Jake Garner Coaching

Stop avoiding exercises because you’re scared of getting injured.

Now of course there are exercises that are higher risk than other but across the board they are all safer than pretty much any other sport.

If you’re worried about your back breaking from deadlift or your knee exploding from plyometrics.

Chances are you SHOULD do them.

Stress on the body brings adaptations and improvements if you have a problem with an exercise it’s most likely the intensity not the exercise itself

Work up to heavier weights, more plyometrics or power based exercises.

If you’re concerned about injury, start light with a lower volume and build gradually.

You’ll feel the benefits almost immediately.

Making a change can be tough.

Choosing to put one foot in front another and walking in the direction you know is best for you will be always uncomfortable.

But the more steps you take the more natural it starts to feel

The more natural it feels the quicker you make those steps

The opposite of a vicious cycle.

You build momentum,

Consistency is good and you need it.

But momentum makes being consistent easy.

As Fitness and strength training is becoming more and more popular there are opinions and “facts” that get circulated across social media on a regular basis.

So in that vein here’s a few of my personal semi-unpopular fitness opinions.

In the modern world of social media, you would be forgiven for thinking that in order to get the fitness results that you want you have to do the craziest most restrictive exercise and diet plan.

You don’t.

In fitness, moderation is your best friend, consistently above average will get you where you need to be without all the suffering.

Skip the nonsense carnivore or raw vegetables only diets, skip killing yourself doing exercises and workouts you hate because Mr-fit-tryhard says it’s the best way to lose 30kg of body fat in 4 days.

✅ Eat nutrient dense foods you enjoy
✅ Manage your calories
✅ Increase protein consumption
✅ Strength train 2-4 times a week
✅ Find cardio you enjoy
✅ Get some sleep

You manage of these moderate targets, you’ll get where you need to be.

Midway point in July,

Appreciating everything right now, big and small.

Been enjoying making my content again which is nice and spending time with the nieces and nephews is always a positive.

Trainings slow right now, a lot more people at the gym and with the rain and overall humidity, picking up small lingering illnesses has been a setback.

But as always we move forward.

Full body workouts have been shown to be superior (specifically for fat loss) than split-body workouts, when doing the same number of reps and sets across the week.

Whether you’re a beginner to strength/resistance training or have a decent level of experience full body splits might be for you.

✨However✨

If you find that sticking to a different split like a Upper-Lower or a Push-Pull-Legs gives you significantly more intensity and or volume throughout the week then they may be preferable.

If you’re unsure which path suits you best or just want a little nudge in the right direction drop me a DM saying “Full-Body” and I’ll send you a FREE training outline that is guaranteed to give you a good starting point for building your own training plan.

I’m never going to tell you one diet is superior to another because like exercise, diet is very subjective to the person who is doing/eating it.

People may find it easier to remain consistent and enjoy the restricted approach of the carnivore diet, particularly those who experience auto immune issues.

✨HOWEVER✨

Having a diet that consists almost exclusively on red meats and butter is not going to be healthy for most people in the long run, regardless of how organic or pasture raised it is.

In fact I’d argue it won’t even be healthy for most people in the short term.

Conditioning comes in many different forms, from strength endurance and muscular endurance to your standard “cardio”

No matter how fast the car or skilled the athlete, an empty gas tank is an empty gas tank.

If your opponent outworks you, any skill gap you might have closes extremely fast.

You’re only as good as your body allows you to be.

And if you are looking for a personalised training plan or need help getting your different conditioning bases covered drop me a message saying “PERFORMANCE” to get the ball rolling.

Staying consistent is hard.

I’m fairly new to social media, I didn’t grow up with it and posting regularly is something I find really difficult.

I’m sure there’s people out there who are like:

“just do it, you need to stay consistent for your account’s visibility”

And I hear that and make an effort to, but sometimes all it takes is something in my personal life to knock me back a little and suddenly creating/posting content feels a little like pulling teeth.

When it comes to fitness, I never have any difficulty getting to the gym and training. I’ve done it so long now that it’s as much a part of my daily routine as showering or brushing my teeth.

✨But it wasn’t at the start✨

I guess the point of this ramble is that staying consistent is difficult but unless you STAY consistent for as long as it takes for it becomes part of your daily routine it will always be difficult.

So keep at it, what ever it is you’re doing.

The anabolic window is a real thing.

✨BUT✨

It lasts a fair bit longer than the 1 hour after you finish in the gym.

