I’ve always loved training the same days every week and I prioritized barbell hip thrusts forever. I like my exercises in a certain order and 8-10 is my go-to rep range. If you’re like me, you love your gym favorites. But in our own little nirvanas, picking heavy stuff up and putting it down, we rarely think about how our favorites contribute to our inevitable weightlifting plateaus. We convince ourselves that our favorite things in the weight room should still be delivering {Read More…}
Post-Mastectomy At-Home Training Routine
April 30, 2017 By 3 Comments
After my bilateral prophylactic mastectomies, I trained at home and mostly focused on physical therapy exercises. I just was not ready to hit the gym until after my reconstruction. There are both physical and mental hurdles to overcome when you’ve had your breasts removed and replaced, and my insecurity about being in the gym had to do with my appearance (lost muscle, different breasts) and my high level of discomfort and pain. Doing this routine at home worked perfectly, but I missed the {Read More…}
How To Strength Train After A Mastectomy
March 13, 2017 By 27 Comments
It had been about six months since my breast reconstruction surgery and bilateral prophylactic mastectomy. I was at the gym, following an old training program I wrote. Back to training for months, I’d mostly avoided chest training until recently. I glanced down to see which exercise was up next: Push-ups. I felt a little flutter in my stomach and made a spur-of-the-moment decision: I would try push-ups this time instead of skipping them. Since it would suck to lower myself down and choke at the {Read More…}
How To Create Your Own No-Guilt Travel Workout
January 10, 2017 By 4 Comments
I like looking at training problems from angles most people don’t think of – until they come up, of course. Take your typical travel workout, for example. The usual articles focus on killer bodyweight workouts in idyllic settings. But how often do you have a perfect gym while you travel? How often are you actually motivated to do any exercise? And how often do any of those travel workouts resemble what you do at home? Hardly ever, in my experience. I {Read More…}
Why “Should’s” Suck The Life Out of Blogging (And Everything Else)
November 30, 2016 By 15 Comments
This post is about getting caught up in the wrong things. It’s about the “should’s” that have been crushing my bloggy soul and preventing me from being here. If you also have “should’s” that are sucking the life out of your passions, you might be able to relate with me on this. Clearly, writing this blog and finding new coaching clients have not been at the top of my priority list this past year. First, let me tell you what I’ve been doing {Read More…}
The “What to Wear” Dilemma Simplified
November 23, 2016 By 2 Comments
You might be surprised to learn that I don’t wear gym clothes 24/7. In fact, you may also not know that I’m a freelance writer, in addition to being a personal trainer. I need to fix up when I meet with clients to plan copywriting projects, and I like that. I enjoy clothes a great deal, actually, but I need them to move with me, not against me. For one thing, I’ve got to feel relaxed in what I wear, even at {Read More…}
