5 Things I Like: Brandon's Picks

Rogue R-4 Power Rack
I put this beast in my garage so I can get seriously strong without leaving Disruptive HQ. It has Westside hole spacing for the bench press range, comes with some band pegs, and will still be kicking when my grandchildren are gone.

The AeroPress Coffee Maker
This thing is magic. In fact, I gave up my french press coffee when I got the AeroPress. Home brewed Americanos for about 30 bones. That's hard to beat.

Inov-8 f-lite 192
These are my go to athletic shoes. Super comfortable, zero drop, fiery styles. What else could you ask for?

OlyCustoms Weightlifting Shoes CHECK OUT THIS LINK!!!
What's better than training in a solid pair of weightlifting shoes? Training in a solid pair of Iron Man weightlifting shoes. A buddy of mine is customizing your shoes, to your theme, and does a quality job. Check his work out on instagram @olycustoms.

Captains of Crush Grip Trainers
These things are the top of the line crush grip trainers. If you can close the #3, you are probably strong enough to pick up Mjolnir. Sorry Thor.

3 Ways to Stop Missing Lifts in the Gym

I wake up pretty early to get to work. I usually try to get ready in the dark to avoid disturbing my wife. This morning as I was leaving my bedroom to get the morning coffee going, in the dark, I missed the door and walked right into the door frame. It's not quite like hitting a brick wall, but it hurt, and it momentarily stopped my progress.

Some of you guys and gals are doing the same thing in the gym. No, you're probably not running into door frames (if you are, I bet it's embarrassing), but you probably are missing too many reps in your training. When it happens, sometimes it hurts your body, it always hurts your confidence, and it definitely hurts your progress.

Body

Failed lifts always seem to be more taxing to my body than made lifts. On top of that, you tend to be out of position when you miss. I rarely see someone miss simply because the weight was too heavy. It is almost always the combination of a heavy weight and bad form on that particular lift. Putting your body in compromising positions with heavy loads is a recipe for disaster in the gym. Even when you save bad lifts, it's inefficient and therefore puts a higher stress on your body which is harder to recover from.

A good example of this in my training is muscle ups. I'm not as consistent as I'd like to be (give me some credit though, I've done muscle ups over 250lbs body weight) and when I miss, it hurts my shoulders. Miss enough and I end up with some pretty achy shoulders for a few days which impacts the rest of my training.

Mind

As a competitor, missing lifts in the gym can get into your head before a competition. I had a few rough days before my last meet that resulted in some shaky expectations going into the bench press. For a lot of the people, a missed lift can lead to fear of that weight or that exercise in general.

Sometimes we talk about a lift or a weight "getting in your head." That essentially means you're afraid of it and instead of you working with the barbell to get stronger, it becomes your adversary. When the bar is your enemy, it always wins. It can always be heavier, it never gets tired, it doesn't need to recover, and you can't psyche it out.

Progress

You don't get stronger from the reps you don't complete. If you are doing a simple 5x5 program to build strength and you aren't getting all of your reps, you might not be getting sufficient stress to drive adaptation and progress. Even worse, if you're injured by missing a lift, you have time away from training where you not only don't progress, you actually regress.

Progress is one of the biggest motivators for people to keep training. When you hit a plateau, if you don't know what to do to get moving again, it can be a slippery slope back to the couch. No one likes banging their head against the wall trying the same lifts with the same weights over and over again only to fail over and over again.

So what do I do?

Here are three things you need to do if you consistently miss lifts. 

First, you must address your weaknesses. Are you missing lifts because your lower back is too weak? Lower back weakness is a huge culprit in missing the big lifts like squats, cleans, and deadlifts. If you can't keep your back extended under a load and tend to round or fold forwards, there's your sign. If that's you, it's time to start doing some weighted back extensions, banded good mornings, or other low back exercises to build up that link in the chain.

As a general rule, your weak links will be hamstrings, low back, abs, and triceps. I know that because, as Clint Darden says, everyone has weak hamstrings, low backs, abs, and triceps. Start chipping away at your weaknesses to stop missing lifts in the gym!

Second, back off the weight a little bit. This is almost too easy to give as advice, but it's something frustrated lifters need to hear sometimes. Don't let your eyes be bigger than your biceps. It's okay to back off the weight a little bit. You're not a failure, you don't suck at lifting, and constantly banging your head against the wall missing heavy weights isn't going to help anyway.

By resetting the load, your body will have some time to recover and allow you to come back to the heavier weights refreshed and ready to work. This is a common tactic, especially with newer lifters to keep adding weight to the bar over a longer period of time. As a rule, it's hard to get unstuck at a plateau than it is to keep moving intelligently forward by taking planned periods of reduced work to let you recover. It's better to take 3 steps forward and 1 step back for a long time than to take 10 steps forward and fall over dead.

Third, you need to improve your technique. This is the key to being more efficient and improving your lifts while staying healthy and safe. If you're experiencing pain in your training, 10 times out of 10 your technique needs work. Being more efficient in the lifts, or doing them as technically perfect as you can, lets you express all of your strength on a particular lift. It also lets you lift in the safest positions. As machines, we are designed so that the strongest positions we can put ourselves in are also the safest ones.

