Performance over fitness

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

–Frank Lloyd Wright

Just like your taste for clothes and certain foods evolves with time, so does your appetite for lifting. You start with goals of perfect form, that weight you think is heavy, and a goal to be fit. This is your goal at the start of your journey. Now fast forward to today, look at where you are, at the numbers you have put up, and at your current level of performance. Are you further than you were when you started? If not, something needs to change, but most likely you are leaps and bounds away from that person you wanted to become, because you are so much better. But the real question becomes: Are you done growing? Are you happy with where you are at? I don’t ask this question to evoke a negative response, but rather to ask, are you as great as you can be? This is the basis of our performance team we plan to start in the new year.

The concept for this team is simple:

We want to find the most dedicated athletes around town to come in at given times and train together. We want to breed an atmosphere of success, one in which the possibility of failure is impossible. Can you imagine the PR’s that will be made? Can you imagine the weaknesses that will be over come? What about the mental fortitude that will be strengthened?

And the best part…

It is free.

But there is a couple of caveats:

1. You must have a gym you train at and program you follow
   1. One or two days of greatness a week does nothing if you don’t follow it up with other days.
   2. This is not meant to be a “come get some free training and go about your merry way”, this is meant for dedicated athletes.
2. You must make the training sessions
   1. If you only come once in a blue moon, then this is probably not going to be your thing… If you are not willing to put in hard work on say, a Friday night before going out, then this group is probably not for you.
3. You must leave negativity and your aches and pains at home
   1. If you have a structured program then you know that soreness and pain are part of the process, so since we are all hurting, please leave those comments somewhere else. 
4. Come ready to compete and push others
   1. The whole point of this team is to come and be pushed by others, to find the biggest fish in the pond and try to beat one another, so come ready to compete!
5. You must represent Pure Health at your competition of choice and give back to those who helped strengthen you
   1. Since we are putting time and effort into your development, we would like it if you gave a little shout out back toward those that helped you along the way.
6. And last but not least, you must help out those that want to become better.
   1. This group is not meant to bash anyone willing to train for a goal, so if you only squat 135 but have a dream of putting 300 on the bar, then we want to help you out!!

NOTE: This group is not meant to push anyone away from the gym or to make a special clique of elite lifters. However, in my years of training and coaching, I have found that there are always certain individuals that want more out of training than others. If you think about lifting all day, if this is your passion and love, if your main goal is to become elite, compete in competitions, and crush PR’s, and you are willing to put in long hours to do it: this is the group for you!! 

On a different note:

Taylor Tran and I were talking the other day about warming up and how it is really important and the better you get, the more warming up you have to do, but everyone knows this….. right?

We often come into the gym, start doing are warm-up, get to chatting with one another, check our phones, and then start are training for the day. Here are a couple of issues with that:

• There is no attention paid to HOW you are warming up
• You have skipped over many of the much needed mobilization exercises or have done them in haste.
• If you have a phone in your hand, how effective is the warm-up really?

If you have trouble coming up with a warm-up pre-workout, follow a couple of the tips below to get a little more out of your warm-up and ultimately your training session.

1. Start with a foam roller
   1. Hit all the major muscle groups for 30 sec. a piece. My list looks like this:
      1. Upper back
      2. Shoulders
      3. Lower back
      4. Glutes
      5. Hamstrings
      6. Quads
      7. IT Bands
2. Activate the GLUTES:
   1. Get some lunges going and make sure to get that full ROM. This has personally helped me with a hip injury I caused myself by decreasing my warm-up time and trying to jump to heavy squats. 2 or 3 sets of 10-12 each leg
   2. 

      

      Throw in some weighted hip raises pre-workout to help get those hips firing! 2 or 3 sets of 10-12

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3. After all of this is done, now get a bar in your hands and start working your motions! I personally start with some squat jerks, some good mornings, and some deep pause squats
   1. 

Again, if the competition team peaks your interest, make sure to PM us on facebook or email us at purehealthperformance918@gmail.com!