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Thursday, 1st March

We all worry about weight, and we are all mostly concerned with the “visual” aspects of health, but we all need to work on our “internal” health a lot more often.

Many of you do not realise for instance, that even if you are at your “target weight”, you are prone to not being exactly healthy inside.

Being skinny is not a guarantee of being healthy at all, and we all know people who smoke 40 a day, drink alcohol, and do not exercise and are still skinny, but would you really say they are healthy?

Let’s use this example.

If you are healthy even, and consume a big fry up with all the added on stuff, black pudding, bacon, fried eggs, fried bread-everything!!!

Then if you tested your blood after 4 hours, the test tube would show a white substance at the top of the water, and that would show the saturated fat you have built up in your blood.

If you compare this to the 4 hours after eating a bowl of porridge, a chicken salad etc, then you WOULD NOT HAVE that horrible white stuff on top of the water in the test tube.

This is scientific fact and you are welcome to ask your doctor about this very experiment.

It really DOES matter what you eat and you ARE what you eat.

Please do not use the excuse that you are “exercising plenty” so you can eat what you want. This is the biggest lie you will ever say, because you are kidding yourself.

If you want to be healthy inside AND out, then you had better take care and choose wisely what you eat.

This all starts in the supermarket, and if you buy rubbish in, then at some stage then you’re going to eat it, so lets stop that excuse right now and take some responsibility for your eating!

Eat well, choose natural and fresh when possible, and really think of how your body is working inside, it’s the key to it all!!!

Twitt
Posted on

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
Posted on

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
Posted on

Friday, 17th February

You are eating well most of the time, you are training okay and you think a lot about how you perform and look, but you may still not be sure that you are improving any more?!!

It may be tedious at times to check your progress, and maybe its time to look at things in a different light?

Every time you run, walk hard, swim hard, cycle hard, you have to realise that with every step forward, you ARE improving because things will be getting easier. You are bringing fresh oxygen into your cells, and your body will be functioning internally far better than it did first thing this morning, and a million times better than if you didn’t do any cardio at all, thats a fact!!!

Every time you eat well , you ARE improving and feeding your body like it derserves to be fed.

You didnt stop off in any one of the fast food places that a lot of people do these days. You did take the trouble to make food from scratch, instead of buying in ready made meals which are full of salt and every preservative under the sun!!! You are fulfilling your body’s potential to be much better and you’re not being one of the crowd that doesn’t care what they eat.

You drink water everyday to  IMPROVE, just think of it like that, if you don’t take enough water onboard, your body won’t function as well as you know it can, keeping hydrated is the single most important thing you can do for your body.

Every time you make your workout happen, you have reached your commitment for that day in terms of exercise.

Whether its struggling to get through traffic, struggling to juggle your time with everyday demands, whether its getting the focus together again to hit the numbers you know you’re capable in your big productive exercises, you finally got there and you will sleep with confidence that you can still improve, whatever your age!!!

EVERY DAY can be regarded as improvement if you look at this differently and keep things in prospective!!!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, 16th February, 2012

This week we have talked about not making excuses about lacking time to train, how we can really make the most of ten minutes when that’s all we have, and to make quality come first in assessment of our workouts, rather than “just working out for an hour” and that’s our benchmark and that’s it!!

Another not very time consuming tool that’s very powerful for the effort put in is self measurement.

How long does it take to measure your own waist and hips, or get someone else to do it for you?

I have talked about it many times before, if you measure yourself around once a month and see if you have come down a little bit in terms of inches, then you know you’re doing something right!

If an individual comes down 1-2 inches a month, then you would consider that great progress.

Inches off your waist are nearly always a better indication on how you’re doing than weight on the scales, which are often inaccurate due to a variety of reasons.

If you lose weight off your waist, then your clothes will feel much better, another tried and tested way to show progress.

Losing inches off your waist is one of the best ways to tell if you are fit and healthy, and to avoid serious disease.

Your waist size should always be a maximum of half your height in inches.

In other words and using simple maths, say you were 6 foot tall, that would be 72 inches since there are 12 inches in a foot of course.

So your waist should not be more than 36 inches and ideally a little smaller.

Medical science has proven that this is a very good formula for showing true health.

You secretly know too that if you are carrying too much weight on your stomach and hips, that you are not as healthy as you could be, that you will not be as confident as you could be for the summer, when you are likely to be wearing less clothes, that you are not as confident in visiting the doctor for a health check up and you won’t have as much energy as once had when you are in peak condition.

Do the waist test on yourself or get someone else to do it, and in general, you will be able to tell how much work you have to do!!!

Twitt