BGMT #32 Gavin Van Vlack

Bad Guy Muay Thai

http://www.gavinvanvlack.com About Gavin Gavin has been a lifelong athlete, with more than twenty-five years in the fitness industry. He has worked for top facilities in New York and Los Angeles as a high level trainer, bringing his own style of skill-based training combined with Muay Thai kickboxing to clients who wanted to get results while having fun. In that time he has also become a much sought after strength coach. Employing the same philosophy of focus, purpose and intent in developing programs for several elite level athletes ranging from Muay Thai kickboxing, Brazilian jiujitsu, track and field, and snowboarding. After leaving his position as an educator at Equinox Fitness in 2006, Gavin has helped develop programs for smaller gyms and Martial Arts facilities in the New York area, bringing Sandbag training, Kettle bells, Suspension training and many of what were considered to be then “unorthodox methods” of training to what is now the forefront in the fitness industry. Gavin still works to help other trainers and facilities as a consultant and has often been called “The Trainer’s Trainer” by many within the health and wellness community. “Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish and you feed them for life” So many times people have come to me with the same issue. “I go to the gym regularly, I lift weights, I do cardio, I spend up to 1 1/2 to 2 hours (way to long) there but I’m not seeing the results I want.” Often I will ask them to give me a breakdown of what they do at the gym, and often this is what I’ll here. “I use the treadmill (elliptical, bike) for forty-five minutes to an hour”, “I do curls, bench press, leg presses, leg curls then leg extensions then abs” (most of these movements on “selectorized*” machines), “I do back and bi’s on one day then chest and tris on the next, on the third day I’ll do legs”, “I do boot camp style classes that use bells, plyometrics, and interval training but I keep getting injuries” gavtrainingHonestly, the list goes on and on. All of this work is done in earnest, the intent is good but more times than not people tend to either do movements that yield little benefit and /or we tend to “over train”. The problem here is lack of information along with the high amount of misinformation that is thrown at us on the Internet, television, and fitness media. The best I can do to help this situation is to try to the best of my ability to educate my clientele as to how to understand basic fitness programming, fundamentals in bio mechanics, how to understand metabolic factors in training, and most importantly how to maximize their bodies recuperative capabilities. These are all tools that you will learn to use so that even when you’re not in a gym you will be able to design a program for yourself using as I said earlier “little or even no equipment”.