When muscle fibers experience tension and metabolic stress, a short-lived inflammatory response begins clearing out damaged tissue. This temporary inflammation is an essential part of the adaptation cycle, but problems arise when inflammation does not fully resolve.

Optimizing the nutrient environment around training is one of the most powerful means by which coaches can directly influence both the quality of a session and the physiological adaptations that follow.

There has been an ongoing war in the fitness community between the science-based lifters and the bro-science lifters. There have been decisive victories on either side, but there's one battle that has been raging on for some time: the efficacy of foam rolling.

Whether you're training for aesthetics, athletics or rehab, the deltoid group will at some point become a primary focus of your training endeavours. Mechanically, the delt is a simple muscle to train due to its uniarticular nature, but there are complicating factors.

Limited ankle mobility is one of the most commonly cited range of motion restrictions in the entire body. Oftentimes a scapegoat for pain throughout the lower body or just poor technique, it's rare to find someone who doesn't complain of poor ankle mobility.

Back training presents one of the most complex programming challenges in resistance training. This stems from looking at back training as a list of similar rowing and pulling variations instead of understanding the biomechanical principles that govern fibre recruitment across the different muscles

The barbell bench press has forever been the great measuring stick of upper body strength. And from its original form, the barbell bench has spawned many a variation: incline, decline, floor press, football bar, buffalo bar, and the focus of today’s conversation, the close-grip bench press.

Centre of mass management means much more than "being on your midfoot"- and it has massive implications for muscle recruitment, force output, and magnitude of applied training stimulus.

Most trainers gravitate toward their strongest pressing patterns while neglecting the ranges that challenge their stability. This creates a fundamental imbalance between the strength you can express and what you can functionally control.

Deep spine muscles can only contract in response to sensory feedback. This doesn't mean that we can't still train these muscles- but we'll need a much more sophisticated approach than programming back extensions.