Crewe Fitness

I’ve been coaching my gym members on this lately, so I thought I’d share with the larger class too.

If you’re someone who wants to target glutes with your Bulgarian split squats, give this a watch to see if you have this tendency too!

Attempting to get my s**t together: cardio edition

I have, at times in my fitness life, had what I consider to be very good cardiovascular fitness. I’d run 10 km before starting work at 7 am a few times a week and crush torturous conditioning workouts.

Oh how children have humbled me.

While I’ve found a flow with 2-3 weights workouts a week, I hadn’t done any formal cardio since having Nora. Health-wise, not ideal, but it really is hard fitting it in.

In my n=2 experience, around 2 years postpartum seems to bring about a mental shift around pushing myself and exercise and I felt ready to tackle this.

So if you’ve seen my post-run story updates, this is what I’ve been up to. I haven’t missed my weekly run yet and they’re starting to suck less, which feels nice.

I’ll keep you all updated and I’m rooting for you if you’re also in the trying to get your fitness s**t together phase 👊🏻

Do you train your abs directly?

I started as girl 2, then became girl 1, and now I’m firmly girl 3 🫣

I’ve actually started supersetting core exercises mid-way through my workouts so I stop skipping them, which does work well. Can’t say the same about biceps though ✌️

How to bail out of a squat.

If you’re someone who ever squats without safety bars, this is a very worthwhile thing to practice.

Shoutout to the poor woman from the squat video. You’re a queen and I hope you’re ok.

Deadlifts vs Romanian deadlifts (RDLs)

“Which one is that again?” is the most common question I get when I mention deadlifts or RDLs, so I decided to make this as a resource for anyone else who isn’t sure of the differences (and why it matters) when they see one in their program.

Do you prefer one over the other? While I think they’re both great movements that have a place in most people’s strength training, I’m definitely partial to RDLs.

This was a lot of fun and I promise we do actually like and love each other 🫣😂

If you want to test out your power (and your body is used to jumping/prepared for some impact), try this out! I’d recommend starting by trying to jump your height, sans arms extended overhead. I’ve been making my gym members try for a couple weeks now 😝

Also, Allan is really annoying. In slides, no less.

To band or not to band? And how long did it take you to get your first chin-up or pull-up, if you can do them?

I see a lot of people adding in banded pull-ups/chin-ups early in their training towards unassisted reps and while I do actually think bands have their use value, I think a lot of people overly rely on them or add them in a little too early.

Controlled negatives and variations that include pauses will really be the meat and potatoes of your training for most of the strength gains needed to go from 0-1 reps

Also, there is a huge amount of progress to be made between 0-1 reps, so please don’t feel discouraged if you’re working away but not there quite yet. You’ve probably made lots of strength progress towards it!

By popular request from my stories, how to use lifting straps 💪

Do you use straps in the gym?

I used to shy away from using lifting straps in service of strengthening my grip until I realized I could sometimes almost double my reps on certain exercises.

If you’re finding your grip is your limiting factor on certain exercises, I’d really encourage you to try them out!

Because I know some will ask, I got mine from DMoose (on sale for a great price) and I like ‘em :)