MO POWER Strength & Conditioning, Tennyson street, Brownlow business centre, Bolton (2026)

06/05/2026

Amateur boxer Ricco Oconnor working on core stability using stir the pot exercise.

What is the Stir the Pot Exercise?
The stir the pot exercise is a variation of the traditional plank, typically performed using a Swiss ball (stability ball). This dynamic exercise involves moving your arms in a circular motion while holding a plank position on the ball, mimicking the motion of stirring a pot. It effectively targets the re**us abdominis, transverse abdominis, and obliques, while also engaging the shoulders, lower back, and glutes to maintain balance.

Benefits of the Stir the Pot Exercise
1. Enhanced Core Strength
The stir the pot exercise intensifies the traditional plank by incorporating movement, which forces your core to work harder to stabilize your body. Studies show that dynamic core exercises for stability, like this one, are more effective in engaging the deep core muscles, such as the transverse abdominis, compared to static holds (Romdhani et al., 2024).

2. Improved Shoulder Stability
The circular arm motions help build strength and endurance in the shoulders. Exercises that engage the core and shoulders simultaneously improve overall stability and functional strength (Johnson et al., 2019).

3. Better Balance and Coordination
Because the stir the pot is performed on a Swiss ball, it requires excellent balance and coordination. This instability forces your stabilizer muscles to engage, enhancing your overall proprioception and control. Research indicates that exercises involving unstable surfaces, such as the Swiss ball, significantly improve balance and core activation (Hassan, 2018). By incorporating the stir the pot, you can improve balance with stir the pot techniques.

4. Core Endurance
Unlike traditional crunches or sit-ups, which often target one area of the core, the stir the pot exercise engages multiple muscle groups at once. This helps build muscular endurance across the entire core, making it a great choice for athletes who rely on core endurance, such as runners, swimmers, and cyclists (Romdhani et al., 2024).

02/05/2026

In Fitness — as in Life — Patience is a Virtue

When tempted by a quick fix or instant gratification, think about your purpose and process.

Recently, there’s been a surge in the popularity of workout programs. They are based on “muscle confusion,” on the premise that constantly switching up your workout routine — i.e., “confusing” your muscles — is the pathway to fitness gains. Unfortunately, muscle confusion doesn’t work.

“All the crap you hear about your body needing a different stimulus each week or a new ‘workout of the day’ is BS. The number-one reason people don’t get results is that they don’t have the attention span to stick with something.

The key to getting stronger/fitter lies in adhering to something called “progressive overload.” And, years of exercise science supports this. Citing increases in strength and muscle size, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) published an official-position paper in favour of progressive overload for resistance training in healthy adults, and a 2015 study published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology found that the best endurance athletes in the world follow progressive overload’s principles.

Unlike with muscle confusion, in which exercises constantly vary and no two days are alike, with progressive overload you work a specific muscle or function (e.g., your chest or running) in a specific manner, progressively adding intensity and/or duration over time. Hard days are followed by easy days and prolonged periods of intensity are followed by prolonged periods of recovery. Repetition and consistency are key. Results don’t occur overnight but after months, and even years, of sticking to the same routine.

The psychological drive to seek what is new and exciting is an innate one; what’s new are the fitness programs designed to prey on that impulse. Today, everyone desires novelty and endless stimulation. So running around and constantly switching what you are doing from one day to the next is in vogue.

22/04/2026

3 Deadlift Mistakes To Avoid.

Mistake #1. Using the biceps

I often see many lifters start their deadlifts with a sharp tug & their arms bent. This is a big mistake & is the cause of many Bicep tears.
If you tear your bicep, you could be out for a long time... so don't start your pulls with bent arms. The Biceps are small muscles and you can not "curl" a Deadlift.
It simply won't happen.
With the mixed grip, the supinated hand is particularly vulnerable to tears, so here is what you must do:
Start your pulls with your arms locked straight. Think of the arms as a connection between your shoulders and the bar. They are nothing more (during the Deadlift)
Do 3 or 4 sets of Biceps CURLS per week for high reps (10 reps per sets minimum). This will help you improve tendon and ligament strength and go some way to helping you avoid bicep tears.

