Sarah Walls 3/22/12 Sarah Walls 3/22/12

A Tool for the Toolbox

An awesome aspect about being a strength coach is you get to watch great coaches do what they do best and at the same time be taught by them yourself. You have the pleasure of learning and then applying this knowledge gained to your athletes and you alike. The following deadlift refinement technique is not something I made up; again it’s something that I learned from the awesome coaches I’ve worked with and something I’ve been able to utilize with the athletes and my own training. Try this to fix up your deadlift technique… The volume is a little low for some reason (my apologies); better than last time though…

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A few supplementary notes…

This is not something to go super heavy on. This is a tool to refine your deadlift technique.
Keep the bar weight light but use bumper plates; as I mentioned in the video it was only 95lbs of bar weight.
As far as band tension goes you shouldn’t be using anything more than a mini band.
Use this during your warm-up or during your off days as a way to improve your form.

Also the below video is definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for some motivation before going to train. The video is of Jeremy Frey, a strength coach and powerlifter from EliteFTS. This guy is ridiculously smart when it comes to training and STRONG!

[vsw id="4WAkvOnZv7w&feature=player_embedded" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"]

Sarah Walls 2/17/12 Sarah Walls 2/17/12

Friday Musings: Females Unplugged from the Matrix, Training for the Skinny Fat Ectomorph, Deadlifting, and More

1. Below are two great articles that (if you haven't already read them) you'll really enjoy.

4 Things Your Girlfriend Should Know: A Girlfriend's Response - by Lisa

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Lisa (along with her other half, Tony Gentilcore) while my wife and I were up in Boston for our honeymoon. It was immediately clear to both Kelsey and I that Lisa is a high-class woman, and is "the real deal" in her own right.

Anyway, Tony had written a post (linked in the article above) that blew up on the interwebz and definitely ruffled a few feathers. Lisa then popped in on Tony's blog to give a response to the upheaval that occurred as a result of the original "4 Things Your Girlfriend Should Know" post.

Given that women are constantly bombarded with misinformation regarding how they should exercise (and subsequently, how they should look), I felt that Lisa did a SUPERB job addressing this issue. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Even if you're a male, it may help you relate better to your female counterpart.

Solutions for the Skinny Fat Ectomorph Part III: Programming and Training - by Anthony Mychal

It wasn't so much the training program that made me raise an extra eyebrow to this post (although it is a good program) but the words of wisdom Anthony prefaced the program with. For example: "There are no Holy Grail exercises. There are no Holy Grail programs. So stop looking. Results come from consistent training. That’s it."

It seems that everywhere I turn, people are always looking for the "latest and greatest secret" that will get them to their goals. New fitness products are pushed out every week promising to get people where they've never been before. I hate to break it to you, but you're not [insert athletic performance or physique goal here] because you have yet to find the Holy Grail exercise or diet trick.

Well done on this one Anthony.

2. My Cup-O-Strength coffee mug recently arrived in the mail, and I can tell you that I'll be using this with reckless abandon. As a matter of fact, The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research is conducting a study to show that consuming a caffeinated beverage out of this mug will increase your deadlift by 8%.

Okay, maybe that's not completely true, but they will be doing that study at some point. They just don't know it yet. Do yourself a favor and pick up one of these awesome bad boys HERE.

3. Speaking of deadlifting, I've been doing a little deadlift experiment. I'm not going to go into too much into the details here and now, but needless to say I've been getting more than my fill of this movement recently.

Over the past four weeks, I have pulled 155 reps in singles. Yes, I have "dipped, gripped, and ripped" on 155 separate occasions over the past month.

That's all I'll say about that for now though.

4. Metamucil has changed my life. I recently started taking it regularly and.....man!!! I'm not joking you when I say that if you haven't been taking this stuff, you're missing out on one of the greatest things man has ever manufactured.

5. Haha:

I don't know why but this made me laugh pretty hard. Maybe it was just the mood I was in. Anyway, I don't know about you, but we have some good movies coming up in 2012: Hunger Games, The Avengers (<-- maybe it will be corny but I still want to see it) Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, etc.