I’m delighted to share with you that I’ve been selected by Origym to be honoured in their Best Personal Trainer in Glasgow Awards.
 
They asked me to answer a couple of questions in order to help aspiring personal trainers which I’ve shared for you below.

Everyone knows what a pressup is and most likely there has been a time in your life where you could bash them out or where working towards one. They can be pretty effective up to a point when you are starting strength training and there are a few ways that you can both make them easier or harder depending on your current ability.

The hanging leg raise is great for working the abs in a way that transfers to many sporting and performance-based activities. They are required to hold a strong isometric contraction which is vital for transferring force during the prior mentioned activities. The legs create the resistance and having them straight out makes things tonnes more difficult. Remember to keep good control, especially eccentrically on the way down to get the most out of these. Make sure you have mastered the hanging knee raise before moving onto these.

The Good Morning is a hip hinge movement and is very similar to the Romanian Deadlift in terms of execution. The only difference is where the weight is loaded and thus how it challenges the muscles involved. A well-executed good morning relies on a good hinge pattern. It can be inherently risking due to the forward lean and placement of the weight on the back so it is important to take this into consideration before planning it within your routine. 

The seated row is a useful machine as it allows you to focus on the muscles of the upper back and arms with more isolation than other forms of row. Other rowing variations tend to rely heavily on the core, spinal erectors and legs to keep you in a stable position to pull from which can sometimes hamper and limit the work out the muscles you are trying to work can get. The seated row allows you to brace against the chest pad while sitting tall so that you can place the focus firmly on the bigger upper back pulling muscles and those of the arms.

The chin-up is the ultimate upper body pulling exercise. It requires a lot of strength to do though as unlike most other resistance exercises, we can’t change the load – we weigh what we weigh! It works the muscles of the upper back and the arms while the whole body has to work on keeping tight and maintain tension so that it can be transferred from the working muscles. 

The vertical jump is a great exercise for developing power when carried out with the intent to jump as high as possible. It requires no equipment but there are a few things to bear in mind to ensure you keep it safe and effective. Really, the vertical jump exercise is for anyone but I would recommend having some basic knowledge and strength during a loaded squat. This will allow you to safely decelerate and control your body positions during landing.

Building strength is not complicated, in fact it is pretty simple. Simple doesn’t equal easy though and with the unlimited amounts of information available to us, the shiny object syndrome pulls our efforts from pillar to post distracting us from what is going to most easily make sustainable strength progress.

The 4 steps (or tips) I’m about to lay out will get you stronger than you ever thought possible – as simple as they sound. If you are straying too far from these steps then you are potentially holding back your progress, over-complicating things and denying yourself the results that you both crave and deserve.
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Now let’s get stuck straight into these steps which I have ranked in order of importance so that you can implement them right away.

The Single Arm Row is my favourite upper body pulling exercise. By having your feet square and 3rd point of contact through your non-working arm, you can create a really stable position to lift heavy weights. It is for everyone, there is only a very low body awareness required to be able to perform this movement safely. You need minimal equipment too, a dumbbell and then something sturdy to lean on and you are good to go. This exercise gets your core working hard to brace and to resist rotation, you will feel it in your oblique’s the next day if you work hard to resist excess rotation. With 3 points of contact for support, you are really able to isolate your big pulling muscles of the back and arms. It will also raise awareness of any side to side deficiencies.

It is easy to cling onto certain ideas and let our biases shape what we do. This is particularly true when it comes to training for strength. We can end up on a very narrow and focused path and if we just take a step back to look at the bigger picture we might notice that we add or exclude certain things which aren’t necessary or even helpful for our original goals.

I’ll share 5 of the things that I see people with the goal of getting stronger clinging on to which are not necessary and sometimes even detrimental.

The more you can dig down into the why of your goal - Why do you want to get stronger?

Why have you chosen these particular lifts to define your strength?

Then the easier it becomes to guide how you go about achieving that. Remember you are individual and you have your own motivations for doing what you do, you can set your own path and don’t have to get stuck to the ideas that others have had before you.

​Keep reading to find out 5 of the things you thought where non-negotiable when it comes to get stronger but you might actually be better off without.