I get to bed early most nights. But Friday night is the worst. I’m lucky if I make it to 9pm, especially in the winter. For one, it's the end of a long week of getting up at 4:30 and I'm just tired. But another reason is that Saturday is leg day. Always. I stopped assigning workouts to specific days of the week years ago. No “Chest Day Monday” in my world. I train Push-Pull-Legs and just follow...

The Air Force had a big problem. At the height of WW2, planes were returning to base riddled with bullet holes. So the military decided it needed better ways to protect the planes and the crew. The holes were concentrated around the tail, body, and wings, so they set forth to reinforce these areas. That is until Abraham Wald, a statistician, saw they were only looking at the damage on planes...

Weight training is the greatest form of exercise. Its transformative effect on the body has no equal. It's also our best defense against the effects of aging and modern sedentary lifestyle. But while there's no substitute for lifting, it does have a perfect complement: walking. A brisk walk might not be a momentous calorie burner (neither is weight training for that matter) but that’s a very...

In the 80’s Van Halen was the biggest rock band in the world. Their live performances were legendary, as was their artist rider, a part of the performance contract that specifies everything the artist requires to perform that day. Van Halen’s long rider had "a large bowl of M&Ms, all brown ones removed.” Seriously. This was dismissed as typical rock star diva behaviour. But it turns out it...

The Big Rocks of a diet & exercise plan are surprisingly flexible. You don’t have to follow specific workout splits or work in certain rep ranges or include a bunch of "must—do” exercises. Calories don’t have to be the same every day and you can even work off a 7-day average. The weekly average approach also applies to daily step count, a simple indicator of how much you move but a BIG...

Priority #1 in my coaching is Minimize Injury Risk. And if you never train with a barbell you'll never suffer a weight training injury. Sure there are exceptions. But the larger point below stands. If you’ve injured yourself working out (especially an acute injury, like something going pop) the odds are it involved big barbell exercises like deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, barbell...