Mistake #2: Letting The Bar Get Out In Front Of The Body

Many Deadlifts are missed (both in the gym and at competitions) because lifters let the bar get too far in front of their body.
Great Deadlifters often have scars on their shins for a reason... the reason being that they drag the bar up their body.
Weak Deadlifters often let the bar drift 2 or more inches away from their body when pulling. With 50% weights they get away with it, but with near max & new personal best weights they FAIL.
If you have this problem, here's a simple tip to cure it:
As soon as the bar leaves the floor think of pulling "back". By doing this you keep the bar close to your body at all times and your bodyweight becomes like a counter-balance: Bodyweight goes BACK, bar comes UP -

Mistake #3: Pulling Through A Partial Range Of Motion Too Often And Ignoring Floor Work

To be a successful Deadlifter you have to pull the bar from the floor all the way to lockout, right?
If this is true, how come so many lifters train in the rack, through a partial range of motion all the time?... Is it because their starting strength off the floor is so good that they can simply ignore pulling from the floor? Or is it because they like to stroke their ego and lift weights that are way over their current max, through partial ranges of motion?

19/03/2026

Freestyle wrestler
swinging like an orangutan on the peg board. Joking aside a peg board was originally designed for climbers but it has got a following in the general fitness domain.

Why use a climbing peg board?
There are loads of benefits from using climbing peg boards:

• Grip strength and forearm strength – using a climbing peg board will really help you build on your grip and forearm strength, which are both fundamental in weight training. By training with a peg board, you’ll not only be able to improve your performance climbing, but you’ll also be able to progress your lifts too.

• Coordination – when you’re used to weightlifting in the gym, it can be easy to switch off and just make your way through your training. Peg boards however are fantastic for building coordination as well as breaking out of the same lifting patterns that you’re used to.

• Strength – it’s not just weightlifting that’s going to help you build strength. Lifting your bodyweight over a sustained amount of time is fantastic for building upper body strength. They will really help you improve your pull ups and muscle ups too.

• Sustained tension – it’s not just about how much you lift but building muscle and strength is also down to the quality of your exercises. By continuously holding up your bodyweight, you’re sustaining tension on your muscles which is really important for maximising your gains

04/03/2026

4 Key Points You Must Follow to Develop Strength

When I look at people’s programs when they ask for my help, nine times out of ten I see way too much conditioning work and not enough strength work especially in combat sports.

People tend to do what’s fun and exciting versus what they know they need to do, which is attacking your weaknesses. With this in mind I want to discuss what strength training really is and some major key points to focus in on.

First off, strength is KEY. If you’re an athlete, you need to be strong. If you don’t compete in sports you still need to be strong. Strength is a necessity. Period.

Because, honestly, WHO wants to be weak? The truth is, having a good base of strength will cross over to everything else you do. Some benefits of strength training include:

● Improved Skill (way more efficient at basic to complex movements)
● Lower Risk of Injury
● Overall Conditioning Improvement

I feel there’s a lot of different definitions of what strength can be, in that strength isn’t only applied to just pure heavy lifting and training, but can be applied to strength of character, a tough mindset, overall physical effort, etc; that’s of a whole other level of discussion, which I won’t get into, but I felt it was important to note. Now, here are the key points of strength training.

Strength Training Point #1: Progression
You should know just as well as I do that if you want to get stronger, you’ll have to start out somewhere. Instead of just getting super strong overnight, gaining strength and getting strong as hell takes time.

You’ll have to progress meaning that you’ll have to build yourself up to the next level. For instance, if you have never Deadlifted before or you’re trying to get stronger in the Deadlift, you’ll want to take some specific progressions to get there.
The main point of this key is to use proper progressions for building strength. This can be applied to all movements (and should be).

