EP.43 Guest Nick of ChristensonPerformaceGroup

I think it's incredibly important for everybody to strength train no matter what their goals are. If you want to live a long, happy, healthy life, I think it is incredibly crucial to strength train.

Hey friends, thank you for listening to the All Things Good 4U podcast. Join us as we explore ancient traditions, modern tools and practices in the world of health, wellness and personal development. I'm Amy Christiansen, your host and your curated mind coach.

And I'm your co host, Brian Bowen, founder of Integrative Health, Inc. And Better Human Company High Performance Coaching. Are you ready to take control of your life and start feeling enthusiastic, empowered and limitless each and every day for a life well lived? Let your curiosity flow with all things good for you.

Hey Brian, what's going on?

Amy, how are you?

Oh, good, good. It's a normal day activity and fun. How about yourself?

I've had a fantastic day of just doing a lot of diverse, fun, interesting things and Crushed it at the gym today.

You crushed it at the gym? I was crushed at the gym.

Crushed and crushing it. As long as some something's getting crushed, we're good. And just to warn everybody, this is an evening podcast that we're recording. It seems to follow the wheels come off the bus during these evening podcasts. So I apologize in advance for whatever we have a guest on. So whatever he says, I don't know what's going to happen. So we'll see where it takes us.

Some There's a different vibe on our evening podcast. However, you're the only one having beverages tonight because I am on a dry February commitment and I know my I know our guest doesn't very often, so.

Why'D you have to throw me under the bus?

Because you brought the bus into the to the whole arena.

So a lot of bus already. I'm having one beer. I figure we're going to be talking about fitness tonight possibly. So I figure I don't know what I was thinking actually, but it's here and now. Now it's out there. So we can't delete all that.

We can't go. There's no reason to. So I'm going to start us off a little bit with I grew up and I know you have a background in fitness too, but I grew up very active and fit. I got a job at 16 in a what look what was back then. We won't really talk about how far long ago that was it back then in the galaxy far, far away. It was very similar to lifetime and I was one of the youngest employees and that Was my first really big job, and I stayed in the gym pretty much my entire life since then. And then about a couple of years ago, I took a little reroute, and then life threw me a couple hiccups, and I got off of my path of being in the gym. And some good things have come from that. Some good stuff that I've learned and about myself, and some things have surfaced. But I have to say now, after taking about two years off of any serious gym work, maybe a little longer than 2 years. Might be 3.

Ish.

It's all right.

Ish. I am back in the gym again, and, man, can I just tell you, I apologize to all the people I trained, all the people I led classes, and mostly apologize to all my physical therapy patients that I worked on because I was always in good shape. And I never knew what it was like to not be in shape. And I am learning that lesson now. I've never known what it was like to not know how to fire your glute muscles. I never knew how. Like, I'm working really hard, and it's not working sometimes.

Sounds like you got him firing on all cylinder wonders today, though.

I had a really good workout today. I'm back. Yeah, I'm back in the gym. I'm working out with an expert trainer, so that's pretty good.

Which happens to be our special guest tonight. Drum roll.

Hello.

Hey, how are you? Amy, would you like to. You'd like to do this introduction?

We have a very special guest. And yes, this is the one and only, the magnificent, the fabulous Nicholas Mitchell Christensen, who goes by Nick.

Yes, I much prefer Nick. Nicholas. Still feels like I'm in trouble.

Even threw in the middle name. Nicholas Mitchell.

Yeah, I know.

It's best name ever.

So it feels like there's a connection here that you might want to talk about here.

I don't know if anybody caught the last name. It is Christian Christensen. So this is my son. This is Nick Christensen. He is a fabulous personal trainer, and. And I actually hired him, and he is my trainer now. He's literally kicking my tail on a regular basis and helping me get back into a good focus. So we have Nicholas on today for our podcast to talk about all things fitness.

Welcome, Nicholas.

Thank you. Thank you. Super excited to be on and super excited to nerd out about some fitness.

Don't take it easy on your mom, because here's your opportunity. When you have her in the gym, you have total control and power. So all those little moments of when she didn't give you that Cookie that you really wanted. It's your time to shine.

Did I restrict you on cookies?

Never.

That's the first thing I could come up with. I'm sure there's something.

I restricted it among video games and then they paid me back by being adults who play video games all the time.

You got to get it out when you're a kid. And if you don't build a gaming computer but it turns out to work well for business.

No, no to parents out there. Go easy on the things, Nick.

I for one am super excited about talking about training and fitness and stuff like that. I love working out and my. One of my desires. I don't really want to retire, but I have a desire to go to the gym every day and never be. Have a time constraint on when I have to leave. If I could just hang there and be there for two hours and just navigate as my intuition tells me and just. And leave when my body's ready, that is I desire and I'm cranky when I don't get to do it. I'm ready to geek. I'm ready to geek out with you.

Love it. Yeah, I agree with you there. That's my goal in life, is to be able to spend hours in the gym every day to myself. I do it anyways, mostly working. It was funny when I worked at Lifetime, everybody always gave me a hard time because even on my off days I was in the gym, but I was actually there for almost longer. Some days.

