The three areas to test in a fitness assessment include body composition, movement capabilities, and work capacity.

In this week’s installment of OPEX One I’m going to be giving insight to the art of assessing an athlete who’s been chewed up and spit out by the grinder.  If you’ve been involved in fitness for awhile you’ve likely seen the athletes who have stopped making progress, […]

Litmus Test – Upper Body Pulling A litmus test is a gauge of progress in program design. If your prescription has been targeting a specific quality in fitness, a litmus test communicates honesty in the development of that quality.

Jonson Tan flew all the way from Malaysia to meet with me. He had knee surgery in the beginning of the year and hasn’t been able to squat or move much at all due to pain so he sought me out to get him back in the game. Thanks Jonson for dropping into OPEX. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting you and appreciate you letting me take you to lunch as well!

James FitzGerald talks strategy as well as indirect assessment while EC Client Laura Dickerson does a test of 15 second all out effort sprints on the new Stairmaster Air Bike. If you’re interested in setting up a free consult and are ready to get started with your personal assessment and fitness plan you can fill out your information here.

Clients may be struggling to gain lean mass because they are not capable of breaking down their muscle tissue. This is because they lack the prerequisite levels of strength. In order to gain lean mass, the client needs to be capable of breaking down muscle and recovering from that breakdown.

In this month’s Knowledge Series webinar James FitzGerald discusses the concept of training age, how you can determine your client’s training age, and how it will affect your programs. 

When it comes to creating a training program for your client it can be easy to get lost in detailed long-term planning and periodizing, just to end up overlooking the basics of a daily program. Here are three tips to make sure your client’s daily training session is always focused on the goal.  

At the beginning of the year you had a detailed plan to progress your client towards their goals in the gym. Then COVID-19 spread, and before you knew it the gym was closed and your client’s ability to train was limited. You were forced to adapt and now find yourself coaching your client through home workouts. While this may have forced you to abandon your original program, it does not mean all hope for progress is lost.

First, ask the client “does this pain you feel lead to a decrease in your function?”  If the answer is yes then a medical route should be pursued. But, if the pain does not decrease the client’s function than it is up to the coach to identify the cause of the pain and work around it.

By conducting a thorough assessment both the coach and the client get a clear understanding of what the client is capable of. This will quickly ground any fantasies goals the client may have and enable a focused conversation on goals, progression, and appropriate timelines and trade-offs. The assessment is the coach’s chance to help the client fall in love with the long game and the progress they will make over time.

Commonly found in functional fitness gyms, the AirBike is OPEX Fitness’ go-to method for testing our client’s work capacity. Based on James FitzGerald’s latest monthly Knowledge Series, an exclusive webinar for OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) Coaches, here is everything you need to know about the 10-minute max calories on the AirBike test.

In this weeks Ask Me Anything (AMA) sneak peek, James FitzGerald, tackles the question of should clients only drink water when thirsty? These AMA sessions are exclusive content available to OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) Coaches, in which FitzGerald answers three questions submitted by our coaches, weekly.

The assessment of a client’s fitness is what separates professional coaches from amateurs. A coach needs the concrete data collected from an assessment to construct a fitness program bespoke to their client. Without a personalized fitness program, a client cannot reach their full athletic potential. Assessment and programming are obviously interconnected, but what defines a quality assessment?

Journaling is a relatively simple habit, despite the fact that there are hundreds of different methods to do it. The actual practice has actually been around since humans learned how to put their thoughts into words. All the great minds from history have journaled in some capacity including: Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marcus Aurelius, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Maya Angelou.

Here are eight key performance indicators (KPIs) for competitive functional fitness coaches and athletes, pulled straight from James FitzGerald’s latest course Mixed Modal. Understand these KPIs and take your athlete’s performance to the next level.

Society places great stock in the art of measuring one’s future success. SAT, ACT scores and IQ tests are supposed to correlate with one’s ability to be successful in school. Logic holds that if you do well in one, you must do well in the other. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these indirect measurements of success they are still an indirect method. The only way to validate these indirect measurements findings is to collect more relevant data.

Now, there are one million and one ways to assess clients, generally speaking, but by not tapping into how your athletes are truly moving, carrying themselves (and their loads) and where there may be potential body break-down, underlying weakness or pain, you certainly are missing a mark.

You probably have experience with the Concept2 rower, but do you know how to use it to effectively test your client’s fitness? In this week’s Ask Me Anything (AMA), James FitzGerald, explains how coaches can use the Concept2 rower and the 4 x 30:30 test to analyze their client’s current level of fitness.

James FitzGerald gave a seminar on the eight characteristics of elite fitness athletes on the Wodapalooza Seminar Stage. Use these eight characteristics to determine if your client is capable of being an elite fitness athlete.