MP Strength and Conditioning

MP Strength and Conditioning Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from MP Strength and Conditioning, Sports & Fitness Instruction, Guelph, ON.

07/29/2026

Very few people know what asymmetrical loading is. Even fewer train it. Yet you do it every day without realizing.

Groceries in one hand. A kid on one hip. A bag over one shoulder, walking up the stairs. Your core is working to stop you from tipping and twisting toward that load. That’s what core strength and stability is - anti-lateral flexion, anti-flexion, anti-extensions and anti-rotation.

Train it on purpose and the stability, balance, and coordination carry straight over into the parts of daily life that actually challenge you.

Train Hard, Train Smart, Get Strong.

07/24/2026

Every week there’s a new hack, a new trend, something that’s finally going to change the game.

None of it is new, and none of it is what works.

Energy balance decides whether you gain or lose weight.

Progressive overload is how your body adapts. Learn to move well, then raise the demand toward whatever you’re training for.

Boring, repetitive, and that’s exactly why it works.

The principles don’t change. What changes is how they get applied to you.

Train hard. Train smart. Get strong.

07/07/2026

Cueing “push your hips back” doesn’t work for everyone. Here’s what might.

You can someone”hips back” all day and still watch them shift their whole body backward instead of hinging. More cues rarely fix it. Better feedback does.

Set a bench about an inch behind the calves, just below the knee. The goal: push the hips back without the calves touching the pad. The second the knees drift back instead of the hips traveling back, the legs hit the bench = instant feedback, instant correction.

The bench forces the movement to come from the hip, not from shifting the whole body. Hips back, shins stacked - which is what the cue was trying to buy you in the first place.
Good coaching isn’t more cues. It’s the right tool at the right time.

Try it on your next pull and let me know if it helps 👇
Train hard, train smart, get strong.

06/23/2026

Won’t squat, knees hurt. Won’t deadlift, back hurts. Won’t press, shoulder hurts. So you cut the lift.

It never stops at one. Avoid every movement that flares up and eventually you are avoiding training altogether, because the actual cause never got addressed.

Start with a proper warmup. A real RAMP, ten focused minutes getting your joints, tissues, and nervous system ready to load. For a lot of people that alone changes how the lift feels.

But if you have warmed up right and it still hurts every time you load it, that is not a warmup problem. That is something upstream, and no warmup fixes it. That is when you get assessed in person instead of guessing.

If a lift hurts every time, even after a proper warmup, get it looked at. Book a consult, link in bio.

06/15/2026

Relying only on how something feels is a guessing game. Relying only on what you can see misses what’s happening internally.

You need both - and if you don’t know what to feel for or what to look for, that’s exactly where an experienced trainer and coach earns their value.

06/08/2026

Calling a training session a “recovery workout” doesn’t make it one.

Recovery isn’t something you stimulate - it’s something your body does automatically when you give it what it needs. Water, food, sleep, and enough time away from the thing that stressed it in the first place.

The mistake is mislabeling a light resistance training session as a recovery tool and wondering why your body isn’t responding the way you want it to.

If you want to support recovery inside a training block, reduce your volume and pull back your intensity. That’s a legitimate programming decision.

Dressing up junk volume with a better label isn’t strategy. It’s just noise. Every session in your program should have a clear purpose. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong there.

intentionaltraining

06/04/2026

Widen your lense.

For many people squat depth isn’t a hip problem - it’s an ankle problem.

Restricted dorsiflexion forces one of two compensations: heels rise and you lose ground contact, or the pelvis dumps back and the torso drops forward. Neither starts at the hip.
Short term fix: elevate your heels on a plate.

Long term fix: address the ankle mobility directly.

Test it. If your depth immediately improves with heel elevation, you’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem.

guelpH

05/28/2026

Same movement pattern, completely different physics. 🏋️‍♂️ Clueing into where the load sits changes everything about the exercise mechanics.

When you change the barbell position, your body has to completely restructure its joint angles just to follow one golden rule: keep the weight balanced over your mid-foot.
Here is exactly how that alters the muscle demands:

🍑 THE BACK SQUAT: Because the bar is behind your base of support, you are forced to lean forward. This pushes your pelvis back into a hip hinge. At the bottom, the horizontal distance between the bar and your hips is massive. That huge moment arm shifts the mechanical tension directly onto your glutes to drive you out of the hole.

🦵 THE FRONT SQUAT: With the bar resting on your shoulders, a big forward lean results in you dropping the bar. To keep it over your mid-foot, your torso must stay upright. Your hips drop straight down, and your knees are forced to shoot way forward over your toes - demanding a lot of ankle dorsiflexion - creating a massive moment arm at the knee, increasing the demand on the quadriceps muscles.

The takeaway? You aren’t just changing where you hold the bar; you’re changing the biomechanical demand of the lift.

Which variation do you struggle with more? Drop it in the comments below! 👇

05/25/2026

Most people don’t have a training problem. They have a timeline problem.

They start a program, work hard for a few weeks, don’t see much change, and move on, right before the adaptations they were training for start to manifest.

The first block of a well-designed training phase is building the foundation. Neurological efficiency, movement quality, loading tolerance. None of it is visible yet.

By the time structural adaptation becomes measurable - muscle being built, strength compounding - most people have already switched programs or stopped altogether.

The people who make the most progress over years aren’t necessarily the hardest workers. They’re the ones who understand the timeline and stay in it long enough for the physiology to do what it’s designed to do.

That requires a program built to force progression across multiple blocks - not one that feels hard for a few weeks and then gets abandoned.

Coaching applications open — link in bio.

guelph

Address

Guelph, ON

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when MP Strength and Conditioning posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category