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Thursday, 7th February

Thinking about your programme in a healthy way is not only important, it will unburden you of unnecessary pressure.

If you just look around you, how many of your friends, work colleagues, family, people you sort of know etc are trying different ways to lose weight/get into shape?

Most of you can probably list 5 ways that people use or have used to lose weight. Most of them will be classed as unsuccessful or not sustainable.

This will often be classed as a waste of time and money.

Then there are all sorts of so called celebrities that people want to look like. This will involve using unhealthy methods to get there such as starving yourself, using a liquid shake diet, and generally putting a “particular look” much further ahead than one’s health!

If you use short term and often dangerous thinking to get into shape, then you need to re-think that strategy right now, and change it right now. Use HEALTH as your number one goal, and the rest of the way you WANT to look will happen in its own natural way.

How can you go wrong if you mostly eat good natural food every day?

How can you go wrong if you drink 1.5-2 litres of water a day, and drink alcohol just once a week?

How can you go wrong if you exercise a minimum of 3 times a week, and improve on a regular basis, however small?

These changes will lead to your clothes feeling better, you will have far more energy in your life, AND YOUR HEALTH will be in terrific shape!!!

Forget all the faddy things you often read in the papers and magazines, they are trying to sensationalise your most important subject-your health!!! If you’re sensible and use your common sense, you will always remain on the right track and achieve the big results you always wanted!!!

Twitt
Posted on

Wednesday, 30th January

Training diaries and records are vital for you unless you have a photographic memory and you can remember pretty much everything you do from session to session!

Some of the most successful individuals I know and train keep a record of everything, from their training to their 7 days eating typically.

The eating plans tend to be done once only every couple of months, or especially the sudden gaining of a little weight!!

The training record though would typically be kept in a little book, and some of these books can go on for years I have seen! The thinking behind it all is that you will have a roadmap on where you have been, and indeed where you intend to go from where you are now.

Also, if you have no plan, no past workout history, and you workout in a haphazard fashion, then your results are never likely to be as impressive as you would like.

Your body responds well to a good routine too.

For example, if you are doing 10 press ups for week one on a Monday and Thursday for example, then pushing that figure from 10 to 12 won’t seem that too much of a stretch.

The week after 12-15 won’t seem that bad, and the week after that, 15-18 won’t be a superhuman effort.

From these examples, its easy to see how people get to doing 25-30 press ups through this system of gradual progression.

The thought of going from 10 to 30 press ups in one go is frightening, and indeed pretty much impossible!!! Doing this gradually and in a methodical way is the ONLY way in my book.

The training diary lets you record this in black and white, and as I have always told you, when you write your goals down in black and white they are 80% more achievable!!

Your training diary is not only a practical way to record your progress, but is much more likely to see you achieving great things with your body and health in general!!

Twitt
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Monday, 21st January

Assuming you are still building your programme up, one big thing you should be making sure of is the importace of a big workout on a monday to start off your week in the right way!!!

You may have had a workout before breakfast, lunch time or you hit your workout at tea time, whatever that time may be, you need to make sure you hit it with intensity, aiming to do a little bit better than last week, and setting yourself up for a very strong week.

When you do train hard, you will be more inspired to eat well and less likely to make poor choices.

When you train hard, you won’t want to waste any of that effort you have just put in.

This is why monday is SO important. How many times have you had a bad monday in terms of missing a workout, and then you went on to have a poor week in general? You may think that because you missed monday’s workout, then it will not be so bad to miss tuesday too, and by the time wednesday comes along, you may as well wait until next week!!!

Missing a week of training usually goes with softening up on your diet too. The attitude of “putting everything off until next week” is very common, and i hear anecdotal evidence of this all the time.

Being in shape is all about creating good momentum, getting into shape in the first place is very much about getting that momentum going strongly, and the only way you get momentum is getting a succession of good workouts together along with feeding yourself in a highly nutritious way.

The great news is that once this momentum does get going, it can be very hard to stop and results at this stage are much easier to get, almost without even thinking about it!!!

Twitt
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Tuesday, 25th September

Good comment from jean last night about my piece yesterday on training.

Yes, you should (if fitness allows) aim  to work more in a non-stop fashion, and jean certainly knows the value of this!! This level of conditioning can be only achieved though after a lot of training and a lot of efforts already in the bank, in other words you only move on to this more advanced form of training when you feel ready, and this usually involves more traditional forms of training first, which will be slower in nature with much more rest.

Then there is the question, what happens if the session gets easy? It only becomes easy if you do the same thing all the time with the same amount of weight and reps. You can EASILY change this around and make things far harder for yourself, and that means far more beneficial too!!!

You change it in a couple of different ways. If you are doing a set of exercises, and its usually 6 with a maximum of 8, then how about substituting some or all of those exercises with viable alternative. Tricep pushdowns could become arm dips on a bench or vice versa.

Press ups could be substituted for bench presses, lateral raises could become front raises or upright rows even, so you can see the choices are bigger than you thought!

This will create an immediate effect for the good!

Then there is the rep rane, i always love 8 as a rep number, but nothing wrong with changing that to 10 or 12 now and again, to get a different stimulus that will only benefit your body.

Then when you need to change again, and your weights become very light, how about increasing your weight slightly, this will create an immediate difference in intensity levels, as long as you can do 8 reps minimum per exercise, if you go under this rep range, then the exercise doesn’t become anywhere near as effective!

Always aim for good intensity levels and never let your workouts become run of the mill!!!

Twitt