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Category: Exercise, Maintenance and Monitoring

Smith Performance Center strength coaches lifting in a gym, demonstrating proper form and technique, emphasizing their expertise in strength training and injury prevention.

Unlocking Your Health Potential: The SPC Phase Concept of Exercise, Maintenance and Monitoring

At Smith Performance Center, you will hear us mention “phases” or see references on the website or social posts.  If this is your first introduction, welcome! The SPC Phase Concept is the cornerstone of our approach. It’s a system designed to solve health challenges, keep you moving, and provide a shared framework for our team to deliver exceptional care. Why the SPC Phases Matter Our mission is to help people stay active, healthy, and capable of enjoying their lives. The five SPC Phases guide you from identifying your problem to progressing toward peak performance. The phases aren’t a one-time journey—they form a cyclical process designed to meet you where you are, adapt to your needs, and keep you moving forward. A key turning point in this system is Phase 4: Exercise, Maintenance, and Monitoring. This phase helps you establish consistency in your health routine while addressing one of the greatest

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A graphic illustrating the relationship between fatigue and fitness, showing how training stress, recovery, and adaptation impact overall performance.

Maximize Your Season: Structuring Endurance & Strength Training with Three Key Questions

Structuring your endurance and strength programming can make or break your training. To help clarify your training schedule, we use three key questions to correctly scaffold the program. While the typical question we hear circles around sport-specific exercises, more important questions often get missed—questions that can make or break the season and influence your performance on race day. Question 1: Are You In-Season or Off-Season? Your immediate reaction might be, “I’m not sure what the difference is.”  To clarify, our strength coach, Spencer, offers this guidance: “If you’re building up to a specific race and tapering to maximize fitness while reducing fatigue, you’re in-season. Out of season might still include races, but it’s not aimed at peak performance.” To put it succinctly, here’s how our team defines it: So, which one are you currently in? Once you know, we can get specific. If You’re In-Season: For athletes training in-season, here’s

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A speaker at Smith Performance Center giving a lecture on exercise barriers and habit formation. The discussion covers evolutionary mismatch, injury risks, shifting barriers, and the gap between knowledge and action in fitness adherence.

The 4 Reasons Exercise is Hard to Start and Maintain

Starting an exercise program usually begins with a detailed look at your goals and a plan to achieve them.  Showing up consistently is assumed. After decades in the health and wellness industry as a personal trainer, strength coach, exercise physiologist, and physical therapist, I’ve seen firsthand that the problem isn’t your goals, program structure, or knowledge of the importance of exercise. You already know regular exercise is crucial. Nor is the problem finding a place to work out, scheduling gym time, or getting the right equipment for home. The real issue is execution: showing up and doing the work.  Exercise is hard to start.  Exercise is hard to maintain. Why? There are four major reasons: Evolutionary Mismatch We did not evolve to exercise; we evolved to conserve calories. Our ancestors developed in an environment with limited access to calories. The body’s ability to conserve energy allowed humans to survive periods

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How to use On Demand Supplement Workouts within your normal exercise routine

At SPC, we’re excited to announce that our supplemental workouts will be available on our On Demand platform.  However, we understand that there may be a learning curve associated with incorporating these workouts into your routine.  That’s why we want to ensure you have the resources to make the most of this valuable tool for future reference. If you’re unsure about what the supplemental programs entail, we encourage you to check out our blog post, ‘ The 4 Types of SPC Supplemental Workouts.‘ We will go into each aspect of the workout, why, and when to add the supplemental workouts. Understanding the Structure: Components of a Workout A single workout, at the most simple level, should include a prep component and a workout component. But this misses other aspects that often occur at SPC. Let’s define these components first: Prep: Getting your body ready for exercise. Skill Development: Learning or

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The 4 Types of SPC Supplemental Workouts

The foundation of our programming is the strength workout. Building upon this foundation using a progressive overload approach is essential for long-term strength and fitness gains. Incorporating supplemental workouts can provide variety, target specific muscle groups and movement patterns, develop new skills, and enhance overall fitness and performance. Supplemental workouts can serve various purposes, such as addressing weaknesses, improving mobility, treating recurrent injuries, reducing risk for falls or simply adding diversity to training. They include exercises like mobility drills, corrective exercises, accessory movements, and conditioning work. By integrating supplemental workouts into your programming, you create a more well-rounded and balanced training regimen. This approach not only helps to prevent boredom and plateaus but also allows for continuous improvement and adaptation over time. We want to review the types of supplemental workouts in this article. The 4 types of supplemental workouts We have 4 types of supplemental workouts: We will explain

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What is the difference between Phase 3: Activity Progression and Phase 4: Exercise, Maintenance, and Monitoring?

