He’s come a long way since then, and he still has a long way to go. Like we said, the guy is still very young. He’s still learning, and boy, he loves to learn. You can see it on his social media pages, and if you listen to what he says in the video below, you can feel how serious he is about his coaching. It comes across in everything he does. We want Irizzary to succeed because, well, frankly, we like the guy and what he stands for. No, not because we had a beer with him or hang out, he’s on another coast, but because we believe in the future of barbell sports.

A seriously legit strength and conditioning coach with a background in college sports, Irizzary has also participated in powerlifting competitions, bench pressing an impressive 633 lbs, and now focuses on weightlifting bringing on Russian champion, Vasily Polovnikov, into his gym to coach his members as well as himself.

Barbell sports gyms are an upward trend in the fitness industry. Irizzary does both powerlifting and weightlifting, running the two groups at the same time, which may sound logical but isn’t always an orthodox option for coaches who see themselves as purists in either discipline. We’d like to see more Irizzary’s unorthodox approaches in the indie gym space because barbell sports are a more sustainable gym model than just pure weightlifting or powerlifting. In addition, Irizzary teaches foundational beginner barbell training, as well as big compound barbell movements not focused on either powerlifting or weightlifting. We like that, too, because you need to have an on-ramp for barbell training of any kind. There are very few places where you can pick up heavy weights, and drop them. People coming from traditional globo gyms can get overwhelmed by the atmosphere of barbell gyms. Give them the tools and let them decide where they go with it, and if it isn’t powerlifting or weightlifting competition, fine, let them enjoy it for whatever it is for them.

It works for Irizzary. His membership ranges in age from people into their 20s to their mid-50s, with more female members than male. That’s exciting to see, but it’s going to take more work to get broader adoption of barbell training. Irizzary is a great example of a coach who has found a focus in strength and conditioning that is not just the usual mish-mash of CrossFit type workouts and Olympic weightlifting as an afterthought. He is constantly learning and adapting his approach so that his barbell sports gym will evolve, and drive more new adherents to the disciplines on offer. In the meantime, we hope to encourage more people to support coaches like Irizzary, who are evangelizing on the front lines and helping to shape the fitness industry by creating a really powerful, strong arena for trainees.

Fitness Influencers are picked by coaches and Breaking Muscle editors in a purely subjective manner. They are coaches who are known to Breaking Muscle through their posts on the site and or through the recommendations of their peers. We look for coaches who exhibit a dedication to their craft, who have a physical practice that is respectful of all trainees, and most of the time we err on the side of promoting coaches who are probably too shy or modest to be great self-promoters themselves. It’s about supporting the independent coaches and gyms that need our support and admiration.

The post The Barbell Sports Evangelist appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Greg Walsh is a sincere man. He looks like he could tear your head off with his bare hands and grind your bones into dust, but he couldn’t be a nicer, warmer, more unassuming guy in person. It’s Walsh’s mind that is brutal, never the man himself.

Walsh is a guy on a mission, a driven coach who desperately wants to get it right. He dedicates his time and his effort to the essentials of movement in every exercise he practices and teaches. He has a sincere desire to do right by his trainees and to stay true to his own beliefs. He is the epitome of the indie coach.

He works out of his own place, Wolf Brigade Gym in Rochester, New York, but travels the country giving seminars, talking to other coaches, absorbing, learning, playing, testing, searching, always searching for ways to tune his teaching.

And when it comes to teaching, he has his own unique approach. While he is assiduously rigorous and devoted to the principles of strength training, he has created his own style, a unique mix of disciplined movement, and aggressive motion that we call subversive fitness.

For Walsh, though, it is all about being part of Wolf Brigade. The message? Learn to crawl before you walk, learn to walk before you run, and learn, learn, learn. Like all great coaches, Walsh emphasizes the foundation of skill building as an essential to finding a true path to greater strength.

He is, at once, a purist and a maverick. When Walsh teaches kettlebells, it’s different, not caught up in the dogma of the competing kettlebell tribes, but completely respectful of the implement and what it can help you achieve. When Walsh teaches maces, it’s continuous movement that bears all the hallmarks of his signature physicality, controlled, smooth, and perfected form.

If you want to know how it feels to be a part of the Wolf Brigade then there is nothing better than trying to finish off one of Walsh’s benchmark workouts. They’re like no other, not in the timing, not in the music, and not in the energy that they create.

Walsh’s background in BMX racing and MMA have shaped his aesthetic, and frankly, that can be daunting for some people to overcome, but the man is about as good a coach as you will find, and the politest guy around. So, yeah, it’s worth the trip to Rochester, to Wolf Brigade, just to spend some time looking at strength training his way.

