FortitudeRx

That seems pretty fast to me 🥵

Am I taking that phrase too literally?

Probably.

But there's a false dichotomy between taking your time and trying really hard. You don't have to go balls to the wall all day every day, but we're not shooting for easy either.

Because easy just doesn't work, no matter how long you wait ⌚

People that try to RUSH rehab, fitness, or diets often fail or regress by the end, but people that accept that it's going to both:

1) Take some time
2) Require significant effort along the way

Are much more likely to have realistic expectations and succeed as a result.

Succeeding in anything worthwhile requires that you set a difficult pace and standard of effort to maintain the whole time until you reach that goal.

It will be different for everyone, but in the meantime, you'll be improving your ability to put forth effort for future marathons.

Join us in the FRxCircle community for support, accountability, and coaching via https://www.fortituderx.com/frxcircle

Who do you think is going to be better at getting off of the floor following a fall when they get older?🤷‍♂️

🅰️ - The person that has avoided lunging because their knees hurt, reducing their pain via avoidance, while also reducing their ability to stand from a half-kneeling position and limiting their pain-free range of motion🤕

OR

🅱️ - The person that has improved their ability to lunge despite initial pain, reducing pain via the mechanism of building capacity for the movement via progressively loading it and increasing their pain-free range of motion💪

???

You know the answer.

If you get pain with a movement and you don't have a clear tissue at fault via an injury, it's probably likely that you're lacking resilience to that specific movement and it would benefit you to practice being there more often.

I'm frequently giving our members movements to start implementing to improve their ability to get stronger without pain in our community, FRxCircle. Check it out via the link in my bio to get some help! We have a 7-day free trial too 😏

The health and fitness industry is likely the most watered down industry in the world

Nowhere else will you find the number of wildly unqualified coaches that you will find behind these curtains

As someone with a Bachelor's degree in Human Performance and Exercise Science and is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, who has also taken the time to get certified in nutrition and strength & conditioning, it's frustrating to see people paying for absolute nonsense and getting no results.

And between my coaches and me, we also have 20 years of combined coaching experience.

You better believe we have the deep understanding of how this all works and what it takes to maximize outcomes from applying our knowledge and experience to a wide range of people and circumstances over the years.

If you're interested in improving your health, fitness, nutrition, and overall resilience, visit FortitudeRx.com to see how we can help.

Most people past the beginner stages of training now realize that "clean" eating is not as important as once considered🥕

And most now understand that flexible dieting is not eating whatever you want within your macros regardless of any micronutrient deficiencies or performance deficits that may pop up🍕

Now we're left wondering, what's the correct middle ground of nutrition for high performance and body composition changes?

It depends on each individual's goals and how nutrition plays a role in their life.

✔️It depends on their tolerance for highly palatable foods that may trigger overconsumption, which may be fine or even preferred in a phase when one is trying to gain weight (but of course it's usually something that is associated with the negative consequences of overconsumption)

✔️It depends on their appetite, where one may need more high-volume foods in order to stay full, and another person may struggle to eat enough calories due to years of dieting, even if the goal is just normal caloric intake to improve the relationship with food

✔️It depends on what "season" someone is in as an athlete. During the season, the focus is entirely on performance and therefore we're not as worried about gaining some body fat, so the carbs may be increased substantially to the point where it would be hard to eat enough carbs via whole food sources. Here, more processed carbs are warranted.

Compared to an athlete coming into a recovery period, in which carbs are switched for whole food sources high in micronutrients and relatively higher fat intake for continued hormonal support.

✔️And the ultimate goal is that you actually adhere to the plan. That generally means including foods that you enjoy eating.

Goals should change throughout the year to support the ebb and flow of life and, if applicable, sports

That means being flexible in the relative mix of food choices, being mindful of why you may opt for less or more "clean" foods, and understanding that food means more than fuel too⛽

If you need help figuring out your nutrition to maximize your performance and make it actually fit your life, visit https://www.fortituderx.com/performance-and-nutrition if you need help, or join the FRxCircle private coaching community for entry level guidance at https://www.fortituderx.com/frxcircle!

Sometimes, not snacking is simply not an option. 😋

Which is why you should be sure to keep healthy options on hand. By having “good” snacks, such as healthier, protein based ones, you can satisfy those cravings, stay full longer, and plan for that bowl of ice cream later💯

Reshaping, recharging, & resurrecting the coach/client relationship ⚡

For athletes, for strength, for resilience, for health, for life, for you 🤝

Coming soon ⏰

Big weight shifts from one day to the next are not something to be concerned about.

Differences in sodium/water intake, exercise, and hormonal fluctuations can all cause sudden water weight shifts.

It could be that you overate the previous day, which generally comes with more sodium and more literal food in your gut. But it hasn't already turned into fat.

Just veer back onto your plan and keep moving forward. Trendlines are vastly more important than random spikes here or there.

If you're not specifically in a fat loss phase, you could also put away the scale and adjust your diet based on how you look, feel, and perform.

It's not for everyone, but those that are super focused on scale weight may benefit from the mental bandwidth reallocation.

Pain is multifactorial, meaning tissue damage isn't the only thing that determines severity of pain ❌

Your upbringing, mood, stress levels, previous pain experiences, what your doctor said, physical/mental/emotional traumas, environment and support system, what you read on WebMD or Reddit, your expectations, your knowledge, your hormones, and a lot more...

All significantly impact how you interpret and handle pain ✅

Sure, tissue damage can influence pain severity...

But it's also been well documented that you can have zero MRI findings, but life-altering pain. Or significant MRI "damage" findings with zero pain or functional loss. In fact imaging, practically speaking, is entirely useless for determining the cause of long-term pain.

