All Strength Training

It's September, and time to feature a new AST Member of the Month!

This month we have , nominated by Coach :

"For the month of September, we're pushing our attention on to Jesse King. This man has been so consistent with showing up to his sessions. He has not missed more than one session since he started at AST at the beginning of this year. He started off coming twice a week, but after seeing his results and probably finding a fine balance between enjoying and suffering through the training sessions, started coming thrice a week now.

Not only is he consistently coming to AST, but works his hardest every time he's here. I genuinely enjoy seeing him leave with his shirt drenched, face exasperated, and half limping through the door. But he comes back for more every time. His determination and strong-willed approach to self improvement is definitely something to strive for. "

The aftermath from yesterday's Arm Clinic - we hope all of the participants are enjoying the DOMS today!

Easy meal prep tip:

has a grilling station at their meat counter, where you can have them grill your meat for you. Easy way to have some pre-marinated chicken breast and skirt steak in your fridge when you're strapped for time.

Plus, no clean-up.

Although I'm fairly confident they limit it to something like 6 items, which is probably the fault of for tasking a bunch of our members with getting a week's worth of protein grilled at a time 😂.

With love,

Your coaches.




beast.fitness

We've been doing a Member of the Month spotlight in our newsletter since earlier this year, but then we realized that we should absolutely be spreading the recognition outside of just our members, so we'll be sharing our featured members on our social media going forward.

Kicking it off, our AST member spotlight for the month of August goes to !

Sam is actually celebrating her 1-year anniversary at AST, and it's been fantastic to watch her progress over that time. She's progressed into more challenging groups, and even took the plunge and joined one of our inaugural Project Peach glute training camps earlier this year. Even with her absolute disdain for Justin Timberlake (and, from the face she's making in this photo, 🤣), it's been great to have her as a part of the morning crew, and we look forward to seeing Sam continue to make improvements!

Our newest addition to our warmup area - 4 Hypervolt 2 massage guns from !

Often, when people come to us after having tried getting results on their own, at least one of the terms from the first slide will come up in their initial consultation:

"Yeah, usually when I need to lose 10lbs I'll just sign up for a 30 day challenge, but that isn't working anymore."

"I saw on Instagram that it's probably my hormones."

"It's hard to afford groceries when you're buying everything organic."

But when we try to address some of the terms from the second slide, it tends to go like this:

"What does your sleep look like?" "Oh, usually only 4-5 hours per night, I've been binge watching this show on Netflix when I get home from work."

"So does your current plan look like?" "Oh, well I tend to eat pretty healthy. But there's happy hour on Tuesdays. And I've got season tickets to the Cubs so obviously there's going to be bad food there. Plus I have a sweet tooth."

Most people tend to look for answers in the "things that are marketed as a quick fix" category like the first slide, when in reality absolutely none of those things should even be on your radar until you've addressed those from the second slide.

And, if you've been struggling with this and need some help, shoot us a DM - this sort of thing is sort of what we're good at 😁

We hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable holiday, and just in case you want to get a workout in before starting a long weekend, All Strength Training is open from 7am-1pm today.

I just got back this weekend from 7 days in Tampa for a work trip, and did a video on how I maintained a fairly normal meal plan while I was gone. Included:

-What I brought with me
-What I bought and where I bought it from
-What I had to work with for cooking (it wasn't much)

I know a lot of the people we work with get thrown off when you have to travel, especially for work trips, so hopefully this helps.

Video is timestamped so you can jump around as needed, and the link is in the comments.

Now in stock at AST - Protein Cookies from !

➡️ Chocolate Candy Ganache
➡️ Milk & Cookies
➡️ Strawberry Toaster Pastry

No, these are not low-carb or low-calorie, but if you're going to have a real cookie, you might as well couple it with 20g of protein.

will be leaving us in May for the sunny climate of California, so we spent one of our final staff meetings together exposing her to all of the American breakfast options she never experienced since moving from the UK:

✔️Cinnamon Toast Crunch
✔️Wheaties
✔️Fruit Loops
✔️Crunch Berries
✔️Reese's Puffs
✔️Cocoa Pebbles
✔️Lucky Charms
✔️Apple Jacks
✔️Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts

The winner?

Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
beast.fitness

DID YOU KNOW - men are more than 10x as likely to die from a heart attack or stroke compared to women?

