Posted on

Tuesday, 16th July

If you’re struggling with your eating, then you’re only reaching half your potential.

If you’re in a serious training programme, looking to put on some muscle and perform to your capacity, then you had better start getting serious right now about food!

Breakfast will always be your most important meal of the day. Porridge, eggs, Weetabix, shredded wheat always work well.

Mid morning always needs a healthy snack to keep your blood sugar levels steady, keep you energized and stop you being too hungry lunch time! Some people have a protein shake and this can fill you up nicely.

Lunch time is a great time to fill up again, put some energy in as well as some good protein sources such as chicken, turkey, lean beef, tuna, salmon, mackerel, cottage cheese etc. If you get a chance to sit down, have the protein source with a jacket potato with some vegetables.

If you’re on the move a lot or in work, try wholemeal pitta bread or wholemeal bread. Don’t put too much spread on if possible.

Mid afternoon is a vital time to fill up on energy, fruit or a bowl of porridge can work well at this time with everything focused on your evening workout.

Evening meal will be ultra-important after the evening workout as your body needs to repair itself. So you need to make sure your protein source is good, have some good carbs such as brown rice, new potatoes, jacket potatoes, wholegrain pasta etc, these are the very best choices.

Make sure you have some veg with most meals as they are the nutrients that really look after you internally, and help your body function at its top potential. You also have to look at your general health and make sure you get a healthy supply of veg in every day goes a long way to making sure that happens.

Try and make sure you drink at least 1.5 to 2 litres of water a day, sip throughout the day and don’t just leave it to the evening when you train.

Eating every 3-4 hours is critical to you achieving what you want, and performing with the kind of energy that you are going to need for our ever-increasing workouts!

This needs to happen most days, as one good day here and there won’t make hardly any difference. Consistency is the name of the game and getting smaller, more regular meals is the biggest thing you need to get used to so you can start making fresh progress straight away!

Twitt
Posted on

Monday,15th July

With a slight cooling temperatures this morning (although temporary), it gives us a chance to see if training through the warm weather has had a positive effect on our fitness or not.

Those of you have got through the last two weeks and performed your usual workouts will have benefitted immensely from that effort and tonight you are very likely going to be able to put in a top performance tonight. The relief in temperature will give your body’s internal temperature a breather too, meaning you don’t get as hot internally when exercising as you would in extreme heat.

Warm weather training for around three months has long been used by professional athletes. California, Australia and Florida used to be the main destinations for training camps, along with Tenerife and Lanzarote becoming more and more popular very recently with the likes of Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky Cycling, along with the England rugby team.

Former rugby union and league player Jonathan Davies was asked yesterday about the league game in Warrington being brutally hot, he agreed but said it used to be far hotter in Papua New Guinea and Townsville in Australia, when temperatures frequently soared well over 100 degrees! He did say though that it took him many weeks to get used to it.

The lesson is that you can train in warm temperatures, but take your time to get used to it, drink plenty of water throughout the day, never do more than you think you can, don’t train any longer than usual (in fact train for less in terms of minutes) and always stop if you feel dizzy or unwell.

So if you have been sticking with it all, then you will find yourself in great condition going into this week, and achieved a period of warm weather training of your own in preparation for a renewed period of progress coming your way!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday 4th July

If you ever needed any inspiration to train, then you have some very good examples at the moment to follow.

If you needed an excuse to get out there and cycle, you have the Tour de France, this is a great event to follow once you have watched it a few times, as it takes a while to get to realize what the tactics are. You may appreciate the mountain stages more at the moment, and these are usually on the weekends, and this is when most of the “fireworks” happen!

You don’t have to try and bike it up impossible mountains though, just getting out on your bike and riding for 30 minutes is likely to be a major step forward for you.

You have Wimbledon of course for tennis. We don’t seem to see many kids playing tennis anymore, but these two weeks used to the time when you would see people inspired to buy a racket and get out there and play. Tennis clubs used to put people off with the snootiness factor, but I hear they are much more welcoming these days so why not try them out!

The British and Irish lions are in the third and deciding test at the weekend, and have taken part in an enthralling series so far.

This is a great time to enjoy rugby and wet your appetite for the upcoming rugby season. I have many rugby players who are just starting their pre-season training, so a good performance on Saturday, especially with so many Welshmen in the team is bound to inspire the next generation of players coming through!

With sports being such a major fact of life and entertainments these days, and the life lessons it teaches us, use all of these opportunities to spur you on to new physical prowess, and to take your enthusiasm for sports and training to another level!!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, 27th June

An instant solution to sort your eating problems out is writing down everything you eat and drink.

If for instance, you had a cooked breakfast, then you had a roll for mid-morning bought in a garage, then you grabbed something out for lunch in a shop, then mid-afternoon you had a bar of chocolate and packet of crisps, then to finish off you picked up a takeaway on the way home, just because you had a busy day and you couldn’t be bothered to make your own food when you got home.

If you did this most days, then it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that you will not get in any kind of decent
shape!

Most people though do not realize what they eat, and never have any kind of plan for their day ahead. Its this type of approach that will lead to longer term weight gain, longer term health problems, and a feeling of hopelessness when it comes to how you feel about your health.

To change all of this, I strongly encourage individuals to keep a 7 day eating diary, writing down exactly what they eat for a week and how much too. They will also write down what they drink, again how much is important too.

What this does is immediately recognizes how well you are actually eating, it shows if you are overeating in each meal or not, how much of your calories are coming from drink (studies have shown that obese individuals can consume 40% of their total calories through fizzy drinks, alcohol etc).

Once your awareness goes up, and it definitely will doing this, then you are likely to get a plan developed, have a good healthy shopping list for the first time in a while, and you will be likely to start cooking many meals yourself, as the takeaway, grab something at lunch time option, grab something in the garage option, soon becomes a thing of the past, as long as you prepare more before you leave the house in the morning.

This simple 7 day eating diary will make all the difference!

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 25th June

Much controversy has reigned over the last few years what diet you should be on, what time of the year you should adopt a different way of eating, whether protein and carbs are bad for you, is all fat bad for you, should you take supplements, should you take fat burners, are hard spirits such as whisky, vodka etc better for you than wine because of the lesser amount of calories, should you drink energy drinks instead of water, etc etc!!!

The best thing to do is ignore all the faddy diets because they are all out to make a fast buck out of you.

Once you realize how your body works, you will realize how your body works when you put food into your body and how it converts into fuel.

Remember the atkins diet? The one where it was pretty much all protein and you somehow went into “ketosis” and all you burned was fat as an energy source? Of course you would lose weight on it simply because you were eating less calories (protein has 4 calories per gram), and you were avoiding simple sugars, plus protein does make you feel fuller for longer.

The bad part was when people realized you needed carbs for energy, and science tells us that carbs are the body’s preferred energy source, please read any medical journal or paper on that.

Most if not all people who went on the atkins diet fell off it as its unsustainable, and the weight piles back on when you begin to eat normally again that’s for sure!

Most supplements on the market are scams, don’t only take my word for it, the EU is trying to ban 70% of the supplement market, and you should realize all that false advertising promising the earth is really one of the biggest scams so please don’t fall for it.

The alcohol part of hard liquor being better for you is false, wine will go through your system far easier, whiskey etc takes longer to go through and pouts undue stress on your system. The more natural a product or food going through your body, the better full stop!!

Energy drinks are needless unless you exercise over 60 minutes at a higher intensity, most people don’t do that so save your money again and drink natural water which most of the time doesn’t cost anything!

Twitt