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How to Date a Personal Trainer and is it even a good idea

Personal trainers leave an impact everyday

Think about the ways in which you’ve ever felt inspired. I get inspired by people enjoying their workouts. It is wonderful to surround yourself with individuals, groups, and organizations who add value to your life.

The workout always comes first

It’s about the workout, dummy

Coaching means investing in people

When you invest your time in others, does it make you feel good about yourself? We all leave an impact on others and sometimes that impact can be quite compelling and attractive.

Filling a hole on the web and Seattle

This doesn’t need to look like a guide even though it involves a few practical steps

Warning

Personal trainers do not want to date their clients for professional reasons, so sparking their passion would be a very naughty thing to do.

How to Date a Personal Trainer

WHAT YOU DO WITH THIS INFORMATION IS NONE OF MY BUSINESS

1. Be there to train and to workout 

People come in many shapes and sizes, so let your personality shine as you work hard to improve your fitness.

2. Proximity and showing signs of availability 

This is common sense. If you give more time and opportunity to interaction, then at least you can test the waters. Stay around and stretch after class or when the person has a break.

3. Exercise and be fit together

Whether you want to be the workout partner or perhaps you get off on being told what to do, working out together is a great way to get excited about each other.

Don’t look too deep into it

Personal trainers often have outgoing personalities since they have many opportunities for banter.

Thank you for reading this article and stay tuned…

 

 

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Why Form and Function should be the focus more than just aesthetic ideal

There is some inspiration about the movement of others

Just think about all of the ways in which people can move. Everyday we display mobility, movement patterns, and how we interact physically with the environment.

Do whatever it takes to get your heart rate up

Do whatever it takes to get your heart rate up

Often we move for practice, whether it be football players doing drills or dancers coordinating moves, the way we move represents something about us.

We can look at fitness as movement

Maybe it’s not what you look like, or that you don’t look like anyone else. Fitness is expressed more through one’s movement. And there are many ways to get active.

Effective methods include resistance training, HIIT, strength, and bodyweight training.

Why not get stronger? There are many ways you could invest your time. Do something that supports EVERYTHING else.

Anyway that’s my words for now, stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

Orangetheory Fitness Seattle Orangetheory Seattle Physical Fitness by Dre
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Have a goal for every workout: Fat Cells respond to progressive resistance by getting smaller!

What is the goal of this workout today?

We all come into the workout room with different needs, strengths, and expectations. To some, not having a specific goal for every workout is actually unfathomable.

My goal for this workout

Keep track of specific exercises that have been done in the past and perform in more progressively challenging ways. These techniques help you to burn more fat:

  • Perform the exercise faster on the concentric, and slower on the eccentric
  • Use more resistance than before
  • Greater amount of reps using the same weight
  • Decrease rest intervals without sacrificing heavy weight
  • Using heavy weights in a larger range of motion
  • Improving your form and technique with weights that you struggled with before
  • Combination of the above
Time constraints can be motivating, as is some healthy Orangetheory Fitness competition

Time constraints can be motivating, as is some healthy Orangetheory Fitness competition

I don’t often speak to these accomplishments even if it is noticeable it helps me stay motivated in fitness.

Examples of a good goal to have

Let’s talk about a treadmill goal to begin with. Of course we’re following a HIIT program and the ideal length for a treadmill workout is between 20-30 minutes.

You can try to improve your times in the following ways:

  1. Your one-mile time
  2. Your half-mile time
  3. Your quarter mile time
  4. Your tenth of a mile time
Kyle Anderson from Seattle on the right running hard

Kyle Anderson from Seattle on the right running hard

You can further improve fat loss by:

  1. Your .25 mile run at 3% incline
  2. Your .25 mile run at 5% incline
  3. Your .25 mile run at 7% incline

Then on a later workout once you have recovered, do your .25 mile run at 1% incline and you will likely be able to run faster than you did before at that particular incline!

Thus progress! Fat cells should get smaller due to this physical and neural progression in muscular contraction.

Once you have accomplished it, nobody can take that away from you!

It’s yours.

Now believe in it and go with it

Orangetheory Fitness Seattle Orangetheory Seattle Physical Fitness by Dre Weightloss Now
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Maximizing your Treadmill Intervals for Fat Loss, Performance and Unlimited Benefit

Will this blog help you get unlimited benefits? Maybe that’s a big statement

I’ve spent years now testing various treadmill interval blocks. Being native to the Pacific Northwest, I can run outdoors whenever I want but there are many times when I prefer to run indoors on a treadmill.

