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Thursday, 13th September

We talk all the time on here about constantly changing your workouts to bring you fresh results, and many of you have judging by some of the transformations you have been through.

We also talk about not letting yourself down in times of stress and doing the usual that most people do of “emotional” eating. In plain English, that means eating and drinking badly when stress comes into your life.

I have seen occasional drinkers become every night drinkers simply by having a month of stress, and finding that a bottle or two of wine has suddenly become the “best” solution somehow.

This is when we need re-evaluate what we are doing, to rediscover why we got into exercising and eating well in the first place.

Everyone should do this because its easy getting “caught up” into all the busy areas of our lives (work, relationships, family etc), often so much so that we never change our exercise programmes, never seek help on what we may be doing wrong, and this is when we can totally lose direction and suddenly we put on weight, lose our fitness through missed workouts, and our ambition vanishes without trace!!

This is because again we forget why we are doing this whole thing. Missing workouts we never once missed is a sign. Allowing a lot more fast food and processed food into our shopping trolleys is another sign we are “giving up” on ourselves!

This can be solved to a degree by the measurements being taken regularly, every 4 weeks, and discussing why your measurements has gone up or down.

None of us are perfect and this is why we need to assess often exactly what we are doing, or our dreams of outstanding health and have a strong fit lean body can go up in smoke without us even noticing!!!

Twitt
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Monday, 10th September

Your training should always be balanced each week over a seven day period, and you should plan what you’re going to do each workout.

For example, today is monday and typically would be a great time to put some weight training/resistance training in. This can be done through weights and dumbbells, or using your own bodyweight as resistance.

I encourage all over body workouts each time, so I would look to put my second weight session in on a thursday whichht gives you 72 hours to recover. Your muscles break down during the session, and build back up again and recover properly only when they have had enough rest.

48-72 hours is a great rest period enabling you to come firing on all cylinders.

A beginner would tend to do their weight training programme on a monday, wednesday and friday because the intensity of their workouts isn’t going to be so great, therefore needing less recovery time.

A beginner will also spend a lot of time just getting used to the new movements, usually using a lot less weight so this means less muscle tissue broken down, this is the big reason not so long a recovery is needed.

So monday, wednesday, friday if you’re just starting out, monday and thursday if you have much more experience and you’re familiar with training and the required exercise and intensity.

Then we look at the cardio side of things. Down at the gym in burry port, we use treadmills, rowers and bikes, but there’s so much more to cardio in my view.

I’m a big believer in the battling ropes, which anyone who has trained with me knows only too well! They are massive on lung capacity, shoulders. Arms, back, legs and most importantly, core! You only need around a minute on these ropes, and you are absolutely blasted so get used to them as soon as possible!

Then we like to use a lot of speed and agility techniques, as discussed late last week, so you can see you definitely DO NOT need to rely on traditional forms of cardio anymore!!

I would put these fun sessions in on a tuesday and friday, with wednesday off to recover and rest properly. Recuperation is vital and always an underrated part of your health and fitness programme.

The weekend can be your fun stuff outside, getting up walking or running even up mountains, and you have endless routes to try in terms of cycling.

There’s always swimming, longer walks in natural surroundings such as pembrey country park and exercise ideas are only limited by your imagination!

Twitt
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Friday, 7th September

There’s an old song called “it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it” and this definitely applies to your training!

How many times have you been caught up with the mantra that you MUST train for an hour, or even an hour and a half?!!!

This may have applied to the thoughts of previous generations and the people who gave them this misleading and inaccurate information, but now you have to accept that times have indeed changed, and now exercise science dictates that we do not have to spend endless wasted hours exercising, especially when we can achieve a huge amount in the fraction of the time it used to take us to exercise!

If you believe that endlessly running on a flat surface is much more results giving than doing sprints up hills, then you need to think again.

If you still believe that lifting big weights, take long gaps for testing in between sets, then slowly move on to exercise to exercise is the best way to go, then please re-visist that thought process once again and try it out for yourself. Stop resting for 5 minutes in between sets, and cut down that rest period to 45 seconds. You will have to drop the weight maybe, sometimes by 20% if you’re not conditioned to it, but the overall effect of the workout will absolutely blow you away!!!

Too many people go to gyms and train so inefficiently it’s not true!!!

You need to get to the point, go after your targets with urgency and hopefully you have some kind of plan and direction you intend moving in!

This is a “must have and have it now” society we live in, maximise this by making your workouts shorter, more intense and make sure you’re focused on results!!

Twitt
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Thursday, 6th September

With the predicatability of the new school term starting as discussed this week, its absolutely no reason to be predictable and boring with your exercise programme.

You may have heard that one needs to change your programme every 12 weeks, but this is too limiting in my view.

You are only limited by your imagination when it comes to designing your workout, and what apparatus, if any, you end up using to reach your goals.

I love doing weight training but it doesn’t need to end there.

I like to throw in a lot of balance and instability work, meaning you really get to work your core in a very deep way, and this helps you get deep down into your muscle, and this is how you really get a strong stomach and back, which is absolutely needed to perform well in just about anything!!!

I love to do speed and agility work. Nothing worse and more boring than going on long, flat runs with no scenery to keep you interested. I love the short and sharper stuff, and getting more agile is what everyone should be interested in. The more agile you are, the better you perform in daily life, meaning less back pain, more core strength and power and you can create an unbelievable amount of energy into your life through this form of training too!!

If you have a look outside our gym by burry port railway station, you will see great big tractor tyres, which are excellent to flip, you will see sledghammers which are great to bash into tyres, you will see hurdles, cones and agility markers, you will see parachutes and harnesses, in fact all sorts of stuff to keep your variety at the very maximum, which also serves to keep interest at very good levels too.

There has never been a more exciting to train and get fit!!

Twitt
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Tuesday, 4th September

We talked about raising the bar with your exercise yesterday, and the absolute importance of not giving in to missing your workout just because it was first week of term!!!

This week already, I have trained many mothers who could have easily called off their training, but are aware of the hardship of missing a week or so when they get back.

Also, they tell me that their eating usually goes by the wayside when they don’t train. They miss the motivation to eat good healthy food when they do not exercise, and I can vouch for that myself.

Which brings me on to the eating side of things, are you going to stand there today accepting the fact that somehow you cannot eat well and healthy all week long? Of course you can still have a treat on the weekend, you can have a drink on the weekend as long as you don’t go bananas and you keep it to one night? Isn’t this a great example of compromise on both our part’s?

So the kids have started back school today, and hopefully you are back in the kind of schedule that is going to support a healthy lifestyle!

You have your supermarket shop in, at least 80% of it is healthy, and you will support your kids health very well by giving them healthy choices most of the time too.

Automatically when you eat healthy, you become much more energetic and much more feeling like doing some exercise. The opposite is true when you don’t eat well!

So with the word “routine” and “schedule” happening big time this week, and the kids finally going back to school, you have the perfect platform to launch your exercise programme and support your health and immune system with as many fresh, natural foods as possible?!!

What are you waiting for?!!! Let’s do it!

Twitt