I recently embraced cooking as a hobby. I’ve always been an average cook, at best. I have been lucky to have my wife, Judy, perform most of the cooking in our home. As much as I enjoy running the studio and being a coach, I’m trying to maintain some level of work/life balance. That requires enjoying things outside of the fitness studio.
Someone I recently discovered on my recent culinary journey is Samin Nosrat. Samin is a writer, chef, and teacher, who has a skill at turning complexity into simplicity.
Her first book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, is a New York Times bestseller, a James Beard Award winner for Best General Cookbook, and was named as Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals. It was such a hit that they made it into a Netflix’s documentary series. Samin has been called “The next Julia Child”. During an interview with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, she shared that one of her biggest skills is taking cooking and making it very simple. The result is that it becomes enjoyable for others. That truly resonated with me because I feel the same way with exercise.
I’ve been that person in the roomwho felt “like the dumbest person in the room” and then experienced all the anxiety that comes along with that emotion. One of my missions is to never have someone experience that at the studio with exercise. A common fear of coming to a gym/studio is the fear of looking stupid. I’m aware that most people joining my studio haven’t done many of the exercises we routinely do. Take a moment and ask yourself when was the last time you did a Turkish get up or a side plank while performing a clamshell and isometric hold on a sandbag? In our studio, we take care to meet people where they are at and then coach them using the proper progressions.
My super power is making exercise easy to understand for my members. I seek out the best exercises that produce results and use them. Those results typically are mobility and strength. My next task is to then master them. This is an important step that many coaches forgo. How can you teach what you haven’t yet mastered yourself? The third and final step is to teach my fellow coaches. Something critical to having a good experience in the studio is simplicity. That includes the learning. That’s why I want my team to teach exercises the same way. Learning how to perform an exercise one way, only to learn it in a completely different way the next time, can be very confusing. Confusion leads to frustration.
That’s been my knock with watching exercises on social media. I post exercises on our Instagram feed (@Janddfitness), but it’s only to share things we do in the studio, not to teach. In the upcoming week, I’m launching my online training series for this objective. In our videos, I demonstrate the exercise with a simple explanation and then reference the proper regressions and progressions.
Working out can be simple and fun. Changing your body doesn’t mean you need to be miserable during the process. To make a difference, you need to embrace the process. Having a coach with super powers can help that process.
See you at the studio.
If you are interested in our online training system and would like more information, email me at Doug@janddfitness.com. We’re offering a discount for the first 100 users.