Episode 10: Build a Healthy Mindset
In this episode, I talk about the essential mindset shift you need to make if you want to achieve long-term success in your fitness journey. Cultivate a mindset of body positivity that keeps you motivated as you build a body you love.
Kick negativity to the curb in this heart-to-heart mindset chat.
In this episode, I talk about the essential mindset shift you need to make if you want to achieve long-term success in your fitness journey. Cultivate a mindset of body positivity that keeps you motivated as you build a body you love.
Links:
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(00:00):
I think that the first thing that you need to do is start to cultivate a mindset of body positivity in the sense that you tell yourself, I'm going to take the best care of myself that I possibly can.
(00:21)
Hey there, friend. Welcome back to another episode of the Coaching Corner podcast. It's been a minute since I last posted to this podcast and I want to let you guys know that I have been thinking about you every single day. Long story short, this has happened several times over my career as a personal trainer over the last 10 years, but I always reach this point where I'm maxed out in terms of how many clients I can take on, but I want to be able to serve my community with more resources that you guys can use to put your healthy fitness lifestyle into action. So I have been working on distilling my coaching that I give to my one-on-one clients into several different formats that you guys will be able to use to help move along in your fitness journey. So I've got courses coming along as well as follow along workouts on my Vimeo channel, as well as some books and workbooks that you guys can use.
(01:21)
All of that stuff has taken a lot of my time, so I apologize for not being more present here, but I promise the time has been well spent and we've got lots of goodies coming your way. So don't worry, we are getting back on track with regularly coming out with new episodes of the Coaching Corner podcast, and I am still showing up live on my Twitch channel a few times a week to answer your questions and create new content. Make sure though that you have subscribed to my email list because that is where I'm going to be sending a lot of the goodies and announcements as these things come out. You can go to jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. Make sure to also subscribe to this podcast wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts or subscribe on YouTube if you're watching me there.
(02:08)
Now, today's episode I'm super excited about because we are starting back up with a bang moving forward with the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm going to be giving you guys tons of tips on how to implement healthy habits into your life to improve your relationship with yourself and improve your relationship with your body as we move along. This episode was recorded when I was live on my Twitch channel. You can follow me on Twitch. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you'd like to hang out with me while I'm live and ask your questions there. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(02:44)
I tell my clients, they always come to me with these ideas of like, I want my arms to look like this, and I want my belly to look like this, and I want my legs to look like this. Instead of focusing on trying to get our bodies to look a specific way, like that one fitness influencer or that one model, what I teach my clients is, first of all, let's focus on health.
(03:06)
A lot of things that you're doing right now that are not healthy and the result of those things is the way that your body looks and how it feels is in a lot of ways, things that you don't like. So I say, let's first focus on getting healthy, doing all of the things that your body needs in order to be its healthiest and however it is that your body looks when it is at its healthiest is how it should look, and your body will reveal to you what it's supposed to look like once you have all of those things in place where you are living your healthiest, when you're eating your healthiest, when you're exercising in a healthy way, when you are drinking plenty of water, when you're sleeping as much as you should, when you're managing your stress, what your body looks like at that point is how it should look when your body is at a healthy body fat percentage.
(03:58)
We can't tell our body where to store fat and where not to store fat. For some of us just genetically, we're going to be more predisposed to our body, storing more fat in our bottoms or up top, and we can't really change those genetics. But what you can control is the health of your lifestyle and how you eat and how you exercise. And I would challenge you to start trying to absorb the idea of I'm going to love my body and I'm going to appreciate my body and how it looks when I'm taking the best care of it that I can, and however it looks when I'm taking the best care of it that I can is how it should look. And I love it for that, right? I think that we need to approach it is more of a body positivity type mindset, but not the type of body positivity that says, oh, it's totally okay that I am unhealthy.
(04:58)
I mean, it is okay. I mean, at the end of the day, you're a grownup. Do whatever the fuck you want it is your life. But if you're unhappy with how, look, if you're unhappy with how you look now before you've made any healthy changes to your life, it's still very possible that you could be unhappy with how you look even when you are your healthiest because you may have a poor relationship with yourself and you may just always be wearing these lenses of looking at yourself, picking apart the things that you don't like. Because I'll tell you right now, there's bodybuilders who have gorgeous aesthetic bodies, and when they look in the mirror, they're looking for their faults and they've already decided in their mind to look for their faults. And so even though they had these beautiful bodies that are sculpted and amazing, they still don't like themselves very much because their relationship with theirselves has not changed.
(05:50)
So I can absolutely help you to change how your body looks by getting healthier, and I can help you to get the most toned or lean and just healthy looking. But if you don't do the inner work to change your relationship with yourself and to question and challenge the beliefs that you have about your body and about yourself, you're going to be right back where you started. Maybe you'll look different, but in terms of how you feel about yourself, nothing will have changed. So I think that the first thing that you need to do is start to cultivate a mindset of body positivity in the sense that you tell yourself, I'm going to take the best care of myself that I possibly can. We're not going to work out to punish ourselves. We're not going to starve ourselves to punish ourselves for how we look or for overeating.
(06:45)
Our mindset going into this journey is going to be, I'm going to learn to take the best care of myself that I possibly can because let's be honest, nobody else is going to do that for you. Almost all of my friends have small children. Almost all of my friends have babies. I'll be bouncing little Kai on my knee and just looking at him or little Addie or little Annie, and I'm just like, how amazing it must be to just have a giant person totally in tune with your needs, just taking care of you When you're unhappy, you need a nap, you need to eat something, maybe you need some exercise, you need to get your wiggles out. There's some giant person who can be like, you know what? Let's go outside and play. Let's have a snack and then make you a snack and orchestrate your day.
(07:35)
But as adults, we don't have that. There's no giant person who's going to take care of us unless you're in a particular kind of relationship, but for most of us, you are it. You are the big person in your life. You're the person who has to take care of you, and nobody is going to do it better than you because you alone are able to be in tune with what you actually need. Once you learn how to listen to your body and trust it, to tell you what it needs something, once you learn how to listen to your body, once you learn how to listen to your brain and to your central nervous system, then you learn how to take better care of yourself. So we want to enter into this journey with this mindset of, I am going to take the best care of myself that I can and I'm going to learn how to take better care of myself, and as I learn to take better care of myself, I'm going to take better care of myself.
(08:31)
So that's kind of the mantra that I want all of us to have as we enter into this journey of trying to eat better or into this journey of trying to exercise and just take care of ourselves. The whole point is why you're here. Why you want to start eating better is because you want a better life. You want to thrive, but you're not going to thrive if you make all of the changes that I teach you how to make and you haven't changed your relationship with yourself, and you haven't changed how you see yourself and see your body. So moving forward, we're going to try to fix that mindset. We're going to cultivate it. We're going to practice things to ourselves. We're here to take the best care of ourselves that we can. I am the only one who can take care of me, so I'm going to strive to take the best care of me that I can, and I'm going to keep learning how to take better care of myself.
