This blog is an old one, but on my morning walk this morning there must have been a flavour in the air, or a sound that vibrated just right to bring my mind back to this moment from nearly five years ago. I often say that Kachalka, in Kyiv Ukraine, is my favourite gym in the world, and it is. However, to be clear, my favourite Lifting Temple is in Sapporo, Japan. Enjoy. The last 5 or 6 days were shit. I had the flu and had to travel from Osaka to Sapporo. Ugh, it was miserabl

(^ working on my fitness, seriously) When people decide that they want to begin making changes in their life to improve their health and fitness, the first things people think about are often changing their nutritional habits, and of course hitting the gym, walking, or jogging. It is also common for already dedicated people who want even more fitness to think that the answer to gaining more strength/fitness is going to be an extra session a week, or longer workouts, or heavie

I’ll be honest. I have been triggered in every hostel that I cooked in over the past three months by people making critical comments about me eating healthy or even cooking for myself. Last nights’ comment was especially triggering and I am fighting a fever so I am a little hot-headed. So, today I am going to rant a little bit about nutrition. Eating Healthy Food Is A Privilege, Not Ambitious If you live in Usa, Canada, or Norway then you are blessed to have access to healthy

For some of you this is going to be old news, but for some of you, this might bring a bit of an understanding as to what your "essence” is and your body-type. There are three body-types that are well known in the world of fitness, physique, and nutrition. They are ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph. In this blog post I will give you some information on each of these body-types, and what they mean in relation to your health and fitness. By and large your body-type is the resu

Right off the bat I am going to be honest with you. This post is as much a cathartic exercise for myself, as it is meant to be informative. Bits and pieces of this have tried to creep into almost every blog post I sit down to write, so I need to dump it and move on. Take it or leave it. My experience with over-training is a large part of why I became a coach. Experiencing first hand what over-training does to a body has a great impact on the kind of coach I am today, and why

I learned this one the hard way. When I first got into lifting weights at the age of seventeen, I wanted to get strong and I wanted to get big. Sound familiar? So, this lead to me lifting 5 sets of 5 reps for about 5 years. It is what dudes in magazines did so it must work. I got kind of strong and kind of big, but also spent about three of those years lifting the same weights. It wasn’t until after I learned about strength training through my education with Opex Fitness that

How to pick a coach. What makes a good

Now I am not going to dig into the question of what fitness is in this blog, but I will qualify this post by saying that my concept of fitness involves more than one's ability to perform physical tasks. With that in mind, I am interested in what things people do who are happy and live a long time. I am also interested in methods and techniques that have stuck around for a long time. One such practise is Pranayama. It is one of the eight limbs of yoga, and involves several dif

Introduction It is flu season, but hopefully it is over by the time you read this. Recently I had a couple of clients become quite sick, and had to miss training. They were both worried about losing progress, and one even had a competition coming up the next weekend. She was so worried she’d lose all her strength and get embarrassed at the competition. She even ignored me telling her to rest, and snuck to the gym to train one evening despite having a fever. I couldn’t really