RX'D Radio Podcast

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.

Overtraining

Part 3

Recovery

            Ask TikTok what recovery means, and you’ll likely get something about foam rolling, massages, and ice baths.  Or blue-light glasses.  I enjoy a good massage as much as the next person, but unfortunately that is what some call “majoring in the minors”.  These things can (possibly) improve recovery, but they certainly play a minor role at best.

            Recovery from exercise means first and foremost: rest.  As much as we want to expedite...

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.

Overtraining

Part 2

Training

            First off, nothing in this article gives you an excuse to not work hard.  If you’re training intelligently, you can work hard and avoid overtraining.  If you’re looking for an excuse to take things easy, don’t waste your time.

            A principle to begin: every activity that you do requires some level of recovery before you can do it again.  If you deadlift your max in a powerlifting contest, don’t expect to do it again for a...

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.

Overtraining

Overtraining is a term that gets thrown around the gym like cryptocurrency; everyone uses it, but no one understands it.  Ask anyone what overtraining is and you’ll get answers ranging from “Your nerves get fried” to “You’re just working too hard”.  You’ll find a lot of people who use overtraining as an excuse to never actually work hard.  Occasionally you’ll find people who “don’t believe in it”. (I wouldn’t believe in it either if I just did yoga for 30 minutes a day and then returned to my sedentary lifestyle).

Let’s...

By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

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

Internal Vs. External Stability

Do you feel like your workouts have been missing something? Does something about their structure feel off? One of the key concepts to understand about exercise selection is internal versus external stability. It is extremely important to differentiate between the two because without it, your workouts within a day will lack structure and intent. 

Stability can be described as our muscles’ capacity to resist force. That stability is internal (i.e. created by the body). Stability requirements can change based on the exercise: for example, the stability your body needs to perform a dumbbell lateral raise for medial delts compared to the stability required for a max low bar squat is vastly different. That is internal stability. External stability is exactly as it sounds: external constraints to an exercise that remove the...

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.

Behavior Change for Health and Fitness

The experts on behavior change and habit formation are not medical professionals.  They’re not gym owners or fitness gurus.  It’s not even life coaches (sorry guys).  If that were the case, the world would be a completely different place.  When you went to the doctor and he said, “You probably need to eat less fast food,” you actually would.  When your trainer said, “I need you to drink more water,” you actually would.  Unfortunately, most of the health community has very little idea what behavior change looks...

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_

Performance is the Proxy

This is one of those iconic Shallow-ism’s that I find myself using incredibly often. There’s so much value in this phrase because it can act as a major guiding pillar for how we deliver results through our coaching.

This may seem a bit ambiguous from the outside looking in, appearing as a smoke bomb without added context for clarity. Let’s dive into what exactly this means and unpack how we can use this as a cornerstone of...

By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

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

UTILIZING RESISTANCE PROFILES IN EXERCISE ORDER

Out of the plethora of factors that can affect programming and optimize it in certain ways, exercise order is one of the biggest rocks to overturn. Effective exercise order can change a workout drastically. It can improve your load selection and management, keep your fatigue levels lower, and even reduce risk of injury down the road. It seems too good to be true, but it is: intelligent exercise order is wildly underrated, and adjustments can be made for every population and to suit every goal. Selecting appropriate and intelligent exercises is an applaudable first step, but then the challenge becomes fitting it into a day in a sound order. This in turn will affect your programming across the week and keep you pushing for longer. Bear in mind that the following suggestions are good heuristics to refer to, but...

By James Thayer

James is an Assistant Director of Fitness and Wellness, educator, presenter and Pre-Script Coach. He believes the best approach to learning is to engage, educate and empower individuals and communities. James utilizes coaching, programming, performance and movement proficiency to set a standard for conversation to application.

Coupling Exercises on the Gait Cycle Continuum

Pre-Script utilizes a warm-up pattern called the Gait Cycle Continuum which integrates gait cycle mechanics in preparation for lower body training days. The Sprinter Pose, Single Leg RDL, Hip Airplane and Forward Lunge comprise the continuum and uses mobility, stability, strength principles to prepare for the exercise demands and positions experienced during a training session.

The priority should be placed on becoming proficient in the movements individually before progressing to coupling the exercises. The proficiency of each sets a foundation for performance moving forward into more complex and...

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...

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...