(09:22)
So that's the first thing that I want all of us to think about when it comes to our fitness journeys. And I want us to try to move away from that shame-based mindset that everybody, if you've tried to get in shape before or if you tried going on diets or if you tried those crazy high intensity programs like beach Body or whatever, it's all about it trying to exhaust yourself. It's all these extreme things of, it's almost like you're going this, I got to punish myself. I got to whip myself into shape. And that is based on a really old fashioned authoritarian model of influencing, and it doesn't work. At least it doesn't work, and it's not healthy. If you want to establish a healthy dynamic with yourself or with any person, whether it's like your child or an animal, if you want to be in a relationship with someone and you want to have a good relationship with them, if you have a dynamic with that person of if they mess up, you're going to punish them and you're going to make them suffer, that's not going to be a healthy relationship.
(10:32)
And I'm sure you probably have been in relationships like that. Maybe you were in a relationship like that with your parents or with a romantic partner or with a friend. It doesn't feel good to be in a relationship with somebody who when you mess up and even if you mess up because you don't know better, you know that you're just going to be punished for it. All this does is create a cycle of fear and shame, and you cannot grow, right? You cannot grow in that kind of a context. So instead, if you want to develop a better relationship with yourself, you're going to have to develop some compassion for yourself. And self-acceptance, we're going to have to practice some self-acceptance. At the end of the day. Most of the time, people's behavior is driven by survival. We're all just trying to survive. We're all just trying to survive.
(11:24)
We're all just trying to stay alive from one day to another. And a lot of the behaviors that you have are likely coping mechanisms that you picked up at some point in the past, and they worked at some point in the past and helped you to survive from one day to another. Even behaviors like overeating and binge eating, a lot of times people engage in those types of behaviors because they are under extreme stress and they have no dopamine and binge eating or returning to food and comfort eating may be the only kind of comfort, the only relief from the stress of their environment or the relationship or whatever it is. So that behavior was a coping mechanism that helped you to survive this very, very stressful period. And the problem becomes when that coping mechanism no longer serves us. So if we want to switch that behavior, if we want to stop that behavior, we're not going to do it by causing more stress on our system, by shaming ourselves and punishing ourselves either by over-exercising or starving ourselves a bunch.
(12:30)
That's why people end up on these binge-restrict cycles, because you're not going to fix the binging behavior, which is a coping mechanism of stress by adding more stress to your life. Do you see what I mean? It's not going to work. So changing your relationship with yourself to where I want you to take this approach of I'm trying to build a healthy relationship with myself, one that is accepting of where I am, and also approach yourself with a little bit of gratitude because some of the behaviors that you have may have been the one thing that kept you alive at some point in the past. So in that context, they were a good thing. But now, once we understand, once we learn the role that those things played in our lives and keeping us alive at that time, we can give ourselves other options that don't cause these negative side effects like weight gain or messing up our insulin sensitivity, for example, with the example of overeating or eating lots of sugary food.
(13:30)
So just try to keep that in mind, these behaviors that you are struggling with with your eating, try to have a little bit of compassion for yourself because those behaviors at some point probably saved your life, or they at least helped you to survive something that you were going through that was really stressful or hard. But you can give yourself other options. And here's the thing is if you don't change that relationship with yourself and learn how to give yourself other stress relief mechanisms, you're going to find yourself falling back on those behaviors again and again and again because they're kind of programmed into your system at this point. So you're going to have to open your mind to maybe accepting these behaviors is like, yeah, this is something that I did and it helped. It did have its place, but I can grow and I can learn other coping mechanisms.
(14:22)
I can learn to self-soothe in other ways while I also learn to eat in a way that supports how I want to look and how I want to feel. So as I teach you how to eat better, I want you to really try to reflect on your current patterns and view them with compassion. You bored eat. Sometimes dopamine, dude, people with ADHD are really susceptible to this people with ADHD and people with autism, ASD, because it's stimulus, right? And a lot of times we need the stimulus or we think we need that stimulus, but when you learn how to give yourself other stimuli that help to give your brain the dopamine release that it needs, or to help stimulate you the way that you need in a way that you're not adding more calories than what your body needs or putting food into your body that isn't really good for you, you can learn other methods.
(15:21)
So that is the mindset shift that I just kind of want to introduce as we head into this journey of transforming our bodies and transforming our lifestyle around how we eat or how we exercise. We want to have that relationship with our body. We want to develop a healthy relationship with ourselves, and we want to approach ourselves with compassion and understanding while at the same time we're learning how to do better. Because you know what? In the past, if you had had access to the knowledge that you're going to gain through your time here, and if you were put into an environment that was healthy, you probably would've made different choices. You can only do so much with the information that you had at the time, so you did the best that you could with what you had. And a lot of these behaviors, they start as when we're children, right?
(16:17)
If you're a child in a high stress environment, that might be where you learn to stress, eat, or binge or restrict or whatever. And as children, we don't know any better, or even maybe later in life when you're a young adult and you're just sprung out onto the world, it's just there you go. Get a job and pay bills and whatever situation that these behaviors may have started and you were doing the best that you could with what you had at the time, and you might not have had the knowledge or the stability to be able to do better. And that's okay. It's okay. You're still alive, you're still here. So as long as you're still alive and you're still here, we can still do better. So we're going to learn how to do better, but I just want to make sure that we have that attitude moving forward or that we're going to try to practice having that attitude moving forward.
(17:08)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Make sure to stay subscribed to this podcast because I've got a lot more juicy content coming your way about how to eat better and exercise to build a body that you love. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you are eating your veggies, eating your protein, drinking water, and prioritizing your self-care. And I will see you soon.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 9: How to Combat Body Dysmorphia
Check out these tips if you’re struggling with body dysmorphia after losing weight.
Check out these tips if you’re struggling with body dysmorphia after losing weight.
One of the first things to happen when you stop eating a calorie deficit is that you begin to lose muscle definition. This can send some folks into a panic. They begin to think: “Oh no! I’m going to lose my gains and end up exactly where I started!”
If you’ve experienced that yourself, then make sure to give this episode a listen or watch it on Youtube.
Body dysmorphia is an obsessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in your appearance and body image. It makes it difficult to see your own body accurately since you focus on what you perceive to be flaws or defects.
People who have lost fat often experience body dysmorphia in the form of perceiving themselves as overweight or “fat,” even when they are within a healthy body fat percentage. They often struggle to see their own progress and are very sensitive to the normal, healthy fluctuations of body weight and size. Any slight change in their weight or waist size can send them into a panic or depressive state.
Hyper-focusing on the shape of your body or weight can negatively impact your motivation to keep going in your fitness journey—especially when it comes time to build muscle.
