Stop Blaming Tightness: Train These 4 Muscles More

Want to become a SUCCESSFUL personal trainer? SUF-CPT is the FASTEST growing personal training certification in the world!

Want to ask us a question? Email info@showupfitness.com with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
Become a Successful Personal Trainer Book Vol. 2 (Amazon): https://a.co/d/1aoRnqA
NASM / ACE / ISSA study guide: https://www.showupfitness.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Seminar Roadmap
• 0:28 2026 Locations And Focus
• 1:22 Career Pathways And Hiring Support
• 2:22 The Four Undervalued Muscles
• 2:49 Rethinking Psoas: Tests And Training
• 3:59 Train All Three Traps
• 4:48 Hip Stabilizers And Unilateral Gaps
• 6:08 Calf Complex And Practical Correctives
• 7:50 Volume, Endurance, And Takeaways

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showufffitness.com. Also make sure to check out my book, How to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy, y'all. Welcome back to the Show Up Fitness Podcast. 30 days of podcasting. We are on day two at the Lakeshore Irvine seminar. We are focusing more on lower body as we focus on 2026, Atlanta, Phoenix, Red Bank, Dumbo, New York, Houston. Those are the five that we have in the books for Q1 of 2026. It depends on which one you go to because it will be either upper body or lower body focus. Prior to these last three that we've done in 2025, the seminar was full body. But we have 10 soft tissue techniques that we teach. And what this allows for us to do is come back to that market. So for example, January 9th and 10th, we're going to be in Atlanta. We're going to crush it. We're going to link up with some awesome instructors there. And then we'll be able to come back anywhere from three, six, nine months later. So it allows for us to get more familiar with the market, meet the trainers, and optimize our referral tree because we want to open up more gyms and have a really good farm system for creating the best trainers out there. And every single seminar that we go to, we talk to management, the number one complaint they have, we cannot find great talent. That's why they love SUF CPTs. Congrats to Caleb. He just got hired at Lifetime Lakeshore because he showed up to that seminar. We coach them through how to interview, links them up. We cannot guarantee you getting hired, but we can guarantee you an interview. And when you go to a seminar, you really get to show off your skills. So help Nick, as I talk about in my book, if you have those things across the board, they're going to want you. So then you're going to start making significantly more than like in an Equinox. I'm a big fan of Lifetime, obviously, because of our partnership. Equinox is right up there with them. So if there's no lifetimes around you, but hell, move to a market. We have a lot of students that just graduated this last course and they're going to be going to Vegas. They're going to be going to Tennessee because there's opportunities there with Lifetime. So put that into your think tank. And when you look at your seminar schedule for 2026, today we're going to be talking about the four muscles that we don't train enough. And this is not only geared towards your clients, but also for you. This is when I suggest being a selfish trainer. If you were to look at these four exercises and tests that you could do today and you're weak in these areas, do them every session with your clients because your clients will benefit and so will you. And that's just going to bulletproof your body. Beginning with number one, the most blame muscle for pretty much everything, the SOAS major. You have lower cross syndrome and your psoas is tight and overactive and your glutes are underactive. We need to fix you. Well, maybe your psoas isn't being trained enough under concentric load. When was the last time you put some bands on your toes and you lift it up as fast as you can? Here's a simple little test to see how strong your psoas is. Can you stand on one leg with your hip flexed to 130 degrees? So your knee is bent and hold that for 30 seconds without any discomfort in your hip flexors. And I would be willing to bet that you're going to experience some tightness. Just like if you were to do a plank, you're going to feel it in your low back. It's because your low back is weak. Our hip flexors are not the culprit of being overactive, they're the culprit of not being trained enough under load. So do some leg swings. Extend quickly back behind your body in the sagittal plane. Bring it up with flexion. Hold for five seconds. Repeat for five to ten reps. That's going to be type two recruitment for that forward concentric swing, but then holding isometrically, that's like doing a plank for your psoas. Do more loaded, concentric psoas work in the sagittal plane. Number two, when we look at the upper body, I would say that this muscle group