When I write, I like to keep a conversational tone to my writing since I’m trying to teach, not submit things for a scholarly article or try to make myself sound smarter than I actually am.

Scholarly type stuff normally only speaks to other personal trainers and strength and conditioning coaches and a handful of others who likely already know what they are doing and those aren’t the people that are going to benefit from my writing. After all, I don’t need to preach to the choir.

This past Friday I had published an article about staying focused on the goal. I shared it on Facebook and out of the blue a friend and a fellow personal trainer had messaged me an article on using Microsoft word for correcting grammar.

Odd, I thought. But I knew that it had something to do with the article I had just written and went over it again a few more times and found some grammatical errors as well as a handful of other things that could be said differently.

A while back when I was in the process of getting my memoir published, I asked a couple authors for some advice. The one thing that seemed to get repeated across the board was;

“get an editor to look at your book, don’t try to do it yourself, just get a pro”

Why is this important and what the heck does this have to do with health, strength, and fitness?

It’s simple, we can all use an outside eye to provide objective feedback to make sure what we are doing is right. When you look at your own writing, your brain will either not notice errors or automatically correct them before the other part of your brain processes it. In other words, you won’t see what you are doing wrong.

The same can be said for your training program and the things you are doing with it. The one arm overhead press is a fantastic exercise when it’s done right. If you look it up on youtube, you might even see some great instructional material on it but what you might not see is your shoulder hiking up ever so slightly or yourself leaning back and essentially doing a standing version of a one arm bench press, both of which put you in unnecessary danger.

You don’t notice this because you don’t have objective feedback from an eye that is trained to see this sort of thing. It’s one of the biggest reasons why people need coaches.

Using myself as an example, I have a pretty good analytical eye when it comes to training movements. I also have pretty good proprioceptive awareness. (that’s your body’s awareness when it comes to positioning and movement). Basically, I’m pretty good at seeing something and doing it myself the right way.

But when I wanted to learn to do some of the old-time feats of strength (a bit of a unique animal), I bought books, DVDs, watched youtube videos and had very limited success. Does this sound familiar?

It wasn’t until I met my first mentor New Jersey’s Superman, the late, great Greg Matonick that I started making progress, and I made rapid progress under his watchful eye. Greg taught technique, body mechanics, materials and getting out of my own way.

After he passed away, my feats of strength continued based on the things he taught me, but progress was much slower because I didn’t have his feedback. I still had so much to learn from him.

Luckily for me, I met my current feats of strength coach Chris Rider and with his guidance, support and encouragement progress came rapidly yet again. The value of having a trained and watchful eye can be key to making sure you are able to make progress while keeping safe. There are no shortcuts in life, with the exception of having a coach with a trained eye that can redirect you from making mistakes.

If you are looking for a personal trainer in Boonton Township give my one week trial membership a try and we can see if you enjoy having me as a personal trainer, and I can see if you are a good fit for continuing as a regular member.

Eric Moss is a world record holding professional strongman, author, speaker and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is in Boonton Township New Jersey with Lewandowski Chiropractic and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, and Parsippany New Jersey.