In this podcast episode, I talk about the importance of doing the inner work to develop a healthy relationship with yourself and your body to help combat body dysmorphia. Seeing a licensed therapist, journaling, and practicing mindfulness meditation are all great ways to develop a better connection with one’s self.
I also suggest focusing on celebrating your gains and the positive changes you’re making in your life to combat the inner critic. Use a journal or the ABC Trainerize app (if you’re subscribed to one of my workout programs below) to track your workout progress, stay disciplined, and identify obstacles.
-Jayd
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 8: Tips for Staying Consistent
In this short episode, I give 3 main tips for building that consistency. When it comes to reaching your fitness goals, staying consistent over a long time is crucial!
In this short episode, I give 3 main tips for building that consistency.
When it comes to reaching your fitness goals, staying consistent over a long time is one of the most important things.
Quick-fix diets and intense workout plans might get you fast results--but these results rarely stick in the long term for most people.
If you want to burn fat and keep it off for good, you need to change your lifestyle to something you can sustain over the course of many weeks, months, and years.
First, I suggest that you get on a schedule. I'm a big fan of time blocking. Each week, I use an appointment calendar to block out my time for my workouts, personal training sessions, and other work. This helps me to stay organized by ensuring that I'm setting time aside for my workouts.
In addition to getting on a regular schedule, I also recommend getting onto an actual training program. Many people just show up to the gym without a plan and wonder why they never seem to make progress. Getting on a training plan will ensure that your workouts are the most effective for pushing you toward your goals. Check out my programs for beginners listed below!
If you struggle to stick to a schedule and training plan, I also recommend working with a personal trainer. Meeting with a personal trainer every week has helped many of my clients to stay consistent and make consistent gains. Look for a trainer at your local gym or check out my online personal training program.
Programs for Beginners
Check out my collection of DIY programs for building beginner strength, delivered via the ABC Trainerize app. DIY programs are $27 monthly, cancel at any time.
Beginner Body Sculpt Foundations (Bands)
Beginner Body Sculpt Foundations (Weight Training)
Beginner Body Sculpt Foundations (Full Gym)
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 7: Tips for Building a Home Gym
Build your home gym one step at a time with my equipment suggestions. Start with resistance bands and progress to weights over time.
Build your home gym one step at a time with my equipment suggestions. Start with resistance bands and progress to weights over time.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of big-box gyms. They seem to often be crowded and noisy—whereas I prefer to work out on my own in a quiet space. For this reason, a few years ago I turned my living room into a home gym and filled it with the equipment that I love to use in my workouts.
In this podcast episode, I give tips to help you build your own home gym as a beginner. You don’t have to go all-out like me and get a squat rack, barbell, weights, and cardio equipment immediately. In the beginning of your fitness journey, you can start building strength at home with relatively inexpensive equipment that doesn’t take as much space. Check out the episode and equipment list below!
Resistance Bands
The first thing I recommend you get for your home gym is resistance bands. These are relatively inexpensive and don’t take up much space.
if you don’t have much space available in your home, bands are a great option. You can just store them away in a drawer when you’re not using them—so you don’t need a dedicated “gym” room or area in your home.
Bands are also a great option if you’re a beginner to fitness. They provide a relatively safe way to learn resistance training exercise technique while building foundational strength.
Intermediate and advanced exercisers can also benefit from using bands—especially for muscle-building and strength accessory exercises.
There are 3 main types of resistance bands I recommend you stock up on: mini bands, tube bands, and superbands.
Mini Bands (Loop Bands)
These small, loop-shaped bands are great for exercises like monster walks, banded squats, and my favorite rear delt exercise—the single-arm high row.
I recommend getting a set that is graded for different resistance levels so that you can track your progress over time. Personally, I almost always recommend the Fit Simplify 5-pack of mini bands to start with. These bands are rated for different resistance levels, which allows you to better track your progress as you get stronger.
Tube Bands (Handle Bands)
Tube bands are great for many upper-body exercises. You can anchor the band to a door or hook in the wall for exercises like lat rows, chest presses, and pull-downs.
There are many brands and varieties of tube bands, however I recommend getting a set that is graded for different resistance levels. For instance, the set that I use is labeled from lightest to heaviest according to weight equivalence (10lb, 20lb, 30lb, etc). This will allow you to track your progress as you get stronger as over time you’ll need to use heavier bands.
Superbands (Monster Bands)
Superbands are long loop-shaped bands that are great for a variety of exercises like kickbacks, good mornings, deadlifts, and mobility exercises. You can also use them as support for pullups and other hanging exercises.
As with the other bands, I recommend getting a variety set of superbands that are rated for different levels of resistance. Some exercises you’ll need lighter bands whereas others will require heavier bands.
Floor Mats
Another great piece of equipment to include in your beginning home gym is an exercise mat. I recommend getting two types of exercise mats. First, you should have one that is thick and squishy to give some cushion to your body while doing exercises on the floor like crunches, bridges, and planks. Second, you should also have a thinner yoga mat that will provide some grip to your hands and feet—especially if you plan to do standing balancing exercises or work out barefoot.
Dumbbells
Dumbbells are my go-to recommendation for beginners to weight training. These handheld weights allow you to perform various exercises for your upper body and lower body, like dumbbell chest presses, rows, lateral raises, goblet squats, Romanian deadlifts, and weighted lunges.
For many exercisers, dumbbells are a staple equipment item that allows you to target different muscle groups for bodybuilding and strength accessories effectively.
I suggest starting your home gym with an adjustable set of dumbbells like power blocks or spin-lock weights. These don’t take up much room and will allow you to progressively overload your muscles with heavier weight over time.
Personally, I use spin-lock dumbbells, but I also have several clients who use some variation of powerblocks. The spin-lock weights are a little more time-consuming to adjust, but they do tend to be more solid than powerblocks.
Bench
It’s also a good idea to invest in a sturdy, adjustable bench. This allows you to perform exercises like chest presses, chest flys, and box squats.
I always recommend that my clients get a bench for their home gym that can lay flat or go into an incline or decline. This will give you more options for variations of exercises that will allow you to target different muscle groups.
Barbells & Plates
As you get more into intermediate and advanced training, having a good-quality barbell will be important for making gains in your home gym. The bands and dumbbells alone should provide enough resistance for you as a beginner to build muscle and get stronger for the first 3-6 months.
Eventually though, you’ll need more resistance to keep your muscles challenged. Barbells like the one featured below allow you to add significantly more weight to exercises by adding plates to the bar. You can use the barbell for exercises like barbell deadlifts, back squats, and bench press.
When you’re ready to get a bar, I recommend investing in a few sets of barbell plates as well. Start with 2 of each: 2.5lb, 5lb, 10lb, 25lb, and 45lb plates. This will allow you to progressively overload your exercises by adding more weight to your exercises up to 220lb total.
