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By Josh Martin, TwoBrain Mentor   “Methods are many, but principles are few. Methods always change. Principles never do.” What this means is that principles stand the test of time. Methods can be thought of as how those principles are put into action. I think that we can all agree on some basic principles: clients should be assessed before any training takes place nutrition is a vital component to achieving the results someone desires recovery is an often overlooked aspect of performance enhancement Now let’s look at some methods with regards to the above principles: Do you perform a movement screen, like the FMS, on all clients? Or do you select something objective you’ve created in-house? Paleo, zone, keto? Meditation, prayer, sleep, cryotherapy, vibration plate, e-stim, static stretching, cold/hot tub plunges? When it comes to training clients in your gym, principles are the backbone on which everything else is layered. Being able to hip hinge, squat, press, pull, and carry – these are training principles we can agree are necessary. How you choose to implement each of these are influenced by the methods you choose. Going to a strongman, kettlebell, weightlifting, or CrossFit weekend course – these things are all great tools to go in your tool belt, but they are methods. Not principles. (In fact, CrossFit is referred to by creator Greg Glassman as a ‘methodology.’ So is the way Westside trains…it’s the ‘Conjugate Method.’) Here’s the take-home message – if you base what you do with your clients within the context of a method, you become limited. What happens when you don’t have that tool (like a kettlebell, or a barbell) at your disposal? How about if you have a group fitness class with 15 people, the workout on the board calls for rowing 500m every round during a 30 minute workout, and you only have 3 rowers? When you have a system to fall back on, and ...

She came into the gym crying, and told me she had to cancel her membership.   “Why?!” I asked, immediately panicking. She was one of my best clients!   “My husband bought me a treadmill. It’s really expensive. I don’t like it. But I feel like I have to use it.”   I never saw her again.   I used to hate it when a client bought a treadmill. When FitBits showed up after Christmas, I could barely stop myself from ranting about wasted money. And when Orange Theory started touting heart rate as the primary metric of fitness, I probably wrote and deleted 50 blog posts. I saw these things as a replacement for true fitness. They were all taking up time, energy and money that my clients could have spent on better stuff, like CrossFit.   Then I grew up a little, and started realizing that the tech wasn’t my competition. In fact, it could be part of my program. If you’re running a prescriptive model in your gym, all of the stuff I’m about to share can fit under your coaching umbrella.   (If you’re not using the Prescriptive Model, this is the best time to learn it. Book a free call with a mentor to talk about it here.)   What follows is a long post about the tech most likely to touch your gym in 2019. I get into neurochemistry, wattage measurement and even microfibers. It might be too long. But I want you to know what you’re up against–or, if you’re in the TwoBrain family, what your new position of leverage might be.   The Delivery of Fitness is Changing. But our brains aren’t. Dopamine is the “happy” chemical. It’s triggered by feelings of success, but only when combined with novelty. Running the same 5k time over and over doesn’t trigger dopamine. Doing the same bench press workout more than three times doesn’t trigger ...