Total Blogs: 83
Hey friend, If you're anything like me during this wintery time of year, when the days shorten and the temperature drops, there will be inevitable breaks in the schedule and hiccups in your habits. Of course! …but it can feel like dog-sh*t. On...
An image from Sam Harris (he's got an excellent guided meditation app that has been a big help for me) has been stuck in my thinking recently: most of us, most of the time, are just flailing around in the windstorm of our thoughts. Pulled every...
My girlfriend always likes to joke about what a sucker I am. Specifically, how I always seem to get sucked into that last minute conversation about my **job **(fitness) riiiiiiight as we're about to leave a party. Oh yea, remember parties? Back...
Like many of us, my greatest strength is also a pain-in-the-ass weakness. (Coach Will here.) **I tend to over-extrapolate.** Over-generalize. Over-connect. Try to draw big lessons from minor blips. Also: look for a meaningful signal amidst all the...
Coach Hannah helping Whitney get the most out of a kettle bell rack hold. We're in the business of changing bodies. Not overnight--that's called plastic surgery--and not just for looks (although that is definitely a goal for some of our...
In the 90's classic "The Matrix", there's that indelible scene when Morpheus meets the somewhat confused Neo (played by the always somewhat confused Keanu Reeves) and offers him two options, a red pill or a blue one. (this is Coach Will here with...
It certainly is easiest to think about fitness in bold cateogries. You know the kind I mean: "Get RIPPED!" "Lose 12 pounds in 6 days" "12 Weeks to Huge Arms". You'll notice that the one thing in common is that the result being offered is always a...
I saw a great graphic this morning, posted on instagram by the awesome dancer/coach/thinker @yuenjon Coach Will here. I love this image because it gets right to the heart of the big question … **What should I do for fitness?** And I love the...
Hey there, What if you were *able* to believe that already, right now, you are *doing it right*? What if you were able to be generous with yourself, and see the glass of your experience as half-full? What if the paths you see for yourself to...
Last weekend, I sniffed the air and decided: it was time to plant the spring seedlings. It's something I really love to do, gardening nerd that I am (Coach Will here). I took a distinctly unplanned approach this year, and just bought a bunch...
Hey there, Well here we are, in the fall of 2020, and what a time it is. Considering the ridiculous obstacles we're all facing, I think it's important to take a moment to send some appreciation to the body that has gotten each of us to this...
I was interviewed recently by a chiropractor friend who was curious about how we go about sharing what we do--and why--with new or prospective clients. He is a client of ours, and really believes in it, but was having trouble formulating 'sound...
"Nothing happens in our [human] biology without mechanical inputs." - Dr Michael Chivers I spent the 4 weeks learning about the body. It was amazing. Most mornings the last month, I set aside 1-2 hrs to watch lectures, and made my way through the...
It took more than a few years of being a personal trainer for me, Coach Will, to realize that the basics of human learning applied as much in the gym as they do in the classroom. But making this connection, and following through with what it...
Recently I had a long-term student tell me that they had finally *learned *what FRC and Kinstretch is, and they learned about it by Googling* *it. Meaning, the deepest underpinnings of our training approach (over the last 2-3 years, at least), had...
You ever stop to think about *how much* information there is in the world? (Coach Will here) Even before the internet, the vast billions of humans who came before us thought and wrote and argued over every little scrap (and the big stuff too :)....
Coach Will here to say: I have absolutely no problem with making up new words. No matter how ridiculous or nonsensical, the only criteria I maintain is that the listener must understand the word in context. If they do, you're good to go. (...and...
I start my days early. And not because I'm a morning person. (Coach Will checking in 👋) I pull myself out of bed, slip on sweats, and stumble in front of the little space heater in the office of my apartment. Yawning, bleary-eyed in the...
By far the biggest challenge we've been hearing from clients through Shelter-in-Place is simply rousing the energy/motivation/drive to work out at all. During the *best* of times, getting yourself to **do the thing** can be a challenge, and these...
Not sure if you saw this news tid-bit, but the US Senate is currently debating about confirming Deb Haaland as our new Secretary of the Interior. (Coach Will here! Stay with this one, I promise it connects to your relations with your bod… read...
