Adapt Fitness

You don’t have to be an athlete to train like one.

Sean isn’t training for a sport.
He’s training to be healthier, stronger, and more athletic in his everyday life.

And this is a great example of what that can look like.

In this clip, Athletic Therapist & Strength & Conditioning Coach Trent is teaching Sean the Deep Tier Switch Lunge — a plyometric variation that challenges him to rapidly absorb and produce force while moving through a deep range of motion.

Why use deep-tier plyometrics?
Because athleticism isn’t just about jumping higher or running faster.

It’s about teaching your body to:
→ Absorb force
→ Decelerate and control your body
→ Produce force quickly
→ Coordinate your upper and lower body
→ Stabilize through different positions
→ Move confidently through larger ranges of motion

We don’t throw exercises like this at people just because they look cool.

We build toward them.

Sean has come a long way from not being able to squat without back pain to becoming a consistent gym-goer who is now capable of handling movements like this.

That progression is the goal.
Build the foundation. Build the capacity. Then challenge it.

And for someone who wants to stay healthy, active, and injury-free for the long haul, developing athletic qualities is a pretty good investment.

Not every exercise variation is about making an exercise “harder.”

Sometimes we change the setup to change the movement strategy.

For this heel-elevated RDL, we’re looking for a few things:
→ Shift the centre of mass slightly forward and encourage the hips to travel further back
→ Keep the knees stacked over the mid-foot
→ Make the feet more active throughout the lift
→ Encourage more hip external rotation when that’s the goal

In Roy’s case, there’s another layer.

He runs a lot, so we don’t want every movement strategy to reinforce hanging out on the heels.
We want him to stay athletic and capable of using the entire foot to interact with the ground.

Think about jumping.
Try jumping while keeping your heels glued to the floor.
You probably aren’t getting very high.

Athletic movement requires us to be able to load, transfer and produce force through the foot—not simply live on our heels.

But here’s the important part: this doesn’t mean heel-elevated RDLs are better.

If your goal is simply max strength or maximizing muscle growth, we’d generally choose the traditional RDL setup.
If the goal is changing the movement strategy and developing a more athletic connection between the foot → hip → trunk, then this variation can be a useful tool.

Same exercise.
Different intent.

A Fun Ab Wheel Variation to Try 🔥

Looking for a new ab wheel variation to try?

Give this Half-Kneeling Ab Wheel Rollout a try.

The traditional ab wheel rollout is primarily an anti-extension exercise — your core works to prevent your spine from extending as you roll forward.

The half-kneeling position adds an asymmetrical challenge, forcing you to resist rotation and lateral flexion as well.

So while you’re still working the re**us and transverse abdominals, you’re also getting a lot more from the obliques and the smaller stabilizers around the lumbo-pelvic-hip complex.

Think of it as an ab wheel variation that gives you some of the benefits of a cable chop or other rotational core exercise — without actually rotating through the spine.

We like it because the goal isn’t to create rotation. It’s to resist it.
That makes it a great option for athletes who need their core to stay stable while the hips and shoulders move around it.

On top of that it’s a great mobility exercise for the lats, upper back and ITB band.

Simple, but definitely not easy.

Try it on both sides — which one feels more challenging? 👀

Crawling variations are one of the most underrated exercises for building a foundation of total-body coordination.

Here, Nash & Jackson are using lateral bear crawls primarily as movement prep—but there’s a lot more happening than simply “warming up.”

Crawling is also an important part of early human development. Before babies learn to walk, they spend a significant amount of time learning how to coordinate their hands, feet, hips, shoulders and trunk while moving across the ground.

That makes crawling an interesting movement to revisit throughout life.

For adults and athletes, getting back down on the ground and performing controlled crawl variations can be a great movement reset—challenging the body to coordinate multiple areas at once, while giving us an opportunity to reconnect with basic movement patterns.

The lateral component adds another layer.
Moving sideways on all fours challenges the hips, glutes, obliques and shoulders while requiring the trunk to resist unwanted rotation.

Why we like them:
→ Total-body coordination
→ Trunk stability & anti-rotation
→ Hip and shoulder stability
→ Frontal-plane movement
→ Body awareness and control
→ Low-impact movement preparation

They aren’t necessarily the main event.
But as movement prep, crawls can help athletes slow things down, reconnect with their body, and prepare for heavier movement.

Sometimes the best way to move better is to go back to the basics.

When’s the last time you got down on the ground and moved like this?

Gymnastic strength testing — and why Trent didn’t just hang the team from a bar.

A straight-arm hang is easy to default to. But it leans on passive tension through the joints and tendons, not the muscles doing the work. And with this group, a few of the girls are already strong straight-arm hangers — that test wouldn’t have told him anything new, and it would’ve eaten the whole session.

So he tested the 90° hold instead.

At 90°, there’s nowhere to rest. No jamming elbows into ribs, no hanging on the joints — just the biceps, lats, and grip fighting gravity at the exact point where a chin-up is weakest.

It’s a faster test, it protects the joints, and it actually tells him something about where each gymnast needs to get stronger.

How long would you have made it? 👇

When Lee first started working with us years ago, power wasn’t one of her strengths.

Today? It’s one of them.

That kind of change doesn’t happen from simply throwing a med ball around. It comes from consistently building the qualities that allow you to produce and transfer force.

Here, Lee is performing a half-kneeling med ball pass.

By taking the lower body out of the equation, we create a more stable base and make it much harder to “cheat” the movement by driving through the feet or shifting the hips.

Now Lee has to create and transfer force through her hip, trunk and upper body while keeping her pelvis and spine controlled.

It’s also a great way to train explosive power without the same impact demands as standing jumps or throws.

For Lee, this is just one exercise. But it’s also a pretty cool reminder of how much she’s developed over the years.

The things that used to be limitations can eventually become strengths. 💥

Most people bounce between a clinic and a gym after an injury — one provider for the assessment, another for rehab, a different one for training. Nobody talking to each other, and you re-explaining your story every time

Trent does all three himself.
* Assessment — Trent identifies what’s actually going on and why
* Rehab — he treats the root cause, not just the symptom
* Training — same person carries you straight into a performance plan, no handoff needed

One person. Every step. No re-explaining your story to someone new.

Book an Athletic Therapy or Training session with Trent — adaptplus.ca or call (902) 883-1939.

Nothing hypes us up more than watching Wyatt skip.

Here Wyatt is in the peaking phase of his strength & conditioning with Bryan before he heads to Montreal for a month of fight camp to prepare for his next pro fight in September.

This is the standard that shows up in this building every single day, and it’s contagious.

We’re ready to workout harder, how about you?