– Now is golfing again, driving the ball 180 yards in the air. Furthest she’s ever driven in her life.

Sean began his coaching career over 18 years ago working with cyclists, general fitness clients and doing physical rehabilitation services. He has been involved in sports and fitness his entire life playing Division 1 soccer for Virginia Commonwealth University and then competing in mountain bike and road cycling after completing his undergraduate studies in Psychology. Sean’s passion to learn more about the human body lead him into graduate school to study Exercise Physiology. Despite his immense educational background, Sean felt that the services he was offering to his clients in his group gym were ineffective. He began to lose the passion he had once had for the profession of fitness coaching.  That was until he ran across the OPEX Fitness blog. Sean told us about how transformative it was for him, “it resonated with me because his message about fitness was much deeper than pull ups and reps. It was powerful to hear James’ desire to change the face of fitness, I wanted to be a part of that.”

Edwin Herrero came on board in January looking to improve his level in competition. Improving gymnastics density and cleaning up his snatch technique were amongst them. He has made vast improvements in these areas, as well as putting up 6 lbs in BW while his midsection fat score has decreased from 51.5mm to 45mm.

How can you excel at fitness competitions? Understand the difference between threats and challenges. Champions see competitions differently—as challenges. You control a challenge, threats control you. Threats, in sports and in life, are often illusions. They exist only in your imagination. If you don’t win or perform well, what happens? Just that: you don’t win or perform well.

Now, we’ve got to keep up with our tweets to keep up with on Twitter, our connections to connect with on Google+, creative pics to post Instagram, our network to build on LinkedIn, and, for the young guns, the action to catch for our SnapChat accounts—just to name a few.

After taking the ‘risk’ to pursue your dreams as a coach, with the selfless intent to change lives and share the gift of wellness with others that you’ve found for yourself, you know you are doing what you are meant to do.

Fall typically represents the beginning of a period of learning in classrooms around the world. Even coaches far removed from school hallways experience this season in some fashion.

Brian Foley- OPEX Remote Coach How Hard Should I Go on the Assault Bike?   Matt Springer- OPEX Remote Coach How Should I Pace on the Assault Bike? (Visited 2,055 times, 1 visits today)

CrossFit Games and Grid Athlete Amanda Goodman discusses her journey with OPEX Remote and Onsite Coach, Robin Lyons.

Patrick Casey is a freshman athlete of mine.  His mother hired me during 8th grade to work with him in hopes of preparing him for his upcoming hockey season in the 9th grade.  I’ve had a lot of success with various athletes throughout my years as a coach, and it always has derived from an individual assessment.  From there, the program I write is based on the information gathered in the assessment.  I’ve seen successful assessments take 10 minutes and some take a few sessions to conduct.  In Patrick’s case, I took a few sessions to “figure” him out.

“I just want to make small steps of progress in the gym. Overall, I want to be more resilient and more robust so I can handle everything else I need to do in the world.”– Houtaneh Houtan

In the late 1980s and early 1990s fitness was revolutionized with the introduction of mixed modal training. Using multiple “modes” or types of movement in training, has the benefit of not only changing-up how you train the three energy systems, but vitally it introduces variety. Variety is critical in keeping your client engaged and ultimately sticking with their fitness journey.

We are now entering the second week of the 2018 CrossFit Open. Hopefully everyone managed to pace 18.1 appropriately rather than ‘fly and die’ like we witnessed scores of novice CrossFit athletes doing around the world.

The body has three main energy systems, and energy system training is training that is designed to improve each of these. 

Tennil has a recovery day today. She has an easy walk and swim programmed. This is to help her body to recover and unplug so that she is prepared for next week.

The great retailer, Nordstrom, places this above all else. They aren’t just words, they are Nordstrom’s ethos.

“For an athlete specifically, you know you’re ready to take part and be in the open, you have to look at the training specifically, and what you’ve done in relation to scores from previous years, in relation to scores in different time domains, in different modalities, that are all open style pieces which then give you the context of if you’re ready or not. Of course, we use scores that have a lot of information and data to compare to to say, Okay, capacity is good or endurance and gymnastic is good, in relation to what we see in the test itself. If it’s not, then we can make adjustments moving forward to ensure that the athlete is prepared.”

If you follow her Instagram page, you will see she has done just that. She is a proud new “dog mom” of a Yorkie Poo appropriately named Madison (yes, that Madison), or Maddie for short.

Fitness is personal.  We live in a fast-paced world that is growing more individualized every day.  Some years ago I foresaw this development and made it OPEX’s mission to provide fitness education that was not only appropriate, but outstanding.