Category Archives: Fitness

Schedule Changes

Fitness, Life Health, State of the Union, Training

It’s a strange time right now in Pittsburgh. The sun is shinning, the birds are chirping, and the Pirates have been winning some Baseball games. Here at Union Fitness, we are making some seasonal changes as well in order to better suit our members and to bring them some new additions. Beginning on May 31st for the month of June, we will be adding a new class to our line-up, along with some adjusted hours and locations for our current classes.

 

Beginning on May 31st, we will be temporarily removing our 7am Powerful class from the schedule and replacing it with an Olympic Weightlifting class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This class will be coached by none other than our resident Olympic Weightlifter, Ethan Raese. If you’ve been in the gym while Ethan is training, then you know how much he enjoys Olympic lifting, and how dedicated he is to the craft. As with all of our classes, there are always modifications and progressions for each movement and exercise. So even if you have never tried Olympic lifting, you will have no problem getting into the swing of things even after one session. Be sure to sign up online or stop by the front desk to reserve a spot. 

 

Also beginning in June, our evening Cardio Lab class will be moving from 5:30pm up to 5pm to ensure that all of you have more time to enjoy these beautiful spring and summer evenings. In addition to this, our evening Yoga classes will be moving to the Cardio Lab area immediately after Cardio Lab class is finished at 6pm. On the weekends, our Saturday and Sunday our 10:30am Yoga class will be taking over the indoor and outdoor space over at our Performance Lab location. By doing this, you will have a chance to enjoy the refreshing outdoor space provided by that section of our gym.

 

As always, your first class in on the house. We would love for anyone interested to try out our classes to see how you like them. For more information on any of our classes, please check out our website. For all information regarding times, locations, and instructors, check our schedule on our website or on the Union Fitness App. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone there!

 

Curtis

It’s Concert and Cycling Season

Fitness, Life Health

Pittsburgh is well known as one of the rainiest cities in America. We all know that the winters can be long, and not very vibrant. Now is the time to get outside, enjoy the sunshine, and the free Vitamin D that it offers.

 

Vitamin D.

 

Vitamin D has been written about often and I will not bore you with more details on this micro-nutrient. What I will say is you must remember that your body needs sunlight, your body needs Vitamin D, and Vitamin D needs sunlight. Most Americans are Vitamin D deficient due to lack of exposure to sunlight.

 

Concerts and Cycling.

 

One of the best things you can do for your health is get outside. As many of you already know I love mountain biking. I love it for a multitude of reasons, not the least being that I get to be out in nature. When I do solo rides it is not unusual for me to stop and just sit in the woods. The Japanese call this shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. This can also be translated to absorbing the forest atmosphere. The point is to get out in nature, get some free sun, and some exercise with minimal added stress.

 

Now for the concerts side of this coin. I have performed music my entire life and I love many types of music. Most Americans stop learning new music by the age of 30. This is just as scary to me as when I read most Americans don’t read books. One cannot separate the arts from movement. Humans need both to grow mentally and physically. This takes us back to Vitamin D, I know this Saturday Tenzing and I will be sitting in the sun listening to the amazing Adia Victoria.

 

Find what moves and motivates you. Find ways to get sunlight, discover new things, and find growth. Get Vitamin D, cycle, walk, and jam to some new tunes. Reduce your stress and collect the free Vitamin D.

 

Hamer

Ham’s Breakdown of Classes

Fitness, Life Health, , ,

One of the coolest things about UF is the diversity inside our gym. We have diversity of clients, classes, and employees. I never know what I am going to get from one day to the next. This week I want to break down our classes, (in a light hearted way) and the diversity of the classes. So I hope we can all laugh at ourselves.

  1. Blitz- I am going to start with my class. This class was founded back in 2020 for the busy office worker (clearly I am terrible at predicting the future). It is a class perfect for people like me (want to train, but come on let’s not work too hard). Seriously, though the class is meant to be short, fun, and a little bit of everything. So no need to sweat so hard, just come and get a little lunch sweat.
  2. CardioLab (the classic)- These classes are OG’s of UF. They have been around forever and I tell everyone here the goal is to burn 500 calories, as painlessly as possible. Warning, burning 500 Kcal is never painless. Make sure you take Steph’s class for extra pain.
  3. Powerful- Powerful is by far our most popular class. Imagine training for a sport that scores of people throughout the US train for, this is powerful. Yet, somehow the crew makes powerlifting look cool in this class.
  4. Ryde- Ryde is our indoor cycling class. Similar to CardioLab classes, Ryde will burn some serious calories. The Ryde instructors are also great DJ’s as they all have their playlists set far in advance. This is the newest group here at UF, and they have brought their own flair to the gym,
  5. Yoga- Haley and her devoted yogi instructors do a great job, on a rare occasion you may even find me twisting my body up with this crew. Plus, they do cool events like heavy metal and whiskey yoga.