The podcast below is a great way to become acquainted with the man, and the coach. Indie coaches like Walsh are at the heart of innovation in the fitness industry, and by bringing their own sensibilities to traditional implements like the kettlebell and mace, they create new energy for traditional practitioners and create new enthusiasts who are excited by the freshness of the approach. Support indie coaches like Walsh. Train with them. Learn from them. You’ll never regret it.

Fitness Influencers are picked by coaches and Breaking Muscle editors in a purely subjective manner. They are coaches who are known to Breaking Muscle through their posts on the site and or through the recommendations of their peers. We look for coaches who exhibit a dedication to their craft, who have a physical practice that is respectful of all trainees, and most of the time we err on the side of promoting coaches who are probably too shy or modest to be great self-promoters themselves. It’s about supporting the independent coaches and gyms that need our support and admiration.

The post Greg Walsh’s Brutal Strength of Mind appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You’re also missing out on working with a coach who coined the phrase fitness improv. This a coach who can usually be found contemplating the mysteries of movement in her studio and helping her trainees discover their own best practices through an improvisational style that emphasizes their own awareness of their bodies.

Pilotti believes that if she can get people to feel themselves in space to understand how the different parts of their body connect then they can feel stronger and more stable in whatever other activities they do.

Jennifer Pilotti’s articles on Breaking Muscle are full of profound observations delivered in a soft-spoken manner with warmth and intelligence. You feel like you’re really learning something and not just following along while someone teaches you to contort yourself.

Educating yourself, the way Pilotti found her own path to knowledge, is an important part of your opportunity to create a better physical experience for yourself. While some people have an innate understanding of their physical presence, most people need to be taught how to find it.

Educating the Educators in Fitness

It was after the great recession of 2008, disgruntled with the fitness industry when Pilotti decided to seek advice to find a path for her self. The result was a decision to become the best trainer that she could be and the way she ran with it was to go back to graduate school to educate herself some more. For Pilotti, the usual industry courses and reading materials weren’t telling her what she needed to know.

What Pilotti discovered in her own quest for knowledge was that in order to be a better teacher and trainer she had to read, do and explore movement more deeply than she had ever anticipated.

She is still on a constant quest to better herself and gain more experience and knowledge of movement. It’s part of why she is passionate now about training other coaches and trainers; she understands the shortcomings of the fitness industry and is trying to do her part to help everyone raise their game.

In the video below, Pilotti explains it best herself when she says, “I was able to begin figuring out how to queue and how to draw attention and how to help clients put things together in a way that made them feel more integrated and people started to do really, really well. Little neck aches and pains that had been bugging people dissipated.”

Pilotti found she was helping people become more efficient and more coordinated, gaining more strength in the process. Today, her space is like her little lab where she continues to learn, research, share, and educate. You can find Pilotti’s studio on her Be Well Personal Training web site, as well as her schedule of online courses and offsite seminars and events.

Take a listen to Pilotti in this video, and remember that we need, we want, more independent coaching minds like her to be accessible to everyone. Articles like this are here to support people like Jennifer Pilotti and her work with trainees and other coaches because we don’t want the limits of the mainstream fitness world of magic elixirs, quick fixes, and false promises. Pilotti and her peers are educators, they are the real deal.

Fitness Influencers are picked by coaches and Breaking Muscle editors in a purely subjective manner. They are coaches who are known to Breaking Muscle through their posts on the site and or through the recommendations of their peers. We look for coaches who exhibit a dedication to their craft, who have a physical practice that is respectful of all trainees, and most of the time we err on the side of promoting coaches who are probably too shy or modest to be great self-promoters themselves. It’s about supporting the independent coaches and gyms that need our support and admiration.

The post Fitness Improv – An Educator’s Approach to Movement appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

In the last decade, the fitness industry has seen some major changes. From CrossFit to obstacle course racing to kettlebells to Olympic weightlifting to gymnastic bodies to a general explosion of interest in all things functional fitness, strength sports, there’s been a lot happening in a short span of time.

It gave rise to the box gym, a sort of iron dojo for strength and conditioning, what we prefer to call the indie gym, a place where you can drop weights, shake the foundations of the building and flop onto the floor into a pool of sweat without feeling like any of it is extraordinary.

For a while there, it seemed like we were witnessing the demise of the globo gym and the emergence of a fitness culture that was going to turn everyone into a warrior athlete. However, sadly, as many indie gyms that sprouted up over the years, the same number would disappear. It seemed almost faddish.

But, we don’t want to see the indie gym disappear, we don’t think it will, the genie is out of the bottle and the magic is going to happen. What we may not want is to revert to archetypal coaching approaches. A recent conversation on building an indie gym culture really opened our eyes to what the essence of the indie gym should be all about. You can read about that and see the video of the conversation all below.

