Hey Steve, whats your opinion on maintaining intra-abdominal and thoracic pressure throughout the entire ROM of deadlifts?

Karky (training.fitness) believes one should release all inhaled air at the top of the lift before entering the eccentric phase. I disagree. I believe this will encourage poor spinal position during the negative.
Whats your thoughts?

Well, now karky is saying one should let out small burst of air. I don't disagree with this. Just his first remark seem to imply that one should completely exhale at the top. Regardless, whats your belief in this?

My mom's decided to hold off on the gym--and I am happy with that--as long as she does some kind of exercise around the house. I showed her how to do some stuff with resistance bands that are within her capabilities. I also told her about your idea of just walking around the house for 5 min several times a day. I am not sure what her calories were today, but I suspect they were higher than yesterday. As long as she's under 2500, though, like you said, I think she'll lose weight.

Yo Trevor... I was interested in hearing what you had in mind with regards to your question yesterday or the day before about the videos my company is making for the website. I'm always up for suggestions.

With regards to your question here... I advocate the advice of Jim Wendler. Before decending into the squat or dead, I push my abs out as hard as I can, filling my abdominal with air. As you mention, and I agree, this increases intra-abdominal pressure thus stabilizing the spine. I only release that air if necessary... which is hardly ever unless I'm really nailing some max efforts.

Jim's mental cue he uses, if I remember correctly is something like, "Take a deep breathe in and get fat," meaning fill that belly with air.

I'm okay with all that, as you know.

In truth, with someone in her shoes, it's all about becoming more active. Often times structured exercise isn't the answer. First and foremost it's getting the calories under wraps, obviously. Beyond that though, it's finding anything that they a) enjoy or b) can tolerate consistently that is beyond what they are normally doing, i.e., being sedentary.

I've used bands successfully. With them, I usually teach them very basic movements. A lot of isolation work actually. Concurrently, I work on dynamic mobility drills. After some time of this after their conditioning and mobility improve, I'll work in some sort of structured routine usually consisting of high reps and as little rest as possible.

Feel free to hit me up if you even want to bounce some ideas off me or want any suggestions. My site will have some videos that she can use for sure.

Haha - I forgot to reply to that. Am now.

Cool. We see eye to eye than.

You know. I think this sounds as good as it can be. I love the custom video thought.

That would really be a big plus for me if I was a client looking for online training.

Last I checked the majority of internet uses still used dial up, such as myself, and as such many of them will not be able to benefit from these videos.

Perhaps you might burn some of these videos to DVD or cheap USB drives and send them through the mail to people. You can get USB drives in large quantities for pretty cheap. People can just inject them into their USB hub and watch the videos straight from it.

Steve, anytime you want some thoughts on anything or whatever just pm me. I'm more than willing to listen and give you my thoughts on it.

and you could brand them with your swanky logo...

Is that accurate... most people are still using dial up? That's something I had not heard, but I never really thought about it. If we find it to be the case, we will definitely find a work-around for those clients who need access to them. We've been thinking about making a dvd later, when we have the time and assets to invest in a professional production. Until then though, it's just Gord and I in his basement doing the filming ourselves, lol.

Most certainly.

As you know each client as of right now will get a mini-book explaining the basics of everything.

As well, we're thinking about sending a binder with our logo on it filled with exercise logs for tracking workouts and whatnot. We haven't thought it through completely yet b/c ideally we get to see those logs so we can tweak as needed. For that to happen, clients would take their binders to the gym, write in them, and then at some point have to get on the computer and fill out the electronic copy all over again so we have access to them.

I mean people could always fax or scan but I don't think that's feasible for most.

We'll have to think about that later when we're closer to opening.

Oh, and for now, for those clients who have trouble playing our videos due to internet connection or whatever, we could take a ton of still frames from the video that would more than adequately represent what's in the actual video.

I would think your audience - or rather the people who are looking for online personal training would be living in the 21st century and have access to high speed internet access...

I mean if you take this forum as a sample population, it doesn't seem like too many people have problem watching videos as I've thrown links to them around like crazy. I'll just play it be ear and see what happens.

What is broadband?

those stretchy band thingies that people use for strength training exercises... 'cepting these are much wider - (not as wide as my butt but close

oooooh, thought you were talking bout teknalogee... that stuff scares me.

You could do a start up package. With your logo. Make profit on items and get your brand out into the gyms.

For example:
Preloaded USB. Depending on what size you buy you can possibly load your entire web site on one

Gym Bag

Water Bottle

T-shirt

Gym towel

Binder and/or Jotter

Lot of companies do this as upgrade or contract incentives.
Example:
Sign 1 year contract get free gift set
Upgrade to gold package get free gifts etc.

You would be surprised how many people will spend an extra hundred bucks to get $30 worth of free stuff.

Interesting concept.

We do want to get some customized stuff worked up, but for now... we're just sticking with t-shirts.

I understand that 'enticing' people to sign up for a service is part of the business. For starters though, I'd just like to see what we can do without doing any enticing.

We do plan on having a storefront though, where the sort of things you mention can be purchased.