Make sure to also invest in a set of plate collars (also called locks or clamps). These secure the plates onto the barbell to keep your lifts safe and sturdy. I use a variety of collars, including plastic clip-ons as well as stainless steel weighted ones.
Squat Rack/Power Rack
Some barbell exercises (like squats and bench press) are much easier to do if you have a squat rack or power rack to hold the weight between sets. The Fitness Reality squat rack is a surprisingly inexpensive and good-quality rack that can be ordered from Amazon. Make sure to also get a set of J Hooks to hold the weight between your sets.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 6: When to Add More Weight to the Bar
Learn how to keep getting stronger by challenging your muscles with more weight over time.
To keep getting stronger, you need to challenge your muscles with more stimulus over time.
In this episode, I share valuable insights on how to determine the right time to progress in your training program, whether you're focused on muscle building or high-intensity strength training. Join me as I breaks down the key differences between these two approaches and explain how to gauge progress effectively.
This episode was recorded during a live stream on the Jaydigains Twitch channel. Join live streams every Tuesday and Friday on Twitch.
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(00:00):
Hi there. Welcome to the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and I'm here to share some training tips and nutrition tips to help you build a healthy fit lifestyle. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you a coaching call that I had with some of my clients in my Coaching Corner Discord server. Every month I host a one to one and a half hour training session with my clients and subscribers in my Coaching Corner Discord server. These calls are like a private live stream where you get to ask your questions in the chat and I respond to them live, and I usually have some kind of a lesson or a message prepared to share with my subscribers as well based on the kinds of questions that I've gotten from my clients throughout the week or things that we have talked about on stream.
(00:44):
If you would like to participate in those coaching calls, you'll just need to join my Coaching Corner Discord server and I'll provide the link for that below. You'll also need to make sure that you are a subscriber plus and that will get you access to the monthly coaching calls in the future. I do plan on adding more coaching calls throughout each month, but for now we're having them on every fourth Sunday of the month. I hope to see you there. Now let's get into today's episode. One of my clients asked a really great question during the coaching call, which was How do I know when to progress in my training program? Now, this person is someone who is a power lifter and has followed a couple of different programs before coming to work with me as his personal trainer, and in the last couple of months of working together, we have been focusing just on muscle building and keeping him consistent on his fat loss.
(01:35):
But as we get into bulk season the winter, he wants to switch back into focusing on strength training or moving big weight. So in the coming weeks, I'm going to be putting him through what's called a max test. And a max test is when you test your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rep maxes on a given lift to see where your strength is. The goal of this kind of a test is to see how much weight you can possibly lift in 1, 2, 3, 4, or five reps at a time. Doing max tests is a great way for you to see where your current strength is. It also gives you an idea of what kind of weight you should be using in your workouts in order to build more muscle and build strength. Many power lifting programs recommend that you train with a given percentage of your one rep max or your estimated one rep max in a lift when you test your maxes every six to 12 months.
(02:30):
This gives you an idea of your progress as you get stronger over time. Ideally, we want to see those numbers going up over time, so six months from now you'll want to be able to lift more weight in 1, 2, 3, or four or five repetitions. Now testing your progress in this way is very different from the way that you would get a sense of progress when you are doing a muscle building phase and when you're in a muscle building phase, a bodybuilding or accumulation phase of your training, it's going to be a little different in assessing when it's time to progress. IE add on more repetitions, more sets, or more weight. So in this episode, I do talk about the difference in what it feels like to do these two different styles of lifting and how we can get a sense of when it's time to add on more based on whether you are in a muscle building phase or if you are working for strength and intensity.
(03:21):
So I hope that you find this discussion really helpful. I will say before we get into this that if you are in the first year or two of your resistance training journey, first off, welcome. We're so happy to have you as part of the club, but you should be focusing mainly on muscle building, developing your mobility and learning the technique of different lifts during this first year to two, getting into higher intensity lifts where you're lifting a really heavy load is something that you really want to reserve for when your technique and your muscle mass are solid. So you want to have a good foundation of a year to two of consistent lifting before you head into higher intensity lifts. The people that I'm talking to in this coaching call are experience lifters and they have been working with me, each of them for at least a year, and before they started working with me, they did power lifting.
(04:10):
Okay? So these are experienced lifters who are ready for those high intensity lifts, but in working with me, they're getting a stronger sense of the differentiation between the different styles of training and lifting. So if you're just a beginner or you're in that first two years of your training, put this information in your back pocket because you're going to need it later on. When it comes time to testing your one rep maxes and beginning to work with higher intensity load, make sure that as always you listen to your body anytime you train. All of this information is given for educational purposes only. You are responsible for your own gains, but if you are looking for a coach, I am taking on clients currently. So go to my website, jd gaines.com or jade harrison fitness.com and you can check out my coaching program there. I also do have some DIY workout programs.
(04:59):
If you would like to start building muscle using my programming and my videos, that will get you into the community and you'll be able to join the coaching calls live. So check out that information on my website. Wherever you are, make sure that you subscribe to this channel to get notified anytime I post a new episode. And also make sure to follow me on my social medias. I'm JD Gaines everywhere, and without further ado, let's get into it. Here is how we kind of differentiate in terms of when to progress. When you are in a muscle building workout or a muscle building phase versus a high intensity workout or strength training phase where you are trying to hit high intensity numbers, it's going to feel very different on your body and knowing when to progress is also going to feel very different. So let's talk about the muscle building phase first. When we're doing muscle building workouts, our goal is muscle fatigue. Our goal is to approach muscle failure because that's what our bodies
(05:56):
Need in order to build muscle, in order to put on more lean muscle tissue, we need to actually break that tissue down. We need to cause little tiny microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. So the way that we typically do this is with what's called higher volume work, higher volume exercises. So you may do your big lifts, you might do squats, bench deadlift, or you might just do bodybuilding style exercises like chest press with dumbbells, single leg dead lifts with dumbbells, right machine work. And each of these exercises, your goal is to fatigue the working muscles to the point that you are close to muscle failure. In some exercises, you may actually be asked to go to muscle failure, get to an RPE 10, but typically I'm going to be suggesting an RPE eight, nine or 10, sometimes a seven, leaving three reps in the tank depending on what the lift is and what we're trying to work on.
(07:00):
Now that RPE seven, eight or nine or 10 is going to feel like muscle burning for a lot of people, right? That's what a lot of people associate the approaching muscle failure with is a burn. Not everybody feels the burn, okay? But often people do associate approaching muscle failure in a hypertrophy exercise as like burning in the muscles and that burning that you feel is lactic acid setting in and the muscles as your body goes through the lactic acid system for giving the muscles energy, we know that we need to progress when we are able to do the max number of repetitions. I usually give you guys a range of repetitions for each exercise six to 12 or something like that. When you're able to do the max number of repetitions with whatever given weight and it feels like an RPE seven, like you have three reps left in the tank, that's when you know it's time to progress.
