The bar muscle-up can be a difficult skill to master as it requires significant strength and coordination. Many athletes spend months working on learning the bar muscle-up with limited success or poor technique that rapidly falls apart mid-WOD. Gymnastics expert Pamela Gagnon has a number of tips for improving technique and exercises that will build your bar muscle-up specific strength and technique....

Continually improving your skillset is an absolute must for all fitness and rehab professionals. A better understanding of how the human body works will help improve the outcomes you get with clients. But improving your efficiency, sales, and general well-being is also crucial to your success. Fitness and rehab professionals frequently ask me for recommendations on learning options, and books...

Thanks to Pamela Gagnon for joining this week to discuss Toes To Bar efficiency. This is a movement that a lot of fitness athletes have difficulty with as their technique robs them of energy and slows them down! Pamela has some great insight into optimizing your technique. Gymnastics skills such as the T2B give many CrossFit athletes a lot of...

The Safety of Deep Squats I am excited to have Dr. Mitch Babcock of HealthHQ contribute this amazing research review on the safety of deep squats. Squats unfortunately continue to get a bad wrap in the medical world as a knee destroyer. But the available literature on deep squats shows them to be very safe. Research also proves them to be...

Rib cage flare during overhead lifting is a common movement fault seen in fitness athletes. While it is not always an issue, quite often it needs to be addressed for better positioning as an athlete moves weight overhead. If you aren’t familiar with the term rib cage flare, it is another name for overextension of the spine. This usually occurs...

I previously published an article on BENCH PRESS MOBILITY. In this article, I outlined several of the key mobility areas to address to allow for proper bench press form. One of those areas was shoulder extension mobility, a commonly overlooked component of shoulder mobility that can impact not only the bench press, but also pushups, dips, and muscle-ups. Since publishing that...

Deadlifts are unfortunately all too commonly believed to be unsafe exercises for an individual’s low back health. But the research says quite the opposite of what many believe. Crazy right? An exercise known to help make your back and hips STRONGER might also make it HEALTHIER!!! Let’s dive into the research on deadlifts for low back pain. Are Deadlifts Safe?...

Many fitness athletes think of improving their mobility for squats and overhead presses. But, few consider the mobility needs of the bench press. Although it doesn’t usually require as much mobility attention as those lifts, I often find mobility limitations in athletes that impact their ability to bench with optimal form. As with any movement, when wanting to improve the...

No two athletes are the same. And while we believe that in a group training setting all athletes will improve follow the same training, it is important to analyze each athlete individually as well to determine if large individual differences in performance warrants some individualization of programming. For example, if an athlete is working on a goal of performing a...