I love in a gym, you're living. You're living the life that you teach and preach, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

What. What took you down this path?

Yeah, a little background on me is grew up always playing sports, being super fit. I wasn't always the greatest athlete, but always had a really fun time doing it. As I grew up into high school and maybe even into college was when I really realized that everybody has the potential to be a phenomenal athlete if they have the correct guidance. It was funny being in a D1 sports program up at the University of Wyoming, seeing the level of training given to all the other teams. Besides the football team was not up to par and wasn't really done incredibly well. And that really irked me. Drove me crazy that I was taking a whole bunch of the guys from our cheer team. That's what I was on to the gym afterwards to get extra training and really focus on the things that we actually needed to help us in our sport. And from there it led me down the path of getting into fitness, getting into training other people. And in that, I realized how neglected a lot of training was for athletes coming up. Coming from really 12 years old, I think is of the most phenomenal times to start an athlete in actual training and especially into high school. So that's really why I got into fitness, was to help those communities. As I got into the industry, training at Lifetime, I realized that those same characteristics can be taken over into everybody. Any what we would call in the fitness industry, general population that goes from your elderly seniors to your weekend warriors to just dads that want to play golf with their kids or moms that just want to be fit and be able to go climb our mountains here in Colorado or anywhere. Just get out, be active, feel like ourselves, feel happy and healthy and everything, everything that we do in everyday lives so we can really get out and perform an attack every day at our best.

Like it?

Love that. I love it. I love just being able to see the possibilities within any age group on where there's opportunity because everybody has an opportunity available to them. So kudos to you for recognizing it.

Appreciate it.

I'm sure your upbringing had nothing to do with that.

Yeah.

So I know you guys have. I. I jumped in after you. You were talking about some of the questions, but I'm just curious because I'm a diverse. I like to really diversify my workouts. I like to keep things shaken up. But do you have a favorite type of program or type of workout or strength training that you subscribe to?

Yeah. So everybody has different goals. Right. And there's in my opinion. But now the training industry is very opinionated. I want to state that, and this is just my opinions in the way I've taken the science and adapted it to people to help them in their best. This is just my viewpoint on it is there is no bad way to exercise, to train, to work out.

Yeah.

That is because everybody has their own goals. Right now there's probably some, some trainers that would tell you, Brian, that switching it up every day is going to negatively affect you going to take a look at it and say, what's worse? Following a boring program that's not going to get you in the gym, or is it giving you something that you can have fun with and that gets you moving and working in whatever capacity that is to be healthy and your own goals. Now, not everybody wants to train and be super jacked, look like Mr. Olympia. Some of us just want to be able to not be obese, be healthy and still go in, out and enjoy ourselves on the weekends, have hamburgers, beers with Our friends go out and do these things but not feel like crap while doing it. So I necessarily don't think there's any wrong way to exercise. So kind of going off your question, going back to your, the root of your question, is there a specific program I like to follow? Yes, but that's me specific. And then with my company here, the Christians and Performance Group is my company. What we do is meet with each one of our clients and figure out what it is that causes them to want to work out their why. What is really at the root of why they want to get and get healthy. And then around that we can formulate a specific plan that fits within their schedules and gets them to their goals, whatever that may be.

So my why real quick is I'm 5 foot 10, 175 pounds but I want to look like the Rock, but party like Frank the Tank. So if I How do you. How do you balance that?

I think we have to start.

I'm just kidding.

I think we have to start with shaving your head and getting you some really good spray tan happening some tribal tattoos.

Yes. That sounds like you guys came up with a perfect solution.

There you go.

And yeah, I don't need any of that. But back to seriousness here.

Yeah.

No.

So I mean my big philosophy on it is I think it's incredibly important for everybody to strength train no matter what their goals are. If you want to live a long, happy, healthy life, I think it is incredibly crucial to strength train. That is because there's a lots of studies that show between anybody that just works out picks up a weight in any instance throughout a week, has a 20% reduction in all cause mortality. Right now there's lots of other factors that go in on that but that's a study if you want. You don't want to look it up. Harvard talks about it even so that's very trusted source. I would say the other things that it can do for us is create habit, create dedication, create drive. Then that's without besides the health benefits and the mental health benefits provide for you give you an outlet for the. For any mental problems you're getting through throughout the day. Gives you a place to I guess spend some time to yourself is the way I'd like to talk about it. A lot of what I use my use it for myself and then we can get into even deeper into the health benefits of it of helping delay osteoporosis, creating dense bone, helping the Alzheimer. Exactly. Keeping our brain healthy.

I think everybody is all the experts are coming on board with the major key factors of health and longevity and well being, health and fitness. But well being also including the way we think and the way we grow old is one of the major key factors is exercise and mobility. Right. Moving your body, eating somewhat healthy and sleeping, rest, recovery and deep relationships. I think those are like the four key things. Purpose. All right, we can go into all the other things, but exercise across the board, no matter what approach you take, some sort of exercise and mobility for your body is key to your mental health, your physical health, longevity and enjoyment of life, period. Yeah, gotta get out and move.