(07:58):
So ideally, pay attention to the RPE that I give you if it's a RPE seven, whatever weight you need to use to stick within that range of repetitions and feel like you have three reps in the tank. If it's RPE eight, I want you to use whatever weight allows you to get the recommended number of repetitions and feel like you have two reps in the tank. If it's a RPE eight, if it's RPE nine, then I want you to use whatever weight within the recommended number of repetitions that leaves one rep in the tank, and if it's RPE 10, you're going to failure, okay? So have your safeties up, have your safeties up all the time. But in accumulation or muscle building, that's what we're generally going for. So I usually will put what weight I think you probably need based on the numbers and what I'm seeing in your videos in trainer eyes, what the recommended amount of weight is.
(08:52):
If you feel like you had five reps in the tank using the weight that I recommended, then go ahead and add more weight. Just try to only add no more than 20% at a time, so add 20% to the weight that you're lifting, go for another set and listen to your body scale of one to 10 where you at on RPE and adjust and add more until you are at the RPE. That's suggested where you're finishing your sets and you feel like you have only two reps in the tank or only one rep in the tank or three reps in the tank depending on the RPE, and that's how we handle it with accumulation. RPE is ultimately our number one guide, and it's very similar when we head into intensification or into your higher intensity lifts. It's similar, but reading RPE is a lot harder when you get into your high intensity lifts because it just doesn't feel the same as it did when you were at your hypertrophy.
(09:49):
You're not going to feel that burning, so it's a lot harder to judge like how many reps did I have in the tank? I don't know. That's another reason why people like to use percentage of their one rep maxes. I like to do a max test after you've reconditioned or after you have built up your work capacity with some muscle building for a good couple of weeks, if not months. When we test our maxes, we can use that whatever number that we lift, we can use that to inform what weight we should be training with. In our practice training sessions in general, depending on the block that you're in, you're going to be working with a lower percentage of your one rep max when you are in a muscle building phase or an accumulation phase. And then when you enter into an intensification phase, then you're going to be working with slightly higher percentage of your previous one rep max.
(10:42):
And then when you get close to peaking when you're going to test again, then you're going to be lifting as much as 90, 95 and a hundred percent of your previous one rep max so that when it comes to you actually retesting, you hopefully see those numbers improve and go up. So we have our high volume sets. Generally you're going to be working with between like 50% to 80% of your one rep max. That's generally what we go for. Sometimes 85%, okay? And we're going to be doing higher numbers of reps, okay? Something like 5, 6, 7, 8, all the way up to 12 or 15, and our goal is to feel the burn or approach muscle failure. If you don't feel the burn, you'll feel the effort because your muscles just reach a point where they're just, you can't move at the same rate. It starts to slow down or you feel like you're just, your muscles are going to give out.
(11:44):
The muscles. Giving out is a lot closer to what you experience in high intensity sets or high intensity days or blocks and high intensity lifts. We're going to be working with 85% to 100% of your previous one rep max, and we're going to be sticking to a low number of repetitions. One rep per set, 2, 3, 4, up to six six is really on the border there between strength and power versus hypertrophy. So usually when working with smaller number of reps, but a much higher weight that's closer to your tested one rep max and RPE feels a little different there. The rate of perceived exertion is going to feel less like, oh, my muscles are burning and more like the weight just isn't moving, or now I'm slowing down, or I am going to have to change something about how I'm doing this lift in order to get the weight to move.
(12:44):
So those are the things that we look for at higher rates of perceived exertion with higher intensity lifts with your strength lifts and very few people feel a burn when they approach failure in a high intensity lift because you're just not exhausting the lactic acid system in the same way that you would when you're doing a longer set, but you will experience just like it's not moving or it's very, very slow and I just can't get it quite back up. And so that's why I say this is a skill that has to be practiced over the course of a couple of weeks to a couple of months because learning what it feels like when you are approaching failure with a high intensity lift, it takes some adjustment when you have been doing muscle building for a long period of time, even if you have previously done high intensity lifts in the past, you're going to have to reteach your system and reteach your brain what it feels like as you're approaching the higher intensity stuff, and you're going to have to learn how to push in a completely different way and grind in a completely different way than how you had to when you were approaching muscle failure in muscle building.
(13:55):
For me, I do and I do prefer to teach people to listen to their bodies, learn what it feels like to lift at these higher intensities. This is why I'm such a big proponent of RPE. It's always a good idea to listen to your body to stay safe. Safety is my number one concern with all of you guys when you're working one-on-one with me. My number one concern is keeping you safe and injury free. So that's why learning RPE is such an important part of my programming, and there are criticisms of RPE for sure. There definitely are criticisms of RPE because your perception of how hard you're working, it's subjective. So what feels like an RPE seven one day may actually be an RPE five things feel harder than what they actually are or things feel easier than what they actually are. If you suspect that you are sandbagging, if you suspect that you can lift more than what you actually are, if you feel like you're being held back or if you feel like you're holding yourself back following a program that just says this percentage this week, this percentage that week, and you just have to follow the numbers regardless of how you feel, we can train that way.
(15:08):
You don't necessarily need to think so much about how the weight feels to judge whether you need more weight or not because you're just following the program. So that makes it very easy to just kind of turn your brain off and just no think, just lift, right? Because if we we're just going by numbers, then we're sort of progressing on a bi-weekly or tri-weekly basis where we're adding more reps or we're adding a higher percentage of your one rep max. That is a way to train just purely off of one percentage of one rep max. It's very challenging and you have to be in the right mindset. You have to be on your game. You have to be consistent in your sleep, you have to be consistent in your nutrition. You have to be very consistent in following your workout plan on a week by week basis so that you're properly recovering.
(16:02):
Because if you're not getting your recovery time and you're also not getting the frequency and the consistency, you're going to have a really hard time keeping up with that percentage progression, which is why what I like to do is work roughly within a certain percentage of your one rep max, but I'm always going to give you a range of reps that I want you working with so we can progress using a certain weight and we're going to stick within three to six reps or one to three reps or two to three reps, three to four reps, something like that. That way you have that space to listen to your body, and if you're having a day where everything feels really hard, you have the percentage of your one rep max that you're supposed to lift. But if you're just feeling like crap, then you can just lift three reps instead of going to six that day.
(16:49):
And then if you're having a really solid day, you take your percentage of the one rep max that's suggested and then go to six. And if you do a set of six and you feel like, wow, I feel super duper strong, then add on another 10%, no more than 20% at a time. That's what I encourage you guys to do. Listen to your bodies and your training should be responsive. I think when we are trying to train according to keeping you injury free, I think that that's the smartest way to train. If we were leading up to a powerlifting competition, it might be a little bit more disciplined in terms of following the program on a week by week basis, making sure that we're hitting this number of reps total with this percentage. We might be a little bit more disciplined about it. That's something that we're going to have to kind of adjust and play by ear based on one, how you're feeling.
