StansellFit

New profile pic just dropped!

I’m gonna get it framed and put one in every room of my apartment.

That way everyone who comes over will know I’m a runner.

First Peachtree Road Race in the books. Hopefully more to come. But running outside in the summer is buns so we’ll see.

On the one hand, we’re going to be far more likely to do things we like. On the other, you won’t like all the things you need to do.

Once you have done what you can to make working out easier or more appealing, you’ve got to accept the fact that you still have to put in the work. And you’ll hate it sometimes. It will be the absolute last thing you want to do.

But the moment you give yourself permission to skip one session, you become the kind of PERSON that skips sessions.

This doesn’t mean you can’t skip; it just means that you need to have a high threshold for it.

There are so many things we do that we probably don’t love because we know the payoff is worth it. Exercise is no different.

Go to the gym. Even when you don’t want to. Especially when you don’t want to.

Lifting injuries almost always come down to one of these three things. But it’s also important to remember that they can just happen sometimes 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Our capacity on any given day is like a moving target, very difficult to precisely identify. But if we want to get stronger and build muscle, we can’t be ultra-conservative with training stress either. You have to lift weights heavy enough and with enough volume so your body responds by getting stronger and/or more muscular.

I often tell my clients if they’re on the fence about a weight, it’s better to live to fight another day. Undershooting has fewer drawbacks than overshooting.

This, again, is not an excuse to not push yourself, but rather a reminder that staying healthy and in the game long-term also matters.

You cannot always make incremental changes in the same environment with the same people who are used to the old version of you.

One of the hardest parts of lasting change is not just saying goodbye to the old you. It may mean removing people from your life.

We all want to believe our friends and family will be supportive when we want to improve our lives, but it doesn’t always pan out that way.

Because they are people and they may prioritize their own discomfort over your wellbeing.

Sometimes change requires a scary and seismic shift in who you are and who you surround yourself with.

I have known so many clients over the years that wanted to do the bare minimum yet expected noticeable results.

Your body does not want to change! It requires you repeatedly training with effort to force your body to adapt by building muscle. That doesn’t happen by avoiding discomfort.

It often requires months and often years of discipline. Showing up when you don’t want to, training harder than you want to, and doing it longer than you want to.

Which is exactly why the people that see the best results own the process and let the outcomes be what they will. They find something internal that pushes them forward.

If you’re fighting every step of the way with nothing deep propelling you forward, it will be next to impossible.

Everyone has their own reasons, but if you want to build that kind of body, you gotta find yours.

Very few people struggle with results in the gym because they’re oversimplifying their training. It’s almost always a lack of action.

Are you showing up? Are you training with high effort? Are you doing more over time as you adapt? If you can answer yes to all of these, congratulations, you’re in the top 10% of gymgoers. Maybe 1-5%.

Your s**t doesn’t need to be perfect. Just do it. You’ll figure out what isn’t working over time. But only if you’re collecting enough real feedback through repeated action.

Look, obviously there are exceptions to this. If you genuinely are sick, have a serious injury, or any number of other things that reduce performance, fair.

But the relationship between how you feel pre workout and how you feel during the workout isn’t as tight as most people think.

I’ve had some of my best lifting days on 2-3 hours of sleep and some of my worst on 8 or 9.

I’ve been hungover and felt like the Hulk and woken up as right as rain and had the strength of a small child. The opposite has also happened, which is further proof that it’s unpredictable.

So before you throw in the towel or decide you’re not up for a particular exercise, TRY IT. Be smart of course and don’t push it if you don’t have it. But don’t assume you don’t have it.

This isn’t meant to be some kind of hot take, because I think many of the PTs I know would agree with me here.

There are absolutely times where we need expert support, but it’s not every time something goes wrong with our bodies.

Our bodies are very good at handling things that go wrong without outside intervention the majority of the time.

Getting to a point where you feel like you can’t “heal” without someone doing something to you instills fragility and removes autonomy.

To reiterate in case I haven’t made the point clearly enough, there are unequivocally times where you need to see someone.

But you do not need to set up an appointment for every ache, pain, or ni**le.

Connective tissue issues are the worst because they take significantly longer to heal compared to muscles.

Which is why I take special care to avoid them by:

- Progressing more slowly
- Taking action to modify as soon as possible if a tendon is complaining
- Dialing back a bit after a layoff even though I’m technically strong enough to handle the load
- Adjusting my technique to limit as much “collateral” connective tissue involvement.
- Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, if you do experience connective tissue issues, dial back as much as you need to to get it to calm down first. But then try to slowly add stress that you can tolerate to that same tissue to get it used to handling it again. Many people make the mistake of removing ALL stress from the tissue in perpetuity, which often leads the tissue to decondition like crazy and become more sensitive to everything.

In my experience, load is the most important or causative variable in connective tissue issues. And I do have a little less leeway as I’ve gotten older.

Moral of the story: Progress as slowly as you need to, make adjustments if you feel tendon funkiness, keep ACTIVE and get back to stressing the tissue in a way that you can tolerate as quickly as possible.

And as always, be smart. Always live to fight another day if you experience connective tissue pain in a workout. It’s not worth it.

It takes some time for many of my new clients to get used to the pace of resistance training. Especially if they come from group fitness.

Not everything is about getting torched. In fact, that’s often counterproductive when training for strength or muscle growth.

That’s not to say that an intense resistance training session won’t leave you fatigued, but rather that’s not the goal.

The rest allows more reps to be performed across all the sets, which ultimately creates a better stimulus for growth/strength.

And if there is no drop-off in reps despite short rest periods, you are massively undershooting the weight.

Most folks do best anywhere between 2-4 minutes of rest depending on whether they’re focusing on muscle growth or strength. Some isolation exercises may only require 60 to 90 seconds and that’s fine. Much less than that and you’re losing the plot.

Bottom line, the bigger the movements (I.e. more muscles involved) and the greater the focus on strength, the bigger the rest periods need to be.