My partner Mark has a pretty serious man crush on both John Meadows and Chris Duffin, so when the opportunity came up to take a course taught by Duffin, of course we took the opportunity and we headed out on the road to NJ to learn something to bring back to our personal training clients.

The idea of DMS is to assess movement based on the main lifts, and to correct deviations using a very simple approach. The main reason I wanted to attend this course was to learn new cueing and coaching techniques to use with my clients who are focused on strength training.

We left for NJ on Friday morning, with our co-worker and friend, John. The ride was pretty easy, we stopped for some cherry coke and other american goodies once we passed the border (I always let my diet slide when I'm in 'Murica). Once we got into Freehold NJ, we hit the local Chipotle, then tried to get some sleep.

Day one of the course was very well run. The entire morning was focused on breathing, core stability, and grounding. We then went on to addressing Tspine mobility, and shoulder stabilization. With each focus we broke off into groups and assessed, coached, and cued for each person. We eventually got to working on squatting with weight, but I kept things extremely light since I am in meet prep and there was no way I was up for a max effort squat!

One thing a few of us really picked up on is to get the real Duffin coaching experience, you need to say 'boom' at the end of any movement. This will increase core stabilization by at least 85% and really gets your glutes activated.

The group headed out for dinner and drinks afterwards. We got to sit with some cool dudes from CT for dinner, who were pretty easy to make fun of once we discovered their love for fro-yo and lack of ability to locate a Chipotle 10 feet from their hotel.

I got to chat with Chris a bit and discovered that he is pretty much exactly what you would see of him online, except for the one secret that he doesn't actually like whiskey (Shhhh).