14 January 2026
Warming up when the room is already 30°C
January in the room is already warm at 07:00. A warm-up written for a temperate hall, ten minutes of pulse-raising before anyone touches a bar, leaves people shiny and a little empty before the first working set. We have been cutting that piece. The joints still need time. The heart usually does not need to be persuaded.
What we are doing instead is slower: breathing on the floor, a hip opener, a few empty-bar squats, and then the first warm-up set of the lift we came to do. If you arrived on a bicycle, tell the coach. You may already have done the part we would otherwise invent. If you arrived from an air-conditioned office at 18:00, we will give you a longer ramp, because the body that sat in the cold will not take a heavy hinge two minutes after the door.
Drink water. That sentence is not a programme. The useful detail is to drink something before you leave the house for a 06:30 slot, not only at the water point when the first set feels thick. We will still start on time. The warm-up will look shorter than it used to. It is not laziness. It is the room telling us the temperature already did part of the work.
3 February 2026
Why we deload on week four even when you feel fine
Week four looks like a step back on the card: fewer sets, the same positions, loads you have already lifted. People who feel well often ask to skip it. We keep it anyway. The deload is not a verdict on how tired you look that morning. It is how we read the previous three weeks and how we keep week five from becoming a story about a shoulder.
Singapore weeks are uneven. A block that began cleanly can pick up a late dinner, a hot outdoor run, and a night of poor sleep without any one of those things seeming decisive. By week four the journal usually shows a little drift: bar speed down on the last set, or a mobility position that was easy in week one. If we add load on top of that drift because you “feel fine”, we are choosing pride over a clean next block.
Use the quieter week to practise the positions you rush. Ask the questions you save for a review. If you are genuinely under-cooked, we will say so and we will write a slightly fuller week four, not a personal record. Feeling fine is useful information. It is not a reason to throw away the shape of the block. We would rather you leave week four a little restless than start week five already negotiating with a shoulder that only needed a quieter set of days.
26 February 2026
Walking is training, and other things we repeat weekly
We say this so often it has become a floor joke, except that we mean it. A forty-minute walk most evenings is already a training week for a large share of the people who come through the door. When we add lifting, we do not ask you to drop the walks to prove you are serious. The walks are the habit that survives travel, a late meeting and a bad night. The barbell is newer. Newer things break first.
The other lines we repeat: eat something before a 06:30 session. Tell us about the run you already did that day before we add a bike sprint. Put the plates back. If your calf spoke up on Tuesday, it belongs in the journal on Wednesday, not in a story you tell in week six. None of this is ideology. It is how a six-person room stays usable, and how a shared note stays true.
If you are bored of hearing that walking counts, you are probably the person who needed to hear it. We will keep saying it. We would rather sound repetitive than watch a first block collapse because the only “real” training was the hour that required shoes and a booking. Keep the evening loop even on the weeks the bar feels important. The loop is what is still there when a meeting runs long, when a flight lands late, or when the room is closed on Sunday. Treat it as training and it will still be there in month four.
19 March 2026
Lifting around a travel-heavy month
March has been full of flights. We have been writing blocks that assume two cities and a week that will not look like the week on the card. The useful version of this is not a hotel-gym programme with fourteen variations. It is a short list you can run in forty minutes: a squat or a sit-to-stand, a hinge, a press against a bag or a band, and a walk. If the hotel floor is a cupboard with a rusty dumbbell, the walk still counts.
Tell us the dates before you buy the ticket if you can. We will pause the pack, or we will move the deload to sit on the travel week, or we will keep your group place and write a return session that does not pretend you were here. What we will not do is stack a heavy week onto the first Tuesday back because the calendar has a hole in it. That hole was a plane, not recovery.
Come in on the day you land if you want to move. We will keep it light and we will be glad to see you. Come in two days later if you slept. Either is better than disappearing for three weeks and then asking the bar to remember who you were in February. The journal will remember. You should not have to. If the trip is a string of short hops, send the dates once and we will treat the whole stretch as one pause rather than a set of missed Tuesdays you then try to repay.