Thursday 8th September

As winter approaches, and we are definitely in autumn already, it seems as if all the “warmer” type of cooking is very much “in” and the summer salads are very much “out”!

The problem is that when winter food does come in, that seems a big excuse for some people to really slam lots of salt in when it comes to food preparation, and with added sugar in just about everything these days, this is one of worst ways to stay in shape, and weight gain is pretty much a certainty unfortunately.

Once all of this winter food starts becoming a way of life again, the next stage are the famous baggy jumpers and dark colours to try and look “slim”!!!

You can get used to baggy jumpers and we all must have been there at one time or another. Baggy jumpers become addictive because nobody really knows whether you are in shape or not!!!! You enter another world where you think you can get away with anything!!!!

 Baggy jumpers don’t really work the following summer though, unless you like sweating a lot of course, and then a whole winter of eating “winter food” becomes apparent to everyone and this is why crash dieting becomes universally popular in spring!!!!!

You can easily avoid all of this disappointment and crash weight gain, then crash weight loss horrible scenario if you just use your intelligence and don’t change things too much!!

Nothing wrong at all with eating warmer foods but there is absolutely NO reason to slam lots of salt in your cooking, you don’t need ANY as it happens!!! You don’t need to add corn flour, sugar or anything else thats guaranteed to make your health a lot worse over time. Whats wrong with keeping it all natural anyway?

It can be done and all people i look after do it this way.

If you thinbk thats no possible, then perhaps your taste buds are conditioned to junk food, and saturated fat and high sugar in particular!! If this is the case, then you need to change and make it right now!!!

Thursday 1st September

One of the biggest changes I have seen in the fitness industry over the last 20-30 is the size of gyms. They went from a small little community gym to the massive operations that are owned by the huge companies.

A lot of people joined the biggest gyms, and they made a lot of money.

The problem was that the big gyms didn’t realise that their memberships were not going to stay faithful for as long as they had hoped.

As has been previously discussed on here, due to a lack of attention and usually experience, the staff were not able to cope with the massive numbers joining these “super gyms”, and because profit was the main driver for these gyms, they always employed the minimum wage staff who were usually not very experienced.

The customer soon got fed up of not seeing results and constant turnover of staff, and biggest of all, the draconian contracts they had to sign, sometimes for 1-3 years in some cases as Watchdog has shown!

Then in America, then trend started to turn dramatically around 4-5 years ago. Despite offering cheaper memberships just to get people through the door, retention rates dropped to 3-5% which is devastating on any business.

When you add in the fact that the overhead for these businesses was £300 thousand a month, you had a business model that was about to crash and burn!

If you take a look at the business pages of any paper these days, you will see many casualties who can’t pay their rates and rent on their gyms, and often losses of millions of pounds.

The fact that they have 20 treadmills and bikes in one room doesn’t impress so many people anymore, but it does cost a SERIOUS amount of money and that’s whats hurting them.

A recent study done in America confirms this trend. 8 out of the top 10 gyms are much smaller, independently run gyms offering much more specialist training and advice. Results are always the number one offering from these places, instead of a competition of how many treadmills and bikes they can offer.

Its no coincidence that these smaller gyms are actually making a much bigger profit too! Its great that results matter again these days, and that training on endless machines is dying a slow death!!!

Training only on machines is not  very efficient for the body, and can hamper your results, get back to free weight and freedom of natural movement, you will spend less time training and have double or treble the results!!!