All posts by rnagy

Words From Anthony

Fitness, Life Health

As I wrap up my 5th week here at Union Fitness as an intern it seems like a great time to reflect on everything, I have learned so far. I’ll start off by giving you all some insight on what I’ve been doing since I started here: Cody set up a very in-depth curriculum for myself and Wyatt so that we can not only learn from all the trainers here, but also take a deeper dive into some of the training literature that is out there. 

 

The first couple of weeks we learned about different styles of programming; Periodization (linear, undulating, and block) and also Emergent programming. Being a powerlifter, this was probably my favorite thing we have done so far up to this point. During the week talking about this I got lots of insight from Cody and Curtis specifically and one thing that stuck with me that Curtis and I talked about was that as a coach, you need to really learn your own philosophy when it comes to coaching and have reasonings behind what you do. Every coach is different, but to be an effective coach you really need to learn what it is you believe in, and how to put those things into practice. This past week we started covering the Big Three (squat, bench, and deadlift) and got into some of the mechanics behind them as well as the variations used to help each of them. Other than the curriculum Cody wrote for us, I have also been floating around in some of the Powerful classes as well as the training sessions we hold here for some of the local college sports teams. It’s been a great opportunity to see the difference in how all of the trainers here communicate differently with those they are training as well as getting some insight as to why certain things are programmed for the athletes and how to progress them in those movements. 

 

I really lucked out landing this internship because I honestly don’t think I could intern at any other gym that would have as wide of a knowledge base as Union. It’s been great working with some of you during Powerful classes and I hope to continue to work with more of you and keep picking the brains of everyone here at Union. 

I Love Eggs and You Should Too

Clean Eating, Diet, Fitness, Life Health, Meal Prep, Nutrition, , , , ,

Hang around lifters, (the humans not the bad nickname for your shoes) long enough and the topic of protein will come up. The rule of thumb that most of you have probably already heard is eat one gram of protein for every pound of bodyweight. For me I float around 200 lbs so around 200 grams of protein a day is a good goal. There is some debate about this number yet we can use it as a starting point. From there the quality of protein matters. If you do not understand amino acids that’s OK here is how you can think of it. For this blog we are going to just use numbers to represent different amino acids(AA). Let’s say AA your body can produce AA’s 1-5 but not 6-10. AA’s 6-10 must one supplied through diet. That is what makes a protein a “complete protein.”

 

Your goal for protein intake can include some non complete protein, yet getting complete proteins is very important for recovery. Another rule of thumb (no this is not a fact yet a decent rule of thumb) is animal proteins are generally complete. This is why being a vegetarian is so hard. Often times you will have to supplement with AA’s that you miss in your diet.

 

Onto the egg. Here are some fun facts about eggs.

 

  1. Eggs are a complete protein
  2. The yolk has as much protein as the white.
  3. They are one of the few foods high in Vitamin D.
  4. The are delicious and easy to prepare.
  5. This is the big one. The egg has a cheat sheet inside of it to tell you how awesome it really is. That cheat sheet is the yoke. A yellow yoke=BAD egg. A dark gold or almost brown yoke=Gainz. Without delving into hens diets too much a darker yolk means that the animal had a healthier diet and more than likely a better life. Run an experiment for yourself. Go to a local grocery store by the cheapest eggs you can look at the the yolk, cook it and taste it. Now go to a farmers market or east end food co-op, do the same thing. See and taste the difference for yourself.

 

Clearly point #5 was the one I really wanted to write about. The yolk tells you most of what you need to know. Now I am aware that people will say “Hamer, those eggs are expensive.” I do understand yet let’s look at the bigger picture. If you are willing to spend 4-6 dollars on your fancy coffee yet not 4-6 dollars on your eggs then you made your decision as to what’s important. I love the fancy coffee too and I also know the fancy eggs are more important. So skip the mocha, soy, chai, skinny, latte, with the sugar free, sugar infused vanilla and a pump of hazelnut and buy some real eggs.

 

Eat real food.

 

Hamer

 

Member of the Month

Uncategorized

Union Family,

 

Today, raise your dumbbells, burry your squats and let’s give three cheers to Ryan Russman for being Member of The Month. We’d like to thank him for all his hard work and positive energy he brings with him. Lets get to know Ryan a bit more.

 

Ryan grew up in Pittsburgh and resides in the Northside. He works as an accountant executive at a software company. Here are Ryan’s own words. “I have been wanting to build muscle and strength for a while but didn’t really know where to start, what lifts to do or how to do them properly and definitely didn’t know how to create an effective workout. With the suggestions from a couple friends and UF members I tried the powerful class, and immediately knew this is what I wanted. The welcoming attitude and knowledge everyone has at UF was exactly what I was looking for. It didn’t take long for me to find that my favorite lifts are squats & deadlifts, with my technique improving weekly I am seeing some great strides with these two lifts. I am always playing, “Don’t Stop Believin’” in my head as I try to hit a new PR, that extra motivation to never stop believing in how much I can push myself at the gym. UF has given me so much knowledge and helped me gain so much strength but more importantly, it is giving me the confidence & self-assurance that I never had when it came to lifting weights.”

