Charlie Cates

Charlie Cates is the leading consultant to high-level professional, college, & high school basketball players in the Chicagoland area for injury prevention, recovery, & muscle performance. As a certified Muscle Activation Techniques® MATRx practitioner & former college basketball player, he uses his personal experience & understanding of the game & player demands to create customized exercise options for his clients to recover faster & perform their best. He is certified in the highest levels of MAT®, including MATRx, MATRx Stim, and MAT® Athlete. Follow him on Instagram @CharlieCates!

Why Your Workouts Aren’t Working

When you think of the reasons why you should exercise or do your workouts, what do you think of?  Improving your health?  Increasing your fitness abilities, such as your strength, endurance, or flexibility?  Changing your body composition?  Changing how your body looks and feels?  Increasing your energy levels?  As a personal trainer in Schaumburg, I can tell you that all of these are wonderful reasons to exercise.

Now, when you actually go and exercise, what do you think of?  While you are doing your workouts — the running, the lifting weights, the group fitness class, the biking, the whole exercise thing — what are you thinking of?  Are you thinking about how your body is feeling?  Are you thinking about what your body is doing?

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Meditation – 5 lessons I learned from doing it every day for a year

I always thought meditation was some woo woo kind of thing where you would sit in silence and pretend like you were floating while discovering the answers to your deepest questions.  I thought there was a perfect meditation position that you needed to sit in in order to attain the benefits of meditation.  And, most of all, I thought that meditation, while an intriguing concept, just wasn’t for me.  The “perfect meditation position” was extremely uncomfortable, my mind would be racing constantly, and I would often wonder how much time I had left before the alarm that I set for myself went off.

Then, back in 2015, I started using the popular app Headspace to guide me through meditation exercises.  I wanted to see if a regular meditation practice could help me manage my stress a bit better.  I was also starting to hear of the many health and brain benefits of meditating, and wanted to experience those for myself.

When I first got the app, I really enjoyed using it.  I completed the first 10 days in a row, then the first 30.  Somewhere between days 30 and 60, however, I fell off the wagon and stopped using the app altogether.  I would open it up every now and then for a 10-minute meditation session, but those times were few and far between.

But then, last April, I decided that I wanted to start meditating using the app again.  I wanted to see if I could meditate every day for an entire year and set the goal to do so.  The app has a nice feature where it measures your current meditation streak, so that would be easy for me to track.  It also has markers along the way at days 3, 10, 15, 30, 90, 180, and then finally 365.

So I started the “woo woo” activity, sitting in a more comfortable position than what I had originally believed was appropriate, and just dealt with the fact that my mind was wandering a lot during my practice.  And I did that everyday for an entire year.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

5 Ways To Tell If Your Personal Training Is Truly Personal

How personal is your personal training?  It can seem like a ridiculous question, but let’s explore.

A quick search on Dictionary.com reveals that there are multiple definitions of “personal”:

  1. of, relating to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private
  2. relating to, directed to, or intended for a particular person
  3. intended for use by one person

The definitions continue, but, for our purposes, these will do.

When it comes to personal training, there seems to often be a disconnect between the type of “personal” that is marketed, the type that is delivered, and the type that could be experienced but is often overlooked.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

What makes a Muscle Activation Techniques™ practitioner unique?

When people think of muscles, they usually don’t immediately think of a Muscle Activation Techniques™ (MAT™) practitioner, but they should.  Similar to how somebody might think of a dentist after hearing “teeth”, or a chiropractor after hearing “back” or “spine”, Muscle Activation Techniques™ may one day have that same relationship when somebody hears “muscle”.  For the time being, though, that typically isn’t the case, and here’s why — many people aren’t sure of 1) what MAT™ is, and 2) what makes MAT™ unique.  In that case, let’s discuss both of these. 

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Considering Adding MAT™ To Your Professional Toolbox? Read This.

As a personal trainer or fitness professional, adding the Muscle Activation Techniques™ (MAT™) skillset to your professional toolbox can be one of the best decisions you make.  Not only can it serve as a differentiator from your competitors, but it can allow you to help your clients in ways you did not think were possible, both as a result of the MAT™ process as well as because of the information the MAT™ process provides you.

When I first started personal training, I was completely unsure how to assess my clients.  Coming from a sports performance background, assessments had always involved some kind of one-rep-max bench press and squat.  But what kind of information would that really provide me about my clients?

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Doing The “Right Things” When You Exercise

“I don’t know how my body got like this.  My entire life I’ve done the right things.  I have eaten a healthy diet. I have exercised regularly.  I have been doing the right things for as long as I can remember.”

As a personal trainer and MAT™ specialist in Schaumburg, this kind of statement is one that I hear every now and then.  People are in disbelief that, despite their best efforts, their bodies are not feeling and functioning as they would expect.  Their joints are achy, their muscles are stiff, and their once-youthful energy seems to be just a memory.  And the most frustrating part for them is that they have always tried to do what others told them would be good for them.  They always tried to do the right things for their body.

However, the unfortunate truth is that the information they were given and the activities they were doing have likely contributed significantly to what they are now experiencing.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

The Physiological and Mechanical Tradeoff

Check out this snippet from Charlie’s most recent post on FitnessProfessionalOnline.com, titled “The Physiological and Mechanical Tradeoff“!

“As a personal trainer, one of the difficulties I often run into is trying to balance what a client can do with what they want to do.  Often times these situations will look like this:

Client: “I want to build my glutes.”

Me: “Okay, let’s add in some lunges today.”

Client: (During the first set) “Ouch, this is bothering my knee.”

I call this dilemma the physiological/mechanical tradeoff.  It’s a tradeoff because, as personal trainers, we know how we want to challenge our clients’ physiology, but we need to be able to do so within the mechanical parameters that are presented. (more…)

By Charlie Cates, ago

3 Must-Do’s To Exercise For Quality

Exercising for quality is difficult.  As a personal trainer and Muscle Activation Techniques™ practitioner in Schaumburg, this is an issue I run into on a daily basis.  Exercising for quantity, on the other hand, is much easier.  This tends to be the default most people fall back on when they start exercising.  It is completely understandable because, as mentioned, it is far easier to exercise for quantity than it is to exercise for quality.  But there is a way to change that, and it is simpler than you may think.

First, though, what is exercising for quality versus exercising for quantity? (more…)

By Charlie Cates, ago

Supercharge Your Stretching With This One Simple Change

I used to stretch all the time growing up.  I would stretch before I worked out.  I would stretch after I worked out.  I would stretch in the mornings.  I would stretch in the evenings.  I would stretch all the time because I wanted to improve my joint mobility and make sure that my body was prepared for my workouts.  For over a decade, stretching was a staple in my workout routine.

Despite all of that stretching, I never got to the point where I felt really flexible.  I would always feel stiff and achy.  My muscles felt chronically tight.  This persisted until I made one change to how I was doing my “stretching”. (more…)

By Charlie Cates, ago