You can have a visible six-pack and a back that rounds the moment you pull heavy. I know this because it happened to me. The fitness industry has two competing myths about core training, and both of them are wrong. The first says that heavy compound lifts are all the core work you need. The second says that crunches and planks will build a midsection that performs under load. Neither is true, because both treat the core as a single structure with a single function. It is not. Until you...

You loaded the bar with the same weight you hit last Thursday. You unracked it, descended into the squat, and the barbell buried you. The weight has not changed. Your programme has not changed. Something has changed, and you have no idea what it is. This is the moment where most lifters make the problem worse. They assume the programme is broken, swap to something new, reset their numbers, and spend the next eight weeks rebuilding to the exact same wall. The stall is not a mystery. It is a...

Someone in the gym asked me whether I had increased my training after losing 12kg. The assumption was obvious. Visible fat loss must mean more sessions, more intensity, longer workouts, some heroic escalation of effort that explains the result. When I told them I had reduced my training to two one-hour sessions per week, the look on their face told me everything about how deeply the fitness industry has embedded a single, spectacularly wrong idea into the minds of the general population: that...