Final Post: I’ve moved!

Posted by Andrew - July 13, 2008 on 10:30 am | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


Big News!

Posted by Andrew - July 8, 2008 on 2:04 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


Lapland-Bound

Posted by Andrew - June 10, 2008 on 7:37 am | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


Shoeless Bliss

Posted by Andrew - May 29, 2008 on 5:21 am | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


Old Dogs…

Posted by Andrew - May 22, 2008 on 10:05 am | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


More Kid-Tastic Training

Posted by Andrew - April 15, 2008 on 4:21 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


I’m a C.S.C.S. GOD!

Posted by Andrew - April 3, 2008 on 11:43 am | In Dynamic Fitness | No Comments

 


The Key to Progress

Posted by Andrew - March 11, 2008 on 9:08 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


Calves of the Gods

Posted by Andrew - February 27, 2008 on 7:26 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


Muscle…or Fitness?

Posted by Andrew - February 26, 2008 on 10:43 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


The Best TV Show Ever

Posted by Andrew - January 24, 2008 on 8:35 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


The Siren Call

Posted by Andrew - January 14, 2008 on 1:52 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


Aragon Alert!

Posted by Andrew - January 5, 2008 on 7:33 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


Presidential Physiques and the Making of Squat-Rack Barack

Posted by Andrew - December 19, 2007 on 5:20 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


A Lesson from the Shrubbery

Posted by Andrew - December 18, 2007 on 9:02 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off

 


The Lost Art of Spotting

Posted by Andrew - December 13, 2007 on 12:29 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off I've never been a big "workout partner" guy. Whether running or biking or lifting weights or swimming or practicing kata or hitting a heavy bag, working out has always felt like an inherently solitary endeavor to me, ever since my initiate days of pumping concrete-filled "DP" weights in my parents' basement. My few forays into "social" exercise--in triathlon clubs, boxing gyms, and martial

 


CrossFit: A Total Sham or The Second Coming?

Posted by Andrew - December 11, 2007 on 8:28 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off A reader named tommythecat (not--presumably--his real name) wrote to me recently and asked me to do a post on CrossFit, a popular training system whose devotees and detractors lock horns on chat rooms with alarming frequency and leave the rest of us wondering what the big deal is. Taking away all the hoopla--and there's plenty of that, believe me--CrossFit offers brief, intense workouts that

 


Nature: ONE; Nurture: ZERO

Posted by Andrew - December 5, 2007 on 11:35 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off In Andrew Niccol's 1997 sci-fi movie Gattaca, Ethan Hawke plays an aspiring astronaut in a dystopian future where the quality of your life is dictated by the quality of your genes. It's a world where, "with the right helix tucked under your arm, you can go anywhere." Unlike his brother, who was engineered to be a perfect combination of his parents' best features, Hawke's character was

 


Profiled at the Y

Posted by Andrew - November 29, 2007 on 4:08 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off So I had myself a nice little workout this morning at the local low-frills YMCA: lifted some decent weights (for me), worked up a pretty good sweat, and generally got myself into a narcissistic froth over my own manliness (it helped that the only other people working out at the time was a group of Korean women, none of them a day under seventy-five). Lots of fun. While I was completing my

 


Tale of Three Brothers

Posted by Andrew - November 26, 2007 on 2:44 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Most guys will break off from their Thanksgiving binge to watch football; my brothers-in-law and I, all of us inveterately indifferent to sports trying frantically to compensate, did some arm-wrestling instead. "Quien," I ask, "es mas macho?" A quick rundown on the arm-wrestlers: The older of my wife's brothers, Brennon, is heavy into weight training. You'd think that would mean I'd love

 


Happy Thanksgiving to All!

Posted by Andrew - November 22, 2007 on 12:45 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Okay: Just a couple of things here, I swear I'm going to make this short, because I've stolen away from my family's pre-feasting festivities at our little rented home and am blogging with my wife's borrowed laptop perched on top of a clothes dryer that is currently drying sheets, blankets and towels that my two-year-old nephew spent last night dowsing in vomit. Don't ever say I never did

 


Two Great Fitness Resources for Women!