As long as you reach your daily protein goal and eat within a reasonable time period after resistance training you’ll still be within that anabolic window.

So if your coach, friends or George from accounting is telling you how you need to chug a protein shake the minute you finish training.

Just ignore them…Unless you enjoy it.

It’s not that deep as long as you hit your daily intake

Strength, Power and Endurance are important to almost every sport.

So along those lines a large amount of sports will have similar exercise selection during their strength and conditioning training.

Of course there will be some sport specific exercises and movements that need to be trained at high speeds or under load, but typically this will only make up a small percentage of your overall training schedule.

What I’m aiming to bring with me into year 34

✅ Consistency

Being a coach specifically online, consistency is essential for me to not only improve my strength and fitness but to also grow my business and help my clients make greater progress.

So far this year I’ve been struggling with staying consistent with one or more aspects of my life, which is going to change.

✅ Positivity and Gratitude

Surprisingly everything isn’t great all the time and there’s been times where things which are more or less fully within my control have got on top of me.

Which ✨sucks✨

But when you’re sat in your room focussing on what isn’t working and what needs to change, it’s easy to fall into the trap of not appreciating what’s around you.

Taking a step back at least once a week to appreciate where I am and what I’m doing is going to be scheduled the same as any other training session.

✅ Persistency

Staying consistent is easy when it’s easy.

But staying persistent and continuing to move forward despite a lack of forward momentum is difficult.

And over the past couple years there have been times when pushing forward was realistically easy but it✨felt✨ as though any effort I put into training, growing my business, social media-ing etc was wasted.

For the next year a main goal will be to understand that moving forward is still moving forward even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Sometimes you can be doing everything “right” but still feel as though you’re not living in the direction that you want.

A HUGE obstacle of modern day fitness that is for the most part ignored is general life stress.

It’s been shown that prolonged stress can lead to:

1️⃣ Increase Hunger
2️⃣ Lower Sleep Quality
3️⃣ Bowel Issues
4️⃣ Cravings of High Fat/Sugary Foods

All of which can undermine a perfect exercise and diet plan.

Managing stress can be an important for your ability to stay on track with your fitness/health routine.

So next time you’re feeling like you need to make a change to improve your consistency, take a step back and think of stress is a contributing factor.

If so, add something to your daily routine that helps you relieve stress, it might make all the difference.

Falling off track is a natural part of your fitness journey.

It’s not ideal and we certainly don’t want it to happen…But it will.

✨But✨

If you force yourself to make up for it every time you drift slightly off course it’ll make it happening feel like a much bigger deal than it really is.

Slight over indulgence once every now and then doesn’t really matter if you’re on the ball the rest of the time.

Don’t over do it in the gym, don’t eat less to make up for it and don’t feel bad about it.

Just put it behind you and crack on with business as usual.

Functional strength for your long-term health?

A large portion of age related physical declines begin not with illness but with accident.

When you train specifically for functional strength you enhance your body’s resilience and reduce the risk of injury:

✅ Strong muscles and joints support proper posture, balance, and coordination, making falls and accidents less likely as you age.

✅ Strength training increases bone density, which is vital for preventing osteoporosis and fractures.

✅ Functional strength workouts engage multiple muscle groups simultaneously, mimicking real-life movements.

Starting functional strength training or incorporating it into your existing fitness routine is investing in your body, the benefits are almost immediate but will become more apparent as time goes by.

Stop wasting your money.

Supplements can be expensive and for the most part they either don’t work or are generally not needed.

Most supplements are sold to you on the basis of a need that if you’re taking proper care of yourself and your diet shouldn’t be there:

1️⃣ Carb Blockers ➡️ Balanced diet
2️⃣ Fat Burners ➡️ Calorie Deficit
3️⃣ Test Boosters ➡️ 8 hours sleep
4️⃣ Pre-Workouts ➡️ Simple Carbs + Caffeine
5️⃣ BCAAs ➡️ 0.8g/lbs of BW in Protein

Supplements are being relied on far too much when they are supposed to be used for squeezing out the last little bit of potential from your diet.

Looking to a supplement you found at 1am on google to boost your testosterone when you’re sleeping less than 6 hours a night is insane.

Same as assuming that BCAAs (branched chain amino acids) are going to make up for not eating anywhere near as much protein as you should have.

If you’re not eating, exercising, sleeping and preparing properly the supplements will most likely be a waste of time and money.