 

There it is our classes in a nutshell. Now go take a class or two and have some fun.

 

Hamer

Tips to Make Exercise a Habit

Fitness, Life Health

It can be hard to find the motivation to make it into the gym or to try to get our bodies moving somedays. We’ve all had those days where we just don’t feel like exercising or even moving off our couches. Even though we may not feel like doing anything, it is important to remember how beneficial it is to exercise and to make that a part of our weekly routines and daily lives. It takes about 30(ish) days to form a habit and about 90(ish) days to make it a permanent lifestyle change. Here are some tips that may help you to make exercise a true habit in your lives:

 

  1. Set both short-term and long-term goals to help motivate you to stay on track during your fitness journey. For example, it may be difficult for you to find motivation go out on a long run just for fun. By setting a goal such as signing up for a half-marathon or a 10k a few months from now, you are more likely to hold yourself accountable and stick to a routine which will help to enforce the habit. The same thing goes for those who are looking to get into Powerlifting. If you sign up for a Powerlifting meet in the upcoming future, it will more than likely motivate you to work hard and stick to it.
  1. Find a great gym to train at. I know a great gym in Pittsburgh that you all may or may not have heard of ;-). With that being said, Union Fitness is the place to be. We are known to have a very welcoming and friendly atmosphere that may help you find that you actually want to come into the gym more often and make it a habit to be there.
  1. Find a training partner or a group that you enjoy working with. This may help you with accountability, encouragement, and added motivation to your training sessions.
  1. Have a gym bag packed and ready the night before your planned trip to the gym. When everything is already laid out for you and ready to go, you may find it more difficult to say no to making a training session happen that day. 
  1. Start small and go up from there. If you’re not used to doing 60 minutes of exercise, don’t try to start there just because someone told you to. This could lead to burnout and a lack of motivation to commit to exercise. Start small by doing something along the lines of 20-30 minutes of movement at first and then continue to progress from there.
  1. Make exercising a convenient and flexible thing for you so that it doesn’t feel too much like a chore. Life happens, but don’t let it get in your way of being active. Find some nearby walking trails or maybe even choose to take the stairs instead of the elevator every day.

 

These are only my top 6 tips. There are so many other ways out there that may help to make exercise a habit for you, so don’t just stop here! 

 

Stay healthy my friends.

Toria Crispin (Tordawg)

Turning Small Wins Into Big Victories

Fitness, Training

If you follow our Instagram page, then you’ve probably seen our “Takeover Tuesday” stories that we post each week. Sometimes it’s a few helpful tips regarding form or technique. Sometimes it may be our interns giving helpful information. Or sometimes it may be one of us dropping beneficial life knowledge. I would like to think that my recent takeover falls into that category, but I’ll leave that up to you to interpret. My most recent takeover involved the lessons of the barbell and how they can relate to our goals in life.

 

A few months back, Cody Miller and I were doing a squat session together. We decided to do sets of 20 reps with the SSB bar. If you’ve ever used this bar, you know how challenging it can be. And if you’ve ever done 20 reps on squats, then you know how equally evil that can be. After our second or third set, I racked the bar, looked at Cody, and said “I don’t think I can do another rep.” Cody looks at me and says “Doing reps is like taking steps. You can always take one more step, no matter how bad you feel.”

 

This resonated with me, as I’m the type of person that always sees the similarities between training and life. If we were to approach each day the same way that we do each rep, of each set, of each workout, then our goals would be much more attainable. In today’s society, we think that we always have to have something right now. If we set a goal, we think that we have to achieve it instantly, or we’ve failed. That’s just not accurate. A better way to think of it is by taking one more step, doing one more rep, checking off one more box each day. If we focus on the smaller victories each day; checking off each box when we wake up, throughout the day, and each night before bed, we will ultimately get to the big goal. But if we only focus on the end result so much that we paralyze ourselves from seeing the smaller wins, then we’re going to have a hard time getting there, and we may even get frustrated before we give ourselves a chance to get to that point.

 

As I’ve said multiple times, this applies to training as well as to life. They are exactly the same. The best lessons I’ve ever learned are from the barbell and the weights inside of the gym. It taught me how to take these steps, how to progress, how to believe in myself, and how to be patient and hardworking. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it often takes much longer than you would like. But if you continue taking one more step, doing one more rep, and checking off one more box, you will ultimately get to exactly where you want to be.

