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Sarah Strange | Strength & Mobility Coach

@sarahstrange33

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20yrs coaching strength, mobility, conditioning
From first-time trainees to world-record performers
1:1 coaching • custom programs • coach education ↓

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Early in my coaching career, I was convinced that a bulletproof strength and conditioning program was all I needed to achieve peak health and fitness for myself and my clients.

Mobility was conceived of as mostly painful stretching and smashing shit with lacrosse balls. There was this fuzzy idea that if you could achieve a position, your joints must be healthy.

I didn’t have a good enough system for evaluating someone’s joint capacity, identifying an appropriate starting point, or measuring meaningful progress.

“Can you do this, yes or no?” isn’t much of an assessment. And “Now you can squat, so your hips are healthy” isn’t a universal training truth.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the real value of a good coach isn’t in having the perfect program. It’s in understanding how to adapt training to the individual, sometimes on a day-to-day basis.

Progression obviously matters, but so does readiness, and training volume is a lot more nuanced than counting sets of squats, presses, and rows.

Strength, hypertrophy, conditioning, mobility, joint-specific work… it’s all training. (There is no spoon.)

The questions are: What adaptation are we chasing? What does this individual actually need? And what can they realistically recover from?

The longer I coach, the less attached I become to any single methodology—and the more interested I become in understanding the person in front of me.

The program should serve the person. Not the other way around.

#FRSInternalStrengthModel #MobilityTraining #OnlineCoaching by @sarahstrange33

The longer I do this, the less I give a 💩 about proper form. Here’s why 👆

#properform #goodform #frsinternalstrengthmodel by @sarahstrange33

If you can’t fully control the movement of your shoulder blades, you can’t fully train your shoulder.

Closed chain scapular movements like these are sort of like single leg bounds in that they easily make everyone feel like it’s the first time they’ve ever been in a body. They can be humbling. We also tend to avoid movements that make us feel like that when we probably instead should be visiting them frequently u til they become less-awkward.

We regularly program closed chain scapular training like this in our online program. If you’re interested in checking out our program, the link is in my bio and the first week is free!

And that last exercise is just something fun I did within that session. This is the first time I decided to try loading it from both ends and have to say I’m a big fan! Give it a try!

#scapula #FRSinternalStrengthModel #strengthcoach #builtbybiology #shouldertraining shouldermobility shoulderrehab by @sarahstrange33

I get it- stretching feels good, but unless it’s space or range of motion you need, stretching can be a dead end street.

The question you need answered is why is this tissue feeling tight or painful to begin with? Often times the solution involves stretching, but for bendy people like me, stretching provides temporary relief but won’t resolve the problem.

I wasted years trying to stretch away neurological guarding.

I’m obviously not here to say that stretching is bad! But diversifying your toolkit and assessment abilities will help turn your stretching routine into a true joint health practice. #frsinternalstrengthmodel
#hipmobility
#stretching by @sarahstrange33

Elbow tendinitis is a real B-word to recover from.

Overdoing grip training without addressing specific elbow needs is a prime contributor to ongoing elbow pain.

You can save yourself a lot of drama down the road if you take the time to assess wrist, elbow, shoulder, and neck before embarking on a grip-intensive training program or sport.

Ignored deficits love to pop up to bite you in the medial epicondyle if not addressed before you go trying to build yourself some sinful forearms.

Everyone needs elbow training, but grip athletes need it the most ❤️

#Griptraining #sinfulforearms #frsinternalstrengthmodel by @sarahstrange33

A good program tells you what to do but a better program (and personal trainer) should tell you how to make it work for your body.

That component is missing from most online training programs. In any generic program, you’re following the same list of exercises as every Tom, Dick, and Suzie.

But a great program will help you figure out the right training set-ups and starting points- EVEN FOR MOBILITY EXERCISES- based on assessment data.

So we’re adding a guided Functional Range Assessment (FRA) to our online program that has evolved over the last 6 years of doing FRA’s with hundreds of clients remotely.

We’ll take you joint by joint and teach you how to assess your starting point, recognize when a position needs to be modified, and make better decisions about exercise selection, setup, intensity and frequency.

This generalized program just got a hell of a lot more individualized.

We’ll be releasing the assessment in short sections each week so you can actually learn it and apply it as you go.

Want to try the program? Free week at the link in my bio.

#FunctionalRangeAssessment #MobilityTraining #StrengthAndMobility #OnlineFitnessCoach by @sarahstrange33

Quick butt smash 🔥🍑 Sarah Strange style

*ROTATORS
*ABDUCTION
*HIP HINGE
*ROTISSERIE RIG HIP THRUST

#frsinternalstrengthmodel
#glutetraining by @sarahstrange33

One of the most common things I hear from women my age going through perimenopause or menopause is that their recovery is terrible.

From a training standpoint, my first question is always:

“Do you do zone 2”?

Because zone 2 is a low-cost way of supporting recovery infrastructure.