Yeah, I think that gym environment too, whatever fitness training, whether it's a certain specific like a orange theory place or group fitness, I shouldn't drop names here, but any sort of group fitness versus gym environment. It's also that sense of community like you said, times you don't have to engage and other times I work out at a place where I met some of my best buddies there who I'm still been friends with for five years since I met them. So it's a great community.

I, when I moved to Colorado, I grew up in a gym, always was working in a gym. Even through the time when my kids were little, I was always very active. But in, in a gym environment, part of my kids grew up going to the gym daycare. And when I moved to Colorado I was like, I'm never stepping foot in a building with a gym ever again. I'm going to live on the mountain. But I have to say I have gone back to a few things. Like a few years ago when I was working in physical therapy, I had long days and we would get up super early and you couldn't, I couldn't go and run and ride on the mountains in the dark. So we ended up going to a gym situation. I was going to lifetime and I really started to remember how 1. I love the smell of a gym. I'm weird. I know I like the smell of.

A gym and I agree.

And the people I just, I did even if I didn't talk to anybody, being around the energy of other people who are pushing and driving, there's just something to that process of being in that environment with other people. I, I find it again a renewed encouragement and I could see it becoming slated.

Love it. I anybody who shows up there, I just, I praise them for showing up.

Yeah.

Hey Nick, I have this question I just really want to ask if it's okay if I jump in here. So earlier I was talking about I like to be really Diverse and diverse to me is I like to change my tempo, my range of motion, whether it's lightweights, heavyweights. So I'm kind of all over the place. And those are under kind of in a category of, I think, acute training intervals.

Do you.

Could you speak to that a little bit? And which one of those variables do you feel are more important than other of those variables?

Yeah, when it comes to range of motion, tempo, acute training variables within it, they're all in, in my opinion, all are super important. All are really fun ways, if used correctly, to change up your workouts, make them a little bit more exciting as well as target a little bit different qualities that our muscles have in them. So some of the main ones you touched on were tempo, rang of motion, and our rest periods. These are some of my favorite things to play around with. Now, again, kind of like we said before, there's no wrong way to train besides maybe the one that gets you hurt, the one that leads you away from what your goals are. So I'll just speak to the. Our philosophies here at the Christian Performance Group and how we attack these different things. So in my opinion, I love working through full range of motion most of the time. Now, there's a couple of caveats. When it comes to range of motion, everybody's going to have different ranges of motion based on either anatomy and their ability to maintain proper form through that range of motion. Somebody with what we call retroverted hips may never break parallel on a squat, but they are technically working through their full range of motion in that squat, which is awesome. Now, we can use different exercises to increase that range of motion for each muscle. And then we also love to work our muscles at their end range of motion and then also at their most lengthened position. Okay, so say I also love to use isometrics in the instances I feel like they're the safest, especially at that very deep range of motion. Isometrics are incredible as well. We would say end range of motion depending on the exercise.

So let's. Let's clarify just for anybody who's not familiar with the terminology, the end range of motion is what you can take a joint through to its available area of movement that can sometimes be restricted because of decrepit joints, or as you'd mentioned earlier, like even just a physical difference of the way the joint was grown, but. But taking it to the end availability. So think of that range of motion is such that it's literally that it's the range that you can take your body part through a length and movement of motion. And what you're saying is it's really important to train in those extended ranges.

Absolutely. So different muscles are going to be at their most lengthened position at different points throughout a lot of movement. And in day to day life, we're going to also use those muscles through there. So if we really want to be truly healthy and strong, we want that muscle to be able to control through its full range of motion, through that joint's full range of motion. If we only train muscle to perform 90 degrees, half of that range of motion there, in my opinion, is a much greater risk for injury when we happen to use that muscle in a range of motion that we don't practice.

Whether on purpose or by accident.

Exactly.

I mean, anything from reaching behind a car in the back seat to grab a bag, it could be slipping on ice, it could be falling on your bike, it could be running on a muddy trail and slipping out on a muddy trail, it could be wiping out on skis. There's a lot of times in our body and our joints are taking to the extended ranges and pushed to their limits that we don't train in. We're not training in those spaces typically.

I was just thinking about real quick, I was just thinking about really how I always like to think about. We have input on a regular basis, good or bad, of repetitive things that we do. And some people are actually activating only a lower third of that range of motion on a regular basis and not the. And not the middle or upper third. And some people are more the upper third and not that based off what you do if you're at your computer or whatever. And so it's not even like you take that joint through range of motion. So sometimes it's overstrained or overstressed in those different situations and in those different range of motions. So again, that's why it's good to train all the range of motion at different intervals and tempos and stuff.

And you're not talking, Nick, about grabbing a big dumbbell and rotating your arm back as far as you possibly can with a heavy weight?

