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Thursday, 8th March

Following on with the family food advice, you need to keep considering why you are doing this whole thing, and this will keep you strong in your times of doubt and uncertainty.

  • Eating often is fun and good for you!

–     This day’s eating is all about eating every 3 hours or so, raising the rate our bodies burn calories so we burn more fat, feeling full throughout the day so we don’t feel the need to binge at certain time, and actually feel about hundred times better than we have before.

Positive trade off’s

–     You CAN keep this way of eating up if you really try and all it takes sometimes is  5 minutes preparation the night before making a packed lunch.

–     Plus, all that money you will have spent on junk food can go on something worthwhile, like a new dvd or some new clothes!

  • Summing up

–     changing your lifestyle to a rewarding healthy one starts with what you put into your body. Make it a priority when you go to a supermarket to influence your parents on what you want to eat. As a parent, you can inspire your kids to eat well too. They will listen if you tell then you want good food (and vice-versa) and soon it will become second nature.

–     Make sure you try and work up to 5 servings of fruit and veg a day

–     Try and get 2 servings of protein such as fish, chicken, eggs, lean beef, nuts, lentils etc per day.

–     Choose 2 portions of milk, yoghurt, cheese etc for calcium and extra protein

–     Use whole meal/wholegrain versions of pasta, bread, rice, cereals, potatoes to give you lots of energy every day.

–     Try to limit these in your diet using them more as a treat-Crisps, cakes, biscuits, pastries, chips, mayo,  salad cream, margarine, cooking oil, pop/fizzy drinks

You have had a pretty good overview on how you should be making your healthy lifestyle count, and its benefits.

If you adopt all or most of these guidelines, then you and your family’s quality of life in terms of health will be enhanced out of all recognition.

Once you do it this way, you won’t fall for the next “big” diet, those slimming classes that never ever worked long term (scientific studies back all of this up), or any of the faddy ways to lose weight.

Trust in your own instincts of what is right, is sensible and likely to work for you over a lifetime!

Twitt
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Tuesday, 28th February 2012

Potential injuries are always a constant threat to our training goals, and its vital we deal with them in an efficient way.

Shin Splints are one of my least favourite injuries, having suffered with them badly when I was 18.

Shin splints are an injury that affects the front part of your leg and in particular your shin. Also, the surrounding tissue can be often painful to touch.

Common symptoms also include pain in this area in the first few minutes of exercise, then it can go away and return just as you finish your run or walk, followed by pain the next couple of days.

I have one lady who is doing the Moonwalk in London in May, and is struggling with the very same complaint.

I have advised two weeks rest from walking to give that area a chance to heal and calm down.

Shin Splints can be caused by running or aggressive walking on hard surfaces, they can be made far worse by using poor quality trainers (you should chance your trainers every 500 miles or 6 months in general).

Icing this area a couple of times a day for 15 minutes at a time can bring a lot of relief, and help greatly with inflammation. The pain can be quite severe and if left unchecked, can lead believe it or not to stress fractures in the shin area!

Simply “running through it” will not cut much ice with this injury, in fact it can make it ten times worse.

When you do feel like getting back walking and running after a rest, I would advise only very soft surfaces such as grass to do your workouts on. Hard concrete type surfaces will only bring back this injury.

Non weight bearing exercises will only be good, such as swimming and cycling, and inside weight training/resistance training of all kinds. This means you can keep very fit and strong whilst you are recovering.

These are all handy tips to make sure you make the most out of a potentially nasty situation, and certainly don’t make it worse!

Twitt
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Monday, February 26th

To maximise your gains in fitness, i cannot stress enough how vital your eating is, and what eating CLEAN really means.
To me, eating clean means eating food as much as possible in its natural state, and keeping refined sugars to an absolute minimum.
 
All the foods we always talk about will always bear fruit for you if you pardon the pun!
 
Porridge is a natural food that gives you long term energy, and stops you snacking.
 
Any oat based products or porridge with added “apple pie” type flavourings, WILL NOT DO YOU ANY GOOD.
 
