While 2020 was a crazy year, I was fortunate enough to still be able to train many people. Every person you train is going to be different and present different challenges. However, there have been many themes I have noticed that will really help anybody reach their fitness goals. Here they are…

Measure

What gets measured gets managed. Progress is addicting. How do you truly know if you are progressing if you are not tracking anything? Write down your workouts, what you ate, how you felt on a certain day, etc. The crazy thing to me is that there are so many people out there who struggle with losing weight but have never tracked their calories for a week. There are so resources out there that will calculate your maintenance calories. Once you’ve done that you just need to find a diet that will keep your calories below your maintenance calories and ta-da, you will lose weight. Measuring things definitely takes effort. Anything that leads to significant change requires effort.

Avoid Gimmicks & Misinformation

There sure is a lot of it. The easiest thing to sell to people is a product that will get them “fast results.” This usually involves some BS fairy pixie dust detox celery juice fat burning powder potion. All of this is garbage. There is also no such thing as a magic program. No, you won’t put 100 pounds on your bench, gain 8 inches on your vertical, or gain 20 pounds of muscle in a month. Bradley Martyn’s workout will also not make you look like him. Seek out information from people who have gotten themselves and other every day people results without any PEDs. Anything that promises fast results is probably a marketing scheme that preys on the insecurity of people.

Be Consistent

A quote by Dan John that has always stuck with me is “Most champions are built by punch the clock workouts rather than extraordinary efforts.” An average effort over years will always lead to better results than a significant effort over weeks or months. It’s really easy for anybody to get into an exercise kick, but to ever see lasting results it needs to be an everyday thing. You know that gross feeling you get when you don’t brush your teeth? You have to get to the point where you feel that way when you don’t exercise. I am not saying you have to crush weights or run long distances seven days a week, but you should do something that elevates your heart rate daily.

Stick to the Basics

There are always fads that come and go in fitness. There’s always a reason they go. Squatting, pressing, pulling, eating a lot of protein, drinking water, and going for a walk are among many things that will never go out of style and will always render results. Find methods of exercise that you enjoy. Another great quote is, “The best program is the one that you will do.” The basics will always provide you with a stimulus strong enough to yield physical change.

I hope my words will get the gears in your head turning a little bit. With everything going on in the world right now, your health should most definitely be climbing up your priority list. Make your body a nightmare of a host for any virus or illness.

I have always said that the process of building a big, strong, and lean physique is a process of almost constantly being unsatisfied. No matter what level you are at, you will almost always be unsatisfied. The little wins in the gym are what keep you coming back. Setting a PR in a lift, seeing a new vein, seeing your weaknesses become strengths are what keep you coming back. I am currently in the midst of a bulking phase and man it will play with your thoughts. The extra fat can definitely be tough to cope with, but you constantly have to remind yourself what the end goal is. As I have dug deeper and deeper there is a common theme I have noticed; many of my fitness idols were at one point pretty fat. Can training hard and accepting being a little on the fatter side fast forward gains and get you to that badass physique you’ve always desired?

Too many people want too much at once. Everybody wants a ballooned up chest, big traps, and a shredded 6 pack. Building muscle needs to be the priority if you want to achieve any of these things. A caloric surplus is an absolute must if you want to consistently put on muscle. You can not gain significant muscle on a caloric deficit. On the flip side of the coin, you most likely are not going to have shredded abs if you have been in a caloric surplus for an extended period of time. In my years, I have noticed that the dudes with the best physiques are the kind of guys who were the former football players or powerlifters that used to be 250+, got on a diet, and now they look amazing. These people were most likely in a caloric surplus for years and years. In this time they were putting on muscle and fat. They probably did not care about being a little fat because it was required to play their position or lift a certain amount of weight in powerlifting. If you look at people like Mark Lobliner, Mark Bell, Layne Norton, and Mike Dolce, they were all on the pudgier side at one point. Now, they all have awesome physiques. I am not saying that this is the best way or only way. It just seems to have worked for a lot of people.

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How do you build strength in the weight room? I’ll give you a clue. It has nothing to do with booty bands, bosu balls, agility ladders, TRX straps, crunches, etc. It is really tough for the common person or gym goer to recognize that these kind of things are usually garbage. If you ever have gone down the Instagram Explore rabbit hole you most likely have seen some woman doing a booty band workout or some juice head posting his bicep curl workout. They are most likely wearing some overpriced and matching Gymshark type of outfit. These people lead you to believe if you train like they do that you will look like them. This could not be more false. Companies will sponsor people who are considered to be beautiful to market their products and get insecure people to purchase them in hopes that they will automatically improve their appearance. These people are usually working with really good genetics and do not look the way they do because of their training. With that being said, I am going to give you guys some low hanging fruit to reach for. These are basic baselines of strength that make anybody who can do them a relatively strong human being. If you can not reach these baselines, getting to a point where you can, will ultimately lead to reaching new levels of strength and improved physical appearance.

