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Psychology

Have you noticed how much your mind plays a part when you’re looking great, you have lost body fat, your waist looks much tighter, your workout performances are amazingly good and just about everything is going your way.

Then your mind plays tricks on you and can also send you on a pretty vicious downward cycle.

After some upset in your life, a lot of people find support in food, and usually food high in sugar or fat, or both. This is why everyone calls it comfort food and with good reason. You tend to feel really good when your eating your favourite treats, this can be the highlight of the day for some people.

Then perhaps half and hour or an hour later, you may be feeling a huge element of guilt about the food you have just consumed. On one hand you have had a great moment of pleasure, and on the other hand you realise that you are moving further and further away from your goals, and that is pretty depressing.

Not using food as an emotional crutch is the key to not falling down the ever present slippery slope. If we all used huge quantities of food every time we were upset or we were facing a big challenge, most of us would be heavily overweight.

Some of us also miss workouts if we are upset, because “our minds aren’t on it”. I know plenty of other people who use workouts BECAUSE they are upset, and find it an excellent way of getting the stress out of their lives that day, or perhaps dealing with the stress in a far better way perhaps.

Its how we react to emotionally upsetting situations that dictate our eventual progress.

If we go out for a workout every time we have stress, then that has to be a positive.

If we have an abundance of good food in the house all the time, then our options to conume lots of rubbish food is going to be limited.

Using the most productive strategies are vital if you want a smooth path in the future to gettting and staying in shape.

Twitt
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Calendar of workouts

A good way to chart your progress in an unconventional way is to log your workouts on the calendar in your house.

You may be surprised how often you train, or indeed how little you actually train!

This has often been an eye opener for many people and often tells the harsh truth on how well you may be doing or not, and more importantly why!

If you are on of the few who workout 3 times or more per week, thats at least 12 workouts a month-MINIMUM.

That’s going to be a minimum of 144 workouts a year or more, and that’s going to guarantee you some serious progress as long as your eating is under control.

How many of you can honestly say this? Do you have “lost” weeks here and there, that is VERY destructive to your progress so have a long hard think on why things aren’t progressing the way you thought.

The actual process of writing down your workouts can be very powerful. It has been proven by scientists that if you tend to write your goals down regularly, you are likely to achieve 80% of them. If you don’t, the research says that mediocre results are more likely. When you have more of a plan, you are likely to be successful in whatever you choose to do.

This is all part of you getting serious, and making much more of your training. Don’t become a victim of not being committed and eventually losing interest in your health and fitness plan, or should i just say health and fitness?

The reality of most people i meet is that not many stick to a well structured plan. Fortunately all the people i train stick to it, well most of it anyway and show up for every session, if they don’t, i tell them they are wasting their time and money.

It’s best to be honest with people, and this is the way to perform and get the very best out of yourself for the rest of your life. Log your workouts, assess your progress once a month and be consistent, thats the true secret!

Twitt
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Using the great outdoors-Pembrey country park!!!!!!!

Nice to see some of my comments have caused some interest from yesterday anyway!

I try to be open minded and if pembrey country park is left in a bad way after the festival, i will be the first to complain!

With this festival closing the doors  to the country park this week, we really should appreciate it that much more from now on shouldn’t we? And the entire coastline when you think about it.

Jean for instance is well known to use the coastal path and beyond in her training, she swears by it and is pretty annoyed its closed this week (the country park)!

If you don’t use the great outdoors, such as the country park regularly, then shouldn’t you start using it a lot more, not only to enjoy the scenery but to do a whole range of workouts?

You have some great running conditions on the hard sand on the beach, i used to use this for my marathon training and usually do 12 miles every friday. From the car park on the left as you go in all the way to the bombing rane should make sure you get around 1 hour 40 minutes of running in, you can run so far down before you notice all the tornado’s coming overhead!! This is a sign to turn back as well as all the signs and barbed wire of course!!

There are great cycle routes there too, all the way around the park and its so vast that sometimes you can get lost, as even i have done several times! I would start off on shorter conservative routes to begin with, and be more adventerous from there as it can take a long time to know the park, and i don’t think anyone gets to know it all down there!

There are also various hills you can sprint up, from hills in the heavily wooded area, to a crazy hill on the right hand side of the ski slope, that jean herself remembers well, this takes some kind of effort i can tell you, and you be a very good barometer on your fitness!!

There are lots of park benches too you can do press ups, step ups and arm dips on and the point of all of this is to state that this is a magnificent place not only to walk, but to get some hardcore workouts in too.

This week’s closure makes me appreciate it all the more, i can’t wait to get down there and experience all its riches from now on!!

Twitt
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Muscle gain part 2

So we are aware of the commitment you need to show to get your muscle growth on a regular basis. Once you pass this test, and you’re ready to give the commitment, you need to think about exercise selection and why you need to choose certain exercises over others.

Here is how it needs to go.