This is just one of the things we'll be discussing at our upcoming, completely free Men's Health Seminar this coming Saturday. More topics include:

➡️ How to improve common health markers like blood pressure and resting heart rate to reduce risk for cardiovascular disease
➡️ The importance of routine lab work and what you should be asking your doctor to look for
➡️ Stress, stress, and more stress
➡️ Finding the effective dose for strength training & cardiovascular training - not enough, too much, and just right (the Goldilocks Method)
➡️ Aging & the decline of testosterone - what you can do
➡️ Insulin resistance & its impact on fat loss and muscle gain
➡️ Mental health, communication & the art of the one-word response

Space is limited to the first 20 participants to register - members can sign up at AST or through our online portal, and non-members can sign up by sending us a DM with your name and email address.

This is an IN-PERSON seminar, and won't be available via Zoom or any online streaming platform. It MIGHT be recorded but no promises.

Coming up on Saturday, April 6 - ABSOLUTELY FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

We did a seminar last year for women,, and thought it's probably time to do the same thing for men! What we'll be covering in our upcoming seminar:

➡️ How to improve common health markers like blood pressure and resting heart rate to reduce risk for cardiovascular disease
➡️ The importance of routine lab work and what you should be asking your doctor to look for
➡️ Stress, stress, and more stress
➡️ Finding the effective dose for strength training & cardiovascular training - not enough, too much, and just right (the Goldilocks Method)
➡️ Aging & the decline of testosterone - what you can do
➡️ Insulin resistance & its impact on fat loss and muscle gain
➡️ Mental health, communication & the art of the one-word response

Space is limited to the first 20 participants to register - members can sign up at AST or through our online portal, and non-members can sign up by sending us a DM with your name and email address.

This is an IN-PERSON seminar, and won't be available via Zoom or any online streaming platform. It MIGHT be recorded but no promises.

We promise we're not actually trying to hide what's going on in here... but the weather has other ideas.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all! Hopefully your day is full of friends, family, and, if it's anything like our house, possibly a bit of an argument about who has bigger calves.

We've asked our members to write their 2024 goals to hang on our Christmas tree, and this one stood out as... not surprising.

Wonder what is going to get in his stocking this year. 🤔 🤣

🤣

We had a great time at our annual holiday party at today! It's always nice to see what everyone looks like outside of gym clothes.

As always, the staff at Mordecai was amazing, and we look forward to doing it again next year!

Here's another aerobic training method to add in once you've spent some time with the Cardiac Output training method we posted the other day - Aerobic Intervals.

Not all interval training needs to be done as all-out short sprints (30 seconds or less), especially if you:

✅ Struggle with reducing heart rate between exercises or after workouts
✅ Have high blood pressure
✅ Have a high resting heart rate
✅ Have issues with your leg burning in less than 30-40 seconds

Longer, aerobic-style intervals are a great progression from using steady-paced cardio and can help:
➡️ Recover more quickly
➡️ Make you last longer (feel free to post your favorite "that's what she said" GIF in the comments)
➡️ Improve fat-burning potential
➡️ Make your cardio workouts more intense without adding time

Depending on your overall program, you might add these in once or twice per week for 20-45 minutes, either as a way to replace Cardiac Output workouts or using a mix of both.

As the weather is changing, the days get shorter, and we're entering prime holiday season, we start to get faced with new challenges:

✅ less organic activity - daily steps drop, we drive instead of walk, or skip going places altogether
✅ increased calorie intake - holiday parties, leftover desserts
✅ increased stress - causing an increase in heart rate and blood pressure

One way to counter all of the above is to be more deliberate with adding dedicated cardio sessions into your week.

If you haven't been doing much cardio recently, we don't recommend jumping straight into high intensity intervals, Tabatas, or higher-heart rate distance training. First, you should take a few weeks to acclimate your aerobic system using a lower intensity method.

One of our favorite methods to use is Cardiac Output, also referred to as Aerobic Output or Low Intensity Steady State (LISS).

