Fitness
-
When to Add Weight, and How Much
Four weeks into a new program, right around the time the trees on Mount Royal start to turn, something odd happens. The dumbbells that felt heavy in the first week of September now feel like the wrong ones. You finish a set of goblet squats, put the 25 down, and suspect you could have kept…
-
How Many Days a Week You Actually Need to Train
Every September the same thing happens. La rentrée hits, the kids go back to school, work picks up after the summer slowdown, and a lot of people decide this is the fall they finally get serious. So they sign up for six days a week. Monday legs, Tuesday push, Wednesday cardio, and on down a…
-
Online Coaching vs In Person: What Actually Changes
February is when the online coaching questions start. The drive stops being worth it. A forty-five minute session turns into ninety with parking, brushing off the car, and the crawl up Décarie. People start wondering whether they could do this at home instead, with someone checking in on them. They can. But the honest version…
-
The Workout Habit That Survives a Busy Month
The Workout Habit That Survives a Busy Month September has a way of changing your routine without asking permission. The kids are back in school. Work gets busier. Meetings start filling up the calendar again. The workout time that was easy to protect during the summer suddenly disappears. And that’s usually how people stop exercising.…
-
Lifting Weights When You Only Want to Lose Weight
The plan people arrive with is almost always identical. Cut food hard, run four or five mornings a week, add weights later once some of the weight is already off. It sounds like a sensible order of operations. It is backwards. Weights are not the reward you earn after losing the weight. They are a…
-
What a First Session With Me Actually Looks Like
Most people walk into a first session braced for punishment. They expect burpees until they feel sick, a trainer with a stopwatch, some kind of test they can fail. Then we sit down and I ask about their sleep, and the whole thing deflates in a good way. The first hour is not a workout.…
-
How Long to Rest Between Sets
Somebody I trained this spring set a timer for 45 seconds between every set of everything. Squats, rows, curls, all of it. He’d built the habit from an app three years earlier and never questioned it once. His squat had not moved in eight months. We changed one thing. Rest went to three minutes on…
-
What 20 Minutes Is Actually Worth
The most common thing I hear in September is that there’s no time. Not that training is hard, not that the plan didn’t work. Just that the week filled up and the hour disappeared. Usually the hour was never the problem. The problem is that people treat anything under an hour as not counting, so…
-
Why I Put Yoga Between Hard Training Days
A client told me that the yoga day felt like cheating. He’d done two hard sessions that week, both of them ugly in the good way, and then his Wednesday was twenty minutes on a mat in his living room. He asked if we could swap it for something real. We didn’t swap it. Six…
-
How to Start Training Again After Years Off
Someone walked into a first session last telling me they used to be in good shape. They said it like a confession. Most people do on day one. I don’t want the confession. The version of you that trained at twenty and the version standing in front of me are two different people, and only…