Treadmill intervals, if you go to OTFSeattle you'll recognize a face or two from this special Ft. Lauderdale workout

Treadmill intervals, if you go to OTFSeattle you’ll recognize a face or two from this special Ft. Lauderdale workout

The benefit of running on a treadmill:

  • Since it is a machine, you can find it easier to quantitatively track, record and achieve parameters of progression.
  • Increase resistance by simply increasing the incline
  • There is never a need to go downhill, so there may be less stress on the knees and the quads will be subjected to less stress and therefore less soreness.
  • Typically, less soreness means you can up your training frequency, thus getting faster results (so long as you stay healthy).

Designing effective treadmill interval blocks

Treadmill intervals are more a mental game than anything else. Almost every healthy person who uses a treadmill regularly can run faster than the maximum speed they’ve ever used on a treadmill. People just need a little encouragement! That’s why HIIT classes like Orangetheory Fitness in Seattle (my home studio Capitol Hill!!) are so popular and effective.

Example of a progressive HIIT block on the treadmill

Since teaching exercise classes to over a thousand people in Seattle, I’ve started focusing on how to coach these treadmill blocks even more effectively than before. Example of a recent All-Out block I coached my classes on.

  • 30 second all out at 1% (exerciser chooses their most intense speed possible for 30 sceonds)
  • 45 second walking recovery
  • 30 second all out using the same speed as last time, but at 3% incline
  • 45 second walking recovery
  • 30 second all out at 1% incline, starts off as an aggressive push, and halfway through exercisers are coached to peak at their maximum speed (even if only for seconds at a time)

After the block was over and people were walking for recovery on the treadmills, I asked people to raise their hand if that was the fastest they have ever gone on the treadmill. More than a quarter of people raised their hands, knowing they have achieved something they never achieved before and thus breaking another mental barrier which could have held them back from their fitness goals.

Kyle Anderson in the teal from Seattle, Washington. He's our fitness and business inspiration

Kyle Anderson in the teal from Seattle, Washington. He is one our fitness and business inspirations and a leader for the local team here

HIIT is here to stay

Exercise science tells us this. Workouts only need to be between 20-60 minutes long and the intensity can vary from minute to minute throughout the training. There is no better way to release that cocktail of beneficial fat-burning hormones in the hours after your workout. Good recovery from high intensity training guarantees the accelerated decrease in fat-cell size.

Stay tuned my people

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Why Bodyweight Training is Essential for Fitness

Bodyweight exercise has existed before any other kind.

Whether humans were running along the fertile ground near rivers or performing feats of strength as ritual, the ability to have control over one’s body is more human than any other training.

These guys didn’t wake up one day and do a handstand… no — they trained for it.

Rediscover the benefits of bodyweight exercise

  • Exercise in a natural range of motion
  • Metabolic boosts, calorie burning
  • Improved recovery capacity and less stress on the central nervous system
  • Typically supports joint health and muscles which stabilize the joint
  • Lean muscle tone

Why don’t more people do bodyweight training?

Even though there are many subcultures of fitness which are entirely dedicated to bodyweight training, the truth is that most people have a failure to appreciate the difficulty of bodyweight exercises.

The Planche is a static hold requiring tension throughout the entire body. This is an advanced position requiring many months of progression and exercises as well as a lean physique with low body fat.

The result, however, is an incredibly fit individual. This is just an example of how bodyweight exercises can increase in difficulty by changing the levers of the exercise. What was once a push up position now supports the entire body in the air.

The cons of bodyweight exercise

Gaining the strength, skill, coordination to perform advanced variations is difficult enough. Moreover, most people simply don’t have the physique (at this point in time) to be able to perform advanced exercises.

So most people are forced to begin with simple variations on bodyweight exercises and they feel very humbled by how much trouble they have. Instead of doing bodyweight exercises, many gym-goers go off and use implements such as dumbbells and machines. People with large body mass or people with significant excess body fat will have difficulty performing bodyweight exercises.

“Older” guys can do it too. Jack Lalane showing his fingertip push up skills.

On the flip side, people with very LOW body mass (skinny people) may have more trouble building muscle mass from bodyweight exercises alone because their bodies are not forced to move as much weight. For example, if a 130 pound guy does 20 chin ups, versus a 200 pound guy who does 15 chin ups — who do you think will have bigger arms and back as a result of chin up practice? Most likely the larger guy.

Embrace the challenge

This man realized the benefits of bodyweight training in association with weighted implement training.

The more I learn about the human body, the more I realize that bodyweight exercises should be foundational and not supplemental. The joint health benefits alone are significant enough, and then you should also remember the coordination and functional benefits as well.

Physical Fitness by Dre