Hello there! It’s your neighborhood personal training gym, Spark Fitness. I’m Connor and I own the place. Today I’m going to write briefly about how we help ladies – or anyone – grow their glutes in a strength training and personal training setting. Glute Activation. This is a crucial part to training your glutes that many people don’t get: if you don’t feel your glutes working when you are working out, and don’t feel your glutes get sore post workout, then you’re not going to be able to grow them. We start everyone with a series of glute activation workouts which teaches people to use their glutes! If this gets skipped, you’re missing out on glute gains in your training. Glute Biased Technique. After this, all of our movements have glute biased technique. There are several different ways to squat, and many of them don’t target the glutes very well....Read more

This is a continuation of our last article about strength training for men 50+. You can catch up on that one here. In this quick article we’re going to detail a couple proven strategies for continuing to get strong after 50, and after the standard Novice Linear Progression stops working. Novice Linear Progression Quick review – the Novice Linear Progression or NLP is a fancy way of saying that when you’re a beginning, the best and fastest way to get strong is just to add 5lbs to each lift every time you train. This works for 6-18 months. Typical results would be to take an average man from a 0lb squat to 300lbs in 6-9 months doing this. (Emphasis on typical – if you don’t have a proper program and guidance, this would seem crazy. But doing an appropriately designed strength program yields results like this all the time.) Everyone...Read more

This is a question I get all the time. As always, I’m going to answer it in the most digestible, concrete way possible. (If you’re new here: What is Strength Training? What is Strength Training? 2.0) Regardless of age, height, weight, experience… Men: 135lb press, 225lb bench press, 315lb squat, 405lb deadlift. Women: 80lb press, 105lb bench press, 205 squat, 250lb deadlift. For some people in the world (…almost no one) these lifts won’t seem very heavy or impressive. But for 99% of people this is very, very strong. And you know what – it shouldn’t be. With proper training and consistency, these lifts are attainable for 99% of people, regardless of starting age/height/weight. The majority of people don’t reach these lifts for 4 reasons. Programming issues. Without knowing it, most “functional fitness” programs don’t actually program for strength… at least not very well. If you get on a true...Read more

In this article, I’m going to write about a few things. First, what you should do different if you are a man that is 50+ vs other ages, and how we do exactly those things at Spark Fitness in North Hollywood. You should come away with a few great nuggets of info on how to approach your training, and hopefully you’ll see we have really great strategies for helping men over the age of 50 get in shape! If you are over 50, you should do some things differently than say, someone who is 15, 25, 35, or even 65! What You Should Do First, being strong is the single most important thing you can be. Thus, strength training is the most important thing you can do. It is the only way to build muscle, strengthen your tendons/ligaments, maximizes your usefulness, helps manage blood pressure, and anyone that said strength...Read more

In this article I’m going to share how personal training at Spark Fitness in North Hollywood will help women that want to gain muscle do so safely, and quickly! First – if you want to gain muscle there is only one way to do so, and that’s strength training. Read about it here and here. Here is our approach in 6 simple steps: Excellent technique. First, we help you develop excellent technique. We are fanatics when it comes to weightlifting/strength training technique. We can explain every tiny detail (but we don’t have to). We will give you the technique you need in order to gain muscle safely and quickly. Appropriate training frequency. Then, we get you on the appropriate amount of training session per week, for you. For 95% of the population, this is 3x/week. (But sometimes 1x/week is better than 6x) Recovery. We give you all the tools you...Read more