Strength Training Point #2: Consistency
Moving on in the last key in regards to progression, if you want to build some serious strength. You’ll have to be consistent with your training.

🔑

03/03/2026

Friends

That's all I want to say in this world full of hate and blame

16/02/2026

Ways to improve your raw bench press.

First and foremost technique is everything. This is an exercise that teaches you to control your descent.

Spoto Press — why the hell not just use a full range of motion?

Because the weight is levitating over your chest in open air, you have to stay tight, commanding complete control of the barbell and maximizing muscular tension. Any loss of tightness is a loss of tension and muscle tension is one of the primary driving factors in eliciting hypertrophy.

The movement is like the paused bench press on steroids! However, there is one important distinction. Instead of pausing the barbell on the chest, the barbell is paused for approximately one second one to two inches off the chest.

The Spoto Press maximizes muscular tension and teaches you to get tight.

History

Years ago, video surfaced of a former arm wrestling champion, Eric Spoto, bench pressing outlandish weights. Eventually he would go onto to set the all-time world record bench press with 722 pounds, which was just recently broken.

This phenom that just came out of the woodworks was explosive and handled the new frontier weights with relative ease. Theoretical warriors and keyboard pundits alike went ape for the fact that Spoto’s bench presses never quite touched his chest. Spoto would stop the barbell an inch or two off his chest, then pause the weight and blast it back up to lockout.

When Spoto finally took the platform, he bench pressed 700 pounds. Then at his second meet, he broke the world record with 722 pounds.

The learning curve, many anticipated, when he would finally have to go full range of motion ceased to exist.

22/01/2026

Old dawg 54 year old battered strength coach doing pad bench.
Please note videos of me training are for information purposes for my followers. I train as a hobby to keep fit and strong as I get older.
This is done to focus on speed or as Louie Simmons (Westside Barbell) would say dynamic effort. It's lifting submaximal load at maximal velocity.
The pad absorbs the kinetic energy developed whilst lowering the bar. I have to accelerate the bar back to the start position.

14/01/2026

Thanks to Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram we can now see what goes on in weight rooms all over the country and the world.

.. it aint pretty.

Take the deadlift, one of the most productive lifts you can do.

If we were to come up with a set of guidelines for the deadlift based on what we can observe pretty much everyone doing these days, they would be as follows:

Step 1: Straps. -- Get yourself some lifting straps and strap your hands to the bar. (I mean you can't 'not' strap up since it means you can lift more weight.)

Step 2: Yank the bar off the ground with a round back. Doesn't matter if your spinal discs shoot across the room like clay pigeons.

Step 3: Once the bar clears the knees, hitch, and pull the bar up the front of the legs in as many yanks as it takes.

Step 4: When you make lockout at the top, (or even if you don't) drop the bar on the platform afterwards, so it makes a big crash and everyone knows you lift heavy.

Now, it wasn't that long ago that only the mullets in the gym trained like this. These days, it seems like not only it is the "norm" but all of these are (directly or indirectly) encouraged.

If you want to train like this, it's certainly fine with me, but it seems to me not much different than juggling hand grenades -- eventually your luck is going to run out in a very bad way.

Learn to lift with good form. As you get stronger and lift more, then add straps and a belt. I've worked with guys who've pulled 3.5 times their bodyweight just wearing a belt at sanctioned powerlifting meets. At present I have 5 young lads under the age of 20. Not one of them has used any support aids. They're all pulling minimum double bodyweight. A lot of time has been spent on good solid technique which includes learning to brace (intra-abdominal pressure), not to chase the numbers and enjoy the journey.

I will never compromise my philosophy and beliefs for the mighty dollar. A man's integrity is not how much wealth a man acquires, but to affect those around him in a positive manner.

Remember folks the" strength same is years game, not a days game" the late Bud Jeffries.

27/12/2025

Professional boxer strength and conditioning session highlights.
He's in preparation for his next fight which is for the vacant Commonwealth Silver lightweight on 24th January at the Co-op Arena.

MO POWER Strength & Conditioning

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