Keri McKibbin Personal Training

All of our programmes revolve around strength in one form or another, with very good reason.

The amount of stimulus that a strength programme gives your body is incredible, and this is why our fat loss programmes all work so well.

In technical terms, it’s all about the cellular and metabolic stress caused by the training that makes your muscles stronger, and allows them to be well-fuelled in future to attack greater and greater stress in your upcoming workouts.

I have always said that strength workouts get your metabolism to rise far longer than just doing work on the bike or treadmill. It can be over 24 hours more in terms of elevated calorie burning for your body.

Constantly asking your body to adapt is a very good habit to be in.

When your body adapts to anything easily, it uses less energy and becomes much more comfortable with exercise, this is exactly what we don’t want.

We need a framework of exercises and workouts that encourage the body to HAVE TO constantly adapt to new movements, and if these movements are tougher, your body will have to use a lot more energy, and this means burning a lot more fat.

It’s still up to you to make these adaptions occur though.

If you push yourself, rather than going through the motions, you cause further “good”stress to your muscles, raising the rate you burn calories 24 hours a day, and making you much fitter and better conditioned full stop.

Your workouts need to be tough, and aim to take yourself out of the comfort zone regularly.

Don’t let your body adapt as this is when the progress slows right down. Measure your progress regularly, and there’s no excuse not to keep on improving.

All of you who have started training with me will remember how slowly we took it first session, then we built up gradually and many of you are now very experienced in our training, and will now know how to train extremely hard.

The exercises you found relatively okay when we first started, have been turned into very difficult exercises now. Plus you are very likely to be doing a whole lot more too.

There are different levels to performing every exercise. You can make it easy on anything, and this is desirable for any beginner. To progress though, I have to make it more difficult for you by increasing the intensity of the movement.

This is often done by adding weight to the exercise, but sometimes other techniques are needed.

You will be very familiar with me putting you off balance with many of our tools at the gym. Training when you are struggling for balance will work your core like never before, plus it will transfer into daily life too.

Every single person we train now regularly has dramatically improved their balance, some have had a poor start but all of you have now have become very accomplished at all balance challenges.

Everyone as they get older loses some balance, many lose a lot of balance and are very unstable, making the exercises we do even more important, making the chances of having a fall in old age far less than they would have been.

For the sports people we train, balance is hugely important to performance on the field. Balance is also vital in terms of lack of injury. There is plenty of science to suggest that those who train with extremely challenging balance exercises, tend to be the ones getting less injuries. Keeping our athletes ON THE FIELD all the way through the season is an absolute priority for us and the athlete of course!

We are here to challenge in every way possible, this is what creates amazing results.

To make a transformation in your body, you may be aware that you are going to go through a period that totally takes you out of your comfort zone in all sorts of ways.

It’s not just your body, your mind may have to go through the biggest change of all. I find you can’t treat two people the same way, they could be brothers or sisters even, but everyone is different emotionally, and I had better be able to plan as the situation develops.

Ups and downs are going to happen, and you have to react to each of them with a strategy that’s going to work. Just because the textbook says one thing, there’s no substitute for thinking on your feet, and this always comes from experience from a whole range of situations.

Most people by the time they get to us have tried everything else. We never ever advertise so its always going to be a referral from one of our members, and I have learned to expect a degree of skepticism from a new member, even if their best friend or mother or cousin has just gone through a big transformation in front of their eyes.

Nobody actually believes it until THEY actually go through it and see results happening all the way through. Luckily, we have people now you can literally train next to and ask how they did it, ask them how well they have done and what did they think the turning point was.

Morale may be rock bottom when someone new starts, and most people need things broken down on what they are going to do, and why in the past they have tried everything seemingly and why it’s never worked despite all that advertising and false promises?

So your mind is your main driver in achieving the success you are about to go through, or have just been through. It’s your mind that can lead you to great things, or keep you going when the going gets tough and the moments of doubt and indecision kicks in.

You can do it, an unbelievable amount of people have and are going through it right now, but its always good to be aware and realistic about the process. Its never easy, but anything worth getting never was easy.