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Floyd Landis v Lance Armstrong

The floyd Landis revelations that he ACTUALLY did use drugs for his tour de france win, and years before, was the startling news of this week.

The more shocking or perhaps not (depending on what you believe) was that he was part of a systematic drug doping programme at US postal (Lance Armstrong’s ultra-successful mutli-winning cycling team).

The problem with Landis’ revelation is that he has been a proven liar before.

When he won the tour, he was found to have doped, he denied this.

Then he spent $2 million on his defence and lied on oath stating he never took drugs.

He benefitted from his book “positively false”, stating again that he never took drugs.

So to confess this week is very puzzling and a bit late in the day to say the least.

He does go into great detail though and speaks of the doping programme and how intensive it was.

If you want some more details, have a look at david walsh’s article in the sunday times or timesonline.co.uk, its very good indeed and will let you make your own mind up.

One things for sure, lance armstrong remains the most tested athlete on the planet and still has not tested positive, thats a fact so no point slinging shots at him until theres evidence.

Many of armstrong’s ex-team mates have now tested positive though, tyler hamilton, roberto heras, landis, andreu and vaughters admitted EPO use, and i believe manuel beltran also got caught last year in his final year of racing.

Cycling has been a dirty sport for years, but the last few years it seems to have got cleaner, so here’s hoping for a better future.

Most sports use doping, its just that cycling seems more serious in its testing and banning of athletes especially over the last 4 years.

The sad thing is that there’s a scandal every year just before the tour de france, and this year is no different!

Whatever happens, landis is not going to come out of this good, but if the murky truth does come out one day, then it would have been worth it. If landis has been lying again, he loses any respect he may have had left and his life will remain in the gutter.

Twitt
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Schedule it in

Making the effort to get your programme going seems the biggest “effort” to most of you right now.

There are lots of different ways to get around this.

Why don’t you call an old friend, and ask them if they want to get fit, and you can support each other. Both of you will have times when you don’t feel like exercising or eating well, or both. This is when your friend becomes important, picking you up off the floor when your morale is also “on the floor”.

Many of us appear super-confident, super-motivated and super go getters. The realities are that i train many such people, but really are the pussy cats, the worriers, the self-doubters just like the rest of us. We are all worrying about the future, regretting sometimes about the past but we have to put it into context and condition ourselves to not worry about the things which are likely to drag us down every time.

That’s why i feel that scheduling in your workouts is hugely important and is far more important than your dental appointments, your doctors appointments, your appointment with your solicitor-YES IT REALLY IS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do these people promise you great health or do they just fix something that has gone wrong?

When you workout, are you investing in your future big time? Of course you are and you know it, i just don’t think you realise HOW IMPORTANT YOUR WORKOUTS REALLY ARE TO YOUR WELLBEING. I really believe this!

Shrugging your shoulders is not good enough when it comes to assessing your weekly performances and trying to hide the fact that physically, you havent made the most of your obvious attributes!

Making the leap from where you are now to where you really could be is all about scheduling it in, and you know it and taking care of business. Taking care of business means getting the job done, making those workouts count, getting in those extra couple of reps in when you feel like you can’t do any more.

Getting up that hill on the bike when it would be eaiser to walk the bike up is crucial to your development, you won’t get to this standard UNLESS you schedule in regular workouts and you know it.

Its the workouts you do when NOBODY is looking really counts and you know it. This is no programme for show offs with all the best gear, its about fighting to get to your personal best, and not talking a good game that gets you absolutely nowhere. This is the time for action, the time to scheduled workouts that you never miss and getting serious about your health and fitness, once and for all so lets do it!!!

Twitt
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More focus in your training/cycling

The same old training all the time brings with it more limited results, and a lack of motivation because you will be doing the same old thing all the time.

If you’re out cycling today, then you may be just in the mood to get out there and coast it, no problem at all with that.

If you’re out to do something different and add something quickly to your fitness, i would look to challenge yourself a little more.

Easy ways to do this on a cycle path for instance, would be to pick off targets along the way. Paula Radcliffe for instance would aim to chase down targets or runners in front of her. If you see someone in front of you cycling, then try to chase them down and eventually pass them, then you can coast for a while.

When you get your breath and legs back, you can chase down the next one and so on. 20 minutes of this type of workouts will get you breathing very hard indeed!!

You can mix it up on the hills too, there must be some path or some succession of roads that you never thought you’d be able to cycle up? Well, let’s go and try it!!

