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Monday 12th September

Having an escape route to relieve life’s tensions has become even more important.

With life’s pressure’s getting bigger and bigger for most people, the escape route in exercise terms has never been so important!

I can think of many people who use exercise as the perfect route.

It could be a bike ride on a more obscure route, it could be a run in the woods, or it could be a simple walk anywhere.

What you find with these options for exericse is that you not only get a good fat burning workout in, you also get some “you time” when you can gather your thoughts and really unwind after the pressure of a hard day, or if you turn it around another way, you can exercise first thing in the morning which is the best preparation for a hard day to come, and seriously helps with the pressures of normal life to come!!!

Everyone has a favourite run or bike ride, or cycle or even swim becomes they become familiar with it.

I have a woman with five children i train who likes nothing better than walking up a really steep route to her friends house, and a walk that used to take her 40 minutes now only takes 20 minutes!!! What once was a pain in the you know what of a run has now become a quick easy walk which she now happens to do more often!!

The best part about the walk is the time out she gets when she can let off steam and think about what went right and what went wrong with her day! Some people use alcohol as this emotional crutch but many, many people i train now use their daily “escape route” as their must do every day.

Nothing better than getting rid of stress and losing  body fat the same time!!!

Twitt
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Friday 9th September

A reflective sunday coming up for many and i am talking about september 11th of course, the kind of day definitely when you remember exactly where you were on that day!!!

Ten years ago now and its a good day to remember where you were with your health and fitness!!!

Were you leaner, were you heavier, were you out of shape, were you at your fittest, did you always perform well then, were you in a rut you never thought you would get out of then?!!! All different situations and i will bet that things could have turned full circle by now if you haven’t been consistent with your training and eating, or certain things in life happen sometimes completely out of your control?!!!!

The bottom line is where are you now and what you have learned about yourself in the meantime. Why are you or why aren’t you in shape now? There’s a pathway to being in shape and staying in shape and did you stay on it or did you completely go off that path and have forgotten the way back since?

So ten years may have gone and you may be reflecting on what has happened in your life since back then!!!

The question is now are you going to use all of that positive and negative experience to good effect this time in determining the path you’re going to go on for the next ten years? If you don’t, then the last ten years of training will have been a waste of time if you can’t use it to your advantage?!!!

You should be a smarter trainer now, you should realise that faddy diets do not work, you should know the value of rest, you should know the value of changing your trainers regularly (every 6 months max), and the really good advice of having a really well thought out programme thats going to bring you results year in year out!!!!

Things change over the years, but the fundamentals never do, i mean the stuff you need to do every day to be successful!!!

Twitt
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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!!!

Twitt
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Monday 5th September

The first week in september takes us all back to our brand new school year, and the start of a very big and nervous time in our development. Its an exciting and an uncertain time and this is when true progress is always made.

How often have you had this feeling when you trained last?

When was the last time you thought about your upcoming training session and what you were going to do?

When did you last reach a fitness goal?

When did you last fit into your all your favourite clothes?

When did someone last complement you on the way you look?

When was the last time you hit a personal best in your workout?

When was the last time you enjoyed your workouts?

When was the last time you had a good week of eating, and by that i don’t just mean 2-3 good days either!!!

When was the last time you had the mental resolve to follow things through and reach a goal?

If you can’t answer these questions very well, then you badly need to look at what you are doing and why you may be falling short of every goal you really want to achieve!!!!!

September for me is all about being fresh in weather and outlook!!! Its not about settling into some kind of  “cosy” routine because thats not going to get you anywhere, its really not!!!!

September is the month to get you going and use the nearly 16 weeks right up to christmas day to the very best effect, its about managing your time better and making the most of your energy, your time, your inner drive, just about everything thats going to help you reach that goal that drives you deep within, so lets get it going again in spades and really pile it on right up until christmas!!!!

Twitt
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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!!!

Twitt