is the same as the psoas. We like to blame it for everything. You have shoulder pain, it's because of your traps. Oh, you're weak here. Focus on all three traps, not just the middle and lower, because those are stereotypically not as strong. We do have a propensity to recruit the upper traps faster. So, like when we do a row, it's very common to shrug up. But why not load up those upper traps as well? Do pronated wide horizontal abducted rows because that's going to hit the middle and lower traps. When you're doing an overhead press, focus on the eccentric control because those upward rotators have to control that eccentric motion. I feel that for the shoulder health, if we focus on getting those three muscles significantly stronger, it would have a huge impact overall on shoulder mobility, stability, and overall strength. Number three, two part here, it's hip stabilizers in the frontal plane. So that's going to be your abductors, your glute mead upper fibers of the glute max, as well as the adductors, specifically your adductor magnus. We do not train these muscles under load very much. Can you do a side plank with a four-pound little wrap around your ankle with your leg abducted above parallel? Look at the post that I'm going to do today, and you'll see that on one side, my right leg, I'm significantly above parallel. On my left side, I can barely get to parallel, and I only can hold for about 15 seconds. Whereas on the right side, I can do it for 30. These are great exercises that you incorporate with your clients. Now, if they can't even lift their leg up, you can throw a weighted ankle brace on your ankle, hold there while they're doing it just with their body weight. These are great things to incorporate to challenge your clients to get stronger where they're typically very, very weak. And I guarantee you, where you're weak, they're definitely weak as well. So during the warm up, during the cool down, you can incorporate these exercises, mobility, stretches to improve yourself, which is ultimately helping your clients. And that's why I say it's selfish because you're working on your weaknesses, but they're benefiting as well. And guys, specifically, when you look at the lower body patterns, a hinge, a squat, a unilateral. We don't do a lot of unilateral work, definitely focus more on squatting and hinging. And when we hinge, it's gonna be more deadlifting. So we're not thrusting to really focus on the glutes. When we squat, we don't get below parallel. So we're not getting full activation of all those hip muscles because we're doing it bilaterally. So when you isolate and you add in some adductions with a cable or use the quote unquote girl machines, the A-Bductions and A deductions, those are amazing to incorporate because those are muscles that we're not training via isolation. Yeah, you're gonna get some work under load with the synergist when you're squatting or when you're doing lunges, Bulgarians, and so forth. Most of your clients that you're training are doing bilateral leg work and not unilateral. This is where I give women a ton of respect because they do a great job of hitting the entire hip. Flexion, extensors, A B, A deductors, they're doing it bilaterally, unilaterally, different rep ranges, but also isolation. So if you look at low back health, if you look at knee health, ankle health, if we're just doing sagittal extensions via squatting and hinging, it's not optimizing the complete hip blueprint and total health. So let's bulletproof the hip, which is going to ultimately help with your knee as well as your ankles. And then the last muscle group that I don't see us training enough are gastroc, nemius, and the soleus. Plant our flexors at the ankle, but also for the gastroc, it's going to be a knee flexor. But we don't do a lot of work for the posterior calf muscles. We definitely don't do enough work on the anterior calf muscles. So you could just piggyback those together. Do some farmers' walks on your toes one way, drop the weight, and then walk back on your heels. We get into a lot of the soft tissue at the knee, at the hip, the QL, as well as the plantar fascia. So you can look at those drills and then implement the correctives. I think correctives are game changers for trainers to implement on themselves because, again, your clients are going to get the benefit as well. Why not implement five, 10, 15 sets per day? Because the volume isn't volitional. You're not doing like a one rep max cable adduction or putting that weighted thing on your ankle and doing a one rep max. You're doing this for eight to 12 plus reps, more endurance, local muscular endurance. So by implementing these four strategies on these weak areas, you're just going to improve the total health and wellness of your system. Give them a shot, let us know what you think. And remember strong so as muscles are better than weak ones, and keep shut up.