(17:43):
Huge. That's huge to me. How are you feeling? How do the lifts feel? How are they moving? Are you feeling any pain while you're doing them? Two, how are you recovering after your lifts? Because high intensity lifts, a lot of times you don't feel that burn, but in your 24 to 48 hours after lifting, are you experiencing any joint pain, any inflammation, that kind of thing. And then also, are you able to progress over time? If I give you a higher percentage that I want you to lift with, are you able to do that? So I'm going to pace you gradually through this so you have in terms of when to progress, I'm going to be also looking at your lifts, and this is why it's such a good idea to be taking your videos and sending them to me because I can watch you and see how fast the weight is moving, see if we're getting any form failure as we get into these higher intensities. And I can help you to judge when it's time to put more weight on the bar. Now, not everybody trains according to one rep max. You don't necessarily have to in order to make progress, in order to build muscle and in order to get stronger.
(18:50):
It is a very effective way of training, and it can be very nice because it does help you to know on a week by week basis exactly what you should be lifting in terms of what weight you should put on the bar. I like to start everybody off in, let's get a max test. Let's get a starting point. Use that as a percentage point for what our lifts are going to be moving forward and try to add more weight over time to our one rep maxes. I think that that's a really great way to pace yourself and to see yourself getting measurably stronger.
(19:19):
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, and leave a comment in the comment section if you're here on YouTube to let me know what you thought about the episode. If you would like to receive emails from me with coaching and nutrition tips, make sure to sign up for my email list on my website. Just go to jaydigains.com. I will talk to you guys again soon. Thank you again for being here with me, and don't forget to drink your water, eat your veggies and protein, and I'll see you next time.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 5: TwitchCon 2023 Fitness Panel
Over the weekend, I met up with other streamers in the Fitness & Health community of Twitch as well as some of my followers and online clients for this year’s TwitchCon. On Saturday, I spoke on a panel put together by TominationTime called The Streamer's Workout: Gaining XP in Fitness & Streaming along with other streamers Smashley, Smexi, AceofAllTrades01, and theHOLDERHEK.
Over the weekend, I met up with other streamers in the Fitness & Health community of Twitch as well as some of my followers and online clients for this year’s TwitchCon. It was so great seeing so many of you in person 🤗
On Saturday, I spoke on a panel put together by TominationTime called The Streamer's Workout: Gaining XP in Fitness & Streaming along with other streamers Smashley, Smexi, AceofAllTrades01, and theHOLDERHEK.
TheHOLDERHEK was kind enough to stream the panel on his channel and let us watch the VOD on my recap stream this past Monday. I’ve edited the video and added the audio that I recorded for most of the session and posted it to my Youtube channel, which you can watch below:
It’s been so incredible to watch as this community has taken shape over the last 3 years.
I started live streaming on Twitch at the beginning of the pandemic as a gamer playing the game Subnautica. Many of my IRL friends who followed me encouraged me to stream my workouts on Twitch—to which I responded “that’s a thing?”
Sure enough, Twitch had recently added a Fitness & Health category to the platform as more people were joining the platform to stream their workouts and streamers like MartiniMonsters, BenRice_PLG, and TominationTime were growing in popularity. The Fitness & Health category on Twitch brought hundreds of people together, allowing us to find community and “fitspiration” with each other during lockdown.
For me, joining the category and interacting with other streamers and community members has led to so much personal growth and development as a coach and athlete. Events like the Twitch Powerlifting Meet put on by EatItPal_ and AverageJoes_oc as well as the Twitch Rivals Tyler1 tournaments brought the community closer and even encouraged people outside the community to get involved with fitness.
Twitch Con 2023 was another of those cornerstone events that I think we’ll look back on as one of the defining moments of this community. In the last year or so, as the world begins to open up in the wake of Covid lockdowns, the Twitch Fitness & Health community has felt a bit adrift. Many streamers have left the platform or stopped streaming altogether, which has led to a general feeling of 🤷♀️ “what are we doing here?”
But getting so many of us together in one place and spending time together helped us to see the potential of this community moving forward. Not only did we actually all get along (despite 15 of us staying in the same house together!) but we also felt inspired to work together moving forward and take this community to the next level.
I think that there’s a huge opportunity for the Twitch Fitness & Health community to become a major hub where people can learn about fitness, stay motivated, and find personal connection in their fitness journey. One thing that Twitch as a platform does very well is providing the foundation for the development of communities. However it’s up to the streamers and community members to craft those communities and make them grow.
Many of the communities on Twitch are centered around a single streamer who cultivates a group of loyal followers and subscribers. The thing that makes the Fitness & Health community special is that we are each involved and invested in each other’s communities and fitness journeys. We share knowledge, encourage each other, and support each other in our growth in fitness and wellness. And everyone involved benefits from the collaboration—including viewers and lurkers.
The thing I’m most excited about is that so many of us who stream to the Fitness & Health category of Twitch are now interested in working together to grow the community at large. There’s so much value that we have to offer to people who are looking for motivation and community in their fitness journeys.
Interested in checking out the Fitness & Health community on Twitch? There’s many different ways to get involved!
If you’re just getting started on your fitness journey or if you want to start a fitness journey, the Twitch Fitness & Health category is a great place to hang out.
Many people watch streams while they’re at work during the day and have them on in the background while they are doing things at home or in the gym—kind of like how people listen to podcasts or watch Youtube videos. However with Twitch livestreams, you can interact with the streamer directly by participating in chat. This is a great way to ask questions, share your progress, or just goof around and make friends in real time. Many of the fitness streamers are certified personal trainers and are a great resource for free advice and live lessons (I do this on my channel, as does CoelRunnings, JoWorkouts, and theHOLDERHEK).
Other streamers on the platform have been on a fitness journey for many years and also give excellent advice in a number of different areas. For example Acroiono is a great resource for learning about bodybuilding, posing, and training towards an aesthetic physique. There are also many streamers who do powerlifting and offer great advice for getting strong (like BenRice_PLG and AverageJoes). Other streamers give great general fitness, wellness, and fat-loss advice and are excellent at teaching general health.
Many of these streamers also have interactive Discord communities and are active on social media. You can find many of us on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), and other platforms. Some of us (like myself) also have websites for promoting fitness education and even take on 1-on-1 coaching clients.
So there are many ways that this community can help you to get started and learn more about fitness!
If you’re already on a fitness journey, plugging into the Twitch Fitness & Health community is a great way to stay motivated. We all experience ups and downs in our fitness journeys, and maintaining the drive to keep showing up is difficult when you’re doing it on your own. This community can help you cultivate deep and meaningful relationships that can help you grow as a person and take your fitness to the next level.