 

Ryan, thank you for all you do and bring here to this community. We appreciate you!

Who will win the next Member of the Month?

 

Cheers,

CeJ

Curtis Challenges YOU!

Fitness, Life Health, Training, , ,

Back by popular demand are our monthly challenges for all members and staff here at Union Fitness. For the month of February, there will be 3 different challenges to choose from. You can pick one of them, or you can do all of them and see how well you progress throughout the month. Just as we did in the month of December, we will place the scoring sheets on the glass outside of the cardio lab. These challenges can be done either here at Union Fitness or in the privacy of your own home if you aren’t able to make it in. Just be sure to tag us on instagram so we can record your score for you. The winner of each challenge will receive a free massage. For those of you who are not ready to come back to the gym we can save your massage for a later date. 

 

Here are the challenges.

 

Challenge 1: Sand bag/Dball bear hug for time.

 

For this challenge, the goal is to bear hug a 200 pound sand bag or an 80 pound Dball for as long as possible without putting it down. You can stand in one place, walk around with it, or jump up and down if you want (although we don’t advise that). Just as long as you don’t put it down. Record your time and try to beat it throughout the month.

 

Challenge 2: Push-Ups.

 

Similar to our pull-up challenge from December, the goal here is to accumulate as many push-ups as possible over the course of the month. These can be done anytime and anywhere. Just record how many you have done. The only rule is that your arms have to reach a 90 degree angle on each rep. 

 

Challenge 3: Total calories burned.

 

This can be done on either the rower, ski erg, the assault bike, or a combination of all three. Record your total calories for each workout and add them up at the end of the month to see how you did.

 

As with each of these, we will select the male and female winners for each challenge. You’ve already started the year off strong. Now let’s keep it rolling and crush some new goals and personal records. Stay strong, friends!

Weekly Wrap Up

State of the Union

Another week of training and another 2% of our year is coming to a close. Have you stuck to your goals? If not then let’s get back up today and get back to work. If you have stuck to them then great job and keep it up.

 

Here is a quick wrap up of our week here at UF.

 

  1. We are beginning a mental health series. We are scheduling dates now to have speakers come in on this very important topic. This will be free to all members and we will post it online for all to watch.
  2. We have added an extra hour for you to train on Saturday mornings. From this point forth we will open at 8 AM on Saturdays so please come over and train earlier.
  3. What Went Well. We are beginning a What Went Well board for our powerful classes. This is the brain child of our own Cody (worsh) Miller. The WWW board will be a chance to reflect upon your workout and write down one thing that went well for you. Always leave on a positive note.
  4. Check out our member spotlight, because Ward is a cool dude.

 

As always thanks for being a member here and keep us up to date on how you feel we can better serve you and our community.

Member Spotlight; Wardy

Fitness, Life Health, Training, , ,

Union, we love our members so much it’s time we show you off and have CJ climb the incline like King Kong, and shout your presence from atop of the highest point of Mt. Washington!

 

This week we’d like to shout out Ward Stanford.

 

Ladies & Gents, here is the what is about, Wardy in his own words.

 

“I grew up in northeastern PA near Binghamton, NY. I’m not a native Yinzer but I moved here after living in a few different cities in PA, NY, and NJ to settle. I’m a Talent Manager for a Water Engineering company so I’m basically in charge of hiring people and keeping them happy. I’ve been doing Human Resources for my whole career. I’ve been training pretty seriously for about 6 years, I started doing some resistance training as part of a weightloss journey. I was obese from childhood through my later 20’s and decided after being over 400 pounds that I needed to change my life. I fell in love with the strength training side of exercise because it was truly a way to build myself and add something to my life that made me feel more confident. I still train that way to this day, focusing on just being muscular, strong and healthy for myself, I don’t compete in anything, I just train for me. I chose Union Fitness because it seemed like the best environment for me to do that. The variety of equipment and implements and supportive atmosphere made it easy for me to feel like I had a safe place to train anyway I wanted to and explore areas of fitness that you can’t really do in a gym with more specialization.  I love deadlifting and doing weighted carries for examples and finding a gym where I can do both of those things, inside or outside, and also use a treadmill and a preacher curl machine is extremely rare.”

 

A little more about Ward:

 

  1.  If Ward could lift with any President it would be Teddy Roosevelt. Our lift would be bully.
  2. Favorite PR song is Slaves and Bulldozers by Soundgarden. If you time the lift during the high note an angel lifts the bar for you.
  3. I have an entire Wall in my home dedicated to David Bowie.
  4. Shorts can never be short enough for me.
  5. Ward loves spicy food and will always try the ridiculous hot thing on a menu that will inevitably make him cry.
  6. Ward is a believer in the importance of a bigger picture of health so he advocates for therapy, meditation, stress management, philosophy, and mindfulness to support all of the physical and nutritional things we do for ourselves.
  7. If Ward was a character on a tv show he would be some combination of Patrick from Schitt’s Creek and Terry from Brooklyn 99.
  8. Ward is a much nicer in person than he looks, He is much friendlier than his face would seem
  9. Thank you Ward for being a great member of our gym community!