-40 push-ups

-10 pull-ups

-Bench press your body weight

-Deadlift 2x your body weight

-Squat 1.5x your body weight

-Hold a plank for 90 seconds

-Farmers walk your body weight for 50 yards

I started lifting weights for the same reasons that most young athletes do. I wanted to get stronger. I was lucky to have some mentors who shared some great weight-room knowledge with me. However, In Aroostook County and rural Maine, there is an overall lack of resources on strength training. You would think that the internet would provide all of the information you need on just about any topic right? This is where strength training gets interesting. The amount of misinformation that is shared every day on the internet is amazing. It is going to be really difficult for a 15-year-old kid to be able to identify what is quality information. Heck, 99% of people really can’t. My goal as a coach and trainer is to educate. I have been really lucky to have such great coaching mentors in my young life. These people have taught me how to identify quality information. Everything I do and teach in the weight room is stolen. I did not make any of it up. I hope you can steal something from this post.

What are your goals?

The first thing that must always be identified is what you are trying to achieve. Make your goals specific and set a date for when you are trying to achieve it by. Surround yourself with reminders of this goal. For example, I am currently training a high school baseball player who has a set a goal of gaining 20 pounds in a 6 month period. Every Friday, I have a highly anticipated weigh-in with this kid. Week-by-week the scale would go up until one week he did not gain a single pound. He admitted to me that he probably was not eating as much as he should be. Our solution to this problem was to take a picture of the scale and make it the background on his phone. By doing this, there is no way of hiding from his goal. Every time he opens his phone the scale will be looking at him right in the eye. The point I am trying to make is that you need to make specific goals and constantly remind yourself of these goals and why you are trying to accomplish these goals. Your goal should not be “I want to get stronger.” It should be, “I want to be able to do 10 pull-ups by the end of 2020.” Not “I want to get better at basketball,” but “I want to start on the varsity basketball team as a Sophomore.”

Investing In Yourself

I’m a big believer that the best thing you can invest in is yourself. I often see people are not willing to invest in themselves. What is investing in yourself as an athlete? It can be hiring a trainer, buying quality food and supplements, going to a clinic, camp, etc. Often, I’ll hear kids say, “It’s too much money.” These are often the kids who have a new vehicle, Jordan’s on their feet, and every new video game. There’s no doubt that all of these things are a lot of fun, but they all depreciate. The memories training hard with your friends and playing sports are some of the most precious memories you will make. There is a lot of sacrifices that have to be made to become the best version of yourself, but it is well worth it.

Why You Should Hire a Trainer

As I alluded to earlier, many people seem to think that paying for a trainer is too expensive. Being in the basketball community my entire life, I have seen all of these kids who play AAU basketball all around the country every weekend in hopes of catching the attention of college coaches. I am sorry, but if you are 6 feet tall, 170 pounds, and have a 25 inch vertical you are probably not going to draw a ton of interest. Yes, there are always anomalies and I am not telling you that you should not play AAU basketball. I did not have a bunch of colleges knocking on my door, but I have had education and experiences that help me analyze where myself and others have gone wrong. Take one weekend of your entry fee, travel costs, food, hotel room and get a month with a trainer. Every sport is getting more and more athletic. We are at the point where you have to train your body just as hard as your skills or you are going to get left behind. Find a qualified trainer who has had results with himself and other athletes. Most athletes wander around the weight room for years and live in the land of bicep curls and calf raises. That will not do anything. There are so many variables to designing a strength and conditioning program that are difficult to consider if you do not have the proper education and experience. These variables include a needs analysis, frequency, exercise selection, muscle weakness and imbalances, sets, reps, rest, injury history, etc.

My goal is to educate as many young athletes as possible. Growing up in Aroostook County, I always wondered why the star athletes in the area were not going to big programs to continue their athletic careers. I believe a big part of that is because we are behind in the area of strength training. We do not produce big, fast, and strong athletes like other areas do. I think if we get kids doing squats, deadlifts, presses, sprints, sled pushes, loaded carries, agility drills, and jumps we can change that narrative.