Blog – Page 2 – Reps And The Rest

Who Is Setting Your Goals?

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Slim and toned models trying to entice you to join our gyms. Topless, fit looking guys on their paddle boards to sell our services. Lose fat, oil up the abs, look chiselled, bounce ice cubes off the butt.* Not appealing? Fair. Not everyone’s motivated by specific, easy-to-measure, look-like-a-cover-model-who-sleeps-with-a-barbell aesthetic goals. Focusing only on fat loss and muscle building and striving for the glistening fitspo isn’t everyone’s jam. But you keep coming back to the aesthetic goals. Only because you think…

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The Sunk Cost of Believing, Feeling and Behaving

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– Hey, I know you were asking for a hammer for your birthday. Here. It’s the top of the line. And because you’re so special, I didn’t want to just wrap it in an ordinary gift paper. Instead, I buried it somewhere in this terrarium along with ten funnel web spiders in it. Because I thought you’d like to have them, too. – Gee. Thanks. As Seth Godin puts it so eloquently, sunk costs are gifts from our past selves….

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My Coaching Mistakes (well, some of them…)

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As I am closing in on 10 years as a trainer/coach/whatever there are certain past practices that I now look back at with an awkward awe. I’ve been thinking about some mistakes I’ve made along the way. I wouldn’t call them regrets, but signs of professional growth. And sometimes, ripples in my evolution as the person I am today. With that out of the way, here are (some of) my coaching “ughs”. Mistake 1: Strict movement screen for everyone I…

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Book Notes: Breathe by James Nestor

August 21, 2020 Joonas Comments 0 Comment

Book notes reflect a specific time in the reader’s life. If you enjoy my notes and highlights, I highly recommend you buy the original book as it’s likely that there’ll be parts for you to discover that I didn’t find important. Read my notes below. Or buy Breathe on Amazon. The greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, but lung capacity. James Nestor in Breathe Breathe is a fascinating book. I don’t say…

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Too Busy Means It’s Not a Priority

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Being busy means there is no time to stop. Like we’re living in this limbo of errands and poor time management. There’s a deeply negative undertow to it. I am not busy. I never want to be busy. As a dad with a toddler and a three week old newborn* in the mix, there’s a fair bit of life admin that screams (often literally) for my attention. Our laundry baskets (yep, we have multiple) are always 80% full. I am…

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Being Physically Resilient Makes Life Better

Joonas

Now here’s a word I love in every possible way. And probably more than any sensible person should love a specific set of alphabets aligned in a meaningful way. Despite the risk of sounding like a hardcore weirdo, here goes. I love the way it looks on a piece of paper (or on the screen), the way it resonates in my ears, the way it feels in my mouth when I say it out loud. Or even better, when I…

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Getting Stronger is Hard Work

Joonas

The late afternoon sun hugs the field. The two tired brothers have worked since the early hours of the morning. Now they’re getting the last of the day’s harvest done. Bob, the younger of the brothers, is inherently lazy. Trying to get the harvest done with him is like dealing with a toddler insisting on using a hammer to eat a kiwifruit. A patience testing endeavour. Ron, the older of the two, with his sleeves rolled up, is throwing bales…

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Using The COVID-19 Restrictions to Overcome Fat Loss Plateau [A Client Case Study]

Joonas

This is about how my client Niss was able to turn the negative COVID restrictions into a learning opportunity and break through her weight loss plateau. And as the weight came down, so did her back pain. When the shroud of COVID restrictions came down in the late March, they bulldozed Niss’ training routine overnight. Her goals to build strength for running, keep back pain at bay, and drop 10kg got an unwelcome flavor of difficulty. Pour in a cup…

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Why And How to Maintain Cardio Fitness During Rehab

Joonas

The best predictor of an injury is a previous injury. This validates a thorough rehab before getting the green light to return to your sport. Yet this green light is often one-dimensional and rarely covers the assessment of our cardio fitness. Returning to sport with low levels of cardio fitness elevates the risk of re-injury. Are the heart and lungs and everything that comes with it ready for the return? Low cardio fitness means you’ll get tired quicker. And the…

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Setting Up a Home Gym

Joonas

You don’t need much for the home gym to cover your training needs. When we acknowledge and agree on the reasons for training at home in the first place, convenience and results, most of the home equipment requirements dwindle down to few essentials. As long as we treat training as work, a practice of getting better for life, and not a source of excitement in itself, we can make the convenience and results collide efficiently. The non-negotiables for a functional…

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