Coach Will here, welcoming you to your Wednesday! And I need to talk about why movement, fitness, (cue the voice of your worst PE coach memory) "exercise" is--after all is said and done--*pure magic* to me. See, with the movement-DNA link recently...
This idea has been following me around all week. First, it came up while talking to a client who has truly suffered from knee pain, as she shared the infectious joy she'd witnessed watching her young niece fold up like a pretzel. Then, it got...
Heyyyyy there, Coach Will here, and I'm writing to you from the road—Colorado to be exact. And I keep pinching myself. After more than a year of clinging tightly to my home, and my routines, as a sanctuary from Covid but also an anchor for...
My personal fitness practice is where the rubber meets the road, where theory first comes into practice. And to be honest, much of what I now guide people to do is the result of heavy self-study over the past couple decades. What I've come to...
I've been reading this awesome book by Dan Lieberman (he's the Harvard professor/dude who did a lot of the actual research that supports the bare-foot running movement) about how and why the human body evolved the way it did. Again and again, he...
Coach Will here to talk about CARs: Controlled Articular Rotations. I have an irrational fondness for this exercise, and I want to tell you why. I have a lot to say--probably too much--but I wanted to lay it all out. One of my favorite aspects of...
Well hello0o there! It's been a minute since I had a moment to sit down and put some words down (Coach Will here). But more on that in the next couple weeks... These days I'm fully pickling myself in Functional Range Conditioning. Training it in...
Photograph: @Juansharks/Juan Oliphant/AFP/Getty Images Hey friiiieeeend, So sometimes great analogies for fitness/training come up and smack you right in the kisser. That's what happened recently for me. One fine May day, as I was scrolling my...
Every single person I have ever worked with has faced an identical challenge in training their bodies: **knowing what maximum effort actually feels like.** It's a simple enough concept to describe—"contract your muscle as much as you possibly...
I love dissecting simple things to see their complexity. But sometimes, I like thinking about complex things as simply as possible. Like what to do when your body hurts.* Everybody hurts, at some point. Spend enough time doing anything and you'll...
...follow the bouncing coach... Excerpted from our "Travel Workout Trailguide" eBook--get your own copy by signing up for our newsletter HERE. Enjoy! -- Writing a workout--any workout--is both a science and an art. Much like a recipe is designed...
I (Coach Will) spent my senior year of high school in the woods of northern Michigan. Coming from the beachy, year-round vacation lifestyle that is Southern California, the harsh reality of *seasons* nearly knocked me on my ass that year. I'd been...
What if this was the year when you finally got into allyship with your body? What if this was the year when 'loving your body' or 'loving how you feel' stopped being empty platitudes and started to click? When pain stopped being an adversary and...
As folks get started with regular, intense, functional training, two questions come up time and time again: what should I eat before I workout? And, What should I eat after I workout? Like most nutrition questions that are worth asking, the real...
Sipping coffee the other morning, staring at the clouds as they greeted the morning sun, I thought about how organically the world **cycles itself**. (Coach Will here). How normal it is for natural phenomena--sunrises, weather patterns, etc.--to...
There is an incredible carpentry tradition in Japan, founded largely upon creating structures and furniture with joints—where edges of wood come together—that don't use any nails, screws or glue. Instead, they rely on and apply ancestral knowledge...
Happy Saturday team! Coach Will here, to say... **It drives me nuts that in our culture, fitness is pigeon-holed as somehow belonging only to the already fit.** This impossible, circular logic hinges on a sneaky tactic stolen from the...
I might as well come out and say it: Hannah and I are engaged in a full-scale turn-away from traditional fitness norms. A huge part of that is dismissing the tired narrative that springs from the Diet-Culture narrative that says changing your body...
Hey, This is Coach Will dropping by with an update from our world (tho that kinda undersells it, but I'll get there). Early on, I learned that the very best parts of life--the most alive, most creative, most rich--share a critical trait: **they...
Coach Will here with a confession: I have a nasty habit of referring to "shitty" joints. Most of the time, I'm pretty friendly--promise! But in my world-view, our bodies only have two kinds of joints: **joints that work, and joints that don't**...
Heya, and welcome to your weekend.... Today, I want to share a tool that has had an outsize impact for me (Coach Will): the **Start Over Button**. Very simply, this is the mental switch that allows us to "begin again", to leave the paralysis,...
