Globo gyms – a guilty pleasure?

If you read any of my strength training posts, you’ll know that I often sing the praises of specialized strength training gyms – excellent equipment, like minded individuals, positive attitudes, blah, blah, blah. It’s true, all of it. If you are seriously interested in strength-training and you’re lucky enough to have specialized gym in your […]

POWERLIFTERSvs. BODYBUILDERS – CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

Bodybuilders are the low hanging fruit of the weightlifting world. So visible, so easily parodied…And the sport is so incredibly weird, at least in it’s current form. To win a bodybuilding competition you must look completely unnatural on the stage – roll-on tan, dangerously dehydrated, the works. Let’s acknowledge the elephant the room, i.e. the […]

Bench prescient

Yesterday I did 6×5 @150kg in bench-press. I was training at the club and nobody else was there. Now, granted, I used a heavy competition bench with really sturdy safety arms, but heavy benching is always a scary proposition. Nothing will make you besmirch your undies faster than that feeling that you’re going to miss […]

Are you what you eat?

If this was a newspaper, this post would akin to a “Letter to the Editor”. I’m not a dietician, nor do I play one on TV. The opinions I express are just that, opinions, albeit backed by a certain amount of research. The question I’ve been pondering is what is the best sustainable dietary regime […]

Gym Fouls – Don’t be that guy

Mirror, mirror, on the wall: OK, I get it that some people are serious about their bodybuilding and I get that you need to check the status of your “canvas” from time time but nonstop checking yourself out in the mirror is well creepy in my book. Hey, Abs guy, kudos on your diet progress but gazing longingly at your abs whilst holding your tank top up in your teeth? Get a room.

Tulum – Douchebag mecca or victim of it’s own success?

If one were to magically procure Admin rights to Instagram and was able eliminate all post from Tulum, I’m fairly certain that’d reduce total content on the platform by at roughly 30 percent. Why is that? What makes makes Tulum the ideal backdrop for the willfully self-obsessed narcissists weirdly expending a great deal of energy […]

What not going to the gym feels like.

We are 2 months into this pandemic and gym rats the world over are agonizingly jonesing for an “iron fix”. Yes, not being able to train really, truly sucks. Some of the ways it blows are obvious and there is also some unexpected “suckage” which I will outline shortly. Surprisingly, though, there a few silver […]

Life imitates meme…or why the gym is always packed the first week of January.

It commonly said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And yet, in spite of decades of gym-going experience every December I find myself tut-tutting at all those lame “new year’s resolutioners” memes and snarky posts to forums and Facebook groups. Every year I tell […]

What to do when you don’t feel like training…

Sooner or later, it happens to everyone. You take your physical training regimen for granted and little by little, it becomes less of a priority. Whereas before you’d broach no interruption to your training program, now work and family stress become a valid reason for missing workouts. Inevitably, as your training become crappier, so too […]

Why is this so popular? Rant o’ the day

Today I’m going to bend one of the golden rules of this blog The gym should be a judgement free zone, not in the infantile, disempowering “here, have a donut” Planet Fitness sense, but rather a positive place where you do challenging things. Mirin’ is encouraged, but haughty disdain of one’s fellow gym-goer is the […]