Posted on

Thursday, 8th November

Short termism is never usually a good idea, but there is one area where you may need to reconsider!

One of the biggest reasons i have found that people fail in their health and fitness plans is sometimes looking TOO far ahead.

If you tell people from the outset that they HAVE to eat well for the rest of their lives, they HAVE to exercise for a certain amount every day for the rest of their lives, then the reaction usually can be somewhat negative to say the least!!!

When i have set different challenges up for people i train, the overall best participant is usually the one who tells me that the key to success for them was simply taking one day at a time.

They found that even looking one week ahead was often too much of a challenge. One day was the most they could think of, as there was so much going on in the rest of their lives, they didnt was diet and exercise to overtake their lives!

Taking one day at a time also helps you get into routine, and keep routine.

By that i mean you get used to eating well and exercising sooner than you think, and it can get an addictive feeling.

You will recognise the different feeling you get between being idle and exercising.

You will know the feeling you get when you eat well, and when you eat junk!

So what you are doing the whole time is presenting an alternative lifestyle to yourself. One is refreshing, makes you look and feel better. The other makes you feel lethargic the whole time, and makes your appearance deteriorate pretty quickly, as well as hurt your internal health, probably the biggest consequence of an unhealthy lifestyle!!!

Practice the one day at a time theory, it seems to work in a big way for your longer term success too!!!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, 13th September

We talk all the time on here about constantly changing your workouts to bring you fresh results, and many of you have judging by some of the transformations you have been through.

We also talk about not letting yourself down in times of stress and doing the usual that most people do of “emotional” eating. In plain English, that means eating and drinking badly when stress comes into your life.

I have seen occasional drinkers become every night drinkers simply by having a month of stress, and finding that a bottle or two of wine has suddenly become the “best” solution somehow.

This is when we need re-evaluate what we are doing, to rediscover why we got into exercising and eating well in the first place.

Everyone should do this because its easy getting “caught up” into all the busy areas of our lives (work, relationships, family etc), often so much so that we never change our exercise programmes, never seek help on what we may be doing wrong, and this is when we can totally lose direction and suddenly we put on weight, lose our fitness through missed workouts, and our ambition vanishes without trace!!

This is because again we forget why we are doing this whole thing. Missing workouts we never once missed is a sign. Allowing a lot more fast food and processed food into our shopping trolleys is another sign we are “giving up” on ourselves!

This can be solved to a degree by the measurements being taken regularly, every 4 weeks, and discussing why your measurements has gone up or down.

None of us are perfect and this is why we need to assess often exactly what we are doing, or our dreams of outstanding health and have a strong fit lean body can go up in smoke without us even noticing!!!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, 14th June

Salt is very much in the news today, as the newspapers list quite a lot of well-known high street restaurants who make meals that are very overloaded with salt, which is many times your daily recommended amount!

These are often child friendly restaurants that are advertising themselves as “freshly made”, cooked on premises etc, when the reality is that the salt added to the food often outdoes any of the benefits of the vegetables etc.

Salt is one of the biggest contributors to blood pressure problems, as well as links to heart disease and certain other illnesses.

The reasons why a lot of these restaurants use so much salt is to preserve the food (make it last longer) and make it taste that much nicer again. This is playing right in the hands of children’s food as kids always go by taste first, and never of course worry about the nutritional content, not even on their list of concerns!

So naturally, if there’s far too much salt in the kids food, then the adult meal is likely to be over the top on salt too. This compromises the adult’s health and if done on a regular basis, will lead to ill health at some stage in the future.

Another bad situation developing from this is that kids and adults soon become accustomed to salt-laden food, and this soon becomes the benchmark of taste for future meals out and more importantly at home.

If you’re trying to make healthy snacks and foods for the kids, they will soon complain that the food doesn’t taste anything like when they “go out for food”, and your chances of keeping your child on a healthy diet go quickly downhill.

When your child  wants to go out and eat in these places every day, you know have a problem.

Another serious problem is the likes of Harvester, Nando’s etc who are peddling the myth that they serve healthy food, are getting away with it.

 They say “eat fresh” and “come to us”, when the reality is eat sort of fresh (sometimes), and we will make you much more unhealthy than if you made your own meal from scratch in the house!!

This is why its better to eat out once a week max and choose carefully from the menu, avoiding unnecessary sauces and other cooking methods designed to make your food taste nicer, but really disguises a cheap and poor product in the first place!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, May 31st

You either move forward or you fall back, and this is true in everything you do. Standing still is not often possible, and certainly not desirable for most people.

In exercise terms, there has never been a more true statement.

When you start an exercise programme, its natural that you will progress over the short term, but what happens after all of those initial improvements end?

You have to keep moving forward, keep strengthening your mindset and focus on what is to come, rather than keep looking back to what has been and gone.

If you focus all the time on going through all the same exercises, at the same performance level, for the same amount of time, then this is the perfect recipe for mediocrity in your training, and of course overall results.

If you are on the right programme to start with, then you should be looking forward to new challenges that require you to improve your skills, agility, strength, endurance, this is the way it should be.

If you are on the right programme, you should be guided gently and cautiously to these new levels, and your self-confidence will grow and grow all the time.

One of the biggest reasons to be excited about your training is that all the new exercises you will be able to do, will bring the most important factor of all to you-big time results!

If when you start training, your capacity is going to be naturally quite low. If you are on the right programme, that capacity will naturally go up quickly and can easily continue if you keep showing up for workouts, you keep shopping well for good food and cut down on the rubbish, you don’t drink more than once week in terms of alcohol.

A lot of people don’t believe that they can constantly improve their health and fitness. This shows they haven’t been on the right programme, and this has caused them usually to give up in their quest to look and feel their best.

I’m here to tell you there IS another way, all you need to do is take action and make it work for you, and having a commitment to being more active is your first most important step!

Twitt
Posted on

Thursday, 3rd May

Getting out of your comfort zone regularly when it comes to your training should be your number one priority but most people are either scared, cant be bothered or don’t know how to change the programme they initially started with the first day they were shown how to train.

This is almost a “silent killer” when it comes to progressing year after year.

Do this experiment-think of all the people you know who regularly exercise and perhaps they have been for many years.

Then think of in terms of a percentage, how many of them have actually IMPROVED year in year out over those years.

If you get 20% you would be lucky.

Then, another experiment for you to try!

If you know a couple of these people well enough to ask, then trying questioning them on how they train, and then ask them on the last time they actually changed anything substantial with their training?

I’m not talking about one or two exercises, I am talking about their speed or tempo of their workout, their rep ranges, the workout frequency, whether they just use weight, just do cardio, mix them both up, and do they do any core stability work, and what lengths do they go to in the core strengthening?

Do they use medicine balls, bosu balls, swiss balls for example, and what variations of these exercises do they use?

If you carry on with this line of questioning and they soon get agitated or fed up that you want to know, or just dismissive saying they are on the “best programme and that’s that”!!! Then you know they are becoming all defensive and they know deep down that they are now unwilling to change at this “late stage” seemingly in their “training career”.

The truth is that everyone needs to change regularly and test themselves in different ways. This not only keeps things fresh and fun, but will give you the regular results and health benefits we are all looking for!

Twitt