Fitness Contrarian

I started my fitness blog Fitness Contrarian about 2.5 years ago. I really enjoy doing research and seem to spend half my time reading other people’s health and fitness blogs. When I first started blogging I had no idea how many websites were out there in the fitness niche. However, over time I seem to keep going back to just a handful of great sites so I wanted to put together my list of the best fitness blogs for 2011(….)

We all know that fruits are a good source of vitamins and minerals but when it comes to weight loss you have to remember they also contain sugar. My approach to losing weight is based on a low sugar model so I recommend that you limit your fruit consumption to no more then two per day.

I have had many personal training clients that would pick on fruit all day thinking they are doing a good thing but when it came to losing weight they had a hard time. As soon as they cut back on the amount of fruit they were consuming; however, they started to lose some weight(…)

Muscle hypertrophy (muscle cell enlargement) is an area of great debate in the fitness industry. Everyone has their opinion on how to overload the muscular system to produce growth and there are new studies coming out every week proving one method is better then another. But how do you resistance train if your goal is to get stronger and leaner while avoiding that overly developed bodybuilding look? Most of my personal training clients want more of that ripped athletic look but also want to be as strong as possible(….)

It’s Thanksgiving morning and I just saw Hugh Jackman Back on Broadway last night. My wife and I loved the show and would recommend it highly. What struck be about Hugh is how easily he can gain and lose muscle for different projects. He even referenced it in the show.

He said the movie producers of Wolverine get very nervous when I want to do Broadway because I lose weight so easily when I’m up here singing and dancing. He then showed a movie clip of himself very muscular as Wolverine and another picture of himself when he was very thin from the Broadway musical Boy From Oz when he was portraying Peter Allen(…)

What has helped my joints and whole body feel so much better over the past year is incorporating joint mobility movements into my workout program. I personally think that joint mobility or mobility movements are going to be the next buzzword in the fitness industry just like core training or functional training was 10 years ago.

Joint mobility drills are simple movements that bring lubrication to the joints, which can help heal and rejuvenate them. You almost have to look at your joints as separate from your muscular system even though they are all connected. When you are doing these movements you’re not trying to stretch your muscles(…)

One of the hardest things for me to get across to my new personal training clients is that too much exercise can be toxic to your body. For example, I just had a new client come to my gym last week that was in her 30’s with low body fat and apparently in good shape. I asked her how she keeps herself looking so fit and she said “I like to workout a lot so I can eat whatever I want”.

My 25 years of experience as a personal trainer has showed me that trying to control your weight with long hard daily workouts is an approach that will one day get you into a lot of trouble physiologically. I know it is hard to convince a 35 year old that too much hard exercise is not good for them especially when they have been controlling their weight so well with long hard spinning classes, long runs and body scripting classes on a daily basis. However,(…)