Posted on

Friday, 29th November

Part two of the list we started yesterday

m. Exercise helps enormously with depression, which is a huge problem in society but rarely people admit. People need help and support and exercise and eating healthy plays a significant role in treatment now, after all nobody wants to be on pills all their life, and they want an escape route from this common condition if possible.

n. Exercise gives your social life a boost. When you workout or play sports, you tend to do it with other people, and you sometimes meet like-minded people that enhance your social experience.

o. Exercise proves that females are at least as fit as men, and in my personal experience of training a lot of individuals, most women I train now train harder than men-fact!

p. Exercise before the age of 20, along with good healthy eating limits the number of fat cells you can produce. This is biological fact and this is why exercising when you are younger determines a lot of conditions for your future. No exercise and fatty/sugary foods in your teens is a ticking time bomb that is already costing the NHS billions!

q. Exercises changes lives! Every single one of the transformations I have taken individuals through has changed them mentally and physically and all for the better! Every area of their lives improves!

r. Exercise gets you pregnant! I have trained women in the past who were told by their doctor in the past that they couldn’t/or were unlikely to get pregnant due to their weight and health, but once they made big changes to their lifestyle and health, quite often they fell pregnant straight away!

s. Exercise helps you help others. When you get healthier and feel much stronger and fitter, you tend to stop relying on others and want to help others achieve things in their life they may not have thought possible.

t. Exercise saves lives. Anyone who cant have an operation because they are too overweight will testify to this. Once the doctor tells you THAT YOU MUST LOSE WEIGHT just to have an operation, you take note and you get it done. Exercise benefits your health in all sorts of life-enhancing ways.

u. If you’re a parent, exercising will inspire your kids get healthy too. Sit on the settee, eat rubbish and be negative all the time and they will follow whatever you do. Setting a great example works.

v. Exercise helps you sleep better research shows in every study. Those who exercise will know this. There are 120 sleep disorders, 80 are linked to alcohol.

w. Exercise and weight bearing exercise gives you stronger bones and protects you into old age. Weight training/body weight exercises are the number one recommendation.

x. Exercise gives you natural highs! You don’t need drugs, just try to progress your programme so that your intensity
of exercise goes up, and then you will get the natural highs that many of you get anyway most days when you exercise.

y. Exercise teaches you discipline. The regime of eating healthy and working out regularly teaches you proper routines, and keeping them up can be a challenge. It’s the success of keeping it up that teaches you discipline that transcends into every area of your life.

z. Exercise and healthy eating gets you into shape without the aid of drugs or anything unnatural like weight loss powders which provide long term misery, which teaches you self-respect and respect for others. You know that this process can be very challenging, and overcoming all the self-doubts is hugely rewarding, this process is one of the most important of all.

Twitt
Posted on

Wednesday, 27th November

Most people are very positive about these emails, but I do get one or two comments from maybe a friend of someone I train trying to put that person off, and the comments go something like this.

“Why not eat what you want, you could be dead tomorrow or a car could run you down”!! “Eating health is BORING”! “Exercising is a waste of time and energy”!

Let’s look at that statement, the ones who probably gave that statement may be overweight and feel hopeless themselves and don’t really want you to succeed. Most overweight individuals didn’t get that way all of a sudden, it usually takes a lot of eating the wrong foods, and quite a lot of not moving!

Ask yourself whether those people who eat junk every day or go to the pub most days, really are the MOST EXCITING people you have ever met? Does eating rubbish and drinking lots of alcohol make you the most interesting fun person you have ever met?

It’s okay to have that attitude of “it’s the end of the world tomorrow” but what happens when the end of the world doesn’t happen, and you’re not run down by a car?

How does all that junk you eat and drink every day affect you, does it make you overweight, have zero energy, and make you deeply unhealthy inside? Tomorrow for most of us lucky ones does happen, and it’s important to face it feeling as good as possible isn’t it?

Do you want to feel that you can walk in a shop and pick any clothes off the hanger and look great?
What about having so much energy that you wake up to the day with renewed purpose and vigour?

Do you want people to come up to you after a sustained period of training, and be staggered on how great you look? Does this seem impossible to some of you?

If it does, then I’m here to tell you that you’re mistaken and can achieve exactly what you put your mind to, as long as you take action EVERY DAY to get there.

So forget all those comments about living for right now and the end of the world is nigh!

Life is about right now, and very much today, and tomorrow IS likely to come and it’s likely to be a great day when you’re fitter, you’re healthier, and you’re full of energy, these are the facts. Most people I know who eat badly every day and don’t exercise are simply “settling” for a mediocre existence, why settle when you can live life on another level?

The transformations I have seen over the years would jusify the changes I see in people both mentally and physically, they become literally changed individuals and always for the better.

Nobody really believes when they are chomping into a burger and chips, that they are living their last day on earth, otherwise they would be having the whole menu that day!!

If you get accused by some of saying “life is too short” for workouts and eating well, then answer them by telling that life will get even shorter unless they mend their unhealthy ways and really change things around. Those people who advise you not to care what you eat and drink, and not to exercise are the same ones usually having or going to have blood pressure issues and are heading for ill health long term.

Is it too short to avoid a swimming pool/beach just because you’re not happy the way you look and you cant stand the weight you have put on?

Is life too short not to be able to wear exactly the clothes you want?

