Brad and Naomi Leeman wanted to combine their love of fitness with their desire to have more family time. So they created the SwingSesh: a combination home gym and playground setup. 

Brad serves as a Test Pilot in the US Marine Corps and Naomi is an urban design consultant. They came up with the idea for the SwingSesh, designed and engineered it, found a manufacturer, and now have their product available for other busy parents looking to stay active along with their kids. 

In this interview, we chat about how parents can model good relationships with exercise to their children and how they took their product from a dream to production.

So you've been counting your calories and trying to make sure you're in a caloric deficit, but your weight loss has stopped...or worse...you're losing muscle mass. How do you continue to lose weight and make sure it's body fat and not muscle that you're losing?

In this episode, I give you 7 ways to kickstart your weight loss and make sure you’re losing fat instead of muscle. These methods may not be the first things you think of, but they will keep your metabolism revving throughout the day, and still allow you to crush your goals in the gym while dropping weight.

This week on the show we’ve got Straight Shot Coach Megan Foland. Like most personal trainers in 2020, she had a pretty wild year, except Megan also had a baby in 2020, worked as a respiratory therapist, helped with the opening of our sister company, Kinetix Physiotherapy & Performance, and started coaching for us here at Straight Shot. 

We get into all of that in our chat plus we discuss her experience as an Ironman Triathlete, share tips from her nutrition blog, and get a glimpse of how busy parents can juggle family, work, nutrition, and training, AND recovery.

Motivation is overrated. 

Sooner or later, no matter how motivated you are to start something, that motivation will fade. And when the motivation to eat healthily, work out, and recover well isn’t there, what do you REALLY need to stick with it?

It’s Dedication.

In this episode, I share some practical strategies to help you get dedicated to accomplishing your health and fitness goals by properly structuring your training, nutrition, and recovery.  

Continuing with our series on coaches who embraced the challenges of 2020, we have Jess Racz, C.S.C.S. from JR Performance. 

Even before the lockdown hit, she was paving her own path, being a female strength and conditioning coach in a male-dominated industry. I first met Jess when she was in high school, working out at a gym that I worked at. We’ve kept in touch over the years and it’s been amazing to see her growth as a coach. But what she accomplished last year is on a whole other level.

Jess started her own performance coaching business and opened a physical location in the middle of the shutdown and has grown JR Performance to be a hot spot for young athletes to come and build both strength and self-confidence with her unique approach. 

In this episode, Jess shares her experience from last year and all of the struggles and challenges she’s had to face along the way to becoming the coach and mentor that she is today. 

This is the first episode in a series of interviews with coaches, trainers, and business owners who didn’t just go on defense during the pandemic; they charged headfirst into making sure they were still able to help their clients, provide for their families, and grow their businesses by pivoting and rolling with the punches throughout a tumultuous year.

My first guest in this series is George Bolden from Bolden Movement. George was working at a local Frederick gym with dreams of going full time with his own side hustle when the pandemic and shutdown hit. He saw this challenge as an opportunity to take the risk and go all-in on his own business...and it paid off. George now runs Boot Camps in parks, does in-home and small group training, holds local fundraisers, and has big plans for growing his company. George’s enthusiasm and energy empower his clients to take charge of their health and make the changes and sacrifices they need to, in order to reach their goals.

Ever wonder why you keep injuring yourself while working out, EVEN if you weren’t using bad form? Well, there are a TON of other reasons why you may have injured yourself and keep injuring yourself. In this episode, I go through a list of possible reasons behind these bumps in the road with your training, and how making these changes in your workouts can have you training more consistently since you aren’t constantly dealing with nagging injuries. 

Note: Completely forgot to add SLEEP to this list! How could I forget that?! If you don't sleep 7-8+ hours a night, you're going to run into issues with recovery, and risk getting hurt!

The Straight Shot coaches share our own worst gym moments along with a bunch of your submissions from social media.

Look, embarrassing stuff in the gym happens, so we use this episode to laugh it all off together and encourage you to keep coming back and bettering yourself each workout.

You'll hear about falling asleep in a yoga class, pooping under a bush, odd bodily sounds on heavy lifts, throwing up on a Goodwill donation box, lots of trips, falls, and funny fails, and other stories we could barely read we were laughing so hard. 

One of our funniest episodes to date...don't skip this one!

If you're looking to balance your many fitness goals, DUP is a method of organizing your workouts throughout the week to accomplish just that.

Personally, I used the DUP program I lay out in this episode to hit PR's on all of my lifts while still staying mobile and athletic AND drop 20 pounds over the course of 15 weeks. 

In addition to sharing my own experimentation with this training style, I lay out a sample program you can use to start training this way as soon as you're finished listening to the episode!

To drink, or not to drink?

If you're a listener of this show, you know we're all about moderation. But what exactly are all those tasty beverages doing to your ability to achieve your fitness goals?

In this episode, I lay out what alcohol does to your ability to lose weight, get stronger, run farther, and recover faster, and how a little moderation can make a huge difference in your fitness.