Heavens no. You know, whatever the body can and withstand at first, you know, a lot of the times it's lightweight. I love to use bands, especially for small end range motions and like I said, isometrics, especially strengthening shoulders overhead. Love to do just a bar hang. You just hold on to the bar, set your scaps and just hold on. Now that's going to increase the tensile strength of our tendons, ligaments, Joints, all of that stuff, without forcing bad compensations through move.

So an isometric. Okay, you want to hear my trick? You want to hear my trick for memorizing isometric and isotonic movement. Tonic is a gin and tonic. And when you have gin and tonic, you go dancing. So you move yourself about freely.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. That was. My brain likes to make weird little things. It usually has to do with wine or something. But this time it was a tonic because. Yeah, so that's how I memorized it. So an isotonic movement is moving and then the isometric is frozen. It's still. It's not moving. So when Nick's talking about an isometric exercise, let's say we're going to talk about the shoulder. If you took your arm and rotated it back and out and up as far as you can and extended, you wouldn't necessarily want to be, even for a lot of people working with bands or anything. But you could do an isolated symmetric move or exercise where you're pushing the muscle strength without any type of motion. So you're hitting something with resistance, like a wall or corner or what have you, and engaging all the muscles without actually moving the joint. And that builds tensile strength in the connective tissues like the tendons, the cart legs, Ligaments. Ligaments, yeah. Okay.

Exactly.

Nick.

Yes.

How do you feel about more concentric or eccentric loads? Like, where's your head space at with that?

So again, comes back to purpose goals, what the person wants to get out of it. When talking about tempo in general, I think control is. Should always be at the forefront of our minds. Now when we get into what attributes are more specialized in each movement, think power, contraction, strength, eccentric. So in the eccentric portion of the exercise, we're really strengthening that muscle. The concentric. We are adding power to the muscle. So think how fast we can move an object, strength more, how we can control it.

I love that because like old school thought or what you'd see in the gym back in the day is these really more concentric action focused on that. And then they would just drop the weight down. Right. So they didn't have. They didn't allow that. Slow eccentric. So concentric, engaging the muscle, the mechanical force, trying to lift the weight up versus eccentric, slowly lowering it down and having that mechanical force resistance that came down. I like where your head's at more than my old school gym teacher.

Yes. And now taking that and using it to our advantage, say you want to increase strength. My favorite one to talk about in this one is A pull up. There's a lot of people in the world that can't do a pull up right. For a long time I couldn't do a pull up. There's my hardest things still to this day. How I got to actually able to do pull ups one after another was using eccentrics. So say get into a position on top of a box where you're in that top of the pull up. Your chin's above the bar and you hold on and you step off of that box and you try to squeeze for as long as you can. Now you're probably going to move slowly down, but that's perfect. You resist through that full range of motion. Like we said, that eccentric part is still going to increase our strength. So over time of doing those in nice program consistently, you will then increase your strength. And it's wild how fast you're actually going to be able to get to your first pull up.

Hey, I crushed some high schoolers in a pull up competition the other day. Pretty proud of myself for a 48 year old. But I believe it was because of the eccentric load baby.

Yep.

That's fantastic. Nick, Nick, your mom can't do a pull up so you're gonna have to help me. I'll just start working on the eccentrics and that's.

It's really fun. When we do get into eccentrics on how much our muscles are not used. It people will that that have been in the gym for years and move a lot of weight. You take them through their first couple weeks of eccentric movement and they're like I've never been more sore in my entire life.

I love it.

It's. It's that literal ripping of our muscle is what elicits the repair and strengthening of it.

Yeah.

So that's so many questions.

Yeah, I know my brain is going off on a different tangent. I'm trying to keep it together here.

That's hard because then that takes you to like the mechanical. Mechanical fat versus metabolic fatigue.

Yeah.

Which one is that? Which one of those are more important? So this is the mechanical fatigue, the metabolic or both at the same time.

Or so when we start talking about fatigue. I'm glad you brought this up because we can also relay this into rest periods as well very easily. I like to think of fatigue as peripheral fatigued and central fatigue. Peripheral fatigue is our musculature. Right. It's really hard to actually achieve what some would would classify as metabolic fatigue. And if we get to that point, that's usually when we're getting to over Training now we can. Now training in general will help strengthen our metabolic processes, but they don't necessarily get fatigued necessarily from training. Okay, so were you thinking, were you.

I'm sorry, Nick.

Yep.

Brian, were you thinking more on the metabolic phase as more of like anaerobic or anaerobic like, like burning out in the session or mine?

Yeah, no, this is specifically to the muscle spindles themselves.

Gotcha.

Yeah. ATP to the cells or muscles and stuff.

