Beyond Strength

Why We Test at Beyond Strength

We have a unique training system at Beyond Strength. One that you seriously won’t find anywhere else. There’s one big difference that really sets us apart from other gyms.

We test our members.

Right now, we’re in the middle of testing week. Our members are jumping, rowing, lifting, and biking. They’re learning the truth about their current fitness level.

But why?

Why does testing matter when we could all just show up and workout…when we could just coast through our gym experience, lifting weights and doing intervals?

Because there’s more to the gym than just showing up and sweating. Because the gym is a conduit to a better body and a better life. Testing shows us exactly how to use that conduit.

But it’s more than that.

Here are four reasons why we test at Beyond Strength.

Why We Test at Beyond Strength We have a unique training system at Beyond Strength. One that you seriously won’t find anywhere else. There’s one big difference that really

Big Bench Ben isn’t just winking.

Well, he is just winking.

But he’s also using a technique that helps you get more out of your t-spine rotation.

You can get more rotation when your close your lead eye and keep trying to look over your lead shoulder with your off eye.

Your brain wants to know what’s going on behind you, so it keeps turning your torso.

Try it out.

Better yet, come try it with Ben.

Click the link in our profile and come train for $10 for your first 10 days.

How Many Reps Should You Do? (Spoiler alert, it matters in more ways than you think)

We recently received this question via email:

“Do you think it’s ok if I stay in the 6-12 rep range using alternating linear periodization? Below 6 seems too heavy and above 12 is sort of fatiguing for me. Can I keep working out with the same general template and just vary movement order, reps, and exercises and loading type or results will stall and I need to change things up? Any suggestions?”

The simple answer is a combination of yes, no, and it depends.

In this week's blog, we'll dive into the detailed answer. I’ll teach you what to do about the rep ranges and what to do when low reps seem too heavy but high reps are too fatiguing. I’ll also tell you what to do with training templates.

How Many Reps Should You Do? (Spoiler alert, it matters in more ways than you think) “Do you think it’s ok if I stay in the 6-12 rep range using alternating linear periodization? Below 6 seems too heavy and above 12 is sort ...

Reps matter. They develop our bodies, and our minds, in different ways.

You can stay in your comfort zone if you want. But you’ll get a lot more out of your training if you don’t.

Click the link in our profile and get f*cking started with 10 days for $10.

When you’re deep down in the hole and you feel like you can’t get back up, remember this:

You’re fine. You’re just uncomfortable.

How to Keep Exercising While Traveling

Travel kicks workout plans right in the pants. And it always happens as you settle into a good routine, right? You’re humming along. You’re hitting your gym sessions every week. You’re getting in your steps, and you’re doing extra mobility training to keep your muscles and joints right. Then Thanksgiving hits and you have to head to Aunt Edna’s in Albuquerque. After that, it’s Uncle Barry’s in Wisconsin for Christmas. In between, you have one last work trip for the year. And you’re like, fuuuuudddgggeee, how am I supposed to keep exercising with all of this? (Only you didn’t say fudge.)

Whether you’re traveling for the holidays or work has you jet-setting around the country (or world), there are simple things you can do to keep yourself moving. Here are a few simple tips on how to keep exercising while traveling.

How to Keep Exercising While Traveling Whether you’re traveling for the holidays or work has you jet-setting around the country (or world), there are simple things you can do to...

Here’s something to keep in mind. Your weights might not linearly progress over the course of a month.

It might be that you use more weight during week two than you did during week one, then find that your weights go down in week three. Finally, in week four, your weights climb higher than during the previous weeks.

This is all hypothetical. But it’s important to remember that sometimes strength increases in waves rather than on a steady upward trajectory.

If your weights climb each week, great! But be mentally prepared for that not to happen.

Little known fact…

Squatting during killer sunsets comes free of charge with each Beyond Strength membership.

You just have to come to the 4:30pm class.

Click on the link in our profile to claim your first 10 days for only $10

🤔 Did Chris get a terrible haircut, or is that just a weird shadow?

Let us know in the comments… ⤵️

Your nervous system is the main driver of strength output, and it takes significantly longer to recover than your muscles.

It’s important to note this because your muscles will feel ready to go, and they are. But you have to give your nervous system time to catch up so that you get the most out of your workout.

Rest 3-5 minutes between sets of strength exercises.

For example, do a set of squats. Then take a quick break and do a set of and upper-body pulling exercise. Then do a mobility exercise. Then rest a little longer. Once 3-5 minutes have elapsed since your last set of squats, do your next set.
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Make sure you’re doing your strength training properly. Click the link in our profile and train with us for $10 for your first 10 days.

When you started your career, you likely had a lot to learn. You were slower at completing tasks than you are now. And it’s probably true that you couldn’t produce the results you now produce. Strength training works similarly.

