Friday, 19th October

The point I was trying to ram home yesterday was the importance of eating well after workouts, to aid recovery in order for you to keep training hard and to do it often.

Another side of the coin I try to focus on is to eat well and often, never going hungry, never avoiding food because you think it may put weight on, and to get your relationship with food a lot more positive and healthy.

How many times have you been told that you shouldn’t eat much at all if you wanted to lose weight?

How many times have you been told that you need to consume strictly calorie controlled meals sold by unscrupulous weight loss clubs?

How many times have you lived your life by the weighing scales, only to be disappointed time after time, simply due to the fact that weighing scales alone are an unhealthy way to judge your progress, and actually encourage food deprivation which means nutrient deprivation too, exactly what you DO NOT WANT when it comes to getting and staying healthy.

Once you ignore the liars and charlatans of the weight loss industry selling diets that do not work and usually mean you put all the weight back on, plus 5% more at least according to scientific studies!!

Once you decide to ignore these people and organisations, you will definitely move forward quickly!!

Once you decide to concentrate on eating much more natural food, devoid of hundreds of chemicals, salt, refined sugars and saturated fat, your life, body and healthy will go forward at a speed that will pleasantly surprise you!

The great news is that we will keep on discussing food ideas and meal solutions just like yesterday and help you avoid the food traps that all the corrupt weight loss clubs and food supplement industry are trying to catch you with every single day.

Unless you change your normal daily food intake for the better, and keeping it more natural, you will never reach your health and fitness targets, avoid doing it the hard way and make life easy for yourself!!

Tuesday, 16th October

Moving into another week always brings a lot of promise, as long as you don’t do things in a haphazard way, and work fairly close to your plan.
When you have your goal in mind, it’s equivalent to having a destination in mind when you travel in a car or plane.
You start off well, you may get a little distracted and off course a little bit on the way, but in the end you know you have to get where you wanted to in the first place.
The difference with training and people’s goals and travelling in a car journey is that most people do not show enough conviction because most of us do not feel we have to get into good shape, we don’t feel we have to have great health, we may have given up on ourselves and we may feel we are somehow too old, we do not have enough time and we simply do not have it deep down to achieve what we felt we could when we perhaps 25!!
This is the big difference, one is a must which is the car or plane journey, our other journey with our body is at best a maybe, and only a few make it an absolute priority.
The ones who make it a must consistently make their workout, consistently eat well, and consistently raise their standards!!
The ones who are not really comitted constantly go round in circles blaming external factors, and ignore the most vital factor, that they are really not committed to excellence in terms of their health.
Harsh words but in Many years of training a lot of people, it’s easy to see why certain people do extremely well, and others flounder never getting out of mediocrity.
You have every opportunity to travel anywhere you want these days, but the most important journey will always be with your body and make sure you raise your commitment to get to your most valued destination!!!

Tuesday, 25th September

Good comment from jean last night about my piece yesterday on training.

Yes, you should (if fitness allows) aim  to work more in a non-stop fashion, and jean certainly knows the value of this!! This level of conditioning can be only achieved though after a lot of training and a lot of efforts already in the bank, in other words you only move on to this more advanced form of training when you feel ready, and this usually involves more traditional forms of training first, which will be slower in nature with much more rest.

Then there is the question, what happens if the session gets easy? It only becomes easy if you do the same thing all the time with the same amount of weight and reps. You can EASILY change this around and make things far harder for yourself, and that means far more beneficial too!!!

You change it in a couple of different ways. If you are doing a set of exercises, and its usually 6 with a maximum of 8, then how about substituting some or all of those exercises with viable alternative. Tricep pushdowns could become arm dips on a bench or vice versa.

Press ups could be substituted for bench presses, lateral raises could become front raises or upright rows even, so you can see the choices are bigger than you thought!

This will create an immediate effect for the good!

Then there is the rep rane, i always love 8 as a rep number, but nothing wrong with changing that to 10 or 12 now and again, to get a different stimulus that will only benefit your body.

Then when you need to change again, and your weights become very light, how about increasing your weight slightly, this will create an immediate difference in intensity levels, as long as you can do 8 reps minimum per exercise, if you go under this rep range, then the exercise doesn’t become anywhere near as effective!

Always aim for good intensity levels and never let your workouts become run of the mill!!!

Monday, 3rd September

The school term is about to start, and with all of this comes a lot of rushing around chasing your tail.

The word “workout” may not happen for you this week, and if you expect me to agree with that statement, then you’re totally and absolutely wrong and making far too many excuses to yourself!

You need to schedule your workouts when it is possible for you to do them, there are 168 hours in every week, and 7 days, we have all have that time available to us, nobody gets more time than others!

Its how you use this time!

This is why morning workouts can be so valuable to you.

When you train early, the exercise part of your day is over, done, completed and taken care of! You may not like getting up early to start with, but the individuals who i do train and have done for many years, wouldn’t train any other time of day now, they now PREFER TO TRAIN EARLY, and often say that early is the best part of the day!

If you think you cannot get up that early to train, there is a simple solution, try getting to bed earlier the night before, that may help! I could never get up as early as i do if i didn’t get to bed early the night before, it simply couldn’t happen!!!

The people who schedule in their workouts NO MATTER WHAT are the ones i have greatest respect for. These are the people who without fail have the best results too! Not missing workouts will have a dramatic effect on your body, and its all good!

If you train most days, then this difficult school week will become far more tolerable too. Exercise is proven to effectively deal with stress very well so its a no brainer to include workouts most days of your week.

Less stress, less body fat, a stronger heart and leaner stronger body are all huge benefits impossible to ignore!! Schedule your workouts in today for the rest of the week!

Friday, 13th July

Making the commitment to be fit, stay fit and always be fit is totally overwhelming for almost all of us.

This is why i encourage everyone to take one day at a time, and just do your best that particular day.

Chances are you will improve much quicker like this rather than somehow trying to plan your year!

I can totally see how you can plan your week,  but your month or next couple of months is extremely difficult for all of us.

If you focused on one day then, you can see from the following how it can work very well for you.

For example, if you concentrated on eating a good energy filled breakfast every morning, full of slow-release energy, then you’re not going to go too far wrong.

This can be fairly easy if you only buy good quality cereals with only natural ingredients.

If you go for the likes of porridge, shredded wheat and weetabix and stick to the basic versions of these fine cereals, then you’re not going to be taking excess sugars into your sytem, meaning you will be energised and still lose body fat.

Lunch from monday to friday for most people is again fairly simple, make sure you eat some vegetables, good carbs of wholegrain variety where possible and a good quality protein source.

Your evening meal will be fairly similar, and trying to make sure you get some fruit in the day along with plenty of water, at least 1.5 litres.

On the exercise side, try and commit to being active most days, there is a huge variety on offer and we talk about exercise all the time.

Sleep is often underrated, so make this a priority.

Get these things right and you will taking one day at a time very well indeed!