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In George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, 1984, there is a concept called “doublethink”. Doublethink entails the simultaneous acceptance of two contradictory beliefs, and part of what sets it apart is that true doublethink requires no sense of cognitive dissonance, or internal conflict from the logical implausibility of holding these positions. Doublethink is essential for political indoctrination

I’m frequently asked by clients whether making alterations to their prescribed training structure is going to cost them gains. Obviously there’s a reason that I elected to write programs a certain way, and in the past I might have been inclined to call tweaks “not following the program”, but is that really the case? How

When we think about technique training, we often think of performing a number of immaculate reps. I definitely think that practice has value – it engrains “correct” patterning, limits spillover fatigue that you’d otherwise accrue from inconsistent movement and allows for some conscious control of movement without sacrificing performance by virtue of being submaximal. However,

Discussions about the role of meat in the diet are very much in vogue. The WHO recently classified processed meat as a class 1 carcinogen (ie – cancer-causing) and unprocessed red meat as a probable carcinogen. Questions of equity, environmental impacts, and animal welfare related to the consumption of meat have also meant that people

For context, consider the following story. I was having a discussion with a client today. Her best squat is 145kg, and in her last peak we squatted 142.5. In previous peaks she has gotten super beaten up, and occasionally her squat performance has been up and down, which impacted her confidence under heavy loads. Furthermore,

I was initially going to make this piece one of those ones about the danger of cherry-picking evidence. It’s quite easy to find research supporting any given view in health/fitness. That’s not actually a problem with science, per-se. It’s expected that just by chance you’ll have the odd result emerge that runs contrary to the

I’m often asked how much strength an athlete can expect to gain out of a taper, a question to which I’m not sure there’s a precise answer. More perniciously, many people operate on the assumption that tapers/deloads into competition will yield incredible strength gains. This attitude can be harmful for a number of reasons –

In this article I want to explore the coach’s toolbox a little, and see how manipulating exercise prescription, cueing and feedback can help promote learning. The genesis of this piece was actually a presentation I listened to by my friend and colleague Rob Flett, delivered on behalf of the Lift Professional Development group. Rob’s also

I was recently having a chat with my friend Thomas Lilley (aka the man everyone thinks is Frustrated Strengthcoach, in the same way that everybody thought Harvey Dent was Batman) and this came up – using absolute specificity to powerlifting as a rationale for making training decisions is not always the best way to approach

This is the second article in a row that I’ve begun by apologising for being lazy about writing, but the fact is that I have. I’ve been busy with my podcast, Weakly Weights, and putting together automated training templates for the Macabolic Minicut, as well as endeavouring to do a decent job in my in-person