 

-Curtis Miller

Knees Over Toes Mobility

Fitness

I wanted to talk to yinz about the importance of adding knees over toes exercises into your workouts. The main point about training knees over toes (KOT) exercises is that our bodies were made to move in triplanar movement, or movement in all three planes of the body. Incorporating these types of movements in your everyday workouts will increase your mobility and reduce your risk of injury. With KOT, specifically, we are looking to improve knee health by strengthening the tendons. To begin your KOT journey, I would recommend starting with increasing your ankle mobility. This can be done by rolling out the ankles, working on knee to wall exercises, and banded ankle mobility exercises. The knee to wall stretch would be the best way to get familiar with the idea of KOT: start facing a wall, with toes 2-3 inches from the wall, making a conscious effort to keep your foot flat, and begin to push your knee to the wall. If it’s too easy, slide your foot back, too hard slide your foot forward. I believe in a longer warm up prior to exercising, so I always include large amounts of mobility into my training. For KOT, I would add the ankle mobility into any warm up for any leg day, and depending on your familiarity with the gym, add some of the listed exercises in the next paragraph to your warm ups.

 

Once you have the basics of mobility, you can begin incorporating some KOT exercises into your workouts. These exercises can include: step downs, heels elevated squats, reverse nordic curl progression, and backwards sled drags. The main thing to remember during these workouts is that slow and controlled will give you the best results. Majority of these workouts can be used as either a warm up or as the workout by itself. Main points I would like to highlight are: be sure to keep your foot firmly plants for the stepdowns, the reverse nordic curl progression has a long list of progressions/ regressions so finding the perfect spot for your level is easy to find, and during backward sled drags make sure you’re holding a squat and being purposeful with your feet placement (placing toes first and rolling onto heels). Since we want to strengthen our knees and prevent any future injuries, the heavier and slower these exercises are the better!

 

If you’re interested in improving and maintaining your knee health, or possibly get rid of your knee pain, feel free to ask me any questions!

 

Miranda

Set Some Goals, Reach Some Goals, and Fail

Fitness, Life Health, Uncategorized

Back in January I decided to set some goals for myself. It is now April, the year is 1/3 over and I am no where near reaching my goals. This could easily be seen as a bad thing, yet I could not be happier at how this year has turned out. The goals I set assumed that life would not happen and stand in the way of me reaching my goals.

 

Flashback.

 

January stared strong and I was feeling good. Then I had my first injury in years. When i say injury, I mean can’t train injury. I have had run of the mill bumps and bruises. This was the first time in about 5 years that I was in bad enough shape that I had to change everything that I was doing. The beauty with this injury was that I was able to look at what I was doing, look at my goals, and decide where I needed to go from there. I am very lucky to have people much smarter than I am to bounce ideas off of as well. 

 

As I look back at this injury it was the best thing to happen to my training in years. I have not competed in years and needed a new focus. This led me to being able to work on movements and weaknesses that I have not addressed in years. 

 

As for my goals?

 

I reached none of my January goals. Well, I did reach my reading goal, yet that was never really in question. As far as movement goals, I was not even close to any of them. My question for you is, do you think I would have been better if I had reached my goals and not be injured? I know what my thoughts on this are. 

 

I have never been a person who says, everything happens for a reason. I have twisted this saying to my own view, I believe, wise people learn lessons when things happen. The world and all of its happenings can be random and if we try hard enough then we will learn lessons from all these happenings. 

We can do it all this week if we

Now go out, set some goals, fail, learn, growth , and set some new goals. Fail better and maybe one day you will reach those goals. Whether you reach your goals or you don’t does not matter as the journey is really what matters and you’ll remember the struggles more then the goals. 

College Night, Part 2

Fitness

Hey everyone!

 

It is Montrell back with an ANNOUNCEMENT.  April 21, 2022, at 7 pm, the fantastic four interns will be hosting  College NIGHT at Union Fitness! The people have asked and now we are here to deliver.

 

The first college night was a big “W” we had 19 people in attendance. We would love to see more people present so tell a friend to tell a friend.

 

For those who do not know what College night. College Night will be a full-body workout in the Performance lab hosted by the Interns. The class will be open to college students for FREE. If you are interested in joining us, please click the link and sign up. Whether you are an experienced lifter or never exercised a day in your life. Come out and help the interns sharpen their skills as coaches and enjoy the vibes of UF!

 

The fantastic four is looking forward to seeing all of you there to have some fun!

 

Best,

Montrell

How Much Ya’ Bench?

Fitness, Life Health, Training

A long time ago Saturday Night Live had a skit called “How Much Ya Bench?” This as a Chris Farley classic. It was just a bunch of meatheads talking about bench press and all things meathead. This skit is now over 20 years old and I still love it. I love it for many reasons, first reason is that it’s funny. Yet, the second reason I love to watch it is to see how far lifters have come. I remember 20+ years ago the bench was the lift everyone talked about. At Push/Pull events there were many more benchers than deadlifters. Today it is quite the opposite.