What we want to leverage from this discussion is what we don’t want to be. We don’t want to be the person getting screamed at by some macho coach who thinks we are all preparing for war. We don’t want to be the person who needs a pat on the back for doing something as basic as making their first pull-up.

It’s great and all but it’s a blip in your life. We kind of like some of those 30-day challenges but we don’t want to think that they actually have long-term benefits or inspire you to do greater things. What we want to acknowledge is that your fitness life is your life and your life is, we hope, a long, fruitful existence which will, no doubt, have many ups and equally many downs.

We owe this article to a coach who we have known for over a decade and who we have watched build a sustainable business as an indie gym owner the right way. It’s Mike Tromello of Precision CrossFit.

We kind of give him a hard time because he is so passionate about CrossFit and, well, we were kind of over it but, we learned an important lesson, one that we kind of always suspected but never really pushed enough, it’s not the system, it’s the coach that makes the gym.

Mike may be one of the best advertisements for CrossFit out there, the way he teaches it and develops his membership around it. But, it’s not really the CrossFit part that makes Mike unique, it’s his relationship building skills. There are a lot of good CrossFit coaches and there are a lot of good strength and conditioning coaches but, sadly, not all of them are good at building relationships and without relationships, an indie gym ceases to exist, sooner or later.

We have always been about connecting great coaches to great athletes. That was how we started. That’s how we aim to go on. That doesn’t change. However, how we do that has to change because, to be frank, seeing great coaches come and go, stagnate, lose a gym, get a gym, lose a gym, is not fun.

Sometimes, some coaches shouldn’t own a gym or try and run one. Some coaches because of that demon of coaching ego, don’t always think about their students, trainees, members or the people who pay them. It’s almost a distraction as they pursue a golden athlete to train or as they stick to tried and true methods that they have developed over decades.

That’s not the way the fitness industry works. While CrossFit was surging in growth in the early part of this decade, it helped to lift many coaches and their indie gyms on the crest of a trend. That’s not the case today, arguably, because fitness is faddish, it’s fickle. There wasn’t enough emphasis on good coaches and there was way too much emphasis on gym building.

Therefore, it is really, really important that we figure out the best way to keep promoting great coaches and great indie gyms. The globo gym market is, for us at least, the fast food of fitness. The indie gyms are where you get the innovation, the organic knowledge, and expertise that can change a life, make a champion even, or just provide a family to support you on your fitness journey. And it is this sense of family that permeates the best indie gyms, something that you cannot replicate in anodyne globo gyms where the best thing that can happen is you put a membership on autopay and never show up.

Mi Casa, Su Casa

It is about family. We talked to Mike Tromello and you can see his video below where he gets into his philosophy of gym ownership. We can attest to the fact that Mike’s approach succeeds and that all successful coaches that we know have very similar traits. We need more Mike Tromellos and that’s where we feel inspired to pursue a more focused direction in our editorial and our plans for Breaking Muscle.

“I live in a community. I love my community. I grew up in another community. The difference between a community and a family is one very important thing: you can leave a community, but no one wants to leave their family. So, when it comes to building a gym, I wanted an environment that was as supportive as a family. I didn’t want to build a community, that’s a great buzzword, but I did want to build a family.” Says Mike.

He also says, “I have been involved in CrossFit since 2008. I got into an affiliate, Precision CrossFit, about seven years ago. We started out with 30 members, and 20 of them are still here. I know my members, and they know me. I’d say to anyone running a gym that they have to be able to ask their members how they are and know when they’re good and when they’re not so good. Your members should be willing to feel comfortable enough to tell you what’s wrong.

“Sure, that means you become involved with your members, but I also have a line that I don’t cross. Stuff happens. Someone has a bad trip to Vegas and they can’t pay their membership dues. I get it, but that’s not my problem. I am still a business and members have to pay their dues.”

Indie gyms are needed more than ever. We need stronger coaching practices. We need better trainers, mentored properly, and working in secure environments where they can grow over time. We need more people to be aware of the advantages and benefits of indie gyms.

There are great coaches in every city and town, they are, often, well hidden, maybe not out of choice, and they need to be seen. The superficial charge that people get from watching Instagram coaches, athletic and good to look at, is not the same as finding a gym, a coach, a family environment that will nurture and support you for the long term. This is your 60-year challenge.

Fitness Influencers are picked by coaches and Breaking Muscle editors in a purely subjective manner. They are coaches who are known to Breaking Muscle through their posts on the site and or through the recommendations of their peers. We look for coaches who exhibit a dedication to their craft, who have a physical practice that is respectful of all trainees, and most of the time we err on the side of promoting coaches who are probably too shy or modest to be great self-promoters themselves. It’s about supporting the independent coaches and gyms that need our support and admiration.

The post Building a Gym Family for Better or for Worse appeared first on Breaking Muscle.