I would start like this. Take your time more than normal on the flat, and do your best to get up the very steep hills, work up gradually of course and don’t take on the worst hill to start with!

The key to climbing hills on the bike is to stick to a pace that you can keep with. No point going off like mad and then blowing up 15 yards later, remember you’re not in the Tour De France and its not a race up the mountains.

You will get confidence from making gradual progress and the first time you take on a tough hill, that will be the worst feeling you’ll ever get because IT IS your first time. Every time you take that hill on after that, IT WILL FEEL BETTER AND EASIER. It’s all a question of practice and not quitting after the first time you do it because you didn’t achieve that much.

I’ve trained lots of people take on the most mammoth of hills, and they have lived to tell the tale! They developed great self belief from their accomplishments and they are proud to say that their cycling is now first-class and now literally no hill scares them, in fact some people go searching for them now!!!

Have a great day and an even better bike ride!

Twitt
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Massive efforts (only sometimes!)

Making  huge efforts all the time isn’t going to be good for your exercise programme. It is one sure fire way to get fed up of exercise and it soon wears thin in terms of enthusiasm.

We can all pull out all the stops and have amazing efforts in terms of workouts. People do amazing things for charity, and you have to commend them for doing so.

So before you think I’ve gone totally mad, I’ll explain!

A well structured exercise programme aiming to get a 7-8 out of 10 each time you train, will likely be far more successful than workouts now and again demanding 10 out of 10 each time. Even champions can’t work at that intensity all the time, they actually periodise their training plan into different sections of the year.

The time when the champions often go flat out is often only 8-12 weeks of the year. The rest of the year is often structured to create a base for the next level up.

That’s why its sensible to focus at steady and gradual improvements. We talk about it all the time, if you can do 5 press ups in week 1, and you can do 25 press ups in week 5, then this is a great example of making progress without working so hard that you’re blue in the face!

You look forward to workouts that don’t have unrealistic challenges in store. They become more enjoyable and you tend to love the whole process more. Going for a run in a scenic location is fun, and exillerating at the same time.

If you approached the same run with maximum intensity every time you did it, and were constantly trying to beat your personal best, you would soon become sick of that and start putting off workouts when your time wasn’t improving.

You should know by now that im all for working out with great intensity, but you have to put it in its proper context.

Those who did the London marathon a couple of weeks ago will have spent many months or even years training for it.

Those who did the Mumbles Childline Triathlon with us definitely worked hard for months before.

These two events were examples of pinnacle’s in people’s sporting lives.

The reality is that you can’t train like that forever, you have to scale it back for a while, and look at fresh goals.

The bottom line is that you’re still exercising every week, you’re eating well every week and to me, that amounts to being truly successful as you’re aiming to be fit and healthy for the rest of your life, not so many people get to achieve that unfortunately!

Keep working hard!

Twitt
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Uncertainty

The worst thing we have in our lives is uncertainty.

We are sometimes not certain how much money we will earn, not certain how much our bills will be, how much will our next car cost, will we meet our mortgage payments, how our health will be perhaps being the biggest etc etc.

The stock market for instance has hated all the uncertainty of the liberal/conservative fiasco, nobody likes uncertainty full stop!

Most if not all of you show uncertainty in your health and fitness programme at times, and some of you have posted here not knowing which way to turn at times.

You have been encouraged by others and hopefully by myself on here, because we all have had doubts, we all have uncertainties running through us at times, and its how we react to all of that worry that determines where we end up.

Make the ultimate wrong decision such as going on a mega-binge in times of stress and it can lead to a longer decline if not sorted out straight away. Weight gain ALWAYS leads to feeling worse than you ever should have done in the first place!

If you have a longer term plan and  true understanding of what it takes, then you are likely to react favourably under times of great uncertainty. This comes from experience though and you shouldn’t be hard on yourself if you make mistakes, all of us make mistakes and those who say they don’t are liars!

I would rather make a thousand mistakes but as long as i learned from most of them, i would know i have become a better person because of them, and are likely to make better decisions in future in times of doubt and uncertainty.

We all are learning and those who think they know it all are usually just that, know it all’s, and we all know a few but they are usually regarded as fools or to be pitied.

Whatever doubts you have, you know there is plan and way out of it, lots of resources on here to encourage you on the right path so let’s give it a go and be the success you always knew you could be!!

Twitt