Cillian O'Connor Strength and Conditioning

Cillian O'Connor Strength and Conditioning I help unathletic nerds like me gain muscle and confidence with a no BS approach!

20/09/2026

See ya

18/09/2026

Picking things up off the floor is not an optional activity.

Picking up a heavy box, lifting your kids, moving furniture, gardening, etc. These are all deadlifts.

You don’t get to choose whether you do deadlifts in life - only whether you want to be physically prepared for them or not.

Done with the right load for you, deadlifts are one of the very best things that you can do for your back. Obviously you can do too much, but that applies to every exercise. A fire can cook your dinner or it can burn your house down. Don’t blame the tool.

12/09/2026

Cluster sets are a great tool for psychological hurdles in rehab.

Sometimes what you really need is repeated exposure to the thing that feels a bit scary.

Clusters sets allow you to have a lot of first reps, which are the hardest part of a deadlift set when you’re anticipating pain.

On top of this, they can be a great way of being very time efficient with your workouts. You may surprise yourself with how short your rest periods can be when you’re training further from failure.

I also recommend using other tools like recording your lifts and doing the odd AMRAP set to put your ability to push the back to the test.

09/09/2026

Currently training to get a strict bar muscle up, so I’m making most of my upper body work pretty callisthenics focused right now. I’ve done a kipping one before, but this will be a good bit more challenging.

This little outdoor area was actually very well equipped for doing just about everything I needed to get a good upper body workout in.

Still doing some barbell and dumbbell stuff, but it’s not the primary focus. The main upper body gap left by callisthenics is overhead pressing, so I’m ensuring I still get a dose of that at least once a week. In the meantime my dips and pull-ups need a lot of work.

26/08/2026

Sometimes there is a clear biomechanical reason for your pain.

If you throw 100kg more than you’ve ever lifted onto the bar and your back hurts afterwards, there’s likely a strong biomechanical aspect to your pain.

But most aches and pains we pick up aren’t really as clear cut as that.

Often we can’t point to one specific event that was the start of things.

We just slowly had symptoms build until one day we noticed ‘this actually hurts’.

Managing your training load and technique can be a part of treating that.

But there can also be a need to address other things in that process like your beliefs about what that pain means, as well as outside stressors that might be making recovery harder than it needs to be.

Ultimately taking a more nuanced view on pain and injury is actually about giving yourself more tools to help yourself get to where you want to be.

20/08/2026

Few things are as frustrating as picking up an injury when it feels like you didn’t deserve it.

Your technique was good and you weren’t lifting anything heavier than usual.

So did the lifting gods just decide to fck you up for no reason?

Many times when this happens, we can actually identify a lot of other stressors outside training that were probably detracting from our recovery.

The late nights, higher work stress, poor nutrition, the bill you didn’t expect to get.

Each one might not be that bad.

But they can accumulate until our bucket is full, and now a weight that would usually be easy is actually enough to exceed our capacity.

Injury sucks, but it is perhaps the greatest teacher for helping us learn how to do things better.

Sometimes we get bad luck, but sometimes it’s an opportunity to see where we could help our body out by working on some non training stuff that’s taking a toll.

This video is an excerpt from my interview on ‘s Strong For Life Blueprint podcast. Check out his most recent episode 140 for my in depth chat with him about back pain and my own back pain story.

15/08/2026

Why should personal trainers learn about pain and injury management?

Because it’s a huge part of our job.

Everyone you train is going to get hurt eventually.

When that happens, you will either be equipped to help them or not.

Sometimes that means you take the wheel and get them back to health with training.

Other times you need to be able to recognise when you’re outside your scope of knowledge refer out.

But the vast majority of low level aches and pains people come to you with? You should feel very confident in being able to have a significant positive impact on them by using some very simple strategies.

If not, it’s time to upskill!

13/08/2026

Biomechanics can be a very useful tool for helping us rehab.

A lot of the time just reducing weight on an exercise works.

But sometimes, we can benefit from also just temporarily changing the movement so that it’s putting less demands on the injured or painful tissue.

This example of shifting to a more hip dominant squat to treat knee pain is just one example.

You could take a wider grip in your bench to help elbow pain, arch your back / flex more on deadlifts to help your back, change from a pronated to a neutral grip to help your shoulder etc.

The key is understanding that these are not inherently ‘safer’ movements. They’re just tools that are helping you calm things down before building back your capacity to do a wider variety of movement.

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22a Brookfield Avenue, Blackrock
Dublin

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+353892561966

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