“I’ll just have a milkshake”

I’ve done it (Team Vanilla) but choosing to skip out on a McDonald’s and just scramming a milkshake because it feels healthier is not the way to go.

You miss out in the proteins in the burger, you consume more calories and at the end of it you probably still fancy a burger.

It’s the small decisions that make a difference and having the knowledge and understanding to make the correct choices when it matters.

So next time you fancy a burger and think about swapping it out for something else either:

1️⃣ Quickly google the food in question so you can be 100% sure you’re making the right decision.

2️⃣ Hire me as your coach and ask me every little fitness question that pops into your head and get an answer as quickly as humanly possible.

3️⃣ Eat the burger

Burger or not if you feel like lack of knowledge is holding you back from reaching your goals send me a message with the word “DECISION” and I can help you! 📥

Transition periods are a pain.

Whether you’re going on holiday, moving house a minor injury or changing jobs

Staying consistent with your fitness is going to be difficult.

✨BUT✨

You can do things to make accidentally taking time off not half as bad as you feel it will be.

1️⃣ Stay on top of your diet: This can be as simple as making sure you pack a lunch on the way to work or choose a healthier option when you eat out on holiday.

2️⃣ General activity: Walk more, stand on the train or cycle to work the list goes on but making active decisions to be more active will offset time away from the gym.

3️⃣ Stretch: One of the things that comes with taking time off the gym is not moving through the ranges of motion you typically would. Take 5-10 minutes in the morning, at night or on your lunch break to stretch and move, your joints and muscles will thank you.

4️⃣ Relax: Sometimes it feels like taking time off the gym is going to put you back to square one, I promise you that won’t lose all your hard earned progress in 1 , 2 or even 3 weeks.

Periods of transition suck, but if managed properly they don’t have to be so bad

There are so many reasons that you might not be getting started with your fitness journey, with studies showing the main three to be:

❌ Lack of motivation
❌ Perceived lack of time
❌ Lack of support

If you’re looking to take steps to improving your health and feel that any of these are holding you back, then drop me a DM saying “READY” to get the conversation started.

This is for you if you are:
• Looking to make positive lifestyle changes
• Fed up of conflicting fitness advice online
• Feel like you don’t have time to train

What you will get:
✅ A coach who cares about your progress
✅ A coach that works with facts not internet nonsense
✅Full access to my app and a tailor-made fitness plan
✅ Nutritional advice and recommendations
✅ Regular accountability check-ins

If any of this sounds like something that you would benefit from DM “READY” to get a free consultation to discuss your fitness goals and how I can help you reach them.

It’s not just about how you look.

Is what every coach and his dog will tell you, but what exactly does that mean?

By now you’ll know all about the positive endorphins that you get from exercising and the sense of accomplishment of hitting targets and looking how you want to look is amazing.

But exercise, specifically lifting weights does so much for you besides just looking good.

1️⃣ Reducing symptoms of depression: Exercise isn’t a cure all magic remedy but it has been shown to help relieve symptoms of depression in clinically measurable amounts.

2️⃣ Memory and Learning: It was shown that Moderate to high intensity aerobic exercise helped improve memory and a persons ability to absorb information.

3️⃣ Processing power: Resistance training was shown to improve cognitive function specifically processing power and overall alertness.

4️⃣ Creativity: Resistance training helped to increase the ability to think on creative ways by increasing the fluidity and originality of divergent thinking.

So sure you want to look good, so do I. But if you’re mentally stuck in a rut, whether that’s an ongoing mental health issue, a work dilemma, studying or even a creative mental block; lift some weights and see how you feel after

It might not fix everything but it will help.

The road map to how I increased my one rep max in my main lifts by 10-15kg in 10 weeks.

So a little context, I was struggling to find motivation to lift weights. I knew what I enjoyed but felt like I wasn’t improving where I felt I should have.

So I decided to give myself a consultation, ran myself through my goals and prescribed what I would have if I was one of my clients.

Now my goals were very different than my usual client:

✅ increase power
✅ increase anaerobic capacity
✅ increase muscular endurance
✅ enjoy EVERY workout

Now a week only has so many days which presented the difficult situation where I wanted to do more than my body would be able to handle if I trained as heavy as I normally would.

So I did some research and after laying out my goals realised I wasn’t interested in muscle growth (for the first time ever) so let me divert attention away from standard hypertrophy training.

Which opened things up.