 

Cheers,

CeJ

Let’s Talk Mental Health

Life Health, State of the Union

Recently we at UF found out that one of our instructor’s family members took his own life. This has shaken each and everyone one of us at the gym and we are more determined now to be a part of the solution.

 

Starting now all of our fundraising efforts for the next three months will go towards mental health and suicide prevention. On top of raising money for this cause we are now beginning a mental health speaker series. We are very lucky to be able to partner with one local and one nationally renowned university from another state. With these partnerships we are adding free educational lectures on mental health with some of the top professionals. These lectures will also be offered free online to anyone.

 

Our goal is to help everyone lead a better life and if we only focus on the physical side of health then we are doing everyone a disservice. So please feel free to join us as we will be announcing lectures within the next two weeks.

 

Finally, if you are willing to donate we have details to help the family who lost their loved one. Click here for the link. 

 

With that I wish you good health, physical and mental and remember you are not alone.

 

Todd Hamer

Uncategorized

We have been trying to find ways to serve you our members more effectively. We have made some changes this year and have one more coming.

 

Here is a short list of improvements we have made in the last 12 months.

 

  1. Opening of the performance lab and our outdoor turf space.
  2. Rearranged the fitness center to give our fitness center members more room to train.
  3. Added bumpers into the fitness center to give fitness center members more options.
  4. Rearranged the strength lab to more effectively use this space.
  5. Moved yoga into into it’s own quieter space.

 

Now we are adding one more change that will hopefully help us serve you.

 

We will move our opening time on Saturdays from 9 AM to 8 AM. We understand many of you save your longer training sessions for the weekends, and with this in mind we felt it was best to give you, the members, an extra hour to get in and train before the crowds arrive.

 

Starting this Saturday January 30th we invite you to come in at 8 AM and get your weekend started out STRONG!

Meet Wyatt.

Uncategorized

We are happy to introduce you to our newest intern Wyatt. If you see him around the gym say hello. Now I’ll let Wyatt introduce himself in his own words.

 

I am Wyatt Sloan and I am from St. Louis Missouri. I am a senior at Robert Morris University, majoring in psychology with a concentration in sports and a minor in education. Applied to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville for graduate school for a master of science in kinesiology with a specialization in exercise and sport Psychology.

 

I am Interning at Union Fitness to get the experience and learn from all their trainers about the exercise science aspect. This will greatly help in the future as a sports psychologist because I will be able to mentally and physically help athletes perform better in their sport. If you do not see me in the gym, I am playing hockey, video games, or watching movies. Fun fact about me is I am flexible enough to do the splits and my shoulders can rotate around to make my elbows clap. 

Big Dawg or Little Dawg; We All Just Dawgs

Life Health, , ,

Can you believe we are already almost through the whole month of January?! Time doesn’t feel like a real thing anymore if you ask me. Well anyways, speaking of time, I would like you to take some time to think about where you are currently at in this point of your life. Whether it be where you’re at with your fitness goals, work goals, family goals, anything. Now that you’ve taken a few moments to reflect and think, I want to bring something to your attention. This blog right here is your sign to get out there and do something that takes you out of your comfort zone and maybe even scares you a little bit. We all seem to have a set routine and become comfortable with it, whether it’s with training, work, or just daily life in general. It’s important to spice things up and to not be afraid to be scared. 

 

When I think of getting out of my comfort zone, I personally think of my experience as a new lifter here at UF. Coming in to UF, I had experience with Olympic weightlifting through CrossFit and also with training the general population, but I had never really taken the time on my own to learn how to improve my lifts overall. I was so used to my coaches always telling me what to do when it came to training. Since I’ve joined the team here, I have entered a whole new world. I was a little intimidated by the Strength Lab at first, as it is usually filled with big, strong, and knowledgeable powerlifters and people who warmup with weights that are my maxes or maybe even twice that. I would honestly kind of avoid it and only go during the slower times the first few weeks that I was here. I just didn’t feel like me and my noodle arms would fit in with the crowd there. I started to hop in and train with some of the other staff members (thanks CeJ and Hamer) and started to talk with some of the people that always train back there and with the new members that would be there as well. I faced my fear of intimidation and learned that training in the Strength Lab and talking with the staff and members who’s training experiences vary largely are things that will actually help me grow as a lifter in the long run. I learned to step out of my comfort zone and not be afraid to ask questions or for any help/advice while training and being surrounded by others who enjoy picking things up and putting them down. 

 

So, as I mentioned earlier, don’t be afraid to be scared. It’s a new year, get out there and conquer 2021 by stepping out of your comfort zone. 

 

Stay healthy my friends,

 

Toria