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Michael Sirani 10/10/17 Michael Sirani 10/10/17

4 Quick Bodyweight Workouts

Sometimes getting to the gym isn’t feasible for a variety of reasons. Life gets busy, you end up having to stay at work late, pick up your kids, or travel. These busy times are stressful enough and become even more stressful when you view working out as black and white. If you view exercise as black and white you may think things like:

If I’m not strength training at a high intensity then I’m not getting better
If I don’t run as far or at as fast of a pace as last time the run was a waste of my time.
If I’m not laying in a pile of my own sweat trying to catch my breath it wasn’t a good workout

This type of mindset can help push people towards making their workouts a priority in their life and drive them to be consistent enough to reach their goals, but it can also increase your stress levels, make you feel irritable, and make you no fun to live with or be around, especially when life throws you a curveball.

Michael Sirani 2/24/17 Michael Sirani 2/24/17

How to Keep Your Shoulders Healthy When Bench Pressing

Bench pressing is a staple in most fitness enthusiasts’ exercise programs. It’s likely that your first experience in the gym was a chest day, and ever since that, you’ve continually chased the feeling of your first chest pump. For that reason, along with its association with bodybuilding greats and its place in power lifting competitions, the barbell bench press will never go extinct. Nor should it; it’s a great way to put on size and gain strength in your upper body. But, before embarking on any bench pressing journey, you need to consider your risk:reward ratio and ensure that you’ve bullet proofed your shoulders to handle the demands of barbell benching.

Michael Sirani 1/11/17 Michael Sirani 1/11/17

How to Balance Training and Recovery for Better Results

One common possession of those who’ve reached their fitness goals is a training journal or log. Open it up and you’ll find meticulous notes of different exercises, most likely written in a specific order, with detailed sections of sets and reps. A good training log is often filled with lists of how much weight was used and blurbs of how you were feeling on that day.

Sometimes reaching your goals isn’t always as clear-cut as you think. When your progress doesn’t reach a level that is satisfactory to you, it’s common to go back through your training journal to see where things went wrong. This can be helpful, but many times there’s more you need to be looking at—recovery is often given

Michael Sirani 1/4/17 Michael Sirani 1/4/17

What's Really Important for Achieving Your Fitness Goals

With the New Year often comes self-reflection. What did I do last year? What did I accomplish? And what do I want to do now? After this reflection and pondering the New Year, many will decide that this is going to be the year to get in shape.

Then you pause and think to yourself: I started a workout plan last year and then stopped, and I was so dialed in to my diet for a month and then fell off.

These things are very common. Life gets crazy. You have work, family, friends, a social life, school, and maybe even a partner and kids. Instead of going back to the same old routine you struggled to maintain last year, consider reflecting on why you struggled to reach your goals last year and discover what you need to change in order to set yourself up for a healthy and consistent 2017.

Michael Sirani 12/22/16 Michael Sirani 12/22/16

What Are the Best Ways to Progress a Plank?

The front plank is both one of the most commonly used and misused exercises in the gym. They’re often performed incorrectly, likely due to the fact the being able to hold a front plank for a long time is like wearing a badge of honor. Like any other exercise, you must ask yourself why you’re including it into your workout routine. The front plank is an excellent exercise for building endurance in your core and keeping your spine healthy—both of which are essential prerequisites for developing more dynamic stability that can carryover to your sport or daily activities. So, if the front plank is such a valuable exercise, where does it go wrong?