Modern Athletics

10/02/2025

03/19/2025

08/01/2024

DON'T HIRE ME

Brace yourself for one of my most important career announcements:

After 13 years in fitness, I’m stepping down as a Coach…a Nutrition Coach that is. Why? Because there’s someone far better at nutrition coaching than me.

I’m pleased to introduce you to our newest team member at Modern Athletics, Becky Oesterle. Becky is incredibly passionate, knowledgeable, and experienced in nutrition, especially as it relates to women’s health and fitness.

Becky was recently accepted into the Master's program for Integrative Nutrition at Bastyr University (along with my sister), which covers the intersectionality of diet, lifestyle, environment, and culture. She also lifts, plays tennis, and lives an active lifestyle.

Becky’s Thoughts on Nutrition

“Hello, my name is Becky, and I am excited to be your nutrition coach. With nine years of experience in the medical field, I have developed a profound passion for helping others. Over the years, I have come to understand that our health is not solely determined by the medical system, but by the daily choices we make, particularly in regard to the food we consume.

From a young age, I struggled with a toxic relationship with food, using it as a source of comfort and distraction. This led to an eating disorder during my teenage years, which required hospitalization and, ultimately, life-saving treatment. For the next 15 years, I experienced ups and downs in my relationship with my body and food, battling issues such as IBS, fad diets, and fluctuating eating patterns. These challenges made it increasingly difficult to listen to my body’s needs.

A few years ago, I discovered the concept of intuitive eating and learned the significant impact that the food we eat has on our daily well-being. I have since embraced the power of whole foods, the importance of gut microbiome health, and the need to focus on how food makes us feel rather than our emotional response to it.

We are constantly bombarded with new fad diets, misinformation funded by large food companies, and an overwhelming amount of noise, making it nearly impossible to listen to our own bodies. However, our bodies are intelligent, intuitive, and powerful. By relearning to listen to them and healing our relationship with food, we can return to the basics and become the healthiest versions of ourselves.

I am dedicated to helping you on this journey. Together, we can heal your relationship with food and learn to eat in a way that makes you strong, healthy, and confident. I look forward to working with you.”

⚡️ Book a Free Nutrition Call with Becky https://modernathletics.noterro.com/book-online/practitioner/1099782/Becky-Oesterle

You should also know that Becky is my girlfriend, but don’t hold that against her. Even if we were enemies, I’d still recommend her as your Nutrition Coach. Together, we make a formidable team. For the record, I will still coach nutrition, but I’ll specialize more in functional strength and, what I believe is overlooked by most, mental performance.

05/24/2024

Oops, I had overlooked the most important factor for losing weight and keeping it off...

Introducing Weight Loss Brain!

What matters more for losing weight than our workouts, eating habits, sleep hygiene, and stress management is how we think about weight loss.

I would bet you already know enough about how to lose weight. The challenge we all face is that knowledge without consistent action gets poor results. This course helps you think differently about weight loss and motivates you to act based on what you know.

👉 On Sale for Memorial Day https://modernathletics.com/shop/weight-loss-brain/

05/14/2024

Something major is likely missing from your fitness plan, and here’s how to solve it.

You have a workout program, a meal plan, and perhaps a coach (it's awesome if you do). Fitness plans are easy to come by, and most work when followed, but do you have a mindset plan? What are you doing to improve your mental performance? Is this even a consideration?

It's easy to program a result for exercise and nutrition, the science is pretty solid and only getting better. Do this to get this. That's the easy part. The hard part is adhering to it. The hard part is doing it long enough to see the outcome. What do you do when you don't feel like following these plans? What do you do when you feel like giving up? What do you do when you don't see the results you expect? How do you turn failure into success?

As cliche as it is to say, your mindset determines your success in everything, especially fitness. Your success is rooted in how you think or don’t think. Your success is affected by taking action or no action. Action is affected by your mindset.

Knowing I should do something but not doing it has been my personal challenge and the challenge of most people who hire me to coach them. Even if you lack the knowledge of an expert, it is easy to figure out what to do or what not to do. You either choose to do something or not to do something. Therefore, getting yourself to start something or stop something comes down to mindset. Mindset is where your efforts should be focused.

Maybe I’m slow, but it took me a decade in fitness to realize that what was lacking for all of us was a mental performance program. This is the key service I provide. Yes, I coach strength and conditioning. Yes, I help people recover and become more resilient to injuries. Yes, I coach nutrition. But where my best work is done is in coaching people’s mental performance.