Yeah. So in that we can. I see what you're saying now is we can deplete the stores of that, but throughout training and aerobic training, we're going to increase mitochondrial density and that in turn will give us more energy, say throughout and then. But when it comes to training, necessarily, especially strength training, training, that adaptation happens very quickly. And that's usually when we're in a endurance stabilization phase, we'll call it, where those adaptations happen and that we can get into very easily into our rest periods. Right. So for each one of our phases, different styles of training, we want to have different levels of rest based on what metabolic processes we're trying to. Or strength processes we're trying to get to adapt, as we said now, the endurance will happen very quickly. Our bodies adapt to it incredibly well. So throughout an endurance phase, Right. We're trying to have a little bit of rest, work on those aerobic qualities. So we usually only have about a minute of rest in those. And there's a study done by Robert Baresh in 2009 that in healthy. This is like conclusion of it. In healthy, recently untrained males, strength training with one minute of rest between sets elicits a greater hormonal response than 2 1/2 minute rest intervals in the first week of training. These differences diminish by week 5 and absolutely almost disappear by week 10 in Bang. Which is crazy, right? So we think about, if you're in a proper training program, we are not going to get any beneficial adaptations from resting for one minute after five weeks of training.

Consistently training.

Yeah, consistently training. Absolutely, absolutely.

So what's your new rest period become?

That two and a half minutes at least. So I like to go. Yep. And depending. So now if we go into a power phase where we're lifting either a really heavy weight slowly, right. As our body's still trying to move it as fast as possible, but because of the weight is moving slowly, we want to increase that to about three minutes or more. Or you can think of power exercise, think moving very quickly, sprints, we want to have a much greater rest interval so that we can restore ATP to its potential max. In about three minutes of rest, we can recover by about 85% of the ATP back into the muscles.

Wow. So clearly I am not doing any of that. I my in my head space I'm like, I'm going back to back. I'm like taking my when I'm lifting weights, I'm taking my high intensity train mind to the gym. And then I also have been judging people. Yep, that's right. I've been judging people in the gym. They're sitting there just drinking their water on their Snapchats or doing whatever and they just look like they're over there relaxing and I'm waiting to jump on that machine or to hit that squat bar and I feel like they're taking forever and actually they're just maximizing their rest period to maximize their ATP. And here I've been wrong this whole time.

Not necessarily wrong. There's a million different ways to, to train now. I'll touch on this too. One of my favorite ways to incorporate right. Like we said, after the first five to 10 weeks we don't get the very much beneficial result adaptations from resting at less than one minute. But that doesn't mean we don't want to work our endurance or aerobic qualities. We still want to increase those qualities in our muscles, whether that's through cardio training, sprinting, anything like that. Any kind of aerobic work. I like to, especially for a lot of people that are more just I want to get into the gym, stay healthy. We follow a very basic form of starting with. This is just how we formulate our some of our workouts based on our people's goal. And it's one of my favorite ways to train. Say I have somebody that works out three days a week and they can't really get into the gym any other time. They're very busy or they're out on the weekends, being outdoorsy or playing sports, things like that. We like to start always with a nice warmup. Got to get that body going. Okay. Then we always want to start with our hardest exercise, our most fatiguing exercise, which in my eyes is a power exercise. Okay. And then we're going to move on to a strength exercise. Then we move into hypertrophy. Okay. And then we finish up with endurance.

Work like it warm up power hypertrophy, high endurance. Okay.

Maybe explain what that hypertrophy means for people.

So I'll go through each one. So think our power is usually in this case because it's our first One. And we're doing it in things. Think very, very fast movement. Think we're priming our nervous system for the day. Med ball slams, right? Med ball throws something lighter weight. Yes. But we're moving it very quickly. Rest a little bit more than you think you should on those and you'll notice you're able to keep that power through. It's great to use these explosive movements to prime our nervous system for the day. Coming things. So think Med ball slams. And again, we want to rest for that two to three minutes. Now if you're moving lightweight fast, fast, rest for about two minutes. You're probably going to be just fine there. Especially if you're trying to get a fast workout in your power exercise. Could even be after your warm up. Go hop on a rower and just do some crazy strong pulls. Right. That's gonna literally get every single muscle fiber in our whole body fired up, snapping hard, ready to rock and roll for the day. Prime.

God, I'm getting excited just hearing you talking about it.

I'm feeling. So those were thinking one to three if it's really lightweight, maybe six reps before. Okay.

Wow.

Yep. So really light, right? Or very heavy. Say you did a nice warm up and you're like, oh, I'm gonna max out my squat or a deadlift. Today you're doing maybe four sets of three, five sets of three, or working down even to a one rep max, resting heavy in between those. If you're going the heavy route versus the fast route, then we get into our strength. And this goes for any strength phase you're in any thing throughout the day. We're thinking of strength. Strength is in between. I really like to go four reps. At least you can get down into three. So think three to four reps and we're working up to maybe six on the top end of strength. Okay. And those again, two to three minutes. And that's eyes or two. You could even do an antagonistic superset with that one. And we can talk about that more as we get into our different specializations specifications of training. Then our hypertrophy. I want you to choose about two exercises. And these can be total body days. You could be upper body, lower body exercise. Super awesome too. Working our peripheral heart system there. You get two exercises and we're looking three to four sets working in that eight to 12 rep range.

Okay.