Is life too short to wake up with a hangover every day?

Is life too short to simply make it through the day, and slump in front of the TV and watch all the soaps and think that’s a
great day?!!

So using the excuse, “life is too short” isn’t really true and isn’t a valid excuse, in fact it’s just another excuse to eat badly and not move around enough.

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 26th November

A nice story in the paper today about great rugby All black captain, Richie McCaw, was selected for under 19 trials and how his father in Christmas 1998, asked him if he wanted to become a full All black when he was older.

Naturally he said yes like all New Zealanders.

Then his father asked him if he wanted to become a “great all black”? And if he did to write it down on a napkin. McCaw was modest and nodded but just wrote G. A. B. on the napkin. He then took the napkin to his own notice board and hung it there to remind him. It meant little or nothing to anyone else who passed the board, but meant everything to him.

His father set him a target of 2004, but reached this lofty goal in 2001, ironically against Ireland winning 40-29, and last Sunday those teams shared one of the best ever games last Sunday, winning right at the death 24-22, and their win was largely down to the captaincy and calming influence under extreme pressure of McCaw, who has pretty much seen everything in his long career.

McCaw credits that napkin story with keeping his focus when it could have wavered. It was a big lesson in setting a goal and sticking to it, and actually WRITING THOSE GOALS DOWN.

Goals have been proven in studies at Harvard University to be 80% more achievable IF THEY ARE WRITTEN DOWN.

They found that they had students who would talk about their future goals by just talking about them, would in reality have only a 20% chance of being successful in those goals.

The ones in the studies who actually wrote the goals down, and in detail, were found to have an incredible 80% likelihood of achieving those goals when they left college.

When I ask everyone what they want to achieve from their programme, lots of people say “I want to lose weight”, “I want to get fitter” etc, but if you actually write your goals down in detail and what they mean to you, its only then they become much more real, attainable and then you can actually develop a step by step process to achieve them.

If you take the first step right now and write down what you really want, then you will then be able to develop a detailed plan with a TIME LIMIT and schedule it into your lifestyle. The time limit part is vital and means you actually get it done full stop!

More on this tomorrow with examples of successes.

Twitt
Posted on

Sunday, 24th November

The importance of a proper well thought out schedule can never be underestimated. There’s a reason why individuals get into good shape and why many never do, there’s always an explanation and never let your conditioning levels depends on pot luck and guesswork because it ain’t going to work!!!

If you are not doing weight training a minimum of twice a week, then you need to re-think and re-write your schedule right now. You need to pick the biggest value exercises to you, have a plan that’s suitable for YOUR level of conditioning, and the ambitions you have in the future.

If you are doing mostly cardio (treadmill and bike for example), and you have no injuries to stop you doing anything else, then you should radically change your programme, and get stuck into all the different exercises and tools I have shown you in the past and keep showing you. This means picking the exercises with medicine balls and boxing maybe that are really uncomfortable for now.

The good news is though is that all of these exercises get easier, and you will always want to do them more because of the results you start getting.

If you keep on doing the same programme and are not happy with the results, then it would be and is absolutely madness to continue doing the same thing all the time.

The definition of madness in fact is doing the same thing all the time and expecting a different result!!

If you have any doubts about any of these, then I want to know about it straight away, and I will be more than happy to take you through the alternatives one more time, or many times as is the case with most people.

We keep on talking about the run up to Christmas, perhaps it should be about ripping up your current programme (if you’re not happy with the results you are getting), and trying something different, or LOTS OF different things that you either haven’t tried, or have put off training for “an easier life”!

No going through the motions and aim for constant improvements and gains, and this is a great time to hit your training more aggressively than ever and demand much greater results from yourself!!

www.kerimckibbin.co.uk

fitness@kerimckibbin.co.uk

tel 07968 980 808

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, 21st November

So if you have had a good week so far, you need to be concentrating on having a big end to the week.

The training you don’t really feel like doing on a Monday will feel possible on a Thursday or Friday.

Your performance should be good if you’re attitude is up for it.

How about a time trial for a mile on the treadmill? What about 2500 metres on the rower? How about spinning for longer on the bikes and use a really fast gear, instead of the easiest gear?!!

I used to do this myself every week on a Friday evening at the same time, and gradually my time would come down. The result after around 2 months of doing something like this can be quite dramatic.

Also, it doesn’t really seem like your training for the sake of it and takes away the boredom factor.

If you are weight training for instance, start keeping some kind of journal to record your sets and weight lifted. This can be a very powerful tool, and lift your performance for good as you wont want to go back at all.

Putting a little bit of pressure on yourself to make small improvements every week is a good thing, and again over a 6-8 week period, you are likely to have made sizeable gains.

How about your running? Instead of keeping to easier, flat roads, how about targeting some hilly terrain for a change and this can work very well on a treadmill too.

How about all those medicine ball/wall ball exercises you see me giving everyone else but perhaps you have ducked and dived on for a while? They do work in a big way so all depends if you want the results or not!

How about getting outside and getting stuck into the fresh air work outside? It may be cold at first, but your lungs will soon get used to it, and most people get to crave it after a while. Those of you who work inside all day should DEFINITELY get outside, do some speed and agility work, hit the prowler, work with the sledge, hit some steps or flip some tyres for a change (a big one people avoid!).

It’s nearly the end of the week and the easiest time to make it happen!

Twitt