In other words, I coach people to think better so they can do better.

Here’s how you can improve your mental performance:

1 - Subscribe to my newsletter http://eepurl.com/h4KxSb
2 - Chat with me directly on a free coaching call: https://modernathletics.noterro.com/book-online/service/170832/Free-Coaching-Call
3 - Research and buy books on mental performance

04/04/2024

How Guilt Can Lead to Weight Gain
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Emotional Eating: Feelings of guilt can trigger emotional eating as individuals seek comfort or distraction from their emotions through food. They may turn to high-calorie, unhealthy foods as a way to cope with guilt, leading to overeating and weight gain.
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Compensatory Eating: Some individuals may engage in compensatory eating behaviors as a response to guilt. For example, after indulging in a perceived "unhealthy" food or overeating in one instance, they may feel guilty and subsequently restrict their food intake or engage in strict dieting. However, this cycle of restrictive eating followed by overeating can disrupt normal eating patterns and lead to weight gain over time.
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Decreased Self-Control: Feelings of guilt can undermine self-control and lead to impulsive or binge-eating behaviors. Individuals may feel a sense of loss of control over their eating habits when experiencing guilt, which can contribute to overeating and weight gain.
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Stress Response: Guilt can also trigger stress responses in the body, releasing stress hormones such as cortisol. Elevated cortisol levels can promote cravings for high-calorie foods and contribute to abdominal fat deposition, ultimately leading to weight gain.
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Negative Self-Perception: Chronic feelings of guilt can contribute to negative self-perception and low self-esteem, which may further exacerbate emotional eating behaviors and contribute to weight gain.
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Dysregulated Eating Patterns: Guilt can disrupt normal eating patterns and lead to irregular or disordered eating behaviors, such as binge eating or purging, which contribute to weight gain and negatively affect overall health.

04/01/2024

Feelings of failure, disappointment in results, misleading expectations, sacrificing what you enjoy, constant worries around eating, extreme and sudden changes to your lifestyle, complicated approaches, and many other stressful factors often result in overeating, overcompensating, and quitting, ultimately leading to more weight gain than not trying to lose weight in the first place.

Instead, try identifying as someone who is healthy, thinking more highly of yourself, celebrating small victories, appreciating your efforts regardless of outcome, not depriving yourself of joy, and finding less stressful solutions to weight loss.

Yes, there are objective reasons for your unwanted weight, but there are reasonable and less stressful solutions for countering them.

04/01/2024

I can show you progress in a day, even dramatic progress in a week, but you’ll see it’s not sustainable for much longer than that. I can teach you in 12 weeks what it took me 12 years to implement, but that 12 weeks is only valuable if you can keep it going for 12 years.

My point is that any big changes you wish to make require a long-term commitment, not fast-tracked solutions. They require long-term thinking, not short-term thinking. If what you are currently doing to be fit and healthy is not sustainable, make some changes or scale it in a way that is sustainable for you. If it makes you miserable or isn’t enjoyable, it needs to change.

03/29/2024

If you need help figuring out where to start or have questions about lifting, comment or message me for a free copy of my ebook, Strength Training Basics.

03/28/2024

Note: These advanced strategies are not meant to be followed long-term and can disrupt your lifestyle if not managed.

If nutrition advice requires a long discussion or detailed explanation, it’s too complicated. It’s great to hear experts talk about something highly intelligent or scientific, but as valid as it may be, it is not where most people should start.

In summary, make it so easy that you can’t fail.

03/26/2024

Try some healthier foods outside of what you usually eat. You may find that once you start incorporating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins into your diet, your taste adjusts, and you start to prefer these healthier options over unhealthy ones.

Some of my favorite healthy foods I thought I wouldn’t like are olive oil, hummus, brussels sprouts, plain Greek yogurt, smoothies with veggies in them, and salads. I was missing out for sure.

03/22/2024

To be a high performer, practice these skills outside of playing your sport. With the appropriate knowledge and guidance, none are that difficult, only time-consuming. The difficulty is based on many factors, such as the learning curve, time requirements, adherence, and the number of variables based on the individual. All are manageable and simple to incorporate into your training. Mastery takes a little longer.

Most athletes practice strength, conditioning, and nutrition, but it’s far less common for them to train mental performance, and that’s the biggest game-changer. In other words, your mental performance will put you at a different level than your competition.