Welcome to the transition zone—phase 3 to phase 4—at Smith Performance Center. This shift marks an important move from rehabilitation to performance. We’re committed to ensuring that our community doesn’t get stuck in a permanent rehab mindset. The switch from rehab mode to peak performance mode can pose challenges, demanding careful consideration and expert guidance. Phase 3 is all about building up tissue capacity, gradually ramping up activity levels, and prioritizing overall well-being. It involves strengthening muscles, alleviating muscle inhibition, closely monitoring responses to increased activity, and addressing any lingering issues stemming from previous inactivity. Essentially, it’s about improving tissue capacity while laying down a solid foundation for what comes next. In contrast, phase 4 signifies a fresh chapter, with a focus on establishing a consistent exercise routine and raising the bar for performance standards. Our goal here isn’t just to ‘move’ but to instill a long-term commitment to fitness

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Strength coach teaching a banded isometric deadlift at Smith Performance Center, emphasizing proper technique, core activation, and injury prevention.

11 Reasons Personal Training With Our Strength Coaches Is The Right Choice For You

Struggling to Stay Consistent with Exercise? You’re Not Alone. Ever felt stuck in a fitness rut? You want to exercise, but between work, family, and old injuries, it feels impossible to stay consistent. At Smith Performance Center, we make fitness work for real life. Our strength coaches provide expert one-on-one training to help you build strength, recover from injuries, and create a sustainable routine—without the guesswork. Why Personal Training with a Strength Coach is the Right Choice We know that maintaining an active lifestyle is difficult. Technology has made life easier but also less active—more driving, more sitting, and less natural movement. Add in work commitments, past injuries, and uncertainty about the right exercises, and it’s no surprise that fitness takes a back seat. But it doesn’t have to. Working with a strength coach ensures that you’re training effectively, progressing safely, and staying accountable. Here’s how our one-on-one training at

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Optimizing Your Strength Training: The Role of Open Clinics at Smith Performance Center

At Smith Performance Center (SPC), our primary aim is to facilitate a healthy and active lifestyle for all our members. One of the tools we employ to overcome potential barriers to consistent exercise is the utilization of open clinics, which play a crucial role in addressing pain and injuries. An open clinic session lasts for 15 minutes and serves four primary purposes: The genesis of the open clinic concept dates back to January 2018 at Smith Performance Center. Initially conceived as a space for members to report new injuries, discomfort, or movement issues, these sessions soon became integral to our strength training approach. On the first weekend, our physical therapist triaged six people.  Now after five thousand sessions, we recognize their significance in supporting a healthy lifestyle. Why do open clinics matter? Injury prevention, often a cornerstone in healthcare and fitness, presents challenges.  Being active inherently involves a degree of

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The 4 Unique Training Variables Used By Our Team To Improve Workout Success

Creating a single, hard workout is easy.   Creating a series of workouts that improve your overall fitness is not. Creating a true program that builds your skill set, builds your confidence, and adjusts for soreness or an emerging injury is extremely difficult. In the same vein, it is not hard to develop a physical therapy exercise list that targets a single problem, like glute inhibition. It is much harder to progress post-injury using strength training when we need to push the edge of the tissue capacity.  Programming a workout needs to consider numerous, modifiable variables. Remember a modifiable variable is anything you can change in the workout to optimize the training session and the overall programming scheme. At a minimum, you need to consider intensity, sets and reps, rest intervals, frequency of workouts, and supersets.   The minimum however does not optimize your workout and sometimes these are not the most

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