StansellFit

I rarely see fitness professionals talk about how to get in the right headspace for lifting, but I thought this conversation I had with a client might be illuminating for some.

Effort is a fundamental component of success in lifting. If you can’t call up the beast inside of you, you’ll be hard pressed to make long-term progress.

Some people may be propelled by the idea of saving loved ones through heroic deeds or fueled by extreme animus (I’m not one to judge as long as you direct it at the weight).

My approach is the opposite; I turn the thinking part of my brain off and go into 🦈 mode.

If I don’t do this, there is too much opportunity for stray thoughts to fragment my attention. Effort is HIGHLY correlated with your ability to stay locked in.

Find whatever way you can to get to that place and you’ll be crushing your sets in no time.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time you probably have seen me talk about load management for decreasing injury risk. It probably is the number 1 factor, but another often overlooked factor is general movement.

It’s not enough to move during the 2-3 hours a week of training sessions. Not only will that leave you short of hitting movement targets for general health, it can put you at greater risk for aches and pains during the workouts themselves.

Connective tissue is viscoelastic and regular movement keeps it fluid and more responsive. To sit on your butt all day everyday between sessions and then do a normal workout with heavy weights creates a larger discrepancy in workload than you’d see with regular activity.

Bottom line, don’t just do your workouts and call it a week, both for your general health and for your tissue readiness.

This is a (slightly) oversimplified explanation of how muscle growth and metabolism work, but the sentiment is true.

Strength training isn’t DIRECTLY increasing your weight. It’s possible it could be affecting your appetite, but it’s not putting calories in your mouth.

But if you’re serious about building strength and muscle, you might want to loosen the reigns a little on weight changes—unless you’re already markedly overweight.

Training tells your body to build muscle but your diet will ultimately decide how much weight you gain over the long-term.

I am NOT saying anything you do in the gym will get you the results you’re looking for. What I AM saying is that limiting yourself too much on what you’re ALLOWED to do or MUST do in the gym can kill the experience and is probably unnecessary.

My lower body training has been put on the back burner for a while as my running has gotten more consistent.

Not only do I not feel like I’m failing in some way, I’m enjoying training and feeling great. Of course I still do legs but I was holding myself to an arbitrary standard for what I was SUPPOSED to be doing.

That’s the message here. Resistance training is a good thing. But don’t let people shame you or telling you you’re doing it wrong if you’re not meeting their standard.

Clients ask me all the time about abs and how to get them. The formula is quite simple but that doesn’t make pursuing them easy or worthwhile.

You need:

- Relatively low body fat, but how low is predicated on where you store fat. Someone who stores fat in their midsection will have to get to lower body fat levels to see abs than someone who has a more even or lower distribution of fat.

- To TRAIN your abs to make them bigger. Crunches, sit-ups, leg lifts, chops, twists to name a few categories. Don’t just rely on the big lifts covering it. They CAN, but direct ab work will be even more effective.

- More muscle in general. This is a personal suggestion, but unless you’re cool with the emaciated chic look like Christian Bale in The Machinist, generally being more muscular will improve nutrient partitioning and overall body composition, which is probably better long-term for building a hard and visible midsection. Otherwise you’re relying solely on low body fat for visibility.

You don’t need abs to be healthy or fit, but that’s what you need if you’re dead set on it.

Consistency isn’t just about gains. It’s about maintaining tissue integrity and creating a more predictable environment.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people stuck endlessly in a cycle of missing workouts, trying to pick up where they left off, and then getting injured because they didn’t account for their now reduced capacity.

Again, we are what we repeatedly do. You can’t train sporadically and then expect to maintain any sort of readiness.

Keep showing up, so your body has a regular input that tells it what it needs to be PREPARED to do.

I’ve got evening availability for private or semi-private training if you’re in Atlanta and want to get strong the right way. Head to the link in my bio to apply. 💪🏼

You can absolutely get stronger doing an exercise once a week. But you will eventually run out of room with what you can do and recover from in a day before you should add another day of that thing.

Lifting isn’t just about building muscle, it’s also about learning the movements well enough that you can correctly apply the force too.

If you want to get better at squats, squats multiple times per week

If you want to get better at bench, bench multiple times per week.

If you want to get better at pull-ups, do pull-ups multiple times per week.

You get the picture.

It sounds so simple but people seem to totally forget this when creating their workouts.

Do more of the things you want to get better at!!!

You cannot always make incremental changes in the same environment with the same people who are used to the old version of you.

One of the hardest parts of lasting change is not just saying goodbye to the old you. It may mean removing people from your life.

We all want to believe our friends and family will be supportive when we want to improve our lives, but it doesn’t always pan out that way.

Because they are people and they may prioritize their own discomfort over your wellbeing.

Sometimes change requires a scary and seismic shift in who you are and who you surround yourself with.