Now in our hypertrophy, we like to think you'll see bodybuilders hang out in hypertrophy all the time. So if you're like, why does this guy only ever do 8 to 12 reps? It's probably because that has been proven to grow the most amount of muscle. Muscle, usually due to the time under tension from the 8 to 12 reps, usually hits around that 45 seconds of time under tension, which has been proven with the proper amount of rest to increase hypertrophy of the muscle, which is growth of the muscle.

Okay, 8 to 12 reps. Meaning. Meaning like they're, they can't do. If they're hitting 12 reps. There's. They're like, there's no way they're doing another one. Not just 8 to 12, but they could pump out a couple more. It's gotta be that weight where their window is between 8 to 12 before they fatigue. Is that what you're saying? The same.

So I like to go by not so much. I like to say that's reps left in the tank. Right. As in rpe. So I, I like to use RPE scale, usually with high. With all of our movement. If we're not working in the RPE of at least 7 to 8, you should be working harder. Unless you just started. But even when you just started, you should be trying to work up there.

And RPE is. Is rate.

Rate of perceived exertion. Yeah. Yes, exactly. As in the other method, kind of like you were talking about there, Brian, is reps left in tank. Now, an 8 doesn't necessarily mean you have two reps left in the tank. It's just not. You're a 10 and you're not falling on the floor, can't breathe, and you just want to lay down for your full three minutes of rest, that would be a 10. It just means like you could. Yes. And you're right. I do think of it as the same way you could have probably gotten another one or two. But you should be really on that edge of. If you say you're benching and you get down to the bottom and you get that last one up and you're like, I don't really know if I could get another one.

I don't have a spotter. I don't have a spotter.

Exactly. That's a probably good indication that you're right around in the right amount of weight to be using. Okay. Okay. And then we want to work that aerobic, that endurance quality of our muscles as well. And that's usually why we like to finish out with it. Because we're using lighter weight, we're doing more reps. That's. I like to say 15 plus reps. Right now we're doing maybe two to three sets of those and those you can toss in. That's where I like to really put in my accessory movements. Say we're isolating our quads, isolating our shoulders, biceps, triceps, something of that nature. And that's specifically for strength training. Or you can even go to an endurance of you're going to hop on the rower and work for two minutes and give yourself some rest. Two minutes, give yourself some rest, but at a lighter weight where your body can keep up with it. We're working again, trying to help push what we would call our anaerobic threshold to farther on in our heart rate zone.

So that's the system that you follow with your personal training to. With most clients.

Yep. A lot of the time, especially the ones that can't make it in if. Now if we can make it into the five, the gym five days a week, that's not necessarily the format I would use.

So if they're only coming in three days a week, you might be ramping it up and being a little more, a bit more full body and pushing during that time. For good reason. If you're going in five days a week, you have a little more time to do some more specific.

Exactly.

Slow focus.

Yep. And so that's where we really get into what probably everybody in the fitness industry hears as periodized progression. Oh yeah, big old scary word. No, it's not that scary. It's basically moving through exactly what we just talked about, but in more of a three to four week block. Right. Though for a lot of people, I like to start them in, I start a lot of people in just a base builder stage of 6 to 10 reps so that we can really practice proper form without fatiguing our muscles too much, things like that. But then we would move into ideally an endurance phase. Right. Because our body takes four to six weeks really to adapt to stimulus. Right. That's why we want to keep it for that long. If we don't change stimulus after four to six weeks, our body will hit that plateau everybody talks about. Right. If we want to bust through that plateau, we have to change our stimulus. After an endurance, a classical progression would be a hypertrophy phase. After that we're moving up into a strength phase. Okay. Again, three to three to four weeks. Just like we just talked about each one of those phases. And then we end in a power phase. Now, now I don't think a power phase is for everyone. It's good to work power qualities throughout, say Med ball slams. Fast movements. Because that happens in everyday life. Like you mentioned earlier, slipping on ice. Now that may not seem like a power exercise. If our body's not used to working those fast twitch muscles, reacting quickly and stabilizing through that, it's going to get hurt. But if we're doing those quick power movements right throughout, then we can be a little bit more protected, a little more prepared for those happenstances. So unless they're an athlete, I really don't push somebody through a full power phase.

Yeah, I was just thinking. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, no, go for it.

I was just thinking when you were just talking about the fast twitch and all that stuff. I just think about like all these athletes, like, I'm an NFL fan and these guys are clearly like conditioned and trained. But these fast shifting in range of motion and power and all that stuff and not having that rapid progression of a muscle to engage and have the other muscle let go and the timing of all these muscles, like, I know that it's just hard because I love muscles. And so it's just interesting. If we could see them all inside, what all has to happen.

Sure.

One to engage and the other ones that have to help and then you have to have another one to let go. Oh, it's a timing of all. It's the timing of all that. And so I was just thinking about the mobility training in relationship to muscle gain even. Like, how important is that?

Yeah, and incredibly important. I mean, there's countless studies that have shown that larger ranges of motions with load stimulate a greater increase in the muscle fiber length and greater stress on the passive elements of the muscles as well when compared to shorter ranges of motion. Yeah.