Wholemeal bread in moderation is a sign of good clean eating, White bread is the equivalent of a disaster zone, full of refined sugar, bleaching agents and lots of chemicals and rubbish designed to put weight on you, it will be really unhealthy on all sorts of level for your body, and you have to avoid this rubbish if you are to be successful in weight/fat loss.
 
The margarine and butter on top should be avoided, this is saturated fat and can never be any good. Saying that, butter is the natural product and helps your body more than margarine, which can be horrid for your body and contains needless calories.
 
White meats are very welcome, fish is fantastic (no batter or any fatty sauce on it), cottage cheese is great, lean cuts of red meat are fine once a week.
 
White pasta is not acceptable when you can eat “clean” and have wholegrain and wholewheat pasta.
 
New potatoes and sweet potatoes are great examples of potatoes with a nice low sugar release, and offer a lot of nutrition.
 
White potatoes wont work as well, more refined sugar.
 
Fruit is fine in moderation, although classed as refined sugar, is a food in its natural state and offers far more than any negatives.
 
Fruit juice should be dilluted, and this will will give you far less refined sugar per glass.
 
All vegetables are classed as eating clean, and offer an abundance of nutrients and is nature’s way of making you healthy and helping your body to function properly.
 
Eating clean means trying to be as natural as possible in your food choices, this will automatically cut down on your refined sugars, and give you dramatic changes in bringing your body fat down!!
Twitt
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Friday, 24th February

With the big game in Twickenham tomorrow, on show will be the biggest collection of professional rugby players ever assembled.

If you compare these players to the 70’s, then you will be comparing chalk and cheese. The physical development of the players now would make mincemeat of the players back then.

I have to qualify this statement by stating that the players back then didn’t have the access to the training knowledge these days, the nutrition strategies that are commonplace these days, the different mindsets these days, the recovery advances that are very visible now.

We also have to realise that the players back in the 70’s were strictly amateurs, working a full time job and showing up for training a couple of times a week.

Weight training was often viewed negatively.

Eating a lot of protein was thought of as mad.

Training methods were very behind the times, and very unlikely to develop champion athletes.

Make shift gyms (if they had them in the first place) were remarkably poor and often unsafe, and nobody really knew what they were doing!!!

So it would be safe today to say that the likes of Gareth Edwards would likely still be fantastic players today, allowing for the fact that they would be right in the midst of all this training and eating knowledge, they would just be bigger, faster and stronger versions of what they were around 40 years ago!

The exciting thing is now that i really believe that any youngster can be developed into a professional athlete or at least semi-pro athlete given the right access to training, eating well, resting well and someone believing in them.

Many people don’t get as far as they could because they do not get enough professional help, i see many potential athletes every day coming through, and all they need is some encouragement, tried and tested advice based on science, and belief in themselves!!

More on this next week!!!

Twitt
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Monday, 20th February

Losing can often teach you more than winning, or so the saying goes in sports.

The same goes for your health and fitness programme.

How many diets have you crashed and burned on?

How many times have you tried to exercise and thrown the towel in?

How many times have you said “this time i’m going to do it no matter what” and still failed?

If you have been through all of these, and most of us have if we are honest, then they can become very valuable experiences believe it or not!!!

As long as we remember where we went wrong, then perhaps next time we will learn and not do it again?

If someone suggest we join them in a weight loss class, that we know that didnt work last time, and probably never well, isn’t it madness to go through the same useless process again?

The programme we did in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s may not have worked out too well, because some of us didnt train too smart, and got obsessed with doing cardio all the time maybe for example. We know that doesn’t really work and we need to mix it up with weights/resistance work.

So we have all the knowledge now on how to train effectively, so you would think that most of us would do it right, having failed so many times before? It is madness to go through the same process time and time again and expect a different result!!! But still some peope do it believe it or not.

Would you attempt an exam in school or college and say you only had 40%, then the next time you had 41%, the time after 35%, wouldn’t it be time to change your approach and work in a far more effective manner? Unfortunately a lot of people don’t get this and never get the very most out of their training, when sometimes all the solutions thhat they need to achieve their goals are right in front of them!!!

Learn from your past mistakes, and as long as you do, you will find the right approach and achieve great results faster than you ever thought possible!!!

Twitt