Amplify Strength and Performance

Amplify Strength and Performance Amplify Strength and Performance provides training and nutrition solutions that help you build a physique that performs even better than it looks.

In the face of a global existential health crisis, the past two years have forced me to deeply reflect on what is import...
02/01/2022

In the face of a global existential health crisis, the past two years have forced me to deeply reflect on what is important to me and whether the things I’ve was pursuing was serving me and nourishing me or depleting and diminishing me.

Here’s the thing, when our actions don’t align with our priorities, we feel stressed. Unhappy. Exasperated. Unfulfilled.

Recognising this, I’ve realised that as a Coach, it’s not enough to ask my clients to list what outcomes they want. I need to know their core values, what sacrifices they’re willing to make and what changes they’re willing to set in motion. These allow me to facilitate behaviour change.

This is why I have asked my clients to audit their time. This exercise allows us to see whether they are sacrificing what is urgent for what is important. It also helps us to identify opportunities for change.

Here’s how to do it:
1. Track how you spend your time during the week.
2. Organise your behaviour by time spent (slide 2).
3. Add a secondary axis of priority and map out how you spend your time against how important those things are to you (slide 3).
4. Evaluate what needs to change. Start doing more of the things that are a priority and less of the things that aren’t (slide 4).
5. Evaluate new opportunities. When considering new ways to spend your time, ask yourself: “Does this align with my priorities?”

Need some help setting and achieving meaningful goals this year? DM to find out how I can help.

22/03/2021

Recently, my friend and I got a chance to sit down and discuss the role that fitness has played in our lives.

In this short snippet, I talk about how my own struggles have made me the Coach I am today.

In upcoming videos, we talk about how we both got our start in the fitness industry as well the things that have influenced our training philosophies and our training styles.

28/09/2020

Scroll through your favourite Instagram fitness accounts and guaranteed it won't be long until you come across a b***y band workout. ⁠
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If you ask a fitchick what the benefit of using a b***y band is, a likely response is that they are performing a function of the glute med, which they'll happily tell you happens to be abduction of the thigh (moving it away from the midline).⁠
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This sounds fine in theory, however when performing closed chain exercises whereby the foot is on the ground, the major function of the glute med is actually to stabilise the pelvis in the frontal plane. (see picture 2)⁠
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This is because in closed chain exercises, the thigh is not free to move. Therefore, when the glute med contracts, the force of its pull is exerted on the pelvis instead, pulling it in a downwards direction. This is known as depression or lateral tilt to that side. If we look at the fibre orientation of the glute med, this makes a lot of sense.⁠ (see picture 3)⁠
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Now I know what you're going to say. "But I feel my glutes burning when I do these exercises." To this I'll firstly respond by saying check out my previous post on this very topic. I'll then follow that up by saying that the burn that you're feeling is likely coming from the deep external rotators of the hip which happen to sit underneath the glutes, not the glutes themselves. (see picture 4) ⁠
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Tag a friend who needs to see this. Life's too short to waste on crappy workouts 👊🏻🍑

Has Covid has left you feeling a little more curvaceous these past 6 months whilst others have seemingly thrived and sma...
25/09/2020

Has Covid has left you feeling a little more curvaceous these past 6 months whilst others have seemingly thrived and smashed their weight loss goals? Read on. ⁠
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To understand why, let's quickly re-visit some terms that your Year 8 Biology teacher might've terrorised you with.⁠
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Homeostasis - your ability to maintain a stable internal environment by keeping variables to a suitable a narrow range. ⁠(think body temperature and blood pressure) ⁠
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Allostasis - your ability to maintain homeostasis in the face of changing physical, psychological and physiological stressors.⁠ This is mediated by hormones like dopamine, cortisol and adrenaline.⁠
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Allostatic load - is the total accumulation of the stressors that you are exposed to. ⁠
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Picture allostatic load as a bucket full of water. Every time you are exposed to a stressor you are adding more water to your bucket. Every time you recover from a stressor, you pour a bit of water out of your bucket. If your bucket starts to overflow, your ability to handle stress diminishes. The hormonal response to these stressors affect your mood, energy, appetite, and motivation. ⁠
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For clients that have successfully dieted through lockdown, working from home dramatically reduced their allostatic load. Not having to commute to work or work in an office meant being able to sleep enough every night, not having to deal with a toxic work culture and having more time to prep their meals and fit all of their training sessions. Thus over the 6 months, their mindset has remained positive, their energy levels were better than ever, they were much better able to regulate their appetite and their motivation levels remained high. ⁠
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If you're someone whose water bucket was already quite full pre-Covid, then things like increased workload, financial insecurity and social isolation might've cause your bucket to overflow. This makes fat loss that much harder and over a longer timescale, this can also lead to the development of chronic disease. ⁠
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In the middle of a pandemic or not, actively trying to diet at times of high stress, is ill advised. In these situations, your time is better spent emptying your bucket first. ⁠

The barrier of entry to calling yourself a "Macro Coach" is about as low as Britney Spears' dating standards. This is un...
25/09/2020

