By Nick Ridpath

Nick is a personal trainer and online coach based out of DMV Iron Gym in Alexandria, Virginia. First introduced to fitness through sports, Nick played division I football before entering the coaching scene. Nick has worked as head of strength and conditioning for a private sports performance gym, as a trainer in PT clinics, and now runs his own in person and remote business. Nick believes in a principles based approach to provide results for his clients. You can best contact him on Instagram @nickridpath_

Load Wins, As Long as We Can Load It

Despite the tremendous amount of “contextual nuance” and clickbait we see on the internet, getting jacked really can be boiled down to a relatively simple premise. 

Historically, the three pillars of hypertrophy consisted of muscle damage, metabolic stress, and mechanical tension. 

Many of the finer interworking mechanisms of the human body are still somewhat unknown; however, the more we learn the more we...

Staying On Top of Continued Education

Strategies to not be overwhelmed.

By: Eric Bugera

• The pace of information entering the continued education space can be daunting.

• Refining your consumption to credible sources and most importantly – actionable content – can declutter your education.
• Ask yourself, “What can I do with this information?”

The Problem

Continued education is a huge market in the fitness industry, primarily because no single certification, degree, or competition can impart all of the knowledge that your clients might need. Depending on your background, trying to parse through the incredible amount of resources available to you on the internet may feel daunting. An overwhelming amount of content exists – much of which attempts to integrate a more evidence-based approach. The appearance of infographics, citations, and the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research is popping up more and more – even on social media. Here’s what...

What Do They Need To Hear

By Eric Bugera

Language matters, but how you wield it matters too.

How you use language should be scaled to the person in front of you. As you learn, experience, and understand exercise physiology to greater degrees – you should become more comfortable with anatomic and biological terms. This can be fantastic for refining the way you interpret client data and how to problem solve.

Although you may have improved vocabulary, attention to detail, and knowledge of the human body – you still need to communicate like a human being. Your client is not (necessarily) a kinesiologist. They are not (necessarily) a trainer, and they most assuredly aren’t you.

When something new is learned, it is very common to view the entire world through this lens; however, the way you view the world and the way you interface with the world needs to be refined just as much as your knowledge and vocabulary.

Can you, as a trainer, understand to a deeper level than...

By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

Don’t Network, Connect

By Nick Ridpath

Nick is a personal trainer and online coach based out of DMV Iron Gym in Alexandria, Virginia. First introduced to fitness through sports, Nick played division I football before entering the coaching scene. Nick has worked as head of strength and conditioning for a private sports performance gym, as a trainer in PT clinics, and now runs his own in person and remote business. Nick believes in a principles based approach to provide results for his clients. You can best contact him on Instagram @nickridpath_

Your network is your net worth, or something like that. 

This is parroted in many industries, but for the most part it is incredibly relevant to business. 

The word “networking” by definition carries no negative connotation; however, its implications can rub some the wrong way. 

In these cases, “networking” is conducted in a purely transactional manner and is hard to hide. If the forming of...

Eric Bugera is a Pre-Script ™ Lab Facilitator. He holds a masters and bachelors degree in Kinesiology in addition to a bachelor of science in human nutritional science. His professional experience is heavily centered on personal training and more recently personal trainer education. Although Eric has a broad scope of knowledge, his graduate studies focused primarily on hypertrophy training.

A Systems Way Of Thinking

Education is meant to expose you to new information – shaping your perspectives and helping you grow. This can be by way of cold facts, personal experiences, case studies, or anything in between.

Education should also be a humbling experience – drawing you ever closer to the conclusion that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.

This is especially true of fitness. The nuts and bolts of exercise physiology, anatomy, and applied biomechanics can set the stage for sweeping progress – but you are always beholden to the human in...

By Jacob Larsen

YOUR LANGUAGE MATTERS

By Nick Ridpath

Nick is a personal trainer and online coach based out of DMV Iron Gym in Alexandria, Virginia. First introduced to fitness through sports, Nick played division I football before entering the coaching scene. Nick has worked as head of strength and conditioning for a private sports performance gym, as a trainer in PT clinics, and now runs his own in person and remote business. Nick believes in a principles based approach to provide results for his clients. You can best contact him on Instagram @nickridpath_

Know Your Intensities

Three of the foundational tenets of the  Pre-Script™ Level 1 are time, distance, and load.

We often view load as being synonymous with the word intensity. 

Higher load = higher intensity

Lower load = lower intensity 

However, we can further break down intensity into two different subcategories – absolute intensity and relative intensity. These two subdivisions will give us more specific definitions for broader...

By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

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

Understanding Reciprocal & Autogenic Inhibition: Anatomy & Physiology

This concept is an interesting one and quite a rabbit hole to dive into. It has many applications, but I have distilled it down to basically being a more efficient way to warm up the body for exercise, specifically resistance training and even more so at higher intensities and loads. 

To understand this concept, first we need to understand that muscles work in pairs that perform opposing actions: the hamstrings flex the knee and the quads extend it; the adductors adduct the hip (wow) and the glute max/med/min abduct it; the triceps extend the elbow and the biceps flex it, and so on. These muscles when paired are agonists and antagonists: the agonist is performing the contraction and the antagonist is the opposing muscle group. When the quads extend the knee, the antagonists are the...

APPLICATION IS LEARNING

"The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action"

This impressionable line caught my attention recently and I find myself referencing it over and over again.

As a subscriber to this newsletter you’re likely someone who is passionate about continuing their education. Higher education, continued education courses, books, podcasts, and articles can all hold a tremendous amount of value when it comes to learning and improving our skill set as coaches. Understanding basic principles and having a general knowledge about how the human body works is essential to being a valuable coach. The issue arises when we are drowned in information but we don’t know what to do with it – we must learn to filter what really matters. 

Knowledge too often stays in the classroom. In this day and age all it takes is a few clicks on Instagram or YouTube to find an array of opinions from overly-confident but unactionable content providers. Their chief...