Clearly didn't have a good mobility training program this past season.

No. I will give Lauren Landau a little bit of backing on that. He's the Broncos head start strength conditioning coach. He is probably one of the most intelligent trainers, but yeah, that just exactly. That goes to show you that even one of the smartest, most prolific trainers can maybe have a little bit of lapse now. I guarantee you this next year he'll look into why we had so many hamstring injuries with the Broncos.

He's not there anymore. He left.

Oh, you're kidding. When did that happen?

I was probably, I think two or three weeks ago, I read.

Okay. Yeah. Wow. Because I was. They were literally talking about it about two or three weeks ago on the fan of how they think he's going to fix that stuff. That is a bummer. But I guess we'll See, See if the change helped anything.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see.

I don't know.

But yeah, mobility, like the most impressive physiques. And we'll just talk physique because from this thing is when I see really fit and fit doesn't mean you have a great physique necessarily. But when I see people who have this, this amazing physique but yet have the flexibility of the most amazing yoga person ever, that just blows my mind. I'm like, wait a second. They like, are like I can see every. I can. They. I want them to be the model of. In my palpation classes. I can literally feel every fiber. I can see their gracilis, for God's sake.

Yeah.

Whose gracilis can you ever see? But yet they can still have this complete range of motion. I'm just like, yeah.

And honest people think think it that it just comes easy that they never have it. No. Anybody can achieve that stuff. It does take daily work. And we have mobility programs built in to our programs here. And let me tell you, it is the hardest thing to get people to do.

Yeah.

It's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable and it is challenging. Feels I. When we're talking about mobility and end range isometrics and mobility of the joint injury prevention. I have a lot of. Of athletes that come in to see me and they do their sport. But like I have a sprinter and I have a triathlon guy and they're very linear movements. Their hip mobility is awful. And now they're getting older and they're starting to see how that repetitive single motion and the lack of range of motion in their hips. They may be really strong in their sport, but they're not strong in rotation and mobility in their hips. And that's showing up now as they've gotten older. More and more injuries are happening.

Yep. And it's crazy to see some of the most, the highest level athletes that I've seen, they do not move well. It's incredibly strange. Right. Because we're seeing these people sprint like crazy and take these massive hits for say in football. But when you break them down and really look at their movement, it is a miracle that they do the things that they do. Yeah.

Goes to show you how much willpower and how much the body can overcome dysfunction and with its compensation and just make it happen. No matter what. I will get from here to there, no matter what muscle I have to use.

Exactly. And that's one of the craziest things too is, you know. Exactly getting into some of that compensation stuff that focus on a lot, especially my one on one sessions, is everybody has them no matter what. The body will find a way and you may not even know it. You feel like everything's 100 correct and then you take an in depth look and you're like holy cow, all twisted up trying to do this squat. No wonder my back hurts in that spot.

And like I said when we opened up, I was always in pretty darn good shape. Even after having been. I think I was in the best shape of my life a few times. But one of the times I was in a really best shape of my life was not long after you were born, Nick. And I was in, in peak shape. And then now having gone a little out of the that realm, it blows my mind how I can't tell when something's not working. I, I can't tell. This is why I think it's so important to have a trainer. Even if you go in just for a little bit of corrective work and then you go home and focus on it, having a coach, having a trainer, that helps you really see objectively where you may not be seeing your weakness, where you may not be seeing where you could be lacking. And I think just like with mindset, life coaching, high functioning coaching, personal training coaching, we see the potential and the best in the person's ability that they may not be tapped into and we help facilitate a way for them to get into that place.

Yeah, 100, absolutely.

That's the biggest part of our job.

Yeah. And I think that's what I mean, unique about your experience as a trainer is that you don't have a cookie cutter approach. You don't have an expectation that everybody needs to go this route, do these things, do this rep, go through this step, be here at this level, you know that you're able to take back and take a step back and look at the person's individual situation, how they're coming into the to you and then really what their long term goals are. And understand because you work with a pretty wide range of people and you work with large range of ages and also physical abilities.

Yep.

So you've got a lot of experience with how to make a unique program kind of on the fly for what that person needs.

Yeah. Honestly, that's one of my favorite things about training is that it is a. And the human body is that it's a constant puzzle. Every day is a little bit different and we get to solve it.

Yeah. Yeah.

I love it. So we need to find out for everybody who's listening. That's in Colorado where you're at so people can find you. And for people who's not in Colorado, like what should people look for in a good trainer? Because I will tell you, I went to the gym today and I never felt feel quite as satisfied as when I'm getting some training done and we're working out in a group and I start to leave there and I'm like, I don't really feel pumped, I don't really feel tired. I don't really feel shredded. I don't really. But I feel like I got a good workout. But hey, what feelings should I have? I never feel quite like that completeness that I get when I get personal training done. I'd love to wrap it up with that with you and get your digits.

