RX'D Radio Podcast

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By Jake Larsen

Beginning with wrestling and soccer, Jake has been immersed in fitness nearly his whole life.  Personal training and studying exercise in college were the natural progression of that passion.  Competing locally in bodybuilding and powerlifting, Jake currently studies exercise at university and does online coaching at Jackalstrength.com.

WEIGHT MANAGEMENT IS A CONTINUUM

People come up to me all the time to say, “I tried (insert any weight-loss strategy) and it didn’t work.”

I can tell from their opening line that the problem isn’t their diet strategy; the problem is their attitude.

There’s a huge difference between weight loss and weight management.  Weight management involves gaining weight, losing weight, and maintaining weight over long periods of time.

Weight loss is not as easy as your favorite Instagram model makes it seem.  Yeah, weight loss can be boiled down to eating less and moving more (if you don’t care about health, performance, or appearance), but it ...

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By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

Abdurahmaan is a Pre-Script coach from Ottawa who loves reading, traveling, and training.

WHY YOU NEED TO CARE

The coaching field is utterly unique, especially when measured against other fields in the general health industry (see infectious diseases, diabetes, obesity, etc.). Many of those medical fields have been around for much longer than coaching and personal training as we understand it today, so much more research has gone into those fields and a larger amount of data has been collected. From that, many more objective measurements and conclusions have been made in those areas relative to the fitness industry. Their rulebook is more fleshed out, and there are simple equations that can be used to solve the problems. At a surface level, understanding how those illnesses work can be simple, and for many, the process of treatment or medical prescription is a well-established pattern. This is simplifying the problem a lot, and it is not meant to take away f...

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By Jacob Larsen

Beginning with wrestling and soccer, Jake has been immersed in fitness nearly his whole life.  Personal training and studying exercise in college were the natural progression of that passion.  Competing locally in bodybuilding and powerlifting, Jake currently studies exercise at university and does online coaching at Jackalstrength.com.

THE HIERARCHY OF GROWTH

Looking to get stronger?  Bust through a plateau?  Lose weight or gain muscle mass? 

Growth is rarely a linear progression.  Most often we experience a burst of progress followed by a period of stagnation, we seem to be just getting by until the next burst comes along.  This natural process may seem strangely out of our control.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, it seems to come down to luck.

The reality is that there’s no luck to it.  Just like with every high-performance system, success is limited by our ability to find and improve the “weakest links”.  Understanding how to trigger growth is a matt...

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By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

Abdurahmaan is a Pre-Script coach from Ottawa who loves reading, traveling, and training.

"STRETCHED POSITION" VERSUS "LENGTHENED MUSCLE"

Too often in fitness and specifically exercise selection, the terms “stretched” and “lengthened” are used interchangeably. This is a mistake, in my opinion. Words matter, and how you define them even more so. Let’s differentiate between them:

“Stretched” is used to refer to a position in an exercise, when the eccentric is completed and the concentric contraction is about to be initiated. This is completely separate from the anatomical length of a muscle. Let’s look at two different examples to illustrate this. In a preacher curl, at the bottom of the rep when the elbow is almost locked, this is termed the stretched position of the exercise. It is not lengthened in an absolute sense, but it is experiencing the maximal stretch possible within the constraints of that exercise being done correctly. Another example is a sea...

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By Kyle Coogs

Kyle is a strength & conditioning coach residing in Massachusetts. He's spent the past few years working primarily alongside hockey athletes, among others. More recently he had the opportunity to assist with pre-season testing for an NHL organization. He also has some skin in the strength game, having competed in powerlifting for the past 6 years.

Self Efficacy

In October of 2017 while working as a strength and conditioning intern, I had the opportunity to listen to Bob Tewksbury speak to upcoming athletes. Tewksbury is a retired professional pitcher who began working as a Mental Skills Coach within Major League Baseball following his athletic career. I expected most of his discussion points to focus on visualization, positive self-talk, and other common focal points in the sports psychology field. Instead, he recalled conversations with professional athletes and touched on a particular situation that reverberated itself in my mind due to its far reaching application....