Bench Press Mistakes to Avoid to Hit Your Next PR! There are a lot of factors in the bench press that can make or break your success in the movement. If you want to increase your bench press you need to be aware of the things that can go wrong. These might sacrifice your strength potential, or worse, increase your chance...

If you want to maximize your performance with handstand pushups, walking, and other variations, it is crucial that you have great handstand mobility to get into optimal positions. Many athletes lack the necessary mobility, and as a result, their performance is hindered. Here’s what you can do to get better…   View this post on Instagram   A post shared...

The kipping pull-up is often a polarizing debate in the fitness community. I’ve written about this many times, and my viewpoint is that when done properly, the kipping pull-up is a good upper body pulling plus conditioning exercise (read this article for more). The shoulder strength & control that is developed from a technically sound kipping pull-up is great, BUT...

One of my favorite diagnoses to treat in CrossFit athletes is SLAP tears. Quite frequently, athletes have been told their only option is surgery. But, many athletes with SLAP tears in their shoulders can successfully rehab back to full shoulder health and performance without needing to go under the knife. Skipping an often unnecessary surgery saves athletes from months of...

One of the most common problems I treat with CrossFit athletes is shoulder pain with kipping pull-ups. This injury can happen for several different reasons, as I discuss with my Performance Plus Programming partner, Pamela Gagnon. For athletes struggling with Kipping mechanics, join thousands of athletes that have improved their strength and form on our Lats to Fly program! Common...

One of the first questions that CrossFit, power lift, or Olympic weightlifting athletes ask me after a shoulder surgery such as a rotator cuff or labrum repair is “when can I squat after shoulder surgery?” With many shoulder surgeries, the shoulder position required to get set up in a back squat position can be challenging. The shoulder must move into...

In recent years, the fitness world has been slowly adopting the trend of measuring heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is a means of assessing an athlete’s readiness to train and overall recovery. But is it useful? And how do we measure HRV? Let’s discuss… Heart rate variability is a measurement of the variation that naturally occurs between individual heartbeats. When...

Before discussing hamstring flexibility, we need to talk about testing hamstring flexibility. Many athletes believe their hamstrings are tight. But, often they have all the hamstring flexibility they need to perform all of their sporting activities. If an athlete passes the following tests, they do NOT need to work on hamstring flexibility. Unless they participate in sports requiring extreme hamstring flexibility...

Note from Zach: Huge thanks to Kelvin King for writing this article. Kelvin has a ton of amazing exercise variations, like the dead bug exercises he shows below. Be sure to follow him! A little rant: I love dead bugs.  However, their relationship to specific sports performance has not been fully tapped into. The transferable skill of dead bug variations will...