Especially at my age (49 and in menopause) when fluctuating and declining hormone levels negatively impact mitochondria and vascular function.

Zone 2 builds the aerobic machinery that actually does the recovery work.
More capillaries
Better mitochondrial function
Better lactate clearance
Improved autonomic balance

That means waste clears faster and tissues get re-fueled and repaired more efficiently between training sessions.

So many leaders in the women’s health movement are discouraging women from doing “cardio” like it’s all synonymous with ultra marathon training. They promote a training plan that consists of resistance training and too much HIIT. Anyone who follows this protocol, especially at this age, is walking a slippery slope. If they tell me they feel like sh!t, I’m not surprised.

A lack of zone 2 and joint-specific training is not something you can easily mess with at this age.

We need zone 2 for our aerobic capacity, cardiovascular system, mitochondria, and recovery.

We need resistance training to at least maintain strength & muscle mass that will start to go away as you age.

We need joint-specific training to improve, optimize, and maintain joint function and health (and to counteract the downsides of strength training and athletic endeavors)

And I would put HIIT last in order of importance unless you’re an athlete, then to me it’s equal to zone 2. This raises the performance ceiling by improving VO2 max and stroke volume, essentially. But doing HIIT without zone 2 is like putting a $5000 set of speakers in a $1000 car.

If you still have time after all this, then come your sports or favorite activities like yoga, Barre, dance, ball sports, martial arts, etc.

This template is the basis of body care and aging well.

Your training needs to be dialed, not whimsical.
#PerimenopauseFitness
#Zone2Cardio
#TrainingOver40 by @sarahstrange33

Body parts feel so much better in and after a workout if you train rotation first.

We can get into the detailed nitty gritty of how to train capsules and rotation but this post isn’t for the ISM nerds, it’s for the Mobility Dabbler.

Yeah…if you feel called out, you know who you are.

The Mobility Dabbler is the person who’s constantly peeking over the fence at everything mobility and can’t really commit any significant time or change to do what needs to be done. They cling to a program that has always worked really well for them but they limp for a while every time they go from rest to motion. They know they should probably make a change but a bigger part of them doesn’t really want to deal with the discomfort of re-learning and yet the decrepit creakiness of their fit-looking joints keeps them painfully aware that the cup of youth juice has runneth dry.

In other words, their greatest commitment to mobility is the hours spent scrolling on the toilet.

If your warm-up takes as long as your workout (or would in theory…) if your body feels warm by the last set of your last exercise, then change up your warm up! It doesn’t have to get longer or more complicated. Honestly, the rotational way may shorten your warm-up dramatically because it’s hitting the stuff closest to the joint: ROTATIONAL MUSCULATURE. 💡🔦✨

Try this: pull one dubious thing out of your warm-up, that thing you can’t really even figure out the point of, and replace it with a rotational strength training exercise. Your joint will feel better and warm up much faster. And you’ll actually train your rotators more specifically which has got to be much better for you than 30 PVC pass throughs.

If you’re at all curious how @strangegrayson and I program, click the link in our bio to try out a free week of our program.

#foreveryoung #frsinternalstrengthmodel #strengthtrainingwarmup #yourwarmupsucks by @sarahstrange33

As I said in the video, this is NOT a “start here” exercise 😅 Training in strength and stability in a variety of lengths as well as starting with a modified Copenhagen and progressing to the full deal before you go full groin-bungee is recommended.

Why would we train this type of oscillating isometric to begin with? They help the nervous system and connective tissue:

* Detect force changes
* Adjust tension rapidly
* Maintain joint position
* Avoid energy leaks
* Reorganize tension quickly

This is more life-like, training qualities that are better prepared to handle less-predictable forces. They can also lessen neurological tightness (chronically tight but not short)

If you’d like to try a program that features training like these, check out the link in our bio for a free week!

And if you want to know more about OIMAs and all reactive strength style training, follow @absolutesportscience if you aren’t already!

#reactivestrength #builtbybiology #frsinternalstrengthmodel by @sarahstrange33

Life has been weird and training has been minimal!

Spending a lot of the workout time with Pearl, getting ready for Bangkok so my training time has been divided a bit between coaching her and just maintaining strength and joint health (and some heart/lung capacity) for me. And some dancing!

I sometimes go through phases where I “stop” training due to busyness or burnout or illness, but there are always a few non-negotiable training items so that the foundation stays intact. At this age (49) you don’t want to stay from scratch 😆 So much harder!

The best discovery from all of this joint-specific training is that if you just keep your joints healthy and strong, you can easily turn that into squats and deads or jumping into a dance class. The conversion requires less effort vs trying to maintain an ability to do specific exercises- then the conversion to another set of unrelated and equally specific exercises is a much bigger deal.

#builtbybiology #frsinternalstrengthmodel #hipmobility #barre #barreworkout by @sarahstrange33

Simple set-ups are the best.

#hipmobility #frsinternalstrengthmodel #builtbybiology by @sarahstrange33