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?

In the functional fitness space, the Muscle-Up has become a sought after movement to progress for many individuals. The problem for most coaches is knowing how to progress the advanced skill in proper phases of training to ensure maximal expression is achieved. This article will explain how to use phases to progress the Muscle-Up effectively and safely.

For the first time ever in CrossFit Open History, the actual workout is currently being voted for in the CrossFit Games. One of these options actually happens to be exactly what our coaches predicted it would be in our recent post: 13.5.

Welcome to the week five preliminary strategy guide of the 2018 CrossFit Open. This CrossFit Open Workout 18.5 strategy guide is preliminary and not final. That being said, if you are tackling 18.5 soon, this guide will provide you with the information you need to succeed.

The finale of the 2018 CrossFit Open was, in all reality, a bit boring. The community decided the workout and ultimately they choose a repeat of 11.6. Very few of those participating in the CrossFit Open today have been around long enough to have attempted this workout when it was first introduced. As a result, many of them won’t be able to create any direction in purpose in their training that a Open Workout repeat usually allows. Without direct and purpose their can be no real athletic progression.

Map 10, which stands for Maximal Aerobic Power, simply means that work at this pace is very easy. As you move from MAP 10 to MAP 1, the pace increases as and the time of each interval drops in length.

The guy that paints the picture, James FitzGerald is the founder of OPEX (Formerly OPT) and The International Center for Fitness. When not coaching, he’s a full time husband, father and fitness athlete. His 20+ years of experience and service as a strength coach/technician, tireless practice on refining energy system work, nutritional and lifestyle balancing techniques and training of other coaches has made OPEX a sought after method of bringing fitness to a higher order.

“The gym was making a profit, but I didn’t see a future doing what I was doing, knowing I had so much more to offer,” he said of his days owning and running a CrossFit gym that largely followed a group class model.

ROMWOD (Range of Motion Workout of the Day) has been and continues to be a craze within the CrossFit Community. Almost every major CrossFit Games athlete endorses ROMWOD in their social media posts. ROMWOD is even a major sponsor of the CrossFit Competition series now. But does ROMWOD actually work as it is advertised and sold?

In the Wild Wild West that is the fitness industry, there are now countless options for how you can design your coaching career.  You have the choice of selling products like supplements, you can be a the top one to one coach in your city, or you can build an online “empire” through Facebook and Instagram.  However you look at it, you have options.  But, for most coaches, the big fish in the pond is opening a fitness gym.  It puts your name on the map, it sets roots for you, and it allows you to potentially build a juggernaut.  

Energy System Training is a training methodology by which people do various levels of work to try to increase the overall ability to complete work. Energy System Training has proven to be effective in building people’s ability to continue to output power over longer durations of time via repeatable intervals.

The fitness industry is flooded with influencers, coaches, and gyms that claim to offer personal fitness training. They promise to help you get leaner, stronger, and fitter in a short amount of time. But these lofty promises often include an even higher price tag. 

Mixed Modal has become a popular style of training for metabolic conditioning workouts. Initially popularized by CrossFit gyms, the high intensity, time-dependant workouts involving multiple modalities can be found inside Globo gyms, athletic centers and fitness franchises around the world. 

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.

While these diets and hacks may work for a small percentage of the world’s population, OPEX Fitness Founder, James FitzGerald, believes that the majority of the population can achieve longevity through health and fitness. In this month’s knowledge series, a coaching resource available to all OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) students, James dives into the three areas that are key to increasing longevity.  

Have you ever created a training program for a client, who then follows through and diligently executes their sessions, but at the end of it their improvements are a lot smaller than you both had hoped for? Or worse still, your client end ups with some nagging chronic pain in their shoulder that wasn’t there before?

As a professional coach, your mission is to help clients achieve long term sustainable results, this weekly Ask Me Anything (AMA) session sneak peek, provides James FitzGerald’s seven tips for helping gain lean muscle mass and burn body fat.

The longer answer is that, as most things are, if you are fantastic at your job and if you market and sell yourself well, you can make good money.