you need to do is check out the YouTube page! We have close to 400 movement demos (plus some entertaining videos that are now 7 or 8 years old).

It’s a great reference to have saved for a rainy day, or to see some of the movements we’ve been tinkering with.

Subscribe!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Gym Lingo: EMOM

Every Minute On the Minute.

This style of workout requires focus on the clock. When doing an EMOM, you start your exercises on the top of the minute, and rest all the remaining time.

EMOM 10: 5 push ups

This means you’ll complete 5 push ups at the top of each minute, rest all the remaining time and start again at the top of the next minute. The way this is written, you would do this for 10 rounds, or 10 minutes. This is a nice way to challenges technique, build volume and sprinkle in some cardio while lifting.

Another variation of and EMOM can be with multiple exercises, with each movement getting their own minute.

EMOM 21

Minute 1: 50 second machine

Minute 2: 10 kb swings

Minute 3: 50ft sled march

In this scenario, you would complete 7 rounds of the 3 movements equaling 21 minutes total. This style of workout builds work capacity and gets more difficult as minutes on the clock tick by. It’s a great way to be time efficient and cram a lot of work in while keeping yourself on a strict pace.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Balance, Agility and Coordination

I’m reading Balance is Power, by Jim Klopman.

If you’ve seen those little blue balance blocks in the gym, called Slack Blocks, he created them.

Here, he defines agility:

Agility is the ability to control and operate one’s body at high speed, under stress and in space.

Coordination, on the other hand:

Coordination is a component of agility. Coordination zeros in body control.

Klopman’s point in the chapter is that you need to be coordinated to have the best agility and that the two are related to one another. Therefore, balance is the sum of coordination and agility, as represented in this equation.

Balance = coordination + agility

When an athlete improves their balance, they improve their coordination and agility as a result.

Not many people come into the gym considering agility a trait they need to improve, but looking at it from this perspective, it’s a key component to having a robust body.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Progress Without Pain

It’s a misnomer that all workouts need to be hard. And people are hard on themselves in the gym when they skip a set, or bail on their finisher.

Maybe some even stay away from the gym all together, because they think that it needs to be excruciatingly hard each and every session.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time in the gym, it just isn’t true.

You’ll need to push it and have some hard workouts, but more than that, you just need to actually keep working out.

And the plan that leaves you completely depleted, might not be the best for your sustainability in the gym.

Here’s a quote I came across this weekend from Mel Siff, author of numerous strength training books, the most famous being Supertraining.

“To me, the sign of a really excellent routine is one which places great demands on the athlete, yet produces progressive long-term improvement without soreness, injury or the athlete ever feeling thoroughly depleted. Any fool can create a program that is so demanding that it would virtually kill the toughest marine or hardiest of elite athletes, but not any fool can create a tough program that produces progress without unnecessary pain.” - Mel Siff

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Friday Thoughts

With the changing in season, new routines and school back in session, I swear, September is just as busy as a goal setting month as January. Regardless of what type of goal are trying to tackle, weekends can be counterproductive if you’re not prepared.

Basically, this will be a list of me sounding like a buzz kill, but someone has to remind you that you can’t keep drinking all the time and expect progress to happen.

• Instead of staying up late and trying to bank more sleep by sleeping in later, stick to roughly the same schedule that you do during the week. This tip, that I originally learned from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, has upped my sleep consistency.

• Speaking of consistency, eat the same breakfast! On days that I have my same breakfast, eating just seems easier. It’s easier to make the better choice and have willpower later in the day.

• Even if it isn’t a workout, make time to move. I try to get a good stretching and rolling session in each weekend, especially if my body is feeling beat up from hard training. At the very least, I get out on 1 or 2 walks.

• The weekend can also a chance to prepare for the coming week. We spend an hour or two on Sunday preparing meals for the coming days. It saves time and eliminates another choice during the busy week.

Consistency is the most important part of a healthy lifestyle. Help yourself out by learning to be more consistent on the weekends.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Hardstyle

I’ve been reviewing my old kettlebell textbooks lately. I’ve been reminded of a certain way of training. Rather, it’s a training mindset more so than a methodology or rep sequence. It’s a powerful one, and useful information for anyone who wants to get stronger and stay healthy.

These book are filled with references to the Russian Kettlebell Certification (now called StrongFirst). The creator of these certifications is the author of many of these books, Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel is credited with bringing kettlebells to America and he created this training idea I’m talking about. He refers to it as Hardstyle.

The concept with his hardstyle method is to use maximum tension and power production, throughout your entire body on all lifts, even the light ones. Make all your reps challenging. Strive for perfect technique, maximum bracing, spot on timing and seek flawlessness. Make your light weights feel heavy and the heavy ones light.

Pavel encourages very small sets, in the 1-5 rep range, even for endurance training protocols. The difficulty of the workout comes from the intensity you create, not only from the external load of the barbell or kettlebell. And keeping the rep ranges small, offers this opportunity for more first reps.