Constantly varying exercises limits your ability to improve your skill. Skill, dear friends, begets efficiency. When you’re efficient with an exercise, you can use more weight. And, you guessed it; using more weight makes you stronger.

Here’s how it works – you’ll use more weight at a lower RPE and with more reps in reserve. Skill and efficiency change how you perceive your effort during a given exercise. Your body knows how to solve that exercise’s “problem,” achieving the end result by using fewer resources. For example, you’ll need less muscular tension to lift a given weight. Since it costs your body less to find the positions, and execute the movements, you’re able to put more into actually lifting the weight. When you can do that, your weights go up and so do your strength gains.

“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“I think there are two keys to success. One is to show up. The other one is to keep going. Most people don’t keep going.”
-Dan John ( )

Move to recover—wait, what??

Light movement after exercise and between heavy workouts stimulates recovery by increasing blood flow and stimulating your nervous system.

So, don’t just sit on the couch during your days off from the gym. Take walks. Do some mobility training (e.g. the warm-up for all of you current Beyond Strength members).

Just frickin’ move. You will feel better and you will recover faster between training sessions.

Four Days of Strength Training!?

Some of you are real dang pumped about this. We get it. Lifting is a fun time. It’s also, like, necessary for building strength and muscle.

We went to the four-day per week lifting schedule so you’d get enough training frequency and training volume to build muscle. It’s possible to build and maintain strength with only one or two days per week of heavy lifting–depending on your training status. But we need more weight-room exposure to grow muscle. Three days per week can suffice. However, four days per week is better. It allows you to hit each muscle group twice per week with increased volume (amount of sets and reps) and intensity (amount of weight). The schedule also offers ample time to recover between upper- and lower-body workouts. Which allows you to train harder during each workout.

There’s another, non-physiological, reason for the schedule change. Fun.

We’ve worked hard throughout the year to build and maintain work capacity. It was necessary, paying big short- and long-term dividends. But our brains need a break from that type of hard work. Rather than continuing to rise to the challenge, we likely would have grown to dislike that kind of training. Now, we can look back and say, “Man, that was tough and I got in a lot better shape,” without feeling malice for burning lungs and burning legs. And we can also look forward to the next time we train that way. In the interim, we give our minds a break and our bodies a different stimulus from which to grow.

There are a lot of six-rep sets in our current training program. There are good reasons.

Much of the research shows that strength is built in the 1 to 5 rep range. Muscle gain, however, is stimulated in every imaginable rep range. That’s because there are multiple mechanisms for hypertrophy (muscle gain). Mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress are the three main contributing factors. Six rep sets, then, are a great jumping-off point for building strength and muscle.

Starting a training block with sets of six during strength training gives us room to progress into lower rep ranges during the subsequent training phases. Sets of six also allow for heavy enough loads to elicit hypertrophy from mechanical tension.

Sets of six are also great for progressing to higher rep sets that cause muscle damage and metabolic stress. That’s why they're in our assistance training section (the C’s on your training program). We’ve added a three-second eccentric to some of the exercises for a dash of spice and extra mechanical tension.

“Go down swinging. And I’ll tell you: If you fight with all you have, more often than not, you won’t go down at all. You will win.” - Jocko Willink

NEW MERCH JUST DROPPED‼️

Store is only open for two weeks… 💨

https://beyond-strength-performance.myshopify.com

Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing: September 2022 Beyond Strength Program Blog

[NEW TRAINING PHASE!!] We’re entering the summer block’s final training phase. It’s the final phase in the transition from work capacity training to heavy strength and power training.

Give this week's blog a read to see what we have in store. 😎

Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing: September 2022 Beyond Strength Program Blog We’re entering the summer block’s final training phase. It’s the final phase in the transition from work capacity training to heavy strength

We’re so pumped to welcome Rony Torres to the Beyond Strength Staff! ( )

Rony hails from Venezuela where, over 15 years, he built a successful training business.

Rony came to the US 5 years ago and nearly immediately reached out to us.

He’d drop in, we’d welcome him to staff inservice meetings, and we’d pester him to stop by more often.

Not so secretly, we wanted Rony to work with us!

It’s finally happened and we can’t be happier.

Rony is a great coach with an eye for fine details and infectious energy.

He’s passionate about helping people improve their lives through training.

And he’s a great fit at Beyond Strength.

Welcome, Rony!

