Posted on

Tuesday, 8th October

Welcome to the Nutrition section of Keri’s blog and thank you for browsing. Good nutrition and exercise go hand in hand.

Diet plays a huge part in any fitness programme and so every week I will give you some recipes, tips and ideas on how to eat healthily to fuel your active lifestyle.

As you will notice, the recipes I give you may not seem like the sort of things you should be eating on a diet. However as far as I’m concerned this is not a diet but a healthy way of life. In order for you to achieve good fitness and a healthy diet you have to find the food you eat enjoyable and look forward to preparing and eating it. Plain food such as a breast of chicken is nice sometimes but you wouldn’t want to eat it every day and soon enough you would return to your old ways of eating out of sheer boredom!

Another problem I have with diets is that they are always concentrated on counting calories. Not only does this lead to an obsession with the weighing scales but also there is a tendency to limit or avoid certain food groups, such as carbs, which is detrimental if you are following a fitness programme and training hard. Carbs, protein and fats are vital for optimum muscle repair and growth and should never be eliminated.

I believe that you can eat everything in moderation even butter and sugar! However there is a rule. 80% of your food should be whole foods and cooked from scratch. In our household the other 20% equates to a treat on a Friday night such as a scoop of ice cream or a couple of drinks. On a Saturday night possibly a take away or a meal in a restaurant. The rest of the week we eat to train. This ensures a constant supply of the right type of nutrients, vitamins and minerals required for the demands of training. I will show you how to cook simple and quick meals and snacks that the whole family can enjoy.

I want you to start thinking of food not in terms of calories but it’s nutrients and health giving properties. How it’s going to fuel your training, giving you increased energy and vitality. Thinking this way about food will also decrease considerably your risks of getting food related diseases such as diabetes and cancer. Above all I want you to enjoy the food you cook because without pleasure you will not succeed.

If there are any recipes you would like or tips on losing weight please contact me on here or at Ted’s Gym.
Nicola.

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 22nd January

With a bit of luck, you have got through your big workout yesterday to set the tone for the week, and maybe you are thinking how you can replicate that impressive start to the week.

Variety then should be your number one way to keep your standards high, your workouts fresh and therefore your progress high too!!!

This is why your workouts apart from weight training and the usual cardio should incorporate so much more!!!

If you have read this thing for a while, then you will know only too well that i love medicine ball work, bosu ball exercises, swiss ball work, and boxing workouts.

These exercises will work your body in a different way and often reach the hard to get areas that traditional exercise doesn’t seem to get near!!!

All of these different forms of exercise tend to hammer your core much more deeply than a more traditional workout. They are so successful that i consider these forms of training as my “traditional” form workout!!!

Once you have your traditional form of training change, then its at this point when exercising becomes “exciting again”, which is down to the variety AND effectiveness of your training, which in turn produces the big results that we are all after!!!

The best way to incorporate these types of training is to package various exercises into groups of 3.

For example, you could do medicine ball press ups, with alternate squat thrusts, and then finish it off with rope work we like to do at the gym all the time. Let me straight away that the group of three just mentioned may well be the hardest combination you could pick.

Of course, exercise selection depends entirely on your fitness ability and what you can handle.

It’s always better to start off cautiously and we will be discussing much more of this tomorrow!!!

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 23rd October

Unless you fully appreciate each stage off your development, and try to go from A-Z in record time, you are unlikely to achieve sustainable progress.

For example, we talked about some basic but very handy tips on your eating again.

The big question is do you practice all of these habits on a daily basis? If not, then perhaps you need to visit these again before moving on. How many of us have told ourselves that we know it all anyway, and we do not need to be reminded?

I have heard plenty of people use this attitude and guess what? They are always the ones who continually show LEAST progress!!

The ability to be a “sponge” and absorb every scrap of information you possibly can is always undervalued.

I often see the people with the least individual athletic ability over-achieve and better the results of so called more gifted athletes purely because they have applied themselves a lot more, and the same goes for every area in life.

The people who don’t take advice from a post such as yesterday are also the ones looking for some “magic” supplement that will somehow strip fat at a massively fast pace and somehow get you into your best shape, even without eating really well somehow!!!

Those of you who have been down such a route (and most of us have let’s admit it!), will relish the fact now that we don’t need to use such a complex and usually such an expensive route that is ultimately futile!!!

The tips yesterday will offer you stratagies that cost you absolutely nothing, but you will be able to keep up for a lifetime!

They offer you easy ways to get into shape, to speed your metabolism up, to help you make the right choices, and definitely put you on the road to feeling healthy and getting into the kind of shape you always wanted!!!

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 14th August

The Olympics continue to make the headlines for all the right reasons, and when you delve into the successes some more, you can see why a lot  of these athletes have improved so much

Any athlete who wants to be at the top of his/her game, now has to work harder every day, every week, and every year if they want to become successful in the next Olympics in Rio in 2016.

If you apply the same level of detail to your own training as previously discussed, then of course you can reach new highs and fairly quickly.

For example, you don’t need to accept that just because you are getting older, then the famous, or make that infamous “middle aged spread” will definitely happen! This is not the case.

While it is indeed true that you cannot eat as much and as uncontrolled as you did when you were 18, with a bit of thought and a bit of control, you will be able to control new successful strategies in your life that will offer healthy low levels of body fat and increased workout performances.

This is true of ANY AGE, not only do I see it in the “middle aged spread” category, but I see it with teenagers and senior’s in the 70’s.

If your diet is all over the place at the moment and you lack direction, then its time you stopped putting up with this lack of strong mindset and re-programmed yourself for success.

You don’t have to be this incredible Olympian either to do it! All you have to do is start paying more attention to the way you live your daily life. Model yourself on those who are successful with their weight, their body fat levels and their performances.

Whilst Jessica ennis will likely be very, very strict on her diet, and has been for many years, you can create a stricter version of yourself which will automatically take you up several different levels if you give it some time to work.

Consistency of eating well and training hard and regular can never be underestimated and is the true secret of champions.

Twitt
Posted on

February 8th

Now your basic level of conditioning is in, its time you thought about raising your performance!

Before getting into different ways of doing so on a traning basis, i would look at your diet before you do anything at all. If you keep eating rubbish foods full of fat, sugar and salt, you will be HIGHLY unlikely TO GET INTO GOOD SHAPE FULL STOP!!! This is the first thing you need to do before you move forward, or everything becomes a real struggle for you and things will not be easy for you, no matter how hard you work on your training. Its time to be honest, realistic and blunt if it means you getting to your goals quicker, if at all!!!

The old saying that you can eat anything you want as long as you train hard is totally false, and perhaps one of the most misleading claims you have heard for years but was foolishly wrong! You lose nutrients out of your body when you train hard, so it becomes vitally important to replace them as soon as possible.

Good food is good for your body in so many ways, in fact don’t see it as good, see it as vital in your goal to become the best you can be.

It makes sense to say that if you are 15 stone to start, and begin training hard, life will become a lot easier when you are down to 14 stone. Simply being lighter allows you to move more free, you will have less strain on your joints, you will have more energy and you will be far more positive because you have already lost a stone. You will develop the required momentum to easily come down from there.

The key to this remains your eating, without repeating myself too much, this has to be in place before you waste too much effort. Approach your eating and training with equal effort, and this way you get double results!!!

More on training improvements tomorrow!!

Twitt