Really making strides in improving technique usually requires some coaching. I am a coach, and when my squat wasn't feeling right, I hired a coach to take a look at it and help me fix it. You can do a lot by filming your own training and coaching yourself like a client. On the other hand, I tend to second guess my coaching for myself, I can't be as objective as another coach can be looking at me, and I just flat don't always make time to look at my own training. By paying someone else to look at it, they have a pretty good incentive to spend the necessary time.

Conclusion

If you're regularly missing your lifts in the gym, you aren't going to make progress in your training. It's probably been very frustrating and can drive you to distraction. In order to stop missing all the time, address your weaknesses, back off the weight, and get some coaching to improve your technique. This path has worked for countless lifters, and I promise it will work for you too. By taking ego out of the equation and putting in the work now, your training will not only start moving again, but it will keep moving because now you know what to do when things are getting rough in the gym.

Goals: Are you too busy...

Go ask 5 people how they're doing. They'll probably all say, "Good." If you ask them one more time chances are they'll say, "I'm really busy." I bet you've told several people that you're really busy in the last week. And, I get it, you probably are really busy.

We have the mentality that if something is sitting empty that it needs to be filled. Don't believe me? Look at all the closets in your house. Are they full? Yep. Can you remember the last time you used something stored in them? Nope. Are all the flat surfaces in your house covered in stuff? Probably. Do you go by them thinking, "I really need to clean that stuff up?" I know I do. Why don't you go ahead and do it? Probably because you feel like you're too busy and there are too many other pressing concerns.

You probably do the same thing with your free time. I tend to look for things to do if I have some down time. I can tackle this project for work or do that big task around the house. Someone invites me out for lunch or we have people over for dinner to entertain for the evening. Somehow all of my time gets taken up before I realize I even had some free time. The result is that rather than doing the things that I think are really important, it all gets crowded out by being busy, busy, busy.

Are you doing the same thing with your body? I've heard this countless times as a coach. I'll tell someone that I train people for a living and they tell me all about how they used to go to the gym when they had more time. I usually don't press the argument with strangers, but when I have time to dig a little bit with friends I tend to find a common theme.

The simple truth is that people do exactly what they want to do. If they want to stay up late watching their shows, they will, and then tell me how they are too tired to get to the gym in the morning. If they don't want to cook food at home, they won't, and then they'll tell me how they just can't lose weight eating on the run.

Unfortunately, I've found that rather than being too busy, we're just too lazy to do what's important. Instead of spending the necessary time preparing meals ahead of time so they're ready during your busy week, I would really rather just sit and do nothing on Sunday afternoon. Instead of going to the gym in the morning and supercharging my day, I'd rather hit the snooze button a few more times. (Sorry if that stings a little, I didn't brand this  disruptive fitness for nothing.)

So what's the answer? A little bit of toughness and a little bit of planning. Set yourself up for success by preparing what you need beforehand. Make tomorrow's decisions today. That way all you have to do is walk the path.

Leaving the decision to wake up early to get to the gym is very difficult at 6am in your warm bed. Deciding what you will eat when you're hungry and have no food at lunch time leaves you open to all kinds of bad choices. Deciding what you will eat when you cook your food in advance lets you eat food you like that will actually fuel performance without having to leave it to will power.

Keep an eye out for more on budgeting decision making and tracking daily performance in a very simple way soon.  You can hang out with us at our facebook group and throw out questions there, follow me on instagram @disruptivefit, or drop a line in the comments.

You want me to do what!?

Have you ever been to the doctor for an injury? Maybe you jammed a finger playing pick up basketball or sprained an ankle on the curb at the grocery store spilling groceries all over the landscape. (No one ever gets hurt doing anything cool.) What did they tell you to do? I bet they said RICE it and take some over the counter pain medication. But what does it mean to RICE an injury? You savvy readers already know that it stands for Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate the affected body part. Are there more effective ways to deal with the injury? What is the best way to apply RICE to an injury? This is the difference between teaching and telling. The doctor will usually tell you what to do. It will be the best advice that they know how to give, because doctors do really want you to get better. This is where you really want to enlist the services of a teacher.

Here's a story to illustrate the point. I have a super awesome client who was having some serious shoulder issues several years ago. She went to the doctor who made a diagnosis that there was some damage to the shoulder that needed to be surgically repaired. She went under the knife only to discover that the diagnosed damage wasn't there and put her in pain for over a year while she recovered. She was told to rest and ice the shoulder, but never taught how and when to do it. She was told to stretch and improve mobility, but never taught how to do it. She knew she needed to strengthen the shoulder, since she couldn't even hold her morning coffee with the injured arm, but no one taught her how to train. Then she found a yoga teacher who took the time to teach how to stretch and stabilize her shoulder. A good physical therapist who taught her how to apply RICE in a regimented and productive manner. And I like to think she has a pretty good coach now who is working on building strength and work capacity so she can continue to enjoy a healthy active life now. (It's me.)

So why do I tell you the story? Because when you're looking for experts to help you take care of your body, you don't want someone who is going to just tell you what to do unless you're already pretty well educated. Instead, you want someone who can teach you what to do and WHY you're doing it. They can show you technique and explain it in a way that makes sense to YOU the client and student. The difference is huge! After learning some self care strategies like intelligent stretching routines, strength training, and injury prevention (I like to call that prehab) the client above is able to stay on top of what was once a life stopping problem.

If you are tired of being told what to do and never taught how to do it by experts who are not teachers, stick around. You can hang out with us at our facebook group and throw out questions there, follow me on instagram @disruptivefit, or drop a line in the comments.