 

Lifting in the 1990’s and into the 2000’s was dominated by bench press and men. Today meets will have people deadlifting, squatting, and women crushing big weights. What we see is that lifting has progressed far beyond where it was 2 decades ago. It is now usual to see a meet that has even numbers of males and females. Also, deadlift numbers have exploded. Lifters are stronger, healthier, and look much better.

 

My point to all of this takes me back to one of my favorite quotes.

 

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin

 

As a lifter if you wish to move forward then you MUST adjust to the sport. I often hear lifters talk about how it used to be. Yes, I have great memories of “how it used to be,” it is great to recall some great times. I remember competing against and amongst some legends and I look back positively on those times. Now, I have been passed by many young lifters and I have even learned from them. I am still trying to adapt. This takes me to one other quote that I try to live by.

 

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” Oscar Wilde

 

Morale to my story is that we must keep moving forward as well learning from and leaning on the people younger than us. Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome.

 

 

 

 

 

Dylan’s Triathlon Experience

Fitness, Life Health

What is one thing you find impossible?

 

Last year I decided to do what I previously thought was impossible. After joining my local gym, I took up swimming as a form of cardio. While in the pool one day I began chatting up another member and he mentioned that he was currently training for a triathlon. Feeling inspired, I went home and signed up for the next race that would take place in Maryland. With no formal swim training, no bike and only a few 5k races under my belt, I was in over my head (no pun intended).

 

Now that I was signed up, I needed to know how much I should be training (the race distances were 0.75k for the swim, a 15-mile bike, and a 5k run). So, I began working the hardest on my weakest link, which was swimming. I watched all the videos I could find on swim technique (breath count, streamline form, etc.) and developed a good stroke. I would swim three times a week (Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday) with increasing volume as the race got closer. For the most part I would spend about 2 hours in the pool each training session.

 

The order of a triathlon race goes: Swim, Bike, then Run. That just so happens to be the order of importance in my training as well. While developing my best Michael Phelps impression, I also was on the hunt for a bike. With most places asking well over $1,000 for a decent bike I struggled to justify spending that for one race. I ended up finding a good deal on an old Trek road bike that is 3 years older than I am. This ancient relic is what I would do my training on and what I would ultimately use on the big day. For my bike training I rode twice a week (Wednesday and Saturday). Each ride would be between 5-15 miles depending on how I was feeling that day. I was also supplementing my bike training by riding my bike to and from work. This leads me to the reason I thought this venture was impossible.

 

At the time of training I was working 40 hours a week at my job and also 25 hours a week at a coaching internship. The only thing I did in my spare time was eat, train, and sleep. There were days I wanted to quit and skip training or call into my internship and say I couldn’t make it. In those moments I remembered why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do what I thought was impossible. Every day I would wake up and repeat the mantra that kept progressing me forward: I am Endless. Endless energy, endless motivation, and endless determination to reach my goals.

 

I knew the running portion of the race would be the easiest for me because of my background in sports. So, I only trained 1-2 times a week and most of the time I just ran the distance of the race, which was a 5k. As time went on and the day of the race approached, I started including multiple sports a day into my training sessions. So some days I would swim then go run on the treadmill right after. Others I would even do all three sports in the same session.

 

When race day finally came, I was nervous and had doubts that I didn’t train hard enough. These doubts disappeared as I stared out from the starting line over the lake we would be swimming in. Again, I repeated my mantra and prepared for the countdown. When the start timer hit zero, we were off. As soon as I hit the water it’s like I forgot everything I practiced. My breathing was off, form was terrible, and I couldn’t see anything because of how dark the water was. But, these issues didn’t stop me from completing the hardest swim of my life. Getting out of the water I was so disoriented; I didn’t know up from down. But, I trotted over to the transition area, strapped up on my bike and took off.

 

The next 15 miles of the race were a breeze. The bike became my strongest part of the race and allowed me to catch up to many of the others. The course ventured over multiple uphills and downhills and overall we covered about 2500 meters of elevation. I took this time on the bike to pause mentally and enjoy the scenic views of Fort Ritchie, Maryland. As I had the final transition area in sight, I knew I only needed to push myself a little bit more.

 

The run portion of the race went well however, by that point I was drained. I moved as fast as I could, but every step felt like I had cement blocks around my feet. The entire run portion though I could see the finish line in my head and pictured crossing it. At the final straight away I gave it everything I had and finished strong with a time of 2 hours and 58 minutes.

 

I was exhausted, tired, fatigued, or whatever adjective you want to use. But I finished and I proved to myself that I could do what I thought was impossible. I challenge you to come up with something you think is impossible for you to do and go for it. Find that local race, powerlifting competition, or speaking event that you have always wanted to do but never thought you could. Life is short, enjoy the ride.

 

-Dylan Kopp