**New Membership Structure** Greetings! Well 2022 has fully reared its head (I'm trying to ignore the memes about '2020, too' ), and I'm happy to report that we are unveiling something we've been cooking up for almost a year: a **private social...
Heyyyy there... Coach Will here, cuz I just had to share a thought with you that has been, well, **super impactful **for me recently, in multiple realms. 'K here it is... **"You can't find what you're not willing to look for." - Sonya Renee...
When Hannah and I meet (we have realized after many, many years of working together) we are as interested in the inspired, rambling tangents that we find ourselves exploring as we are in actually managing the nuts and bolts of our business. It was...
Bonjour, c'est Coach Will, with **major news (read on)**, and waxing poetic... Time, as they say, only moves in one direction. Always forward, onward, into entropy. Into disarray, chaotic apartness. Our only hedge against this overwhelming...
Hey, it's Coach Will checking in on you as we enter…[scary voice] *February.* I have a quick story for you I just learned about, and it might just shift how you see 'training' your body…I'd love to hear what you think: In 1973, a couple British...
If you're going to understand one concept about how to train your body this year, I want you learn this one: **the difference between external and internal training**. Hey--it's Coach Will, and this is one of those nerd-tastic topics that I...
Someone on some podcast I was listening to (Coach Will here, btw) mentioned Richard Feynman recently. It was the 80th time for me (and I still hadn't read anything by the Nobel-prize winning physicist), so I picked up a short sampling of his...
Hey team, Coach Will here. I grew up in a science-obsessed home. My father is a pioneer of artificial intelligence, and spent his career as a professor of computer science. My mother worked in biomedical engineering for a couple decades before...
Well helllloooo there! Coach Will stoppin' by to say hey, and letting you in one of the biggest keys that I know when it comes to training your body, yet one that is SOOOO easy to lose sight of: respecting your nervous system. See, it doesn't...
The best motivator for 'working out' I know is simply this: showing up to your next workout is the ONLY way to *realize* the ways your last workout have impacted your body. Gotta show up to reap the reward. Let's be honest: the actual moment of...
When it came to choosing a name for our company, The Fitness Alchemists won out unanimously. For us, the idea of turning ordinary and abundantly available metals into rare and precious gold is a perfect metaphor for the transformative process that...
Every once in a while, it's a good idea to have a moment of gratitude for our most abstracted* organ: our humble heart. That thing just works and works, valiantly pumping oxygen- and nutrition-infused blood all over our body. It reacts...
We make one--and only one--assumption regarding the people who work with us: **you want a functioning body.** A body that functions. That works. For *you*. For something to be "functional", we needn't overthink anything. A "functional" body just...
At times, we all get laid out by life. Coach Will here. I lost a close family friend recently, and the experience punched me. It reminded me of one of life's non-negotiables. At one point or another, again and again, life will serve us up a...
Heya, it's Coach Will checking in. As I watch the Covid-19 pandemic phenomenon unravel, I keep feeling as if I am witnessing a slow motion (and collective) car accident. It's been utterly disorienting to watch as the tiniest of creatures (a virus)...
Morning! Coach Will here 👋. Last week I wrote about the importance of having functional joints. If you missed it, **click ****here**** **to read it over--I think it's about as clear as I've ever been able to describe it. You should read *this*...
This week marks the beginning of a new phase in exercise programming for the Fitness Alchemists. As a fitness company, the choice of exercises in our workouts is central to who we are; it is quite literally *what* we do, and one of the main ways...
I'm feeling fiery today, and it's because I know that there are people out in the world (maybe you?) who are feeling blocked in their ability to enjoy *movement *because of that scabby scourge that is **fatphobia**. And that's counter to my...
Hey, I have been working hard recently on more clearly defining *who *and *what The Fitness Alchemists as a company, *is for. *Why *does this company exist?! (nothing like a little existentialism to kick off your Saturday sip and scroll, or...
Welcome to part two of Becoming Fluent, or how to become a better "listener" to your body (and unlock your MOST impactful tool for physical improvement, achievement, etc). If you missed Part 1 you can check it out here. OK, so that was a **bold...
When your job is to work with humans on their physical bodies--how they move, how they look, how they feel--you are forced to confront a big, murky question: **how do you measure change?** On the one hand, you have the "measure-or-die" camp. This...