I shifted to this hybrid style HIFT focussed plan, and after 10 weeks of training (12 weeks with a 2 week break over Xmas) I’ve made some real progress.

Of course this training plan is tailored very specifically to me and my current living situation and it’s not something I would recommend just copying and pasting into your phone and giving it a go.

But it shows how a bit of actual planning and asking the write questions can make your experience with fitness completely different.

You having a bad day?

Some days suck and there’s nothing you can do about it.

BUT

Some days that suck are just 45 minutes away from getting a whole lot better.

Whether that day rescuing intervention is a gym session, a walk outside or some stretching and meditation.

The method is unimportant, the results are what matters and that is the improvement of your mood and the overall betterment of your day.

❌ Stop labelling your day as bad before it’s ended.

❌ Stop worrying about whats happening to you or around you.

✅ Do something physical that makes you feel better.

If you do that you’ll notice the vibe change immediately.

Being in a calorie deficit is how you lose weight, and Tracking your calories is one of the most effective ways that you make that happen.

BUT

If you are perfect all week and then over indulge on the weekend you can easily undo all your hard work.

If you’re spending your week doing everything right but not making the progress you want it’s so easy to lose all motivation and give up.

So focus on making better decisions on the weekend to make sure that your hard work Monday to Friday can the opportunity to shine through.

Remember, consistent small sacrifices make reliable long term changes.

“Just as It was starting to go well”

Let’s talk setbacks.

If you make fitness a part of your lifestyle setbacks are going to happen.

You can’t change what happens but you can change how you react to it.

So I’ve recently hurt my ankle and shin recently, and I can’t train lower body now for the next 2-4 weeks, I could absolutely go off the rails, stop training all together and see it as the worst possible thing that could happen to me.

OR

I could say “ok well let’s focus on my weak areas in my upper body

OR

I could say “Cool I now have time to work on some calisthenics I’ve need meaning to get to”

It’s how you frame it.

You will have setbacks. But if you focus on what that gives you rather than what it takes from you then falling off track isn’t even an option.

When I was younger my parents used to tell me to eat my vegetables so I would grow up big and strong.

Im sure yours did too.

So why now as we become adults do we abandon the idea of eating something you don’t ✨LOVE✨ because it doesn’t taste good?

Surely something that will literally make you live longer if you eat it regularly is reason enough to look past that 10 second trip to flavour town?

Seriously, it doesn’t have to taste amazing every single time you eat something.

It’s an even exchange, you have to make those small sacrifices over a long period of time for the results you want no one else is going to do it for you.

Want to lose 25lbs in 2024?

Here’s what you can do to make that happen:
1️⃣ Eat in a calorie deficit.
2️⃣ Increase your general activity (steps)
3️⃣ Resistance train 2-3 times a week.
4️⃣ Cardio sessions 1-2 times a week.

🔁 Stay consistent

When it’s laid out in front of you it sounds simple, but we all know that life can get in the way.

If like my client you’re looking to lose 25lbs this year, drop me the message saying “25” and we’ll get started moving towards that goal.

Losing weight before your holiday is great, but putting back on with a little interest isn’t.

Being shortsighted with your fitness goals will inevitably over a long period of time put you in a worse position than if you had consistently stuck to the basics of fitness.

Activity, Exercise and Diet

Sounds simple but if you nail down these three things you’ll get where you need to be.

Maybe not in 8 weeks, but over the course of your life, if you stick to consistent basics you’ll still be making progress long after you would have finished that 8 week summer shred you saw on Instagram.

And if you’re having trouble getting on top of your Steps, Diet or how and when to train, drop me a message saying “Basics” and we’ll get to work creating a long term solution that works for you.

If you’re building a fitness plan aiming for muscle growth or fat loss and don’t know where to start i got you!

When building training plans for my clients knowing the difference between what is “optimal” and what is doable is key.

When you’re making your plan aim for doable, and work up to optimal.

If you’re having difficulty making your training plan and need a nudge in the right direction drop me a message and I’ll be more than happy to help.

Photoshoot 📸

Life is too short to be serious all the time, and it’s exactly the same for your fitness goals.

You don’t have to be focussing on killing yourself in the gym or dieting yourself into oblivion.

Sometimes finding the lesser of two evils is enough to get you started and doing the exercises you enjoy the most a good way to keep staying consistent.

Of course there ARE somethings that make reaching your fitness goals easier, but being miserable isn’t one of them I promise you.