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Everything You Need to Know About Starting Olympic Weightlifting

Olympic weightlifting has rapidly grown in popularity over the last 10-15 years. It’s a big hit because it contributes to a number of other fitness phenomena:

  • The growth of fitness-sports like Crossfit;
  • Better appreciation for the benefits of heavy strength training;
  • The development of strength and conditioning science and practice.

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Olympic weightlifting brings a great deal to the table for anyone who cares about these facets of fitness, and it’s more accessible than ever. When I started as a personal trainer, the average commercial gym didn’t even have kettlebells, let alone a weightlifting platform! Now, almost every mainstream gym has a platform, bars that spin, and bumper plates. Yes, this does make me feel old.

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9 Tough Floor Exercises for Better Core Strength

Floor exercises are a great way to challenge the core, shoulders, and hips. They can also be a great way to build tolerance for loading the wrists. This makes floor exercises a great option for a wide range of goals; whether you’re training to get up off the floor after a fall, get better at yoga, or try your hand at gymnastics. These exercises also featured heavily in my guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse!

Picture of me with hands on the floor in a pressup position. I am pulling one knee up to my stomach.
Woman with her hands on a mat and her toes on the floor. She is pushing her hips up to the ceiling in the "downward dog" yoga pose.
By Logan Weaver on Unsplash

Some of these exercises, such as pushups and deadbugs, have been covered in great depth already. This post is aimed at building up the variety of exercises at your disposal. If you find a particular exercise here quite challenging, you can perform it on it’s own with a focus on truly mastering the technique. Alternatively, you can use these exercises in supersets and circuits as they tend to raise the heart rate.

They also force you to use the hips, trunk, and shoulders in tandem to maintain your position. Because you’re not laying on your back, these exercises also allow the shoulder blades to move freely. For these reasons, many strength coaches use them in blocks of general preparation work with their athletes.

If you want to skip the detail and just get an overview of the exercises, you can head over to this video.

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4 Powerful Lessons On Strength Training and Injury

I recently attended the Barbell Rehab Method certification in Central London. The Barbell Rehab philosophy is heavily focussed on the idea of integrating strength training and injury management. The end goal is to allow you to train hard whilst respecting your injuries.

This is a philosophy that is very close to my heart and my training style. This weekend course was validating and eye-opening at the same time. Here are some of the lessons I took from my time with Dr. Michael Mash of Barbell Rehab. I’ve included some tips for you too.

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Video: How to Train for a Strong Lower Back

Having a strong lower back always ranks somewhere on people’s list of gym goals. It may not be as important as their holiday or marathon goals, but lower back strength always comes up eventually.

Often, a new client mentions that their back occasionally feels weak, sore or tired. While back pain can be nuanced, there are simple steps we can take that can make a difference.

What a Strong Lower Back Could Mean for You

A strong lower back doesn’t just affect your gym workouts. It can affect your work, social life, leisure activities, and so much more. If you’ve ever lacked confidence in your back strength, then you can probably remember a time it held you back.

When I started training in kickboxing and weightlifting I was often disrupted by a sore lower back. I had my share of back injuries, and learned a lot of lessons about how to move and train properly.

This post won’t dive into specific back issues, but it will discuss some of the methods that have helped me and my clients feel better about our lower back strength.

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Quick Post: 4 of the Best Deadlift Accessory Exercises

The deadlift is a fantastic strength exercise in its own right, but after a certain amount of progress, you will need to supplement it with other lifts to keep getting stronger. This is where deadlift accessory exercises become an essential part of your strength training programme.

How to Include Deadlift Accessory Exercises in Your Programme

These accessory exercises will help you rectify the weak links in your deadlifting game and strengthen important muscle groups. The downside to this is that these exercises will be hitting the same positions and muscle groups as deadlifts. This means you won’t be able to train every exercise on this list at the same time and deadlift heavy; you’ll have to choose what you want to focus on.

In the breakdown below, I’ll discuss when to use these accessory exercises to improve your deadlifting ability.

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The Truth About Pullup Training That Will Supercharge Your Progress

I started this blog to cover all things related to strength and gym confidence; well, pullup training certainly delivers both! It doesn’t matter if you can actually do pullups. What matters is that you’re working on lifting your body using your upper body pulling strength.

For these reasons, improving pullup strength is one of the most common goals people enquire about when they start training with me. Pullup training will help you improve your grip strength, pulling strength, core strength and more.

There’s just one problem. As pullup goals became more popular, every trainer (myself included) raced online to demonstrate our favourite pullup accessory exercises. This left the public with a library of exercises, but no guidance for putting them in a training programme.

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It’s like having a pile of bricks but no blueprint for the house you want to build. Exercises on their own don’t get you results; a good training programme does! Today’s video covers the programming mistake that so many people make when trying to train for pullup strength.

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4 Tips That Will Transform Your Sports Performance

I’ve always been fascinated by the process of training people to improve their sports performance. My involvement in strength and conditioning began in 2011 and I was reading books on the subject long before that. I’ve identified some universal behaviours that you should follow if you want to improve performance in your sport of choice.

running
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While there is an abundance of knowledge in professional sport, the information just doesn’t reach those who participate at amateur or recreational levels. And yet, it isn’t just pro athletes that want to improve their sports performance.

If you want to improve your game in your chosen sport, then this video is for you. In five minutes I’ll go through 4 things you can do to go further in your sport. These tips aren’t overly expensive, complicated, or time-consuming, but they will help. Some of the tips are quite practical, whereas others will encourage you to review certain aspects of your current training regimen.

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Be Your Own Personal Trainer for Better Fitness Results

It’s not always easy to find a personal trainer you match well with, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting fitness results.

Having a personal trainer is proven to improve training consistency and help you reach your fitness goals (for more on that, you should see what my past and current clients had to say about their training experience).

You may not be able to completely replace a professional personal trainer, but there are a number of PT habits you can copy to boost your own gym performance and results.

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5 Best Exercises for TRX Training – Your Questions Answered

When it comes to selecting training equipment, I absolutely love anything that is simple to set up and use. That’s why, when suspension training equipment like the TRX started becoming common in gyms, I set out to learn a variety of effective TRX exercises that could help my clients achieve results.

This list of my top 5 TRX exercises is not exhaustive, but hopefully there will be one or two exercises you haven’t tried before. I’ll also answer some of the common questions about suspension training.

By Lawrence Wilcox on Unsplash

Note: I am not affiliated with TRX or any brand of suspension training equipment, and am not incentivised to promote them.

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The Complete Gym Motivation Round-Up

When I started Ready Steady Strong in 2021, one of my first projects was a 5-part series of blogs on gym motivation. Each part in the series covered aspect of gym motivation and the mistakes I frequently see. I’m proud of the series, but in hindsight, it was a long read!

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Fast-forward to 2023, and it’s time to streamline this topic with some simple solutions to your gym motivation problems. We’ve all wrestled with a lack of motivation when it comes to training. However, over 13 years of training people, I’ve see what works and what doesn’t when trying to overcoming a lack of fitness motivation.

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