November has been another great month for training, learning, and growing. Sprinkle in Thanksgiving and the start of Hanukkah this week and I’m feeling full and grateful for the things going well in my life.
I have a nice laundry list of content to share with you from this month. Some fitness related and some completely irrelevant. I’ll let you decide which is more important.
I’ll lead with the some fitness first because, after all, this is a fitness blog.
At Home Exercise: Hack Squat
So I recently purchase these squat wedges from Prime Fitness. They are an exceptional tool for a trainer because it allows for exercise modifications. They can help me bridge the gap with clients and modify lower body movements like the squat and lunge patterns according to morphological differences. This will then help me coach to more quad dominant exercises with more forward knee travel…blah blah blah.
You get the point.
All of that to say that I have a new exercise to show you! We’re looking at a home-designed hack squat variation that will blast your quads, adductors, and glutes. Credit to coach Eugene Teo for the hack squat idea. I added in the wedges to really turn things up a level.
I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Ramit Sethi
Join me for a little finance talk for just a second.
I’m a fairly frugal individual. Living well below my means while enjoying what I have. However, I knew I had some things to learn about saving and maximizing my money so I sought out some suggestions. This book, by in large, came the most highly recommended to me.
After reading I can understand why. If I had to consolidate a how-to guide on fitness and health it would look very similar to this. Swapping out all the finance jargon for fitness of course. It wasn’t earth shattering information either, it was merely simple advice on saving and using your money how you truly want. The no frills, no sensationalist call to action is what really did it for me.
Shang-Chi and The Legend Of The Ten Rings
WOW!
What..A…Movie
Trying to put my Marvel bias aside I think this was one of the better films this year, not just from the MCU. The plot was well developed, quality acting performances, and sophisticated fight scenes that represented the pinnacle of martial artistry. I was impressed and am looking forward to future movies with this character.
Fitness Follows: Kassem Hanson (@coach_kassem) & Paul Carter (@liftrunbang1)
Two great coaches to check out here.
Specifically if you want to learn more about the biomechanics and anatomical side of hypertrophy training AKA building high quality muscle.
They both share a boat load of free resources on how to maximize your training. I like to nerd out a bit on this stuff because it is really fascinating to see how the human body operates. Even further we can see how it operates to help us build muscle and strength.
Really cool stuff.
Note-Taking System
Being a big reader of non-fiction I like to have a system of cataloging information in order to store it for later use. This way I can refer back to it when writing.
Before I found this new note-card system that I’ll show you, I used standard notebooks to jot down notes and useful information from the books and/or education I was doing. It worked for awhile until I filled a handful of notebooks without having an easy way to reference them.
Instead of having to flip through pages and pages to hopefully get to the information I want, this notecard system has taken its place.
My new note-taking system looks like this:
- Read (Using a pen and stickies to write comments and mark passages)
- Put the book down for 2 weeks after finishing
- Return to the book (Transcribe all comments and marks to notecards)
- Consolidate notecards into an alphabetical filing system
Hope you enjoyed this recap! I tried to mix it up a little bit to add in some other aspects of my personality.
Stay tuned for next month!