In episode 68 of the Strength System podcast, coaches Nivedhan and Cheryl discuss their respective experiences with training through pain - a 2 year old hernia for Nivedhan and costochondritis for Cheryl. They discuss: - their experience with the medical industry in navigating through pain, - contradictory messaging that they received and how they managed the fear and panic often associated with long-term pain experiences, - how taking accountability for their situation helped come to terms with their new 'normal', - questions to ask the medical industry when going in with pain, especially in the context of returning to training, - modifying and managing training through pain.  If you're someone who deals with any kind of pain, give this a listen!

In this week's episode, coach Nivedhan catches up with Cheryl, who co-runs Muscle Mechanics, a YouTube channel that's established itself to be the gold standard for fitness information in Tamil, especially in the context of muscle building and body transformations.  They discuss: - benefits of muscle building other than for aesthetics  - top 3 factors that can affect muscle building  - realistic and practical timelines for someone to look like a magazine model - low hanging fruits everyone can prioritise to keep building muscle along with other training goals  - common mistakes people tend to make during initial stages of muscle building  - closing thoughts on body image issues and training for aesthetics  If you're interested in building muscle, we highly recommend giving this a listen!

In this episode, coaches Prashanti and Nivedhan catch up with he who wishes to remain anonymous aka Muscle Hypertrophy on Instagram. They discuss everything from the role that meme pages can play in dismissing fitness misinformation to how people can identify misinformation online to the accurate ways of drinking water.

In episode 64 of the Strength System podcast, coaches Nivedhan and Prashanti catch up with 5 of our most consistent and bad ass members, all of them with different goals and expectations from their relationship with fitness.  We discuss: - their first training experiences.  - their training goals and how they've evolved over time.  - their relationship with training and how they view progress.  - ways in which they've managed to build a long-term relationship with training and stay consistent.  - things they wish they'd known when they first started training and advice to anyone who's just starting to figure out training.  If you're someone who currently trains or are considering getting started on training or are struggling with staying consistent with it, we highly recommend you give this one a listen!

What happens when things don't go according to plan? Maybe you lack motivation to train, or your progress plateaus, or you're dealing with pain or injury. In episode 63 of the Strength System Podcast, we talk about how to troubleshoot your training program when you hit one of these roadblocks. This is the 3rd part of a series, so make sure you listen to the previous 2 episodes for maximum context!

Episode 62 of the Strength System podcast is up! Picking up from the previous episode, Varun and Chirag discuss how to approach an actual training program. You have a piece of paper (or a pdf) with exercises, sets, reps and (maybe) weight written out. How do you go about translating this into a workout? And how do you progress these workouts every week?  We walk you through how we approach training programs and how we help our trainees make decisions when we coach them. Next week, we'll cover how to troubleshoot when things don't go according to plan, so stay tuned for that!

Training ought to be relatively simple, but the fitness industry loves to make it unnecessarily hard.   Usually with arbitrary rules like: - doing an exercise with imperfect technique is useless - having 'must-do' exercises for specific complaints - emphasizing warm ups, mobility and cardio more than actually training productively   The trouble with all of these is that they make you less likely to actually enjoy training and make it a part of your life.   In this episode of the podcast, we talk about how we like to view fitness and some really, really basic principles for long-term success.

Strength training during pregnancy can be a controversial topic and often heavily misunderstood! Since our opinion will be biased when it comes to this topic, we thought it might be best to bring on two experts to talk about training during pregnancy.  Gayatri, who is currently on her second pregnancy and Amrita, who trained through her pregnancy a few years ago, talk to coaches Prashanti and Varun about their personal experiences.  If you're considering getting pregnant or are currently pregnant, we highly recommend you give this a listen!

Ever been a little skeptical of those sensationalist media stories reporting the latest nutrition study? You should be.   Varun and Chirag discuss a typical newspaper article they came across lately about eggs and diabetes and how the actual study's findings were rather different. So do eggs really increase your risk of diabetes? No, despite whatever the headline on your newspaper might be screaming.