In Conversation with Bill DeSimone: Joint-Friendly Fitness
Fairly recently I Zoomed with long-time friend of HITuni and all-round great guy Bill DeSimone, to discuss his latest book Joint Friendly Fitness and his current thoughts on strength training, HIT and the wider world of exercise. For those not yet familiar with Bill and his work: he has been an avid exerciser for well over 40 years and a personal trainer since 1983. During that time, he has also participated in sports such as bodybuilding, triathlon, inline skating, martial arts, and softball. As those years passed Bill accumulated some physical damage, chronic shoulder soreness, and a ruptured biceps and …
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Luke Carlson: Words of wisdom to the HIT community for personal trainers and facility operators
Luke Carlson is a familiar face to many in the world of high intensity training, CEO of Discover Strength, the main man behind the Resistance Exercise Conference and the instructor behind HITuni’s The Art of Selling HIT course. In this post Luke shares his time-tested insights on absolutely essential aspects of effective personal training and operating a successful HIT facility. You will learn the key attributes that make for a great personal trainer, how to recruit the right staff- often a challenge for facility owners in today’s world, and how trainers can stay excited and engaged after years in the …
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In Conversation with John Little: The Six-Minute, No-Nonsense, High Intensity Resistance Training course
John Little is probably one of the most fascinating figures in the High Intensity Training world. He is a deep thinker and a natural researcher, with a profound world view and life philosophy, someone, who doesn’t accept the status quo without challenging it, and someone, who doesn’t consider himself “the expert”, despite his work on the groundbreaking books The Time Saver’s Workout and Body by Science, as author and co-author respectively. We met in Canada, before the pandemic, spending our time together filming the course, John Little’s Six-Minute HIT, which presents the culmination of everything he’s learned about exercise over …
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In Conversation with Luke Carlson: The Biggest Mistake When Selling Exercise and How to Avoid It
Luke Carlson is a familiar face to many in the world of high intensity training, CEO of Discover Strength, the main man behind the Resistance Exercise Conference and the instructor behind HITuni’s The Art of Selling HIT course. In this article we go behind the scenes to reveal more about Luke, his perspective on the current state of the fitness industry and some top tips for successful selling. Discovering ‘intelligent exercise’ Luke grew up around exercise, he recalls being aged three or four when his police officer father started taking him and his brothers to a gym above …
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The Rarest Exercise Machines We Tried at Mike Petrella’s STG Strength and Power Gym
As we pull into the parking lot, I see Mike Petrella by the door to STG Strength And Power, which is just as well as the gym is so new to this location there is no external signage. I am excited to catch up with him again after meeting a week previously at the REC conference. We step inside a cavernous space that feels aircraft hangar-like in dimension. This space however is not filled with private jets, instead it acts as a considerable containing space for row upon row of exercise machines. And there are many, no one has done …
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The Duo-Extension: A New “Arthur Jones” Machine in 2019
Half a century ago Nautilus inventor, Arthur Jones’ mind was focused on attempting to solve yet another challenge to improve exercise: how to make the squat safer and more effective. When the solution to doing just this became apparent to him, he referred to it in his IronMan magazine column of November 1970 as “The Final Breakthrough”. What’s the problem with barbell squats that inspired Jones to look to better such a classic exercise? Squats are a relatively high-skill exercise, some people’s knees don’t get on with them and those with low back issues may well find squats uncomfortable …
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Book Review: The Time-Saver’s Workout, by John Little
It is great to have a copy of John Little’s latest book on exercise in hand. Titled The Time-Savers Workout, its publication comes ten years after the release of Body By Science, and nearly two decades after the death of Mike Mentzer. I mention these two touchstones as John Little is co-author of Body By Science along with Dr. Doug McGuff, and he was friends with Mike. Indeed, Little was also involved in the writing of two posthumous Mentzer books, High Intensity Training The Mike Mentzer Way and The Wisdom of Mike Mentzer. Pointing the finger at the health …
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Jay Vincent, Personal Trainer, Fitness Model and Entrepreneur, Representing a New Generation of HIT
HITuni recently released a new course featuring Jay Vincent. We also had the opportunity to sit down with him and get to know the man and his training perspectives. Jay’s Introduction to Resistance Training Jay first got in to strength training whilst playing football, initially his gym workouts were somewhat hap-hazard and he followed no specific ethos or approach to training. He simply enjoyed working out and his body seemed to respond well to it. Even when his football days came to an end, the gym bug stuck, and he found it easy to continue the habit of training. On …
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A Template for Resistance Training, Updated for 2019
One of the questions that I asked James Steele to elaborate on during our recent interview was: if he were to lay out a template for personal trainers introducing clients to resistance training/HIT, how would such a template look today? Let’s explore his answer, as well as James Fisher’s input into the elements that make up the template. Steele starts out by highlighting that his template is best considered as a base that can be built on and experimented from, to fit the individual client and their needs or as James puts it “their context”. The following is a pragmatic, …
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In Conversation with James Fisher and James Steele (part 2): This is why you might want to use heavier loads with your clients
In this post we are going to look at the impact that the load we choose to use whilst performing an exercise has on our results. This is the second in a series of blog posts inspired by and featuring recent conversations with James Fisher, Senior Lecturer Sports Conditioning and Fitness at Southampton Solent University, and James Steele, Principal Investigator at UK Active Research Institute; Associate Professor Sport and Exercise Science at Southampton Solent University. Read the first one on perception of effort and its impact on achieving true muscular failure. In research, the load used for an exercise is …
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