There’s so much information being shared on this platform, and people are truly there to support each other. For this reason, I’m a massive fan of the community and have decided to stick with it—despite the bumps in the road that we’ve had to endure in the last year or so.
I think there’s also a huge opportunity here for other coaches like myself who are interested in growing their brand online. You can use Twitch streams to connect and build relationships with your existing clients and followers by letting them “hang out” with you. Also, each stream is an opportunity to showcase your knowledge and teaching style to new people. Offering fitness advice to your chatters and viewers can help you cultivate authority, credibility, and on-camera presence needed to grow your brand online.
I’m still working out the kinks of how to do this for myself, but I think that the capacity to grow as a coach by streaming on Twitch is still huge. I personally don’t like making pre-recorded content talking to a “cold” camera or microphone, so for me livestreaming on Twitch is a great way to capture my conversational coaching style in a way that works for me and my brain. Most of what I post to my socials and YouTube channel is first recorded live on Twitch streams.
Another beautiful thing about this platform is that you don’t even have to be a coach or super experienced in fitness to have a channel and grow a community. Many people use the platform to document their fitness journey and cultivate friendships with people who hang out with them while they’re streaming. There’s a lot of encouragement and knowledge that gets shared among the viewers and chatters in fitness streams—which can be invaluable to your fitness progress. It can also give you the structure and accountability you need to stay consistent, especially if you get onto a streaming schedule.
If you’re interested in starting to live stream on Twitch, check out the Creator Camp series “Getting Started on Twitch.”
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Episode 4: How to Stay in Shape When Life Gets Busy
When our schedules get hectic and disrupt our regular routines, fitness and nutrition often take a back seat. During these times, it's easy to fall into the trap of self-criticism, which only makes it harder to get back on track. For several years, I've been guiding my clients in breaking free from this cycle through a strategy I've named the MVP, which stands for the Minimally Viable Plan.
Struggling in an on-again, off-again relationship with fitness? You’re not alone!
It’s difficult for many people to make consistent gains, thanks to the demands of everyday life.
Whenever life gets busy and disrupts our normal routines, fitness & nutrition are the first things to go out the window. When this happens, it can be tempting to get stuck on the self-shaming cycle—which only makes it more difficult to start up again.
For several years, I have helped my clients break out of this cycle with a concept I call the MVP: the Minimally Viable Plan (MVP).
The MVP is your bare minimum, “nothing but the basics” plan for exercise and nutrition that you fall back on when you’re struggling to keep up with your normal plan. In this episode, I go over the importance of having an MVP for your fitness and how to create your own MVP.
In general, your personal MVP just needs to hit the basic requirements for health & fitness:
Follow the Healthy Plate Model
Hit a Daily Movement Goal
Total Body Resistance & Mobility Training 2x per week
The MVP allows you to scale down your nutrition and exercise plan to something simpler and more manageable. It allows you to keep some momentum going in your fitness journey and avoid a full stop. This, in turn, will make it much easier to scale your efforts back up when you have the availability in the future.
This episode was recorded during a group coaching call with my clients. Group coaching calls happen in my Coaching Corner Discord server on the 4th Sunday every month at 4:00pm EST. You can attend the group coaching calls by subscribing as a Supporter+ in the Discord or as a Tier 3 subscriber on Twitch. Personal Training Clients and DIY training program subscribers are also free to attend!
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Episode 3: How to Do Resistance Training to Tone Your Body and Get Strong
In this episode, I’ll teach you how to start doing resistance training in your weekly exercise routine. The best way to keep your muscles healthy is to do resistance training at least 2-3 times each week. As we age, our muscles naturally get weaker in a process called sarcopenia. This can lead to a decrease in coordination, balance, and bone density—which puts us more at risk of injury and certain illnesses. By challenging your muscles every week, you can reverse the effects of sarcopenia and get stronger.
In this episode, I’ll teach you how to start doing resistance training in your weekly exercise routine.
The best way to keep your muscles healthy is to do resistance training at least 2-3 times each week. As we age, our muscles naturally get weaker in a process called sarcopenia. This can lead to a decrease in coordination, balance, and bone density—which puts us more at risk of injury and certain illnesses.
By challenging your muscles every week, you can reverse the effects of sarcopenia and get stronger. Build your own resistance training routine, try one of my DIY programs, or work 1-on-1 with me for personal training.
Getting Started
To get started in resistance training, your first task will be to get on a schedule and set up a regular training routine. You should aim to do resistance training 2-3 days each week. Plan to spend 45 minutes to 1 hour and a half on each workout.
As a beginner, focus on what is called Total Body training—meaning you train muscles throughout your entire body in each training session. Later on, as you get more advanced, you can focus your training sessions on one muscle group (upper body vs. lower body) or movement pattern (push vs. pull) and also increase the number of training sessions you do each week.
In the first few weeks of doing resistance training, your goal should be to master the technique of the exercises in your program, first using light or no resistance and later using moderate resistance/weight. As a beginner, you should also focus on developing strength in your core (abdomen and back) while learning how to hold your body in alignment with good posture. Also, try to learn the names of the major muscles and their functions.
Workout Format
When training my clients, I divide each resistance training workout into 3 parts:
Warmup & Priming
Challenge Exercises
Mobility Exercises/Stretching
Each of these three parts is important and serves a different purpose to keep your workouts safe and effective. Let’s look at each in more detail below.
1 Warmup & Priming
Each resistance training session should begin with a warmup and some priming exercises to prepare the muscles for the challenge exercises.
Your warmup & priming should include 5-10 minutes of moderate-intensity steady-state cardio and a variety of light exercises and dynamic stretches done for 10-25 minutes.
The steady-state cardio portion of your workout serves to increase your core temperature and get blood circulating to your muscles. We don’t want to challenge the muscles while they’re cold!
The priming portion of your warmup can include myofascial release, dynamic stretches, and/or light exercises:
Myofascial release can help to relieve tension in tight muscles by putting pressure on the fascia using equipment like a foam roller, medicine ball, lacrosse ball, or other tool. This has a similar effect to getting a deep tissue massage on the affected muscles. Do this for 30-60 seconds per muscle group, but try not to spend too long on this portion at the beginning of the workout (otherwise, you risk bringing your heart rate and core temperature back down towards resting).
Dynamic stretches are like normal stretches, however, you only hold the stretch for a second or two at a time. The focus of dynamic stretches is to bring the muscles through their full range of motion (both contraction and extension) with light or no resistance. This allows you to identify and gently work out any tension or tightness in the muscles before putting them under load during the challenge portion of the workout.