Unless it's acute trauma, pain is usually not traceable to a single source, so outside of those cases...

It begs the question: Is pain all in your head? 💀

Well, of course it is.

But "in your head" is not the same thing as "fake"

Everyone experiences pain for different reasons, at different levels. Everyone handles pain physically, mentally, and emotionally in a unique way and has different support systems, environments, functional needs, and goals that affect it all.

Like mental illness, just because it's in your head, doesn't mean it's not affecting your REAL life. The brain is literally where we process our world and if that world has led to pain, it's going to let us know, whether that pain comes from a physical source or not.

Your world influences your interpretation of itself.

➡️ All this to say: Pain is highly complex. Don't believe anyone that claims they can pinpoint your specific root cause of chronic pain, including MDs or radiologists. Likewise, don't let the idea of things being in your head invalidate your experience. It just means you need to find someone that understands the complexity and will work with you to figure out where things can change to positively influence your life and your pain experience.

Those that are the most successful at any goal, whether that be health, strength, athletics, or business all rely on Motivation and Discipline's 3rd sibling way more

And that is Consistency.

Motivation in the early stages of a goal is fleeting, we all know that ✈️

It waves up and down, it's useful from time to time, we just can't RELY on it to make it all happen

But the mistake that is often made is thinking that teaming up with middle child Discipline is the endgame, as if you should have to perpetually call on your willpower to reach your goals

➡️ The fact of the matter is that all goals rely on the foundation of progress: 𝐀𝐝𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 ⬅️

The system that you follow creates rituals in your daily and weekly life that make it so that discipline and motivation are not even needed to get you to the gym, wake up early, meal prep, save money, run a business, or do any of the work that needs to get done to achieve your goal(s)

Rituals make it so that, regardless of the type of day you're having, you still show up to do the work. Willpower plays no part in it. It's just who you are.

And when who you are is someone that adheres to the system without needing to call upon your emotions, you're someone that will succeed.

Looking for quality coaching that will help you in the long run? ✅

Here at FortitudeRx, we specialize in offering personalized nutrition and exercise plans to fit all your needs. We employ behavioral modifications to ensure maximum efficiency and satisfaction, so that you can be sure to see results not only fast, but also for a long time. ⏳

Starving yourself, working out incessantly for a few weeks and then giving up, feeling guilty about eating foods you love - now you can say goodbye to all these scenarios.

Be sure to say goodbye to them for good. Give us a call, today. 📲

https://fortituderx.com/

It's been an idea for quite some time that free weights are superior to machines

But when are machines better, even if your main goal is strength? Or "functional" fitness?

Surely using machines, with their fixed paths, must lead to a lack of core strength and something else because of all of those tiny stabilizer muscles we always hear about...

Right? 🤔

Well... not really. The idea that there are countless tiny stabilizer muscles that must be trained using specific exercises is patently false. Those muscles are trained with any normal exercise program with compound movements

Machines (and cables) are very useful when:

✔️ You're fatigued from your primary exercise(s) and reduced coordination will decrease your control and/or force output with barbell/dumbbell movements

✔️ You're injured and you need a way to minimize rep variance and focus on consistent rep quality

✔️ You're in a muscle building phase and getting close to muscular failure is necessary, but free weight exercises tend to lead to task failure first, disallowing you to get to true muscular failure, costing you potential gains

✔️ You want to adjust the force curve to accommodate for weak points or strengthen them specifically

✔️ You want a simpler and more stable way to do advanced intensification techniques like forced reps, drop sets, and cluster sets

❌ You're feeling lazy for your accessory work and would rather just sit down

Okay maybe that last one too, sometimes.

While cable and machine exercises aren't usually the bread and butter of a strength phase, they absolutely have their place in large chunks of a properly periodized plan

They don't replace free weight for strength movements, they support them

Just like your accessory and supplemental free weight movements, skipping out on cable and machine work is likely to leave gaps in your strength plan 🕳️

Wanna have a fast, efficient workout? 💪 🕑

Suitable even for those without much time on their hands. HIIT - High Intensity Interval Training - is a great way to burn up calories in between tasks.

Try a tabata workout - meaning, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, for eight rounds of movements. You can alternate between push-ups, air squats and anything that suits your fancy.

Remember - try to find exercises that you enjoy doing, so you don’t skip any workout sessions. 💯

Our guided and comprehensive health coaching services utilize evidence-based fitness, nutrition, mobility, mindset modification, and lifestyle integration programming and coaching. 🙌

We focus on the accountability, support, and community you need to keep moving forward. Whether you want to do it yourself with a little bit of guidance or have us with you every step of the way, we have you covered. 💪

Reach out: 👇
https://fortituderx.com/

Being part of a team, whether it's in business, in athletics, in your recreational hobbies, or being part of a family or community provides you with about a billion benefits

A single coach can provide an objective look at your lifting form, your health, your habits, and your behaviors to help mold you into the person and/or athlete you want to be

But a group of coaches and peers all working together to improve one another...

That's an entirely different level of growth potential 🤯

💡 What if you could get:

💥Multiple angles of thoughts, observations, and opinions
💥Exposed to questions you didn't even know you had
💥An opportunity to teach others what you're learning (to pass it on and solidify it for yourself)
💥Crowd-sourced motivation and accountability to get the job done
💥A way to share in victories and learn from defeat
💥A chance to lean on others strengths and provide your own

The adage of "the 5 people you spend the most time with" is pretty accurate, so find the team that supports your goals, holds you accountable, helps you grow, and makes you want to help others

A good team is not easy to find, but once you do, it's a very powerful experience