Each and every exercise has a certain “exercise cost”. This means certain exercises burn more energy and calories more than others, and break more muscle tissue down than others.

For example, a squat will always burn more calories than concentration curls. This is because the squat is primarily working yours legs which are your body’s biggest muscle group, and indirectly works the rest of your body too because of the sheer effort involved in the exercise.

On the other hand, concentration curls just work the biceps, when compared to the legs is one of the smallest muscle groups. Not only that, but you will notice that the squat is a far harder exercise to perform than the curls. Any time you recruit more muscle groups or bigger muscle groups to perform an exercise, you will be working harder full stop. Any time you work harder, you break down more muscle tissue which is what we are aiming to do here in this post.

So when it comes to exercise selection, try and think which exercises are going to benefit you MOST in your workouts. The chances are that the most beneficial exercises will often be the hardest, and the ones that most people put off! This is why you need a great attitude to break down muscle tissue and create the conditions for muscle growth. You won’t get away with “namby pamby” exercises and still develop significant lean muscle tissue, it simply can’t happen unless you are using steroids, and you don’t really want to cheat and use substances that will have highly negative side effect do you?!!!

So if we are looking at your legs for a start, i would look at doing squats (if you have no knee/ankle/back problems), if you do have any problems, i would substitute this with leg presses, which can still give good results, but you won’t develop any associated problems.

If you have no access to a squat rack, i would try some lunges with some dumbbells by your side, these have a very high energy cost again and you can send that cost much higher if you turn them into walking lunges. Proper form is essential on this exercise keeping the knee in line with your ankle, and not stomping your knee down, be gentle with your knees, you’re going to need them when you’re 70!!

So these 3 exercises are great for muscle gain, and to develop some definition and thigh and hamstring development, i would try leg extensions (make sure to lower slowly too) and leg curls (lower slowly here too). Nothing looks more silly than well developed thighs and weak hamstrings, so make sure to include these too.

For calves i would try standing calf raises, number one for calf development or calf raises on the leg presses which you need to lighten up the weight, as its more of a specialist movement than the leg presses, you are trying to replicate the standing calf raise movement on the leg press.

I would look at doing 10-12 reps on each movement, as legs tend to need slightly more reps.

I would try 3 sets of each.

You will notice from doing this workout that you breathe heavily, and usually get a good sweat up and generally are very tired that night and day after maybe. This shows this workout is a HIGH ENERGY COST and WILL break down a lot of muscle tissue.

As long as you eat a lot of food and regularly, you will develop some serious muscle in your legs!

Twitt
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Muscle gain

A big question I always get from mostly males is how can they put on muscle to their frame. This can be a harder question than you think because there are so many variables when you’re dealing with the individual concerned.

There’s always the lifetime skinny guy who can never put muscle on, no matter what they do or what they eat.

Then there’s the guy who carries lots of body fat, but carries no muscle and the overall shape is less than flattering shall we say.

Then you have the sickening type of guy who picks up a weight and a few short weeks later, starts showing some major progress (it must be said that these genetically gifted people are few and far between).

Before you pigeon-hole yourself into one of those categories, I have some great new for you.

The principles of muscle-gain remain the same no matter where you fit in.

For example, any one of these groups will have to leave 48-72 hours in between working the same muscle group again. Most people don’t realise that when you work a muscle, you are actually breaking it down and it needs to recover, you need to feed it well and let it rest or it won’t grow, simple as that.

Training every day may seem the way to go but more is definitely NOT better in this case.

So if you’re prepared to put all the work into your training, and then not be totally committed to eating every 3-4 hours afterwards, then you’re not going to make gains.

If you can train hard but are not committed enough to hit the sack every or most nights for 8 hours, then you’re not going to make many gains. Your muscles need to rest and if you don’t get it, you will end up being frustrated because you won’t be getting bigger.

This strategy of training smart, eating smart and resting well is also needed for you to get stronger, if you don’t get stronger, your muscles won’t grow so you need to be fresh and full of enthusiasm to push yourself further and further.

If you’re employing all of these strategies, then it should be possible for you to be adding small amounts of weight to your exercises every 2 weeks, and I’m even talking about 1-2 pounds here and there, it DOES add up.

When you first start training, you tend to add weight relatively quickly anyway, but then plateau’s start coming. To smash through these frustrating sticking points, you need to consistent and do the right thing nearly all the time, nobody’s perfect of course but you’d better be ready to give this some massive commitment, or your body’s not going to grow in the way you’d like!

If you start missing meals and snacks, you’re progress will disappear. If you start missing workouts, you will go backwards, if you don’t get enough sleep, you will not feel motivated or have enough energy to get through the kind of workouts you need to do to slap on enough muscle tissue, and that will make a clear difference to the way you may look right now.

We will go into more detail over coming posts, but you need to realise that you have to show a lot of commitment to build a significant amount of muscle, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

If you are willing to do all of this, I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you over the next few days!

Twitt