DESIGNING BETTER LIVING THROUGH STRENGTH
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EUGENIZATION
a personal training blog

From the category archives:

Strength Training

Mechanistic vs Meta-Exercise.

by Eugene Thong on August 27, 2009

The surest way to lose focus during an exercise is to judge yourself on that exercise.   Instead, get “mechanistic.”  Focus on what you can actually do, as opposed to your emotional reactions to the exercise.
Don’t think, “Damn, this weight feels heavy.”  Instead, think, “Drive your heels through the floor; be patient; make it happen.”
Don’t think, [...]

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The Problem With Bodypart Mentality.

by Eugene Thong on August 11, 2009

One good thing about the rise in popularity of bodybuilding in the 60s and 70s was that it got people interested in lifting weights.
One bad thing (”One bad thing?”, the peanut gallery asks) about bodybuilding going mainstream was that it made “bodypart mentality” a part of the training consciousness – bodypart mentality being the idea [...]

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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back.

June 29, 2009

Do you know what the trouble is with looking solely at performance as a method of gauging results?  It’s easy to underestimate the beneficial impact of change.
Imagine, for example, that you’re a professional-level golfer.  Your coach tells you to switch your hand position because it will help to prevent that nasty habit you have of [...]

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I Can’t Perform This Exercise.

June 23, 2009

One of my young wards has an algebra final today that he has been dreading for the better part of the last two weeks.  The obvious reason: He’s “not so good in math.”  Now, mind you, he’s a thoughtful, insightful kid to whom most things (in school, anyways) come easy.
Often, when undergoing the learning process, [...]

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Priorities – Part 1: Exercise.

May 29, 2009

This whole fitness and nutrition thing can be tough.  The newsstand at your local Barnes and Noble carries no less than 10 different magazines, all purporting to offer The Program for vibrant health and physical beauty; and did I mention that each magazine contains 8 or 9 different routines (all different, of course, depending on [...]

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Progress…Is Really Boring.

May 26, 2009

An awful lot of money is spent on promoting the whiz-bang, glamorous image of being fit, strong, and healthy.  What you don’t see promoted is the diligence required to get there.
Here, in no particular order, are some inconvenient truths about going from looking like this to this:
1. It takes the patience of a stonecutter, the [...]

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Compounding.

May 21, 2009

I had an interesting exchange with a client earlier today.  Actually, “exchange” is too polite a term; let’s call it what it was – a full-on argument.  The fundamental disagreement: We spend too much time talking about the exercises and not enough time doing them.
What my client wanted to do was to bang out exercises, [...]

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Misalignment.

May 12, 2009

One of the key concepts that I’ve tried to use in my application of Brazilian Jiujitsu is the idea of misalignment.  If you’ve ever partaken in an organized sport of any kind, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Where the head goes, the body follows.”  Well, the converse is true as well – if you want [...]

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Perfect Practice Makes Perfect.

April 6, 2009

A client of mine (name withheld*) related to me an interesting anecdote with regards to guitar playing:
I read or heard somewhere that if you practice a piece but allow mistakes to seep in, all you’re doing is practicing mistakes.   If you take 40 minutes to play a 20 note passage perfectly, you’ve practiced it once.  [...]

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Do Fewer Things Better.

March 23, 2009

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly trainees want to do new exercises, particularly when they haven’t mastered the basics.  I suppose it’s endemic to our culture of “more is better” that a routine is judged on how many exercises are done.  For example, a good routine for say, chest might be a few [...]

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