I’ve decided that this website desperately needs to be more focussed. Since I launched this site over 5 years ago, the topics of my blog posts and YouTube videos have been all over the map. Workouts with resistance bands, suspension straps, pull-up bar, dip/row bars, dumbbells, stability ball, parallettes, rings, jump rope, etc.

Sure, the general theme of this website has always been about how to exercise at home using minimal inexpensive equipment, but somewhere along the way I think I lost sight of the idea of “minimal inexpensive equipment”. Owning all of the equipment I listed in the first paragraph doesn’t exactly qualify as a minimal home gym setup.

A couple years ago I started to reduce the amount of equipment I own and film videos with. The first things to go were my dumbbells and the stability ball. Dumbbells are completely unnecessary if you have resistance bands, and I’ve never particularly cared for stability ball training even though I did film some stability ball workout videos a few years ago.

Yesterday I decided to take some steps to further simplify my home gym setup and to help focus the content I post on this website. The most recent two pieces of equipment to go are my parallettes and gymnastics rings. I found that that the more I used the parallettes, the less I liked using parallettes, and I decided to get rid of my rings because I hardly ever used them.

What equipment does that leave me with? Three main things: resistance bands, suspension straps, and dip/row bars. I don’t plan to mention suspension straps much here anymore because I recently launched a new website specifically geared towards suspension training. So that leaves only two pieces of gear to be discussed here: resistance bands and dip/row bars.

I thought about getting rid of the dip/row bars because they are nowhere near as versatile as resistance bands, but I really love my Lebert Equalizer and I can’t bring myself to part with it, so I’ve decided to keep the EQ and mention it here from time to time, but focus the content mostly towards resistance band training.

So the plan going forward is to focus the content posted on this website specifically towards home workouts using resistance bands, and occasionally include some Lebert Equazlier workouts from time to time. Probably 90% resistance bands and 10% EQ.

My hope is that this new focus will be a good thing, as the vast majority of people who come to my website and YouTube channel are looking for the best info on home exercise with resistance bands, so going forward the plan is to make this website almost entirely focussed towards that topic.

Here’s a great question I just found in the search logs for my website:

why is exercise such a pain in the ass

That’s an easy one. The reason exercise is such a pain in the ass is most people don’t put in the effort required to figure out what type of exercise they enjoy, so instead they’re left doing workouts they hate and asking questions like “Why is exercise such a pain in the ass?”

If you hate going to the gym, don’t go to the gym. There are lots of other ways to exercise that are significantly more enjoyable than boring gym workouts. Too many options for me to possibly list here, but to give you a personal example, the main form of exercise I do is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It’s super-fun and doesn’t feel like exercise.

Now go out and find your own fun fitness related activity or sport that you have so much fun with, you’ll never again have to drag yourself to the local health club for another boring gym workout.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve mentioned the 5-Factor Diet program various times on this blog, and I even filmed the following review for the program over four years ago:

But since the 5-Factor Diet book was originally published back in 2007, I recently conducted an extensive search to try to discover whether there are any newer nutrition programs out there that I like even more than the 5-Factor Diet.

The result of my research is that 6 years after it was published, the 5-Factor Diet is still by far the best nutrition program on the planet for the vast majority of men and woman who’s goals are simply to lose some fat so that they look and feel better.

Every other eating plan I looked into was way too complicated and therefore difficult (if not impossible) for the average person to follow. The 5-Factor Diet is by far the simplest eating program ever created. No other nutrition plan even comes close to the simplicity that the 5-Factor Diet offers.

So if you’re interested in eating healthier and you’re looking for the world’s simplest and most effective nutrition program, look no further than the 5-Factor Diet. The hardcover version currently costs just $9.98 on Amazon.com, and I promise you that it will be the best $10 you’ll ever spend.

I just did a YouTube search for videos about the Rebook Gravity Trainer, and although I didn’t find any Gravity Trainer videos, I did come across this gem:

I had to check date on the video to make sure it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke (the video was posted in October). What moron at Rebook decided it was a good idea to develop an exercise device based on the 80′s Pogo Ball?

