Short on time
Three to four hours a week is a useless instruction. The same target broken into 15 to 40 minute sessions and four movement buckets you can actually put in a calendar.
Posts tagged blog
The next gen of coaches and trainees
Twelve years in, the kids who started with us at 12 are in their mid-twenties. What a decade of strength training from a young age actually produces.
Profit fuels progress
Profit is the signal that your price is right. Subsidised pricing buys customers, not a moat, and a customer trained to pay nothing will uninstall the moment you charge.
The reasons I write
To rant, to clarify, to profit, to promote. Why I keep writing on a forum I have complicated feelings about.
Daily stressors
The stressors you can dodge, the ones baked into where you live, and why I put my gym 150 metres from my front door.
You do you
Most of our rituals are outdated and dumb. A case against defending tradition while living a life that resembles nothing our ancestors did.
When you say nothing at all
The worst kind of comment is the one someone fed to an AI first. If you had nothing to say, nothing needed saying.
What a gym needs to excel at
Ten questions I use to judge our own gym and coaching service: streaks, comebacks, hand-holding, the range of skill in one room, and keeping the joy in it.
The universal currency we all fight for is attention
Running, yoga, lifting, parkour, and everything else a day demands. As a coach you are not competing with other gyms, you are competing with Netflix.
The Devil eats whey
The protein science did not come from marketers, and the protein boom is what happens to every economy whose income grows. None of which makes protein chips less rubbish.
Right place, right time and right business
Running this gym in 1980s India would have been a nightmare. The tailwinds that made it possible, none of which I had anything to do with.
Respect my authority
No quarterly plans, no annual discounts, no haggling over the monthly fee. Credibility is something a coaching service has to demand.
Recap
Everything I have written about since 2022 in one list: equipment, energy balance, hunger, pain, protein, sleep, training goals and the rest.
My space, my rules
Dress codes, veshtis near a loaded plate rack, and school uniforms. Every institution is allowed its own rules, and you are allowed to take your money elsewhere.
Marketing
I am allergic to marketing and it still works on me. Toyota, Goruck and Casio, and why explaining how you made a thing is the most authentic marketing there is.
Gym envy
Watching someone stronger or more jacked do their thing can make you wonder why you bother. Five questions to ask before you let it get to you.
Do, don’t show or tell
Bodybuilding is a sport with a scoreboard, and Instagram is another one. I would rather have the capacities than the striations.
Business is personal
I despise 'it's business, not personal'. The man who sold me my house signed it over before the cheque cleared, and that is what trust in a transaction looks like.
Almost 2 out of 3 people who train with us are women
Not by design, and not through any marketing. We assume everyone who walks in wants to get as strong as they can, and a lot of them happen to be women.
A squat for the back and plank for the legs
The back extension is a squat for your spine. Why we keep both a 45-degree and a 180-degree unit, and what changing the angle changes.