I was asked by my 5 year olympic lifting coach when I started training with him what my priority for coaching people was and we were both surprised by my answer, it was mobility. This is when I was working in LA Fitness amongst bodybuilder style personal trainers, I had trained along and with them only to find shortly after I was suffering a shoulder impingement which is why I got interested in Olympic Lifting in the first place because those guys can be biomechanical geniuses. After all, in my head strength and mobility is fundamental from standing positions from the legs being in a deep knee bend and the arms being lengthened and locked overhead, to me this is true functional strength in the frontal plane, or face to face.

Unfortunately, Olympic Lifting wasn’t enough for me because unless your designed for the sport theres a limit with what you can do with it. It’s certainly great for power, speed, flexibility, posture and functional strength. Then there’s martial arts, brilliant mobility in bending forward and twisting and massive development in moving laterally, at least if you want to be a good fighter and well conditioned. Now lets go back to the drawing board… My calling in personal training is long term health, mobility and superhuman strength. For me, superhuman powers come from developing yourself daily or with commitment and frequency and I can’t see bodybuilding or martial arts as an entire system by themselves but combine the two and you have awesome power.

Martial arts lacks the joint and ligament strength, it doesn’t necessarily give you a strong lower back or posture, it does give you fantastic movement of the spine and mobility and endurance of the body, lifting weight when done expertly gives you incredible function, strength, power, posture, but it doesn’t provide a vast array of movements patterns and sudden changes of direction.

What’s necessary is a mix of both, and what does that look like? Someone who has powerful posture and confidence, someone who has self confidence because they have multiple skill sets, balance, timing and coordination and someone who can move and is simply an all round powerful person. For me, the balance of both is the way forward which is why here at AWPTS with have a variety of trainers from martial arts to strength training so that you can acquire both skill sets for holistic health and wellbeing.