FLO FITNESS

Check out our article on the Alternative Press. http://thealternativepress.com/articles/brawlhouses-chris-flores-selected-as-coach-for-t-1

There was a man who would take his horse everyday down to the river and drink. One day he brought the horse down to the river and he wouldn't drink. The man found this odd but thought nothing of it. The next day the same thing happened, the horse didn't drink. This went on for a week and the man go worried. He couldn't figure out why the horse didn't want to drink the river water anymore. He thought either, the river water was bad or the horse was sick.   So one night he sat outside the barn and watched the horses' stall. He saw all the kids from the town coming with pails of water to feed the horse. Some were cold water, other were flavored water. He realized now why his horse didn't drink in morning, it was because he wasn't thirsty. The next morning the man woke up extra early. He had a plan on how to get the horse to drink from the river again. He jumped on the horse and made him run for miles and miles until the horse didn't want to run anymore. The...

After revisiting the topic of the “3 phases of healing”, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between the way our bodies and minds work. Take, for example, the word “trauma”. In our field, we generally associate this word with something physical, but in Psychology, it has an entirely different meaning; a meaning that pertains to the mind. Trauma is immediately preceded by what we know as the “Inflammatory Response”. I couldn’t help but liken this to dealing with mental trauma. A traumatic event takes place, and we react in an “inflammatory” manner. In both cases, there is a vascular reaction, which leads to an increase in blood flow, heart rate, blood pressure, and can lead to greater damage if not addressed in a timely matter. This will last anywhere from 0 to 6 days, and, if handled properly, will lead us into the next phase. The next phase is known as the “Fibroblastic Repair Phase”. This phase lasts anywhere from 2 days to 6 weeks and is the time in which our bodies attempt to...

Before you judge the title, please hear me out.                 Over the past 10 years I have mentored, coached, taught, and trained a ton of personal trainers, strength coaches, and athletic trainers. When I first meet anyone who is interested in this field I always ask the same question,  “Why do you want to be a trainer?”. Most times the answer I get is, “I really like to workout and people in the gym always ask me for advice, so I thought it would be a good idea.”.  In all fairness this was the same reason I got into this industry, however I quickly learned that being a personal trainer has very little to do with working out.  Here are some reasons why: 1)       Do you actually want to help others? Personal training has nothing to do with YOUR love of fitness, it has to do with you getting someone else, who normally hates exercise, to enjoy it.  You ha...

Hello All, It’s Johnny, Injury Prevention Coordinator at FLO Fitness and I’m very excited for our new Mental Training Program that we will be starting up in the fall with our athletes. As I write to you, Chris Flo is working on the last few details of our program. We hope to not only help our athletes reach their goals physically but also mentally. At FLO we strive to be the best we can be by obtaining as much information and education as we can in all different areas, whether it be in fitness, business, sport medicine, mental training, breathing and etc. In the last couple months the FLO family has concentrated a lot in mental training. In midst of our group conversations we all decided to try some of the techniques we read about with some of our athletes and the results we got were amazing. I had the pleasure of working with one our swimmers. He was preparing to compete in one of his main swimming competitions of the summer. I should add that this particular athlete is ...

Sorry for the disrespectful title of this blog, but lets be honest, it was the only way you would actually read this blog.                 I would like to touch upon the subject of summer packets for incoming college athletes.   I am getting packets in now from many different schools, some of them are really high level division 1 schools and some are low level division 3 schools.   Either way, there are a few tips that I would like to give you that I think would help in making it easier on other trainers to decode your programs. 1)       A picture is worth a thousand words.   Many of you may have specific names for exercises that you want done. Most of these are not universal names. I am guilty of re-naming exercises all the time.   When I write programs, I provide a youtube clip of myself or staff doing the exercise. It would help our athletes and their trai...

                While reading “Body Mind Mastery” by Dan Millman, I stumbled upon a formula in the book that describes perfectly the philosophy I use when training my youth athletes.   The formula is PSP: First precision, then speed, then power.   This was profound to me because it is exactly the methodology I use whenever teaching new movements or when wanting to increase performance in pre-existing movements.                 Why Precision first? As an Athletic Trainer for a high school, I see injuries all day long. I see what causes them and also get to figure out how to fix them.   I can assure you that most injuries I see in athletics come from bad movement mechanics. This is due partially to the fact that many young athletes are not taught good movement patterns at an early age.   They just do the movement f...