🙌🙌🙌

[What the heck is Eustress Training? 🤔]

Both strength days this month feature something called Eustress Training. It’s a strength-training method developed and utilized by coaches like Craig Weller and Jonathan Pope at Building The Elite and Joel Jamieson (the guy that developed the Morpheus platform our members use for recovery testing and properly zoning their heart rates). Eustress training is designed to improve extensive strength, or the ability to express your strength over time and in higher volumes. That’s good. It trains for the transition between the gym and the real world by training you to use your strength lots of times–while also showing you that you can lift heavy weights more times than you believed. There’s another equally important purpose to eustress training, and it’s found in the name.

There are two types of stress: distress and eustress. Here’s a simple way to understand the difference–distress is stress that you’re not prepared for, and eustress is stress that you feel prepared for. The stress you experience in a given situation depends on how prepared you feel for that situation and how much control you perceive that you can exert in the situation. Eustress training is designed to improve your feelings of control in otherwise distressing situations. Here’s a description from an article I wrote for Free Range American:

“Eustress-training workouts are designed to improve your sense of control so that you feel challenged instead of anxious. They also train you to do a lot of quality work without making your body feel like it was lit on fire and put out with a pitchfork. The results: You’re able to push yourself harder with less demand on your body; your shift in mindset trains you to take on challenges rather than avoid them, and you improve your skill at your chosen exercises.”

The subtext in our website’s header reads: training to overcome any challenge. Well, to overcome any challenge you must feel as though you have the resources to take on the challenge. Eustress training builds the physical and mental resources for kicking challenges right in the pants.

Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing: July 2022 Beyond Strength Program Blog

July’s training program marks the start of Block 3. That means we’re making a small “shift in gears” to transition us from Blocks 1 and 2’s work capacity training to the heavier doses of strength and power training coming in Block 4. We’re also introducing a strength-training method yet unseen at Beyond Strength.

Let’s break it down by training session…

Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing: July 2022 Beyond Strength Program Blog July’s training program marks the start of Block 3. That means we’re making a small “shift in gears” to transition us from Blocks 1 and 2’s...

How do you get comfortable with approaching hard things? Not knowing, but wanting to find out?

You can’t– wait… you can??!

Light movement after exercise and between heavy workouts stimulates recovery by increasing blood flow and stimulating your nervous system.

So, don’t just sit on the couch during your days off from the gym. Take walks. Do some mobility training (e.g. the warm-up for all of you current Beyond Strength members).

Just frickin’ move. You will feel better and you will recover faster between training sessions.

“Training makes me feel so good that I want to push myself to do more.”

Danielle’s not just talking about in the gym. She’s talking about life outside the gym.

Training makes her feel like she can Play Harder.

“Run, walk that extra mile, go rock climbing, etc.”

She gets more out of her life because she has the strength and endurance to kick ass

But, for her, training is also about the mental boost.

“Mentally, I feel really good when I get all of my workouts in 5 mornings in a row. And I feel really confident when I see that I increase my weight or add more mileage on the machines from week to week.”

And, it’s also just about enjoying it.

“I just feel good after I train. I enjoy being able to do it with my person ( ) and my best friend ( ) at the same time. I crush my goals and cheer them on to achieve their goals.”

Danielle consistently kicks as in the gym so she can play harder outside of the gym.

She trains because it improves her life.

Danielle is Beyond Strength.

🚨One week out!!🚨

Have your buddy picked out? 📧 Email Chris and he’ll get them (and you) all set up!

Oh, and what do you get for bringing a buddy?? Unlimited access for the week so that you can BOTH hit every class you’d like… TOGETHER!! 🎉

We all have our own why… no need to take on someone else’s.

“…people can be controlling with themselves to satisfy their introjects. To pressure yourself, to force yourself to act, or to feel as if you have to do something is to undermine your own autonomy.”

The quote is from Edward L. Deci’s book, Why We Do What We Do; it’s an ode to self-determination theory in practical application.

Think about that for a second. How often do you coerce yourself into action? While it’s often a productive short-term strategy, it’s a long-term defeatist, self-destructive means to an end. Autonomy is intrinsic motivation’s spearhead—we must foster it to make self determination theory work.

To avoid this trap, and to develop self autonomy, we have to start with understanding our introjects.

Introjects are internalized rules that don’t jive with our authentic selves. To paraphrase Deci, think of them as loud, demanding voices in your head that come from outside sources. They’re rules you haven’t made a part of your authentic operation, but you still follow them.
Following introjects inhibits our self-autonomy—while likely building resentment.

Instead consider what you authentically think, feel and act on. Does it feel right in your gut? Yes? Then do it. No? Well…that’s why we have a middle finger.

Think of the external fitness and work mores that we coerce ourselves with. If we’re not slaves to the gym we’re not committed. If we’re not grinding ourselves into the ground we’re not hustling enough. If these ideas jive with who you authentically are, then go after them. If not…consider that and start asking questions.

Are you following introjects or are you integrating solid, authentic mores into your decision making process?