I f%cking love reading.

I’ve been an avid reader since…pretty much forever. My dad was a big literary guy so he passed that on to me.

I remember as a kid instead of reading “Goodnight Moon” to us he’d read classics like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “To Kill A Mockingbird”. Ever since then I’ve read non-stop. I started college as an english major and thought I’d end up being a novelist one day.

A blog is pretty close to a novel, right? No? Ok, whatever.

I’m always reading at least 2 books. One fiction book for enjoyment and 1 non-fiction book for self improvement or business related matters. I don’t even recall the last time I wasn’t reading something, it’s just a part of what I do.

I’m always giving clients book recommendations to help them with a habit reset, a mindset problem or even for entertainment.

I’ve never formally written any of them down. That’s about to change. Here are some books that will help you improve yourself.

If you were limited to only one exercise for the rest of your life the push up would be a good choice.

It’s a foundational movement pattern because it works nearly your entire upper body.

It builds strength in your chest, shoulders, triceps and forearms.

It builds stability in your trunk, abs and glutes.

It teaches your body to function in unison and promotes proper posture and alignment.

TLDR: Push ups are awesome.

The problem is that people are often intimidated by push ups.

They don’t know how to start performing pushups, and once they know how to do 1 or 2 they don’t know how to scale the movement to perform many.

There are a few strategies you can use to either learn how to perform a perfect push up, or to learn how to scale your pushup from 1 to 10 or even 20.

The number of adults with shoulder problems is astronomical.

The shoulder is an important but vulnerable joint. A crap ton (that’s the technical term) of nerves, muscles, ligaments and bony attachments meet in the general shoulder area.

The shoulder blade itself has 17 (SEVENTEEN!) muscular attachments that connect to it. That’s a lot of intricate musculature that requires a lot of care, mobility, stability and strength in order to function without pain.

Your shoulder can hurt for a variety of different reasons.

One of the overlooked reasons for shoulder pain is shoulder instability. Today I’m going to show you an exercise that will address instability and imbalance in the shoulder joint itself.

This exercise can be used as part of a rehab protocol to stabilize your shoulder joint.

It can also be used as a killer chest and shoulder exercise. It’s great because it simultaneously strengthens all 4 heads of the rotator cuff, while training your upper chest and shoulders to be strong. By pressing from the floor and not a bench you’ll also be limiting the risk from the movement, since you’ll be pressing in a completely safe range of motion.

It’s a great “bang for your buck” movement.

Pull Ups are great. They work nearly every muscle in your upper body, and are an amazing landmark of strength.

Everyone knows about these benefits. The problem will pull ups is that they are very hard to learn how to do, and very hard to do if you’re not strong enough. You need a way to make them easier so you can practice the movement and build your strength properly.

That means you need an assisted pull up machine, or some bands.

But your gym might not have one of those machines, and you might not own any bands. That doesn’t mean your pull up progression is hopeless. It just means that you need to be a little more creative and control variables other than weight.

Everyone wants abs.  From 12 year olds on Instagram (thanks 2019) to your grandmom (probably).  For some reasons a defined midsection has become a status symbol.  It shows people that you are in shape, strong and damn sexy.  It makes your wife happy, and it makes you look more shredded than a julienne salad.

Too many people spend too much time training their abs, and waste too much time performing exercises that provide little value in terms of strength and aesthetics.  Actually some core exercises place your spine in a dangerous position, and they can actually be harmful over the long run.

In the spirit of safe, but brutally effective core exercises I’d like to introduce you to an exercise made famous by Bruce Lee.

Enter the Dragon…..Flag.

The Dragon Flag, or flagpole, is done by lying on your back on a bench or the ground and grasping the lip of the bench or an object behind you.  The goal of the dragon flag is to lift your legs straight up towards the ceiling so your entire body forms a vertical(ish) line from head to toes.  From there you slowly lower your legs until they touch the ground. 

Most likely you’re struggling to squat, and to squat to proper depth, because you are not engaging your core.

Squatting should be a pretty natural movement pattern. Look at babies. They squat perfectly with no issue, and without really thinking about it.

Babies haven’t yet developed dysfunctional movement patterns, so they still move as humans were supposed to. They don’t spent 8 hours sitting a desk, or 12 hours hunched over their phones. They don’t have any habits that cause compensation in their limbs or along their spine.

You, on the other hand, probably do have some movement dysfunction and some bad habits that cause compensation.

Correcting those issues doesn’t take a Physical Therapist, or a movement guru on social media.

You just need to learn how to properly align and fire your core.

The plank is an amazing exercise to build a strong core and resilient hips. It can go a long way to building a bulletproof torso, and a pain free lower back. It’s a go to in most effective fitness programs.

However a lot of people make 2 really big mistakes that ruin the benefits of the plank.

If you’re not performing any exercise with good, or great technique you’re not going to get the results you want. Slowing down and simplifying the exercise in order to practice your technique is always more beneficial than grinding through the exercise with improper technique.

There is an often replicated psychological study in which two groups of college kids are given a multiple choice test.  The subject matter changes, sometimes it’s a literature test, sometimes it’s a history test and so on.  The tests ask exactly the same questions, and only differ in the verbiage of the answers. 

The first test’s answers use language and words that we associate with being young. 

The second test’s answers were the exact opposite, it used language that we associate with being elderly.

The experimenters weren’t measuring the scores of the test.  Once the test was complete they would measure the time it took for each group to reach the end of the hallway once they exited the classroom.

The result was the same every time.

The group which took the test associated with being elderly took a significantly longer time to reach the end of the hallway. 

The results of this experiment tell us two things:

It tells us that the stories we tell ourselves matter.  Our thoughts about ourselves have a direct physical manifestation.  The thoughts we allow to enter our brain shape our perspective, which shapes our reality.

It also tells us the environment we create matters.  The media we consume, the people we hang out with, the thoughts we let fester all have physical consequences. 

Diets are hard. 

Diets are confusing. 

There is an endless stream of conflicting information and misplaced passions that seem to pull us in a million different dietary directions.  In our quest to lose weight and change our body we can simplify things by following a named diet.

Should you go Keto? Paleo? Vegan?

There are ripped people who follow each of these diets and will swear it is the only way to achieve the physique of your dreams.

Sometimes it’s better to find what you should not eat, before you find out what you should eat.  By eliminating troublesome food you can begin to focus on the beneficial nutrients that you need to take in.