Blog

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

Sometimes you hear other people say something that you already know, but the way in which they express it is so elegant that it helps you clarify your own thinking on the topic. Recently on Weakly Weights we had a guest, Nathan Baxter, who described the powerlifts by attempting to distil them to their simplest

I read something funny the other day on the Instagram story of a friend, saying “contrary to popular belief, screaming “easy weight” to your training partner before a set doesn’t ACTUALLY make the weight any easier”. It was good for a chuckle, but it also made me think about what it is to actually be

I was prompted to write this piece after a discussion with one of my clients, a fellow personal trainer and exercise physiologist, whose lifting technique falls somewhere in that grey-zone that we all know – generally sound and safe, but not entirely consistent or optimised. He expressed a (well-intentioned – it’s not that he wanted

Just like my HYPERTROPHY ARTICLE, this is an opinion piece as opposed to an attempt to systematically answer a question. In this instance, the question is “should weight loss diets be lower fat or lower carb?”. The answer, strictly speaking, is that it doesn’t matter. Provided protein and energy intake is matched, and presuming perfect

I was prompted to write this post following a question in a sports nutrition group that I’m a member of. The particular question was in reference to a fad diet, but the thrust of it is one that as a dietitian and as a personal trainer I’ve been confronted with a number of times, that

Whether you’re an aspiring powerlifter/bodybuilder or just at the gym for your health and wellbeing, one of the biggest favours you can do yourself is learning to love the process of training. Besides the fact that training is (unless you’re some type of professional) a hobby, and that the health benefits of exercise are contingent