Posted on

Friday, 27th June

If you are start off in school in year 1 and you start learning basics, then it’s a natural progression to move on to new stuff pretty much year in year out, and often from week to week even, all of which are stepping stones to your development.

If you use this analogy in relation to exercise, then it should work the same way but often in practice it never does. Most gyms are not accountable to their members, because most people’s experience of gyms is being shown around the gym in broad terms, given a sheet of paper they give to everyone, and then forgotten about and left to their own devices once the direct debit is signed.

How many people do you know when they begin to exercise keep on doing the same old thing at the same level of intensity (or lack of!). It’s heartbreaking when you see this going on for long periods of time, and these individuals never progressing the way they should.

Proper exercise technique can take a lot of time, not only to show it but make sure good form continues to happen.

It’s human nature to go back to old ways, and when you exercise going back to old ways can mean sloppy form and potential injury, and definitely no progress.

It’s also human nature to find the easiest way of doing things.

Going through the motions in gyms is what most people do. Picking the more difficult movements, which require a high amount of energy just to do them are unfortunately what most individuals avoid, leading to mediocre results and a lack of general fitness. You commit to spend time in the gym, so why not make it as productive as possible?

Your programme needs to change regularly if you really want to seriously change the way you look and perform regularly, you need a few different types of workouts that will challenge your body to adapt, and you need to totally get out of your comfort zone, because your body requires a different stimulus all the time to keep on progressing.

See your training as a constant progression, and not just training and getting through it for the sake of it. It makes the difference between being a constant success story or just drifting through your programme without any kind of meaningful results to show for it.

Twitt
Posted on

Wednesday, 25th June

Many trainers are in the business of exhausting their clients, more and more reps just for the sake of it, no plan, no purpose and definitely no progression. Don’t forget that anyone can stand there and try and destroy you with exercise, but it takes true skill and experience to build you up gradually, so you become a much better athlete.

Understanding proper programming, and making sure the individual you are training EXECUTES your programme is of paramount experience, and this is why you see me running around a lot, things HAVE to be done properly no matter what, and we have to get through certain workouts every week like it or not.

Results are vital, and there has to be a plan on how to get them.

The variety of exercises we use in with one purpose in mind, to make you a better athlete full stop!

Hopefully, the goal of the individuals I train is to look better, feel better, and feel stronger and healthier.

We are the opposite of places who train you like you have to be worn-out sore, and feel like they have been crushed. This will likely lead to injury, and over-stress your central nervous system which means your body will break down sooner rather than later.

You need to train hard, but to learn new skills too. You need to get your body to adapt to new movements, then get it to recover with good nutrition, so it’s ready to do those movements easier next time you do them.

Please don’t fall for the rubbish you need to exhaust yourself every time. If you are continually getting stronger, a little bit faster with more endurance, then you are in a great place and you are likely to see incredible results in a far more pleasant and more enjoyable way!

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 24th June

Everyone gets great training days, but there are also times when things don’t go exactly to plan either.

You may have had a poor night’s sleep, the kids may have been up all night, work pressures may be getting you down, relationship stress may be spoiling your concentration, or your body may need a rest full stop, whatever it is you have to take the rough with the smooth.

As long as you are having more good days than bad days, then that’s going to be a victory and you are likely to progress quickly still.

There are ways to minimize bad days though.

1. Make sure you have enough sleep on a regular basis. Staying up late in the week just watching TV and then missing out on the sleep you need will compromise your training efforts full stop. Getting to bed early helps your performance just when you need it most

2. If you are training every single day, 7 days a week, then you need to stop right now and have at least one to two days off. Your body needs to rest and recover and too much training can be overkill. You will feel better with more rest too, and come back after your day off with renewed enthusiasm.

3. Change up your workout. If you train for a long time in your usual session, then try to stay in the gym less but work harder. If you normally do an hour or more, then try cutting it down to 45 minutes but hit everything harder and bring a new intensity into your training. Ask me for ideas.

4. Make sure you eat right. When you train hard, your body cannot sustain these big efforts UNLESS your nutrition is right. Also, you won’t recover quickly if you don’t put enough good food into your body, which is screaming out for good food right after your workout, the need for good nutrients is extremely high for those of you who are training really hard.

These should make a big difference, but if they don’t then of course I want to hear about it as your whole programme may need a fresh look.

Twitt
Posted on

Sunday, 22nd June

Most women carry at least 10% less muscle than they should for all sorts of health reasons due to modern lifestyles, meaning lack of exercise and lack of proper nutrition.

This is why our programme concentrates so much on you getting stronger, making you build lean muscle tissue just to get you to recommended levels, and help you burn calories much faster 24 hours a day than you probably are now.

Your body needs lean muscle to become leaner, and the strength training will have a big added benefit of strengthening your bone density. Osteoporosis is a very real threat to all of us, in particular for women, so a large part of our training focuses on countering that, along with balance and coordination.

You need to forget about the scale too. Please do it. This is the most distracting way of making you doubt your progress when the pounds are not dropping dramatically. If you build lean muscle, you will actually become smaller and more shapely, your clothes will fit much better and according to every single female we train, you are very likely to drop a couple of dress sizes, or several dress sizes even in many cases.

The new health and fitness indicator is your CLOTHES, and it has always been so with me and all the people I train. The sooner everyone changes their benchmark of true success in changing their body the better!

Most weight loss and media focus purely on weight-this is madness and leads to false expectations and can lead to women going on crazy diets that focus on dangerously low levels of calories. This is why large parts of the weight loss industry is extremely dangerous and always lead to misery in the end for the person who buys their “products”.

Would you rather having a lean, strong athletic body that looks great on holiday too, with great internal health and look unbelievable in clothes, often fitting into a clothes size you previously thought impossible and you can go into any shop and pick anything, even if you didn’t have a massive loss on the scales?

OR

Become obsessed with the weighing scales, hardly eating anything just to please the scales, doubting yourself all the time, being miserable and if you don’t train the weight loss will do nothing for “bingo wings”, and a soft, unfit body in general.

Losing weight is great but if you still have the loose skin afterwards, you are still not going to be happy displaying that body without clothes?

Focus on your health, use your clothes as your barometer of success, and focus on increasing your physical performance rather than starving yourself on faddy dangerous diets.

Twitt
Posted on

Monday, 9th June

One of the least productive ways of training you can do is concentrating on certain fancy exercises that never really give you a great return on your efforts. These are all over the internet and on certain magazines offering “new” exercises that REALLY are the “secret” to get into shape.

This advice usually confuses people even more, and can push you further and further away from getting into shape.

I have seen lots of people waste huge amounts of time doing some obscure cable movements, perform exercises that look technical but will give you very little development and not stimulate your body in the way you want it to.

Sometimes the best individuals to train are the ones who have never done any training before because they can learn the right way to start with.

Many people who have gone to different places before us, usually develop bad form in many exercises, and this poor performance of exercise can take some time to work out of them.

Performing movements the wrong way can also lead to overuse injuries and longer term pain problems. Sometimes you need to strip things back down to basics to move forward.

Most people get it wrong with exercise selection, the way they perform the exercise and men in particular try to use too much weight on that exercise, and perform it way too quickly just to get the weight up.

Women before they get to us usually have not challenged themselves with weights like their potential really allows. Once they do, their progress is always rapid and their body responds very positively indeed.

The best advice is to stick to a few powerful tried and tested exercises that have a history of delivering huge results.

They all take proper instruction to learn how to do them, and they will get you out of breath when you perform them. They are hard work but you need to perform them consistently and you will progress.

Keeping it simple, not getting distracted and following through on your plan is a guaranteed way to be successful.

Twitt