1 Reason YOUR Results Are STUCK

BC Girls Wall Pushups


How long you been doing that?!


Ever since starting as a personal-trainer in a big-box gym over 17 years ago I still see it. People doing the SAME exercises and wondering  why their body isn’t changing.

I get it. I fell into the same trap myself. You look around at the gym and see the fittest people who look like how you want to look and you ask them what they do and you start doing it. OR you just fall in love with certain exercises because you’re good at them, you get a good pump, or you just like it and it becomes your forever move.

I’m not against favorite exercises. I am against doing the same thing over and over and then being unhappy when your results aren’t what you were expecting.

A couple of things happen when you stick with the same thing for a long time:

  • Your body gets used to what you do and stops changing
  • Your mind gets used to what you do and things get boring
  • You create something called pattern overload which can lead to overuse injuries and imbalances

If you’re pursuing a fitness goal like fat loss, getting more muscle tone, and losing inches and sizes you bet your booty you’re gonna have to mix things up. Your body sees exercise as a stress and will always work to become more efficient at dealing with that stress. You have to keep your body in a state where it frequently has to work at becoming efficient at exercise stress.

Does that mean giving up your all-time favorite-est things in the history of ever? Not exactly you just have to use something we do at my boot camp in Santa Clarita – periodization.

In simplest terms periodization is a progression of your exercise over time. There are tons of things you can play with when it comes to your progression so I’m going to pare things down  to 1 thing you can start to do today to mix things up and get those results you work so hard for.

That one thing is stability.

True confession time. I LUURV me some deadlifts. I love the feeling of pulling heavy s*** off the floor. The reality for my body is I can’t sustain pulling 2x’s my body weight off the floor for months. It gets harder to recover and I start to get aches and owies that stick around longer than normal.

The solution has been to give my body a break from heavy stuff by taking away stability with single-leg barbell deadlifts.

Does it suck? YES! I feel like a total noob and I don’t get the ego-stroke of being able to pile the weight on, but I stick to it.

The words of my mentor Bedros ring in my ears in the vid below “Embrace the suck”…

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Here’s the thing. Every time you take away stability you are forced to use less weight, work slow and controlled, and train unilaterally. The cool thing about that is you squash any weaknesses you know or don’t know about, so when you go back to bilateral movement you are stronger and can possibly lift more. Happy ego again. YAY!

Here are some ways you can progress:


  1. Standing on two feet
  2. One foot forward
  3. One foot off the ground


  1. Working with both hands
  2. Working with alternating hands
  3. Working with one hand

Like I said earlier this is stuff you can do today. Put it into action and get yourself out of STUCKVILLE.

Committed to your success,


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