Today on my YouTube channel, someone asked me about targeting the “inner chest”. I wrote the following response:

It’s impossible to target that area, but most bodybuilders hilariously and mistakenly believe that it’s possible to target the inner chest, so if you want misguided advice on how to do the impossible, you’ll need to ask that question to a meathead bodybuilder.

The popularity of fitness boot camps was at its peak in 2009. Since then, people have steadily lost interest in fitness boot camps, and that has never been more obvious to me than this morning when I was at the park with a personal training client.

We trained at the same park that I used to run my boot camp program at. Back when my boot camp was running, there were two or three other boot camps running in this particular park, and there would be 50 to 100 people (split up among various boot camps) exercising there on weekday mornings.

Today was the first time in two years that I have been at the park during the typical morning boot camp hours (6am-8am). The last time I was at the park that early was when I was running my own boot camp program and the park was packed with boot camp participants.

Take a wild guess how many boot campers were at the park this morning from 6am-8am. The number of boot camp participants at the park this morning was zero. I find that shocking because this particular park is the premium outdoor boot camp location in downtown Vancouver.

So what does this say about the decline of fitness boot camps? I think it says that fitness boot camps haven’t just declined over the years, they’ve died. Perhaps they’re still popular in other cities, and they’ve just died in Vancouver, but it seems to me that fitness boot camps are dying pretty much everywhere.

Certainly outdoor fitness boot camps are a dead end business at this point, but it looks like as outdoor boot camps have lost popularity, the popularity of indoor boot camp programs has increased.

Its possible that the boot camp fad isn’t dead, but rather the temporary craze of people wanting to exercise outdoors in the pissing rain is dead. In which case bringing the popular boot camp exercise format indoors is a natural evolution that was bound to happen, and perhaps the indoor boot camp format will have more longevity.

Will indoor boot camps be around in a few years? Its possible, but I certainly wouldn’t be on it. My guess is that in the next two years, most indoor boot camp programs will be gone, just like how most outdoor boot camps have disappeared in the past couple of years. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.

GoFit recently released a knockoff of the LifelineUSA Power Wheel called the Extreme Ab Wheel. Here are the two products side by side:

The Extreme Ab Wheel is clearly just a cheap copy of the Power Wheel. Every aspect of the GoFit product looks worse than the LifelineUSA product.

The Power Wheel retails for $49.99, so I figured the Extreme Ab Wheel would cost around $20 to $25, and at that price it wouldn’t be a bad buy for people looking for a budget version of the Power Wheel.

Turns out the Extreme Ab Wheel costs $59.99, which makes the Extreme Ab Wheel a decidedly rotten deal. The verdict: avoid the GoFit Extreme Ab Wheel and choose the LifelineUSA Power Wheel all the way.

My workout today was 50 reps each of two of the best exercises you can do for your upper-body: dips and bodyweight rows using the Lebert Equalizer. The workout format was as basic as it gets: do 50 dips (broken up into as many sets as you need, taking as much rest as you need), then do 50 bodyweight rows (again, take as many sets and as much rest as you need). 50 dips, 50 rows, workout over.

I stumbled upon a pretty unbelievable video last night on YouTube. The video showed two “fitness trainers” (I use that term very lightly) bumbling around like fools as they tried to figure out how to properly setup a TRX Suspension Trainer so they could film exercise videos with it.

Besides the fact that any idiot should be able to easily figure how to setup a TRX, what bothers me most about the video was that those two clowns acknowledged that neither of them had ever used a TRX before, yet they were about to film exercise videos showing you how to workout with the TRX. Jackasses.

For the record, I got into suspension training back in early 2008, and I completed the TRX Suspension Training Course in the summer of 2008. For the past 5+ years, I’ve been teaching suspension training to my local boot camp and personal training clients, and posting videos online helping people around the world learn how to workout with suspension straps.

So if you’re looking for quality information online about how to workout safely and effectively with suspension straps, make sure the trainers you’re watching know what the hell they’re doing, and that they’re not just two bumbling idiots trying to teach suspension training when they themselves have never done suspension training before, and don’t even know how to setup the straps.