If you’ve ever deadlifted or done a kettlebell swing, you know exactly what I mean when I say the first rep of the set is much more difficult than the subsequent. This ‘more first rep’ principle is what allowed me to train up to my 500 pound deadlift a few years ago.

Adopting this Hardstyle mindset will get your more engaged with your workouts and accumulating serious strength. Focus on small rep sets that focus on maximum tension and power production. EMOMs are the perfect opportunity to practice. Keep in mind, this is the opposite of efficient movement, we’re not trying to conserve power, instead maximizing it. Conserving power often results in sloppy movement and poor technique, hardstyle is excellent technique and form each and every repetition.

When you’re a beginner in the gym, the heavy weights will eventually demand this tension from you, but when you’re experienced, you can demand the tension from the light weight sets as well, and make your light weights feel heavy.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Seacoast Cancer 5k - Team Cupcake

The Seacoast Cancer 5k is less than three weeks away!

The race is around Pease on September 24th, you can find all the other details here.

If you want to participate, you should join me in signing up for Team Cupcake.

Kendra, who created the team and is an exceptional baker, is a long time member of the gym, and one of the strongest people I know. She’s been having breast cancer treatments for the past year and this is her team.

Click here to register.

Hope to see you out there on race day!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Gym Lingo: Suitcase Carry

The suitcase carry, or one arm carry, where you carry a single kettlebell or dumbbell by your side is a great builder of trunk strength. It challenges your grip, builds shoulder and hip stability. It pairs well with a variety of movements in the gym.

Performed between heavy squats or bench press, it can provide your body cueing to brace better and create more stiffness, and in a conditioning context we use it as a filler movement, something that allows you to keep moving and keep your heart rate elevated between bouts of a different movement or something cardio based.

Mastering a suitcase carry will have carry over to life outside of the gym. Once you’ve done a suitcase carry with a heavy kettlebell, all other objects you carry are just an opportunity to practice. Obviously, you’ll no longer be needing the wheels on your suitcase, but also grocery bags, jugs of water, kids gear, you name it. If it needs to be carried, you’ll be ready for the job.

How to do it:

• Start with the kettlebell next to your foot.

• Drive your butt back and let you knees bend, hinging through your hips, to pick up the kettlebell. Focus on pushing the ground away as you stand up.

• Keep a firm grip on the kettlebel and don’t just let it hang in your fingertips. Keep you core engaged and don’t forget to keep breathing as you take your first steps.

• While walking, keep a few things in mind:

• no shrugging your shoulder, keep it away from your ear.

• Reach your opposite hand out to the side for balance if needed.

• Keep the weight far enough from your body it doesn’t crash into your leg.

• Walk slower than normal pace. Keep your trunk upright and try your best not to lean away from the weight.

• Don’t let the weight swing around as you turn.

Loaded carries are a fantastic way to build real-world strength and an easy opportunity to push yourself hard in the gym.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Labor Day and Random Thoughts

Happy Friday. As a reminder, we will be closed on Monday in observation of Labor Day.

Here are a few of my random thoughts from this morning.

• If you’re road tripping, having visitors over or are going to be time crunched for a workouts this weekend, look no further than Coach Taylor’s 10 Workouts Under 10 Minutes.

• Get your steps in. Whenever I’m unable to make a workout, I at least try to get out on 1-2 decent walks to accumulate some steps and movement.

• Weekends, especially long ones, can be progress killers. If you’re walking, sleeping, hitting the gym and fueling like a champ during the week, and getting less sleep and going complete rogue with you food choices every Saturday and Sunday, it’ll be a long road of push and pull.

• If you haven’t in a while, take a rest day this weekend.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Keep Moving Dirt

There’s a big white flag in the gym depicting a large shovel and a spoon.

It represents a powerful saying about training.

It was introduced to me years ago by former NFL player and strength training enthusiast, John Welbourn. His quote reads, “Training is like moving a pile of dirt. Some days you move a shovel full, other days you move just a spoonful. Either way, if you moved some dirt, you’re headed in the right direction.”

Not all training sessions will be heroic. So long as you moved some dirt, you accomplished something, and took your training in the right direction.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Habit Behind the Habit

As the seasons change, and we head into September, and eventually the fall, habits are on my mind.

Habits are an important topic, especially the times of year when people’s schedules and routines change, like right now.

As we head into Labor Day, you may have a new schedule, or new routine, or even if everything in your life is going to stay exactly the same, it’s a great opportunity to closely examine your habits. Specifically, the habits the support your gym success.

These, supporting habits, are things you probably already do, but don’t put much thought into.

Things like, laying our your gym clothes the night before, prepping an after work/pre workout snack, or setting the automatic coffee before an early workout. Whether you realize it or not, these are habits too, and the can help or hurt your success in the gym.

As you navigate the world in the coming weeks, pay close attention to your habits, and notice if you have any habits that aid you in completing your fitness routine, or if you’re trying to wing it and need to form some new supporting habits.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain