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Monday, June 20th

If you’re looking for your big start to the week, then you need a fundamentally good start to the week and it all begins with some solid eating plans!
 
 
Nothing wrong with up to 3 cups of tea or coffee a day, but you do need plenty of water on top of that, 8-10 glasses a day or around 1.5 litres if you are consuming by the bottle.
 
 
Breakfast is always going to work best when its a natural choice, weetabix are always fine, and porridge can be a great selection giving you a nice long steady supply of energy to start the day off. Dried fruit can be a great sweetener.
 
 
If you are having some fruit juice in the morning or at any other time, its always an excellent idea to dillute it as you wont be consuming as much sugar as a whole glass of juice, therefore saving on needless calories too.
 
 
Fruit is usually a matter of personal taste, some people like certain fruits and tend to stick on the same ones. Its always good to mix them up a bit so you get different nutrients, but the bottom line is that fruit of any kind should come in on a daily basis.
 
 
Vegetables are a must have in anyone’s day, a lot of people ignore these at their peril, because they provide a lot of what your body needs when it comes to supporting good health.  Again try to keep it varied and your body will feel all the better for it.
 
 
Your protein selections should be the lean choices, such as white meats and fish, and if you keep to this, you will feel full and your calories consumed will be relatively low, red meat is fine but only once a week.
 
 
One of the biggest mistakes people make with carbs is portion sizes, and if they are bigger than the size of your fist, then everything you eat will be putting on body fat rather than giving you energy.
 
 
Portion size for some people is one of the most difficult thing to change, but once you do get used to the smaller amounts, then your appetite gets smaller, and your ability to eat big meals goes down, which means a smaller and flatter stomach of course.
 
Put in a great workout today and add of all this great food, and you’re off to a flier early on in the week!!!
Twitt
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Thursday 16th June 2011

Progress and improvements don’t need to stop if you are injured as we have proved this week. Jean has clearly been able to improve herself this week with some attention to eating and not succumbing to the treats that most people have when they are not training.

The incentive to train hard and eat well is there when you are doing both hand in hand. As soon as you stop training, we somehow automatically become drawn to higher sugar content foods as well as foods high in saturated fats. This is an obvious recipe for disaster of course.

Then once we get back to training again, discipline usually kicks in and our food intake all of a sudden becomes sensible again. It seems madness to do this each time because its another version of yo-yo dieting, in other words your weight going up and down all the time, and every time you go through this process, your body becomes more resistant each time, so your body will find it harder and harder to get into shape, exactly what you DO NOT want!!!

This is why its always ideal to keep your weight, body fat and waist measurement within a tight range. It maybe within 7 pounds for your weight, within 2-3 inches for your waist and within 4% for your body fat.  Keeping within these ranges will mean you are successful short and long term.

This ensures higher standards are kept up even if it may be bit of pain to keep on measuring yourself.

This is why you should always look to your training on weekly basis, and not accept having terrible weeks here and there, unless you are ill of course, when its always a bad idea to try and train through it, unless it’s a minor cold.

Constant re-evaluation may seem over fussy but in reality it’s the best self-assessment tool you have, and will make sure you are ALWAYS in shape, never go on slippery slopes and you maintain the high standards you have set yourself!!!

Twitt
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Wednesday June 15th 2011

The best way to get in shape for now, and for life is to stop everyone scamming you out of your hard earned money and do the things you KNOW that will work.

I really think that some of latest diet books really think we are stupid, that we have too much money and we want to give it to them, or they may actually believe that some of their stuff actually works in a short term faddy type of way despite the longer term consequences?

Someone asked me about the dukan diet again this morning, you know the one which advocates mostly protein in your diet. The great news is that this diet DOES work to lose weight, just like the atkins diet works and its a simple principle they use. One gram of protein has around 4 calories just like one gram of carbs has. One gram of fat on the other hand has 9 calories.

So you can see if you eat mostly protein and not in huge quantities, you will be ingesting less calories every day and therefore be successful at losing weight. Also, protein in no bad thing and will make you feel full for around 4 hours at a time, which is a good thing.

The negatives only start some way into the diet.

 What happens when your energy levels eventually go down? Your training suffers due to your lack of energy and therefore endurance? What happens when you have problems going to the toilet (it had to be said) due to you eliminating certain food groups? Are you really never going to eat carbs ever again? And what happens if you do? Are you going to have some almighty splurge on bread and potatoes or chocolate and chips? Going mad on carbs because you haven’t eaten them for so long? Nobody i know has successfully eliminated carbs long term without any side effects!

So if you want to be healthier in losing weight, trying eating healthy proteins such as fish, chicken etc with plenty of vegetables, for lunch and evening meal, eat fruit in moderation as well as a small handful of nuts, drink more water for added fat loss and keep your carbs under control, its all about portion sizes the size of your fist, that includes rice, pasta, and potatoes, and wholemeal and wholegrain versions too.

Everything in moderation and a wide variety of foods, this is the best and most SUSTAINABLE way to lose body fat AND firm up!!!

Twitt
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Friday 10th April 2011

Friday used to be the day I would measure myself in terms of physical performance, and Friday can be a great day to get the very best out of yourself.

I used to do a 20 minute time trial on the bike from my house in burry port to sandy water park and back. If I went much over 20 minutes, I would take it that I had slipped back with my fitness and I needed to pick up the pace with my training the following week.

If I broke 20 minutes, I knew my form and fitness was close to its maximum and I took a lot of satisfaction in recording this data on the computer not only in terms of time, but in terms of the average heart rate recorded over the course. If my heart rate was slowly coming down over the weeks, yet I was getting quicker, then everything was definitely going to plan and my performance and body was becoming a lot more efficient.

There’s not only the training element to this of course. What I would be eating every day would have a direct effect on my overall performance. If I ate badly, my Friday time trial would be mediocre no matter how hard I tried, if I ate well I would be primed to record an excellent time.

Measurements like this can offer key indicators on your overall progress.

If you have your own similar measurement, let me know and lets see how we can set about improving it.

If you have no kind of standard, then you have no barometer on how you are doing, and some kind of “hope for the best” attitude is not going to do you or your long term results and aspirations any good.

Lets make a difference this weekend and implement this very successful strategy that will give you maximum results every time!!!

Twitt
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Thursday 9th June

Okay, its Thursday and we are approaching the end of another week! Have you become one of the “victims” in life, the ones who sincerely think they cant get into shape no matter what they do?!!!

Or are you one of the people who actually DO good things for their health, they show up for the training session no matter what, having a healthy supermarket basket is a PRIORITY for them, and treats are few and far between, and pretty non-existent in the week in particular!!!

DOING is a very powerful mindset to get into.

You can “think positive” however much you want, but until you actually “do”, then nothing’s going to change in your life.

Listen to the next conversation you get in a hairdresser, or in a dentist or a doctor, when people start talking about health and fitness, it is often amusing to hear such stories going on about their versions of why the cannot train.

The ironic part is that doctors regularly recommend and prescribe exercise these days for all sorts of ailments, just about everything under the sun in fact, so what a time and place to be making excuses why they do not exercise.

So from all of that, you would assume I only want to concentrate on those who “do” rather than those who just talk about, but you would be wrong.

I have proven an awful lot of people wrong in their pre-conceived ideas about their own limitations.

ANYBODY AND ANYONE can get fit and health and I have a massively wide variety of people to prove it!!! All you need is an open mind and to replace negativity in your life with optimism and ambition, which are forgotten words in most peoples vocabulary, sometimes even after the age of 21!!!!

There has never been a better day to commit to yourself and create the best version of you today, Thursday 9th june!!!

Twitt