You simply work at the same pace throughout the workout, trying to regulate your heart rate and intensity as to not overdo it in the early stages. Here's all you need to know:

➡️️Maintain a heart rate of 130-150bpm (120-140bpm is recommended for seated methods like a stationary bike or rowing machine). If you don't have a heart rate monitor, an easy technique to use is breathing only through your nose
➡️️Do 1-3 sessions per week, although there is really no upper limit for this - if you've got the time and desire to do it daily, you absolutely can as long as the intensity is kept in check
➡️️Shoot for 30-90 minutes per session - ideally you'll want at least 30 minutes as that's been shown to be what's needed to get an increase in eccentric capacity of the left ventricle of the heart (more blood can get in with each beat, reducing heart rate and blood pressure)

This is a fairly boring strategy, but it can be super effective at improving health markers and helping to change body composition.

To all of our veterans, both active and retired, we'd like to thank you for your service. We appreciate and support you!

Thank you to everyone who came out to listen to AST owner and head coach present our Women's Health & Hormones seminar, sponsored by .

We had such an interactive group of attendees with so many questions, we ended up running almost a half hour longer than anticipated, and it made for a great discussion with (hopefully) lots of takeaways for everybody who came!

For more information on future seminars, make sure you're following us so you can see when they get posted!

Are you struggling with persistent hip issues? Maybe you find yourself struggling with tightness or pain in your hips or lower back after:
✔️ Heavier squatting or deadlifting
✔️ Spending too much time stuck in a chair meeting work deadlines
✔️ Training for an upcoming 5k
✔️ Participating in recreational sports like tennis, volleyball or golf
✔️ Getting twirled overhead by Patrick Swayze in front of your disapproving dad

Well, hip pain shouldn't keep you from Having the Time of Your Life.

Flash sale - all eBooks are 40% off!

For the next 48 hours, all of our eBooks in our online store are 40% off - training programs, nutrition guides, recipe packs - all at the lowest price of the year! Just click the link in our bio or visit our site:

https://www.allstrengthtraining.com/store

Valid until 9/20. No coupon required.

We posted something like this for fat loss earlier this week, but don't want to ignore all of our friends who have goals more focused on muscle gain!

With muscle gain, let's get one point out of the way first - YES, it is possible to experience muscle gain in a calorie deficit while losing fat, but it's hardly the most efficient way to go about it. So we'll be focusing on a caloric surplus as one of the main drivers of muscle gain.

Why would we prioritize a calorie surplus? Because it's very difficult to create something from nothing, and if you're not in a calorie surplus, it means you don't have an excess of calories from which to create more muscle.

However, you can only build muscle tissue so quickly - for intermediate and advanced trainees, seeing a gain of 2-3lbs of legitimate muscle tissue as a female, or 7-8lbs of muscle as a male in a 12 month timeframe is a substantial amount of progress. Obviously there can be exceptions to this, but if it was common to gain at higher rates than that, every 40 year old in the gym who started lifting in high school should be a 400lb mountain of muscle.

That means that you don't need a massive calorie surplus - 200-300 extra calories per day above maintenance for many people could be all you need. Too big of a surplus means you won't just gain muscle but also unnecessary bodyfat.

In addition to a calorie surplus, the makeup of those calories also matters. One of the first steps should be adequate amounts of protein as your body can't get the amino acids needed for muscle growth from carbs or fat - it has to come from protein. Otherwise it's like trying to install a roof on a house but all you brought was drywall and cabinet doors.

Research shows that 0.8g-1g/lb of bodyweight is ideal for muscle gain, but there can be benefit in going higher based on individual response. If you're carrying more bodyfat, you're better off basing that number on your non-bodyfat weight instead of total weight, but you'd also probably be better served by initially focusing on reduction of bodyfat for a bit before pivoting toward a calorie surplus.

This morning's scan of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube comes up with a laundry list of words used improperly as a misdirect in order to either A) get more views to make the author more money, or B) to scare you into buying whatever expensive, unnecessary product or service the author is selling... to make them money.

Sure, some of the words on this list have varying degrees of relevance to your actual health and fitness, but I would consecutively guess that 90% of their use is just to confuse you, scare you, and get your money.

If you see these words, your "Spidey Sense" should be tingling.

Confused about how to eat for fat loss? Do you not worry about calories and just eat real, unprocessed food? Does food source not matter as long as you just limit your calories?

Like most things, the answer tends to be something in the middle. Think of it like a car - calories in your food are like the gas in the gas tank. As long as you have enough gas in the gas tank, you can get to where you're driving. Driving the car faster (a larger calorie deficit), empties the tank more quickly (potentially quicker weight loss); driving slower (a smaller calorie deficit) won't empty the tank as quickly (potentially slower weight loss).