Light exercises are sets of exercises you might use in the challenge portion of your workout, however in the beginning of the workout they’re done with light or no resistance. This gives you a chance to warm up the muscles involved in the exercise and rehearse the movement before putting the muscles under a challenging load.
Keep in mind that during priming exercises, your goal is not to fatigue your muscles. Instead, focus on connecting with your muscles and getting them ready to work during the challenge portion of your workout.
If you’re working with me or doing one of my DIY programs, you’ll notice that priming exercises are labeled in the workout as “(priming)” to help you know which exercises are part of your warmup.
2 Challenge Exercises
Once you have finished your warmup and priming exercises, then it’s time to challenge your muscles 💪
Key terms to know:
A rep (“repetition”) is when you perform the movement of the exercise 1 time, beginning and ending in the starting position.
A set is the total number of reps you complete before resting.
Your rest period may be as short as 30 seconds or as long as 2-5 minutes between each set or between different exercises.
The challenge exercises are the portion of the workout in which we focus on building muscle and increasing strength.
If you’re working with me or doing one of my programs, watch the exercise tutorial video for each new exercise and pay attention to the target muscle group of the exercise.
Then do 1 or 2 practice sets with light or no resistance—focusing on doing the movement with good technique. Perform each rep at a controlled pace, 2-3 seconds “up” and 2-3 seconds “down.”
Once you have practiced the technique of the movement, then you can begin to add more resistance (i.e., heavier weight or bands) to add more challenge to the exercise.
Keep in mind that your muscles need to be challenged to grow and get stronger. This means that you’ll need to fatigue the target muscles in every set of an exercise. You can do this by doing the exercise with an amount of weight or number of reps that leave the muscles feeling tired or “burning” by the end of the set.
Once you finish a set, rest your muscles for 30-60 seconds before doing another set or moving on to another exercise.
Over time, your muscles will get stronger and you will need to do either more reps, more weight, or more sets of an exercise to keep your muscles challenged. This is called the principle of progressive overload.
In my programs, I usually suggest a range of reps for each set of an exercise (for example 10-15 reps). In the first week of your program, try to find a weight or resistance that allows you to feel challenged with the bottom number of reps (in this case, 10 reps). As the weeks go by, try to increase the number of reps that you do in each set until the top number of recommended reps (15) becomes easy. At that point, increase the weight again until you feel challenged at the bottom number of recommended reps (10).
As you perform your challenge exercises, pay attention to the muscles that you feel working and try to name them. This will help you to develop the mind-muscle connection that is important for safe, effective exercise.
Make sure to record what you did for your workout either in a journal, fitness tracking app, or in the ABC Trainerize app (if you’re working with me or doing one of my DIY programs).
3 Mobility & Stretching
After you have completed each of the challenge exercises in your program, take a few moments to stretch your muscles and bring your body back down to a resting state.
This portion of the workout might include more myofascial release (i.e., using a foam roller) and static stretches. Static stretches involve holding a stretch for 10 seconds or more to promote relaxation and flexibility in the muscles. It’s a good idea to do static stretching at the end of a workout while the muscles are warm (both after resistance training and cardio workouts).
Stay Consistent!
Stick with your resistance training routine for a few weeks and you’ll begin to feel the results pretty quickly! Most of my clients to report feeling stronger overall within 2-3 weeks after starting their resistance training.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 2: What is Resistance Training?
The best way to stay strong and keep your metabolism boosted is to do resistance training every week. In today’s episode, we’ll go over what resistance training is and how to add it to your exercise routine.
The best way to stay strong and keep your metabolism boosted is to do resistance training every week. In today’s episode, we’ll go over what resistance training is and how to add it to your exercise routine.
What is Resistance Training?
As a personal trainer, one of my favorite styles of exercise to teach my clients is resistance training. This style of exercise focuses on improving the health & strength of the muscles.
This is important because our muscles naturally deteriorate over time in a process called sarcopenia. As our muscles naturally weaken, we experience an increased risk of injury due to a loss of strength and coordination as well as an increased risk of weight gain due to the slowing of our metabolisms.
The best way to reverse this process is to incorporate resistance training into your weekly exercise routine.
Resistance training is also key for developing a sculpted or “toned” physique. But there are lots of other benefits to building muscle!
Building muscle can improve your everyday life by increasing your overall strength and coordination, making daily tasks easier to perform.
If you’re an athlete, building muscle can also improve your performance in sports and other physical activities.
Strengthening your muscles can also reduce your risk of injury. By improving your coordination and fortifying your tissues, you’ll be less likely to experience falls or other accidents.
Building muscle can also strengthen your bones, which can reduce your risk of developing osteoporosis and fractures, especially as you age.
Many people also use muscle-building as an aid in fat loss. Building muscle is a calorie-expensive function for the body–it takes a lot of energy to build muscle and to maintain it. By increasing your muscle mass, you can boost your metabolism and avoid a fat loss plateau.
Finally, building muscle can also help to improve your overall health. Regular strength training has been associated with improved cardiovascular health, better insulin sensitivity, reduced risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, and improved mental health
This episode was recorded during a live stream on the Jaydigains Twitch channel. Join live streams every Tuesday and Friday on Twitch starting around 11:30am EST.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 1: Technique Reviews, Deadlifts Tips for Conventional vs Sumo, GZCLP programming, OHP, & Squats
In this episode, I give my Twitch community and clients feedback on their exercise videos posted in my discord server while live on Twitch.
Hey there 👋 I'm personal trainer Jayd Harrison, and in this recording of my live stream on Twitch, I give some feedback on exercise videos posted by members of my Coaching Corner Discord community.
In this stream, I go over technique tips for deadlifts, overhead press, and squats for my strength training clients and followers.
If you'd like to participate in future Technique Tuesdays, make sure to join the Discord and subscribe to post your exercise videos in the #🏋-technique-review channel.
I go live around 11:30am EST on Tuesdays to review lifts and get my own workout in at twitch.tv/jaydigains.
Programs
Learn to Lift
with Jayd Harrison
Check out my 3-month Weight Training Foundations program to build muscle while learning safe & effective exercise technique! You’ll discover the best methods for using dumbbells, barbells, and machines to “tone” your body and get strong.
28-Day Fat Loss Challenge
with Jayd Harrison
Learn how to burn fat and keep it off for good with this 4-week crash course. Discover how to eat and exercise to keep your body burning fat to reach your weight loss goals.
About Jayd Harrison
Jayd Harrison has been a fitness coach and personal trainer for ten years. She works with exercisers of all experience levels, helping them to build muscle, burn fat, and eat better. Her upbeat and positive coaching style will motivate you to keep showing up for yourself! Jayd believes that there’s always something you can do to improve your health & fitness. No matter your limitations, experience level, or equipment access, you can achieve a toned, strong body and healthier lifestyle.
For more personalized programming, check out Jayd’s personal training program. Also check out Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube and follow her on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.