In the musculoskeletal rehab, we’ve made huge strides understanding the importance of improving the strength of patients returning from an injury. But often we’re faced with the challenge of getting the right strength equipment in place. I’d love for every physical therapy, chiropractic, and athletic training facility to have barbells and kettlebells. But, I understand space and issues convincing management...

You walk into your gym and on the white board there it is…the overhead squat. While a few athletes will be thrilled to see this movement most of us won’t. The combination of mobility, strength, control, and coordination needed for this exercise makes it one of the most difficult for many CrossFit athletes.  But there is hope. With the assessments...

If you’ve had an episode of intense low back pain, you know how scary dealing with that can be. Quite often, athletes are given poor advice when it comes to rehabbing their back. This leads to them feeling fragile and scared to return to the activities they love. The most frequent exercise I’m messaged about is the deadlift after low...

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...

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...

Body tempering (BT), invented by power lifter Donnie Thompson, has gained lots of popularity in the fitness world in the last few years. So what is BT? Does it work? How does it work? Let’s discuss…. What Is Body Tempering? Body tempering is a form of soft tissue mobilization performed by rolling weighted cylinders across muscles and joints. Think of...