Yeah. I think the biggest thing when it comes to each person and their fitness goals is find out what works for you. If you want a trainer. Awesome. Make sure that trainer is somebody that you are excited to see every day. Every, every day you're going, it should be the best couple hours of your week. If it's not, keep looking. Right. You'll find one that meshes with you and really looks for your kind of workout. You'll know a good trainer when it is a very good flow. They are able to train a wide variety of people and then tailor based make the program that you want. They're not every single day. If you're not somebody that wants to come in and just get your butt whooped for an hour, you're somebody that maybe needs a little bit more corrective stuff or something along that route. They tailor make it to you rather than Taylor make you to what they want to train.

Hallelujah.

Yeah, I like that.

And I mean besides that, just do stuff you enjoy. If you don't like strength training and you would rather cycle, go cycle. That's awesome. You don't want to go work out in the gym by yourself. You want to do a class. Awesome. Just really take a deep dive into what you want to do and what you want to get out of fitness. Because if it sucks and it's your worst hour, your week, are you really going to go do it for a long time? No. And the fitness journey is a never ending long road. So make sure you enjoy it. Yeah.

Yeah.

We should be doing lifestyle.

Yeah.

Every day, like all the time. It should be. It's not something that we just reach a level and quit. It's an everyday process.

Yeah. And that community is a big thing around that too. And everybody is timid of the gym, but I have found more. It's funny. You'll see memes about it and stuff online, but you'll find more people that you may never know there. They are always excited to see you. They maybe know more about you than some of your best friends, some of the people closest in your life, you may never know their name, but they are one of the most important people in your life because they're. You get to see them every day you're in the gym. Like, oh, sweet. I get to go see the big dude that wears the funny shirts. He makes me laugh and tells me, have a great day. And he goes, oh, man, you freaking crushed it today. And sometimes everybody's scared to talk to the biggest guys in the gym. I guarantee you they are the nicest guys. If you have a question. Yep. Go up to them and ask. They will be more than happy to help.

Yeah.

And if that's not your style, create a community with a class. Classes are phenomenal. They will always get you a great workout and it's a great spot to find friends, find people to keep you accountable. And it's usually a much lower price input starting point for people. It's always important to have a support system around the gym, whether it's your friends, your family, a trainer, the class you go and see. I think that's the most important part about the gym and one of the most amazing things that gyms cultivate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fitness is so good for you. For just all the listeners out there that are in different age groups that obviously from bone strength and as we get older to balance and coordination.

Absolutely.

Avoid accidents and injuries. So yeah. Appreciate the work you're doing, man.

I appreciate it. Yeah. And like you were saying, in Colorado, I work out of Rocky Mountain Strength. Super awesome little gym. It is a private gym, but they do classes. So it's either a class membership or you're working with a trainer. The classes are incredible. The coaches that coach them are super fun, super energetic. Feel free to drop those. Drop by anytime. Quick little Google map search will show you exactly where we are. Rocky Mountain Strength. We're just over in DTC area if.

You'Re in the Denver area. Yeah. And but for people who one just want to get to know you and your focus who might be looking for some helpful tips if they are unsure about how to get into the gym or if they're in the gym and they want to just get some better instruction and just more awareness and depth around the different types of Exercises. You have an awesome resource for people.

Yes, we it's absolutely free and that's one of my biggest things is I want everybody to be comfortable in the gym and learn how to do it without having to pay an arm and a leg. So our YouTube is completely public. Do not have to subscribe to it. And it has a massive library of any exercise, almost any exercise you could think of to work any part of your body that's completely free. It's the Christensen performance group or just Christiansen performance group on YouTube. It's amazing. Check out our page. Watch those videos. I hope it helps. Our Instagram is the same same Christensen performance Group that's C H R I S T E N S O N performance group. And then we also have our website where if you love our our product that we're putting out are looking for maybe a little bit more in depth coaching, say online coaching. We offer online training, nutrition coaching and mental more mind health coaching as well on our website. So if you want to help support us, check out any programs, hop on a plan, see what we offer offer, meet with one of our coaches, check out our website. It's christiansenperformancegroup.com fantastic.

I appreciate it, Nick. I appreciate your time tonight everybody. Absolutely. So yeah, reach out to Nick and get out there and take control of your fitness. People love it, live it, do it.

Let's go perform in life. Thank you guys. I look forward to more of these. There's so much more to dive into.

There is actually. That's would be a great. I think this would be a great regular kind of check in podcast to just kind of. Let's continue. There's. I have like at least 10 more questions and topics to topic. Top, top. Talk about how many.

I had two like 10 more left.

So let's do this again and of course I'm super proud. I would like to just take some minor credit for this being something like the mom who was yelling at your coaches and trainers off in the bleachers that to not ice that shoulder and to get it moving and keep your muscle groups firing. I'm just gonna take a little bit of credit.

Yes, lots of it.

Thank you, Nick.

And thank you. Thank you guys.

Thanks.

Yeah, thank you. And for all those listeners, please download every podcast available on all things good for you and share with your friends and family. We love you and and I love you guys and thank you so much for being on here tonight and you guys have a good evening.

All right.

You too.

Thanks so much, Brian. All right guys. Good night.

Good night.

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