Posted by Andrew - November 16, 2007 on 3:09 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Although I'm sort of a journeyman in this industry, I like to think, as Robert De Niro says in THIS BOY'S LIFE, that I know 'a thing or two about a thing or two.' But there's one thing I'm not and never can be without a lot of surgery, hormones, and therapy, and that's a woman. I like to think that fitness is fitness is fitness, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that,

 


Something Everyone Knows

Posted by Andrew - November 14, 2007 on 10:32 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Some things are repeated so often you stop hearing them. Or at least, that's my theory based on the kinds of things many people believe when they darken the door of the gym for the first time. On some level, we wish--fervently--that getting in shape could be easy. That we could somehow fob it off on someone else, buy, or cajole, or bargain our way to glowing health and drool-worthy physiques.

 


Ultimate Frisbee Conditioning!

Posted by Andrew - November 7, 2007 on 5:29 pm | In Bodybuilding, Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Today's blog is going out to my Irish-Catholic New England cousins, of whom there are 32 (did I mention the Irish-Catholic part?). For the past few Thanksgivings, they have played a fiercely competitive annual Ultimate Frisbee match called the Marie's Cup. I played Ultimate with these guys at our family reunion last July, and they don't fool around. Just about all of them are former varsity

 


Ten-Minute-a-Day Fitness: A Cold, Hard Look

Posted by Andrew - November 5, 2007 on 2:33 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off So I was reading THE OPRAH MAGAZINE yesterday--and there’s nothing wrong with that--and came across an article by Selene Yeager called “Exercise: The Least You Can Do (Would You Believe Ten Minutes?)”. Like most pieces on exercise in that publication, it’s short—and there’s nothing wrong with that, either. I have to remind myself sometimes that the vast majority of the population doesn’t

 


Diseased Canine Training

Posted by Andrew - November 2, 2007 on 3:51 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Alwyn Cosgrove had an interesting post recently that got me thinking. Dangerous, I realize, but hear me out here, gang. Ready for my new crazy assertion that will have everyone talking? There's No Difference Between Cardio and Strength Training. There. You heard it here first. The American College of Sports Medicine, which recently laid out new exercise guidelines for average folks (and

 


My Blog-of-the-Month Resignation Speech

Posted by Andrew - October 31, 2007 on 4:48 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Well, the time has come. On this Halloween day--fittingly, a day when we celebrate darkness, death, the ending of all good things and the rising of all things evil--I now must step down as the holder of the coveted spot as JP Fitness' Blog of the Month. It's been such an exciting whirlwind I can barely believe it's all over now. First there was the official tattooing ceremony, when the image

 


How Not To Set Up Your Gym

Posted by Andrew - October 24, 2007 on 3:58 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Choice in just about everything can sometimes just be a plain distraction. Take, for instance, the gym where I’ve been working out these last couple of months up here in Washington. There are, and I counted, five resistance machines that are variations on rowing, none of which can hold a candle to the bent-over row exercise that one can do with a good ol’ Olympic barbell set. There are

 


Numbers, Shmumbers, Part II

Posted by Andrew - October 22, 2007 on 6:27 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off In my five decades as a personal trainer (okay, maybe not quite that many), I’ve noticed that just about all my clients at some point bring up their memories of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. For those of you who escaped particular ritual, the Presidential Physical Fitness Test is a series of drills that elementary and middle-school students are required to perform, usually twice a

 


Airplane Chats, Plastic Surgeons, and Celebrity Fitness!

Posted by Andrew - October 18, 2007 on 5:23 pm | In Dynamic Fitness, weight loss | Comments Off In my travels this week I wound up sitting next to a woman I’ll call Darla. That might in fact be her real name; I don’t know since she never told me her name. If so, Darla, sorry for not protecting your identity. Anyway, Darla said she was having trouble losing weight following the difficult birth of her five-month-old son, which had been preceded by three months of bed rest. Having told

 


Hungry In Hell

Posted by Andrew - October 17, 2007 on 1:45 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Yesterday I found myself hungry in a Stop-N-Go, which for anyone remotely interested in good health, represents the Third Circle of Hell. There is literally almost nothing in such a store that you can put in your mouth that won’t do you more harm than good, no matter how hungry you are. Every food item should just be labeled “Sugar/Trans Fat Delivery System,” regardless of its nut-like,

 


Numbers, Shmumbers

Posted by Andrew - October 14, 2007 on 10:27 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off About halfway through the first (and best) TERMINATOR movie, the CSM-101 cyborg (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) sits in a seedy hotel room paging through a stolen address book belonging to his quarry, Sarah Connor. Having had some of his external flesh--including one eyeball--torn away in various high-octane misadventures, the CSM-101 is partially rotting, and is surrounded by buzzing flies.

