How Difficult was that Exercise?
“On a scale ranging from 1 to 10, how difficult was that exercise?” That’s the most common question I ask throughout the day. From youth athletes looking to get stronger, to the athlete making the transition from high school to college, to the everyday man or woman just trying to improve their health in our fitness classes, that question will be always asked to help the person grow. Like everything else in life, we have to want to challenge ourselves and step out of our comfort bubble in order to truly improve.
5 Tips For Reducing Your Risk For Lower Body Injuries
"What could I have done to prevent this?" I asked myself that question everyday for five months while struggling to walk up the front steps of my middle school in crutches. When I was fourteen I suffered an awful ankle injury playing basketball. I was in a cast for what felt like a lifetime. I was miserable and extremely upset that I couldn’t play basketball. When the cast was finally removed, I went through physical therapy and that's when my passion for exercise science blossomed. After about two sessions it dawned
Fostering Emotional Resiliency and a Growth Mindset in Young Athletes
“Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable, but is actually the path itself.” —Pema Chodron At Olympia Fitness + Performance, we train athletes who have ambitious goals relative to competing in high school, college and beyond. We support them in their athletic development, and also help them to develop emotional competency for the long haul. What does that mean? Often the ability to manage the disappointment, frustration, and deep sense of loss that comes with perceived failure and making mistakes. Stop and think about this fact for a moment: The
Rebuilding Our Relationships with Food
Food. Food is delicious. Food is comforting. Food is fuel. Food is needed. Food connects us to others. It helps us stay connected with people, whether it’s family dinners, holiday celebrations or even a good night out with friends. Just as these relationships have an impact on our health, our relationship with food also plays a major role in our overall wellness. How often do you stop and really think about your relationship with what you’re consuming? Are you eating to live? Or do you live to eat? It can be hard to face and may be ignored by
Maintaining Mobility: An Essential for the Aging Golfer
Yes it’s true, if you don’t use it, you lose it. And considering the way that we go through our day to day lives most of us aren’t using it, our mobility that is. Unfortunately, the amount of time that we’re required to be at a desk or in a car beginning in our teens starts to add up over time. As the responsibilities mount, the time allotted for fitness tends to decrease. You went from being active for two to three hours each day as a teenager, to trying
Conditioning Training For Performance
Strength and conditioning coaches occasionally direct the majority of their focus on their athlete’s movement quality and strength development while mistakenly letting their conditioning take a back seat. I’ve also noticed that within the industry we’ve developed a habit of referring to ourselves as just “strength coaches”. Perhaps because it’s simply easier to say, but we need to remind ourselves that we are strength and conditioning coaches. We cannot view the conditioning aspect of training as supplemental because then we’d be doing our athletes a huge disservice. It’s no secret
Stop letting your core training go to waste!
Good form is always the most important thing in exercise. It’s more important than your range of motion, it’s more important than how much resistance you can use, and it’s more important than whether or not you finish all of your reps. If you can’t maintain proper form then an exercise becomes useless in the sense that it simply reinforces bad movement patterns. When someone doesn’t understand what an exercise should feel like and you tell them to move a body part from point A to point B, their body
What is Physical Therapy Post-Rehab?
The Physical Therapy (PT) Post-Rehab program at Olympia Fitness + Performance is a collaboration between your strength coach, your physical therapist and you, the client. It is a focused program where you can work on taking the next step from PT to active life. Each party has distinct yet overlapping responsibilities. The physical therapist diagnoses the source of your pain and dysfunction, and prescribes a treatment plan to bring you to the point where you are largely pain-free. At this stage, you then transfer to working with a strength coach, who
Knee Injuries and Female Athletes
The last thing any athlete or parent wants to hear is that they need a whole year to recover from a serious knee injury. Too often young female athletes suffer from knee injuries that sideline them for a good chunk of time and take them away from the joy of playing their respected sport. Sadly, female athletes are more prone to knee injuries than their male counterparts. There are multiple reasons for this and they include anatomy, core stability, and conditioning. So what can young women do? Should they avoid participating
Exercise V. Training – Athletes Must Understand the Difference
There's an old motto in the world of athletics "the best type of ability is availability". High school athlete's account for an estimated 2 million injuries and 500,000 doctors visits every year. According to the CDC, more than half of all sport-related injuries are preventable. So what’s the real issue here? If you ask me, based on observation and talking to young athletes, they’re either not putting enough effort into taking care of their bodies or they’re getting training advice from a friend or a sport coach who isn’t qualified