The barrier of entry to calling yourself a "Macro Coach" is about as low as Britney Spears' dating standards. This is unfortunate because nutrition coaching isn't as simple as just setting someone's macro targets and then sending them off on their merry way. ⁠
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Most people think of nutrition as the food on their plate and seek help in learning “what to eat.” Indeed, nutrition coaching requires us to educate our clients about food quantity and quality. But the “what” is only part of the equation. We need to understand "how" they eat and "who" they are as eaters. We need to understand our clients' unique food stories. ⁠
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These food stories are often overlooked, yet they are powerful drivers that influence our clients' behaviours and habits around food consumption. Food stories are multi-layered and written over the course of many years. ⁠
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It’s how they talk about food and their body to themselves — and to others. It also involves how those around them eat and what they say (or don’t say) about their choices. ⁠
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It’s the way their mother was always on a diet, and how their father didn't care much for vegetables.⁠
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It’s the food they eat when they're celebrating, and the food they eat when they're heartbroken.⁠
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It’s the dish their family always made for the holidays, and the dessert they always order on their birthday.⁠
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It’s knowing they “should” be eating X, and eating Y instead.⁠
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It's that the theatre of fine dining represents a way for them to share an experience with their friends or perhaps the height of their culinary repertoire is scrambled eggs on toast. ⁠
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It's about childhood memories of making scones with Grandma, the traditional foods that connect them to their cultural roots, and foods that their favourite uninformed influencer has taught them to label as “good” and “bad.”⁠
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As you can see from the above, eating behaviour is complex. The greatest disservice we can do to our clients is to oversimplify their challenges and apply a one size fits all approach to their nutrition coaching. ⁠
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I'm curious. What's your food story?

For our prehistoric ancestors, serious physical injury, predators and starvation were the primary threats to their survi...
25/09/2020

For our prehistoric ancestors, serious physical injury, predators and starvation were the primary threats to their survival. Each of these extremely stressful events demanded an immediate physiological adaptation - what we call the stress-response. ⁠
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This stress-response consisted of a physiological cascade of events that involved rapid mobilisation of energy in the form of glucose, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and increased respiration. This cascade was necessary in order to transport nutrients and oxygen to our muscles at greater rates and thus enable them to evade imminent danger. For our prehistoric ancestors, it also made sense to halt less immediate processes such as digestion, tissue repair, immune function and reproduction. ⁠Being able to make babies hardly matters when a saber-tooth tiger is trying to make a meal out of you. ⁠
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Fast forward a couple of millennia and as we have evolved as a species, the stressors that pose us harm are much different. Today for most of us, stressors are more likely to include long working hours, lack of recreation time, interpersonal relationship difficulties and financial troubles. The problem is that we are using a system designed to respond to acute stress to deal with chronic stress. What happens in time is that the very mechanisms that were designed to protect us eventually become damaging. This is how persistently high and unrelenting stress levels can contribute to the development of the conditions that most commonly plague our modern society - obesity, Type 2 diabetes, tension headaches and migraines, hypertension, chronic heartburn, IBS, anxiety and depression. ⁠
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Given the extremely unprecedented and challenging times we find ourselves in, it's time for us as a society to stop paying lip service to stress management. The ugly truth is that if you don't find a way to manage your stress, it will find a way to manage you.

A young Coach once said to me "I've been working really hard for weeks and I'm still not seeing any definition in my sho...
19/09/2020

A young Coach once said to me "I've been working really hard for weeks and I'm still not seeing any definition in my shoulders." I asked how much volume she was doing per week and what her training frequency looked like. I also enquired as to whether she was increasing reps or sets over time. I was met with a blank stare and a shrug. ⁠
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This young Coach made the same mistake most novice trainers make - equating level of exertion with appropriate application of stimulus. Unfortunately, how hard you subjectively feel like you are working, how much fatigue you've accumulated or how much you sweat aren't reliable proxies for muscle hypertrophy (aka the gainz).⁠
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If you want to have something to show for the amount of time and effort you put into training, you need to put the target muscle tissue fibres under enough mechanical tension to elicit structural adaptation. ⁠
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To do this adequately, the following should be noted:⁠
- heavier loads preferentially target fast twitch muscle fibres which have the greatest hypertrophic potential - the downside is that these fibres are easily fatigued so you are only able to perform a low amount of reps. Heavier loads can also be quite taxing on the joints. ⁠
- lower loads preferentially target slow twitch muscle fibres. Because these are much harder to fatigue and the sets need to be taken close to failure in order to be adequately stimulative, this necessitates working with higher reps. This can be both time consuming and uncomfortable. ⁠
- ⁠it's a good idea to work with a broad rep range, but the above considerations places the 6-12 rep range in the Goldilocks zone of not so heavy and not so light. Most of your time is likely best spent here. ⁠
- accumulate 6-8 hard working sets per session or 10-20 hard working sets per week per muscle group⁠
- hard working sets means that the sets should be taken to 2-5 RIR ⁠(Repetitions In Reserve - or how many reps you have left in the tank before volitional failure) ⁠
- train muscles 2-3x per week ⁠⁠
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In later discussions, we'll delve deeper into exercise selection, exercise variation and exercise progression. Do you have any training questions? Comment below or slide into the DM's.

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