 


Important Correction!

Posted by Andrew - October 11, 2007 on 7:11 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off A friend of mine delicately let me know that the words "a bit of a bloater" were NOT spoken by Slough Regional Manager David Brent from the BBC "Office," as I thought when I [mis-] quoted him here, but by the Assistant to the Regional Manager Gareth Keenan. My friend was even kind enough to find the clip for me, which you can access here.. As this ESSENTIAL to the fitness of my readers, I'm

 


A Workout Program that Builds Muscle

Posted by Andrew - October 10, 2007 on 7:12 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off I’ve never been much of one to tout workout programs of my own design on this blog. When it comes right down to it, any specific training program you can name is pretty easy to pick apart. If I say, for instance, you should do four sets of five reps of the clean and jerk and rest 90 seconds between sets, some wiseguy trainer will instantly send me four studies saying how eight sets of two reps

 


Food for Thought…

Posted by Andrew - October 9, 2007 on 5:38 pm | In Dynamic Fitness, weight loss | Comments Off A few weeks ago Sanjay Gupta wrote a piece for TIME about doctors' apparent unwillingness to tell their patients that they need to lose weight. It seems that even physicians get a little squeamish about telling their patients that they're overweight: "Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., recently released the results of a survey of more than 2,500 obese patients who went to

 


Let’s Not Complicate Matters…

Posted by Andrew - October 8, 2007 on 7:35 pm | In Dynamic Fitness, weight loss | Comments Off Last week Chad Waterbury very kindly sent me a copy of his latest eBook, called THE 10/10 TRANSFORMATION (available here, which is a nutrition and workout program designed to get you to lose 10 pounds of fat AND gain 10 pounds of muscle over the course of nine weeks. It’s a nifty program, and looking it over I can see that it would be effective: the workouts are varied, and progressive, and, (

 


Rise of the [Rear-Delt] Machine

Posted by Andrew - October 6, 2007 on 7:30 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Okay, here’s something hilarious, at least to me: I’ve gone off on the “functional” thing a few times in the past, largely on the basis of questioning what ‘function’ means exactly: what function is the exerciser trying to develop, who are the functional training devotees to tell us what functions are ‘legitimate’ and what which ones aren’t, and how exactly does spending 20 minutes working the

 


Welcome to JP Fitness Readers!

Posted by Andrew - October 5, 2007 on 11:05 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Received an email a few days ago from none other than the famous "JP" of JP Fitness.com, who runs the most civilized and informative fitness website and forum out there. It's sort of a "Star Wars" Cantina of fitness gurus, with all the heavy hitters sitting around talking shop over protein shakes and creatine; anyone who reads my blog should check out JP Fitness (just promise you'll come back

 


Best Glute Workout Ever!

Posted by Andrew - September 29, 2007 on 10:25 pm | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off There are reasons both sublime and ridiculous to build one’s glutes. On one hand, they’re your largest muscles and therefore deserve some pretty close attention. As I’ve said repeatedly in the past, many, many people suffer from glute inaction, or an inability to literally get their butts moving: their hip flexors are short, tight and overactive from sitting all the time, and as a result,

 


What Time Pressure?

Posted by Andrew - September 26, 2007 on 10:34 am | In Dynamic Fitness | Comments Off Back when I was in college in the fast-receding days of the early 90’s, I used to shake off the crackling of my overtaxed brain synapses by hitting UVa’s Memorial Gym around 10 PM for an hour every night. I was pretty fanatical about it and rarely missed workouts, even during exam week. I always figured the time away from the books kept me just a little saner and more balanced than my