Posted September 18, 2013

The Long and Short of a Pretty Amazing Year

If you really want to know the whole story, it occurred somewhere between Joe Dowdell having me push a prowler for an hour at his gym, Peak Performance in New York, and riding a city bike rental up the Champs Elysees during a rain storm.

My 31st year has come and gone, and I have to say it was a pretty awesome year. It began, as many do, on my birthday; September 17, 2012, and ended on the same date a year later, which was, coincidentally, yesterday. Between then and now, I’ve had the good fortune to travel extensively, train a lot of clients, expand a few arms of my personal business, and had a chance to make some new friends and form some new business alliances which will pay off huge in the future, not just in terms of money but in social capital. That’s apparently a thing these days, and I guess it means people think you’re cool if you have a lot.

Let’s start off with one of the big accomplishments I’m very proud of. In the past year I’ve had the distinct pleasure to be asked to speak at 3 of the Men’s Health top training facilities in North America: Peak Performance in New York, DeFranco’s Gym in New Jersey, and Cressey Performance in Hudson, Massachusetts.

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CPPS talk

By itself, this is a pretty awesome thing to put on a resume, but I’m more proud of the fact that I’ve formed some strong friendships with each of the three facility owners and I can only envision more appearances at each facility in the coming years.

Additional to this, I spoke at the PTDC Becoming the Expert summit in Toronto, which featured 2 best selling authors and kind of lit the bug under me to get deeper into writing. It also featured a failed attempt by Rog Law to front squat me, which narrowly avoided me looking like a hockey player missing a few teeth when he dropped me, a mere hairs width between my face and a chair back.

I presented Post Rehab Essentials V.2.0 3 times this year as well, once in Tulsa, Oklahoma, once in Calgary with host Andrea Thatcher, and once in Edmonton as part of my companies continuing education calendar. I also released the videos for Post Rehab Essentials in May, which saw close to 500 people picking up a copy. To give an idea of what this means, when I released the first version, I sold 375 copies in 18 months of it being available, and outsold that in 5 days of the new version being released.

The feedback from Post Rehab Essentials was everything I could hope for, and it’s still available if you are interested in getting your own copy. Just click the link HERE to find out more info.

I also saw a near doubling of my distance coaching program. 2 years ago I didn’t have a formal distance coaching program, and essentially only offered it to those who emailed directly to me and asked for it. Now I have a bit more resources tied into it, including a Youtube channel with over 400 videos of different exercises and technical explanations, and assessments. If you’re interested in distance coaching with me, click on the Coaching header at on this page for more information.

One thing I would like to point out is that most of what I’ve done with distance coaching is through my own trial and error with what I saw working and not working with clients. It was essentially n evolutionary process, which had its own growing pains, complete boneheaded moves, and minor victories. If I had a template to follow, it would have made things a lot easier and set me up for success a lot earlier. Jon Goodman and the PTDC just released a new product for people looking to include distance coaching in their repertoire called “1K Extra,” and after checking it out I saw a few things I did wrong immediately and could have changed if I had known about something like this ahead of time. If you’re interested in checking it out and including distance coaching in your own training program, check it out HERE.

I was fortunate enough to continue writing articles for T-Nation, and was also asked to contribute to Bodybuilding.com, Weighttraining.com and a couple other sites, and was even approached by Mens Health UK to write my own article (which unfortunately was cut, but oh well). I was also quoted for another article in Mens Health, as well as on-line publications like Mens Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, and a couple others. Writing is one thing I really enjoy, but it’s a balancing act between the time needed to train clients, other competing demands, and finding time to write where I feel what I’m saying is somehow beneficial.

Because I’m a bit of an idiot when it comes to time valuation, I had a period of about 5 months where I was working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week. Between in-person clients, distance coaching clients, writing for various publications, and getting the odd email from people asking questions like “My shoulder hurts, what exercises can I do to make it feel better?” it was a tough time. I think I remember parts of April, but I can’t be too sure.

I came to stark conclusion this year: addition cannot go on indefinitely without subtraction. I decided to cut ties with canfitpro, the certification organization in Canada where I was a PRO Trainer, teaching courses, proctoring exams, and helping new trainers develop their professional aptitudes. The time commitment was tricky to balance, and with the introduction of a new educational certification program within our club, it wasn’t looking possible to continue to devote time to it.

I also decided to bring my Boot Camp classes to an end, after 5 years. These classes were really fun to run through our river valley, but reduced numbers, increased demands from the other areas mentioned. I also reduced my hours on Friday so I’m essentially done for the afternoon, am working to try to get my Thursdays back to a day off, and reduced hours on Saturdays for in person training.

What this means is that instead of being available for training sessions 62 hours each week, I’m now down to 48 hours, which is a little more sane, and allows me to have some semblance of a life. I’ve also taken 5 weeks vacation this year instead of my normal 4 weeks, which has been a great new addition to my calendar. Maybe it’s a subtraction.

I’ve mentioned in-person training, but haven’t given it its due as of yet. It’s the main thing I do on a daily basis, and what drives my writing, program design, creativity and theory development. There’s a lot of noise made online about whether someone is actually coaching live people or just exists as an internet expert, but I don’t know how someone can honestly say what is effective or not without trying it out on a wide array of clients.

In the past year I’ve trained 1642 over a span of 1119 contact hours. Most sessions are in a private format, which is necessary with some of the more complex cases I get, as well as due to varying schedules, but probably 50% of the contact time I spend with clients is in a small group setting of anywhere from 2-5 people at once.

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I’m fortunate to have a pretty diverse group of clients, but most of them lean towards being middle aged, with about 80% recovering from some musculoskeletal issue or medical disorder. I get the odd cardiac rehab client with a prescribed exercise program, surgical repairs to different joints and tissues, and people who have tried everything else with varied results. I’ve also worked with a junior track cyclist who in her first major year of competition managed to win a major multi-day event, won multiple golds at Canadian Nationals, won multiple golds at the Pan Am games, medaled at the World Track Championships, and is set to potentially make the olympic team for Rio. That, plus a short stint doing some post-season testing on the Edmonton Oilers, which hopefully will continue this season, and it’s been a pretty wide range of clients. My success rate is pretty good, no where near 100%, but still better than average.

Maybe it’s the off-key singing, maybe it’s the bad jokes, or possibly the fact that I’m a large Canadian who has no problem being a complete jackass when needed, but my clients seem to enjoy their training sessions, whether it’s the in-person training or through distance coaching, to which I’m truly grateful.

I Can’t seem to embed the video, so click HERE to see some awesomeness.
One aspect I’m less than happy about is my own dedication to my personal workouts. I had a goal coming into this year of getting to a 500 pound deadlift and getting down to a body weight of 220 lbs. I came to within 50 lbs of the first goal and haven’t really worked on it further, and the body weight hasn’t moved as much as I would like. Part of the problem in the previous year was balancing time to myself and other interests, but in the coming year I’ve already adjusted my schedule to allow more time, so I should be able to hit both of those goals, as long as I put in the effort and time.

My hope for this post was that it didn’t come across as self-aggrandizing or egotistical in any way, but merely as a reflection on some of the cool things this past year have brought for me. I’ve always felt humility and egotism operate on a pendulum, and there has to be occasions where the pendulum swings to either side. As I said to Jon Goodman a few months ago in a text message, “Sometimes you just have to look back on your accomplishments, throw your hands in the air and say to yourself ‘Fuck ya, I did!’” So this is me, doing that.

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