For how much I now love to ride my bike, I will never forget the laughably simple thing that unlocked this love in me: *having the right clothes*. Now why am I telling you about probably the least cool-looking part of my wardrobe? Because nested...
One of my all-time favorite nerd-tastic words is 'affordance'. According to trusty wikipedia, 'affordances are what the environment offers the individual'. It's such a great way of describing the profound ways that we compliment our environment,...
I always get a chuckle when I remember that the name of my business includes the word 'Alchemy'. It conjures up images for me of Merlin the wizard, and dusty explosions coming out of medieval workshops and the like. We originally chose it/found it...
Hellllooooo! Coach Will checking in. It's been a minute since I've had a chance to write to all of you, and I miss it. It's a real pleasure to take a moment to try to coach via email. On one hand, it's always a feeling of "how the hell do you try...
It's that time a year again when holiday parties roll around and I get asked (usually by a stranger) the perennial question (usually several times over the course of a season)… "So *you're* a trainer ... how do I lose this gut?!" (or some variation...
I am continuously reminded of the importance of that simple invitation to let in… the *world*. Read on for my *opinion*… (Coach Will with my philosopher hat on today)… So much of the *drive *to use modern technology is about patching up the gaps...
Halloooooo! ️That's my trail greeting (Coach Will here btw). It's the voice I use when I'm out hiking to let people know that I'm happy to see them, whoever they are, even if I won't be walking near them :). Because through these days of social...
When working with our clients, we noticed that how/if someone cooks tells us a lot about how they engage generally with food, eating, and habits. Digging into their "cooking life" can get right to the heart of underlying issues that might be keeping...
The more I have learned about the human body, the more I am amazed that all of us don't just crumple and collapse with the slightest breeze. (Coach Will here ) I don't get this sense because of how fragile we are--we are *clearly* not--but because...
Easy and delicious Chicken Soup. See recipe below. Over lunch the other day, while enjoying the homemade chicken soup (recipe included here), Hannah and I got to talking about how inspired we get by food that just seems to fall together--easily,...
Well, it's that time of year again. January. Resolution season. Blank slate, fresh start, New You! Also known as: where best intentions go to die. Sorry for the bleak perspective, but that's just reality for those of us in the Fit Biz. January is...
Heya! One great suggestion that we got from our recent survey was to use this newsletter to keep teaching the tangible basics of joint health. So today I, Coach Will, want to talk about **muscle contraction**. Let's start with a definition... To...
"I don't know what's going on, really." She sounded down.
"The last few weeks I haven't been doing *anything *physical, really, other than walking the dogs."
Hey friend, As I am learning, the fight against fatphobia and diet culture is many things, but one of the most critical pieces is realizing that 'losing weight' or 'getting thinner' (or really any body-shaping intent) is **not worth settling...
Heyyyy there, Today I am SO excited to be attending the second-EVER Internal Strength Method seminar being run at Cal Berkeley by the Functional Range System team of instructors. This is the same group that generated Functional Range Conditioning...
What moves you? I mean, what makes you shift, change, or start something? What motivates you? When we dig into this question--as Coach Hannah and I did earlier this week--there's really another, more important question implied: *how* are you...
It's Coach Will dropping in to share some quick thoughts on a topic near and dear to my hear: **how--and why--to life gets better if you can see it through the lens of an artist** (<---I'm hoping you read that with a properly highfallutin accent,...
People like to move fast. They like to move fast even when there's no good reason to move fast. Between the notifications popping up on their phone all hours of the day and night and the BuzzFeed articles describing the life-changing benefits of...
There's always a temptation, when you run a small fitness business, to turn **physical activity** **into a commodity**. To see human bodies as the mere backdrop for a pre-packaged, generic Workout of the Day. To see each new person as a sale...
"What do *you* feel is not allowing your knee to get higher?" I (Coach Will here 👋) had my hand a few inches above my student's knee, as they stood basically still, save for the tiny tremble of effort through their whole body. They were standing...
It was Testing Week around here last week, our first using our new programming tools, and it successfully accomplished our main goals for such a week (hint: it wasn't ONLY for the bragging rights :). Along with several PBs (Personal Bests), this...