But, driving too fast can come with its own consequences - you can run out of gas too quickly and end up going nowhere (dramatic drops in energy), you could get pulled over and fined for speeding (your metabolism adapting too quickly), or you could be going so fast that you don't have the ability to react to an obstacle in the road and end up crashing your car (making one mistake, leading you to "blow your diet").

So we have to manage our speed to allow us to get to where we want to, safely.

Then, there's the nutrient density of your food, which is like the construction and maintenance of the car. If the car you're driving is old and poorly maintained, you can still travel the same distance, but the ride is probably going to be a little less pleasant. If you haven't changed your filters (B vitamins), put enough air in your tires (vitamin C), or if you're leaking radiator fluid so the engine is constantly overheating (electrolytes), you'll find yourself pretty envious of the guy on the road next to you driving a well-maintained BMW.

In some cases, you might even find that poor maintenance impacts how fast you can actually go - a clogged fuel filter might mean you can't get the odometer over 60mph (slowed metabolism), the same way that low nutrient density could actually impact the "calories out" side of the "calories in vs. calories out" equation.

Both sides matter - find the sweet spot where everything overlaps for the most pleasant experience.

New Free Seminar Added!

Stress: What it Is, Where it Comes From and What to Do About It

Understatement of the year, handled in two words: you're stressed.

Now that I've done the bare minimum required to maintain my license as Captain Obvious, let's elaborate.

It's estimated that humans today are exposed to roughly 100x the amount of daily stressors that our grandparents had. While there are a multitude of reasons why, a few of the frontrunners tend to be:

• Overstimulation from advances in technology
• A dramatic reduction in manual labor jobs and rapid increase in highly sedentary white-collar work
• The loss of distinct "work" and "home" environments
• Steve. Seriously, what is with that guy?*

*If your name is Steve, I didn't mean you. I meant the other one. You're a ray of sunshine in a room full of rainbows.

At our upcoming seminar, we'll be talking not only about how stress works and where it comes from, but most importantly, what to do about it. There will be no "you just need to work on your stress" comments here. (As an aside, if there was ever a single most useless, bottom of the barrel level of effort piece of advice given, it would be that one - akin to telling someone with a gaping gunshot wound that they "should consider trying not to bleed so much.")

There will be a lecture portion, along with a hands-on element, where you'll learn about:

• Breathing & mobility techniques to help prevent stress from peaking as well as how to bring it down as quickly as possible
• Nutritional strategies to help reduce the severity of your stress response
• Flexibility and mobility tools to use after you've spent an entire afternoon sitting at your desk on a Zoom call with Steve (Seriously, THIS GUY).

Because there will be a practical element to this seminar, spaces will be limited to 10 people, and we're anticipating a runtime of 90 minutes instead of the usual 60 minutes. We do expect this one to fill up pretty quickly, so grab a spot while you can! Just send us a DM, we'll grab your name and email address, and you'll be added to the list!

You won't find our coaches sitting on a bench during a workout - we pride ourselves on our hands-on approach to training during our sessions. After all, there are thousands of workout videos available online, and the real value when you invest in personal training is having somebody to help when things aren't going the way they should. A good trainer will help you:

- Ensure that you're performing every exercise safely
- Help modify your technique based on your own body's structure and limitations
- Tweak your ex*****on so you can feel each movement in the correct area
- Push you past the point where your brain says you should stop even when your body can keep going (safely, of course)
- And so much more!

Do you find yourself stuck with your own workouts? Check out our free trial so you can find out what it's like to work with some of the best trainers Chicago has to offer! Just visit our website at:

www.AllStrengthTraining.com

How many times have you said this?

"I meant to go to the gym 3 days this week, but the week got away from me and I only went once."

Or:

"I didn't make it to the grocery store this weekend, so I ended up getting take-out for lunch all week."

More often than not, these things happen because we knew they needed to be done, but we never made a commitment to WHEN they would be done.

Very few people can luck their way into accomplishing their entire to-do list without making the time in their schedule to do what needs to be done.

Treat your health and fitness priorities just like any other obligation - give them a day, a time, and carve out enough time to get it done. If something else comes up, reschedule it to a new day and time - don't just delete it.