Most of my job is making shots smoother. This one was about the opposite. I worked with a middle school girl who had a beautiful stroke. I mean it. If you handed me a clip of just her upper body and asked me to grade the shot, I’d have given her high marks and moved […]
Give Your Shot Some Bones: When a Smooth Stroke Is the Problem Read More »
If an exercise feels impossible, you’re probably reading the wrong signal. I had a client who could not do single leg hip thrusts without her hamstring trying to leave her body. A few reps in, the thing would seize up into a full charley horse, except in her Boston accent it was a “chaaalie hawse,”
Why Some Exercises Always Feel Hard (And When That’s Lying to You) Read More »
I’ve got an 11-year-old who’s smaller and younger than everyone in his group. He plays up, against bigger kids, older kids, and most days he’s getting cooked. He knows it. He signed up for it. A few weeks ago he finally got a shot to fall. One bucket. And he celebrated like he’d just won
You’re Showing Up to the Wrong Game in Your Head Read More »
She kept pushing the start date. New to exercise, completely overwhelmed, no idea where to begin. Every week there was a reason it wasn’t quite the right time. Work was busy. Wait until after the holidays. Maybe the new year. I’ve watched a hundred people do this and it’s almost never laziness. It’s that the
Stop Punishing Yourself Into Habits That Were Never Going to Stick Read More »
I had a brand new player, never trained before, and I tried to make a drill easier so she could get a few more makes and feel good. She turned it down. Not rudely. She just wanted the hard version. She wanted to keep bricking it until it started going in, the way a skateboarder
Be More Like a Skateboarder Read More »
I have a client who used to get a tailbone flare-up every single time we deadlifted to the floor. Not soreness. Not a tweak she’d shake off by the parking lot. A real one. The kind that makes you sit a little sideways for about a week and reconsider your relationship with chairs. For a
Some Exercises Just Aren’t For You (And That’s Not a Character Flaw) Read More »
There was a moment in middle school that I still think about. Someone who knew basketball watched me play and pulled me aside after. Said I had real skills. Good handle, decent shot, could see the floor. Then he said the thing that actually stuck: “Your practice game and your game game are two totally
You Don’t Need to Be the Fastest. You Need to Be the Hardest to Read. Read More »
The American College of Sports Medicine published new resistance training guidelines in March 2026. First update in 17 years. They pulled from 137 systematic reviews covering over 30,000 participants, which is about as thorough as this kind of research gets. The headlines focused on the heavy lifting stuff. Go hard, lift at least 80% of
The Science of Strength Just Got Updated. Here’s What It Actually Means for You. Read More »
A high school kid came in looking like he was getting stabbed every time he shot the ball. Not exaggerating. Every rep was a full-body emergency. Shoulders up, jaw clenched, eyes wide. The ball would come out and he’d wince before it even hit the rim, like he was bracing for bad news. Which, to
You Play Like You’re Trying to Survive Something Read More »
A client kept having flare ups. We’d tried backing off certain movements, adjusted his load, took things easier for a stretch. Nothing worked. The flare ups kept coming back and we couldn’t figure out why. So we did something different. Took a photo from straight on and drew a line from the middle of his
Your Body Is Leaning. You Just Don’t Know It Yet. Read More »