When I was in the third grade, I confronted the class queen bee on the playground. I don’t remember my exact words, but it was something to the effect of “You’re not the boss of me.” It didn’t exactly make me popular with the In group. The third-grade “Daphne’s” shunned me after that, and home room became decidedly awkward. Eye contact and talking across our shared desk stopped, and when the Daphne’s ignored my existence, so did their cronies. Nonetheless, {Read More…}

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…}

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 recovering from 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 {Read More…}

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…}

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…}