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Friday, 29th June

The end of the week already and hopefully, you have have found it one of your most productive ones!

This summer so far has resulted in the lowest number of running sessions i have ever had-purely because of the weather!

This has made me much more inventive though, and by developing more and more programmes indoors to create fresh excitement and enthusiasm!

Anytime you create new programmes, you had better make sure that the new exercises had better work!!

There is a million gadgets and faddy exercise products on the market, and i have hopefully managed to navigate these choppy waters and come out the other side with some solid programmes that are guaranteed to bring some good results.

When measuring a good programme, i have to consider two very important factors.

The first will always be safety, if a programme doesn’t have caution at its heart, and the emphasis of proper form as its cornerstone, then the programme will fall flat on its face, because either injury to the exerciser or a lack of results will be certain to be the outcome!

The next vital element is intensity and “energy value” to the individual who is training.

If you have a scale of 1-10, 1 is sitting down and 10 is going absolutely flat out, then i tend to encourage people to work at least to a 7 or 8, and sometimes even a 9. This is a sensible and productive way to manage exercise programmes, where results are important but safety and long term development are always key considerations for me.

So you shouldn’t be put off by this weather one bit, you should open yourself up to new programmes, new ideas, and new ways of doing things full stop.

Time moves on and so does the way we exercise!

Twitt
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Wednesday, 1st February

Nice to see that hill training is coming back into fashion these days with most of the world’s top athletes telling us that this form of training has been their cornerstone for years.

Dai Greene, the world champion hurdler from Llanelli, admitted the other day in the press that he credits hill sprints and in particular, sprints up sand dunes as the most important part of his training to develop him into a world class athlete.

Andre Agassi was famous for doing 900 yard runs up Las Vegas sand dunes to bring him back from the dead in terms of his pro career, he made it back from 141 in the world all the way back to number one by working so hard in his time going up sandy hills!!

Whatever goal you are looking for when it comes to fitness, hill sprints will work in a big way for you.

If hill sprints are beyond you, try and start on hill WALKS instead, but still trying to get up the hill as soon as you can.

Here’s the way it should go.

First of all, try picking the very worst hill you can find!! I mean the steepest, nastiest hill you can choose near to your home ideally and try to master it if possible. You never actually “master” it, you just get better at it, its ALWAYS going to be a challenge that’s for sure!!!

Aim to start off doing 5 walks going forwards, the try 5 walks going backwards. This forwards and backwards type motion will confuse your body a bit, and give you a far more thorough workout, and there’s nothing like it for give your legs heck of burn!!!

Each sprint should be around 30-40 yards a time, and do each one once you have got your breath back.

Start off small and slow, and then each week try and build it up a little more and see how you go.

If you manage to get up to 10 forwards and 10 backwards at a very good pace, you know you will be in great shape!!!

Twitt
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February 15th

Already you should be celebrating more light in the evenings and mornings, allowing you more inspiration to get into shape and actually imagine that spring might really be around the corner!

Now that we are through the new year resolutions part, its time to view 2011 as a positive opportunity.

No matter what your age is, and I sincerely mean that, it is  entirely possible to have a better year in 2011 than 2010, and its easily done.

Getting  older is no reason to scale down your programme, if you do then something shuts down in your mind and you allow yourself to settle for mediocre results which are a lot easier to attain of course.

That’s not to say that you should allow yourself to still do all of those crazy lifts you used to do when you were 18 and you’re now 65, but I have a few 65 year old’s who still train with real intensity and could put many youngsters to shame. Its always good to have safety as your number one concern, but as long as you’re doing things in good form, then the effort should never be compromised.

If you look at every week this week and approach it in a simple way, you WILL improve over the next 45 weeks or so left in 2011.

If you were prone last year to eating a sugary snack most days, how about tightening up and eating only good food Monday to Thursday at least, this means the majority of your days in the week are as close to perfect as possible.

Instead of having 2-3 days per week drinking in the week, make it just that ONE day, this will make a surprising difference to you for all sorts of reasons, 2011 automatically becomes a better day for you when you do this.

Promise yourself that in your workout programme, you will push and test yourself at least ONE day a week when you will try and do better than the week before. It may be one more rep in a weights exercise, it may be 10 more squat thrusts in a set in your indoor workouts, it may be a little sprint at the end of your run instead of just coasting it in, it may be one extra hill on your bike ride, or attacking that hill a little bit harder than normal, attacking a hill sounds a lot better than just “lasting it out” doesn’t it?!!!!

2011 is all about attacking and improving your programme, which leads to much better body fat levels, more energy and better health in  general.

Twitt
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January 14th 2011

Negativity is all around us especially in a tough economy and there’s not much money around. The trick is to either let it bury you so you become as negative as everyone else, or you use it as a tool to burst out of the quicksand you may be in right now.

The question is will you listen to the doom and gloom merchants about your progress, or you will shut them off from your life and concentrate on all your goals and ambitions.

Try and work out the issues that distract you from getting to where you want to be, and then you need to work out ways on how to eliminate them. Of course you can’t eliminate your husband, wife, family and work colleagues rom your life. Start by making a list of the people who distract or even stop you from reaching your goals, and list those who help you reach where you want to be.

Then you need to go back over old ground and start keeping records on your food again over 7 days. There have been a lot of studies showing that those individuals who record in detail everything they eat and drink periodically, say once a month or 6 weeks, the more successful they were in their fat loss goals for example.

You can do the same thing with your exercise, i go on about all the time the importance of trying to make progress in your training, are your numbers going up, sideways or down? Is your strength going up or down, is your endurance better and how’s your enthusiasm for training? All valid indicators that will determine how well you’re really doing, keep a close eye on all of these, you don’t need to do it every week but once a month will be very valuable if progress is important to you!

Another powerful way to make sure you’re successul is to make your private goals and ambitions public, this makes the whole thing more real and you will find that a lot of people are going to be supportive. They will know you’re on a stricter eating plan and not offer or make you high calorie meals/snacks, maybe someone will ofer to come and exercise with you and push you harder when they are out with you on a run or example.

When you make your goals public, you put your reputation on your line and you are showing the world that you can really make this thing happen. You may get some negativity but as we said, we need to ignore all that “noise” and concentrate on those who are going to help you get where you want to be. Its not tunnel vision, its called doing everything in your power to feel and look your best!!!!

As long as you use the number one secret-consistency, then you should advance very quickly!!!

Twitt