Jon Coulson's Fitness Blog

More fitness new, info n stuff

2009-05-28T23:21:00.004+01:00

Following on from my post earlier in the week, I've got some more fitness news and info that I've been reading and thought it was worth sharing with you.

So let's get to it:

Want a bigger bench?

Sure ya do! Everyone seems to want a bigger bench! Thankfully for you, Dave Tate had an article published on T-Nation recently. As ever with Dave Tate, the information is solid and good to read.

What's the deal with Saturated fats?

Here's an interesting video that sheds some light on the saturated fat debate. People are slowly learning that not all saturated fats are bad for you. That said, there are people who cast a big blanket statement on how all saturated fats are bad for you.

Well, to say that saturated fat found in animals are the same as saturated fat found in processed crap is the equivalent of saying that processed carbs are same as carbs in oats. i.e. not very.

Low back issues?

John Izzo posted this article about some drills people can do to help with lower back pain. These drills can be especially good for people who spend long hours at a desk.

...And finally

For the more nerdy fitness peeps out there, I thought this would appeal to you - Free Course - Just go to the website and you'll see the sign up box at the top - it's for a 45 minute video course about evidence based practice. There's a lot of points to take away from it.

That'll do from me for now! Happy surfing.

Fitness news, info n stuff

2009-05-25T21:58:00.004+01:00

It looks like it's been a busy past few weeks in the fitness world, either that or I'm just finding more and more fitness info of interest so I thought I'd give a round up of some of the highlights.

This might even turn into a 2 parter, will just need to see.

The latest fat loss secret?

It seems that studies in mice with Curcumin (apparently a spice in turmeric) can be beneficial to losing body fat. To read more go here

If it proves to be successful in humans (and even if it's not successful in humans) I wonder how long it'll be before the supplement companies start selling it as the next best thing

Excessive cola consumption can lead to problems

It appears that as people drink more and more cola, there is a high correlation to them suffering from muscle problems according to this article.

When you read through it, some of those people were drinking up to 10 litres of cola a day....10.....litres....a.....day.

Dear. God.

Seriously, what sort of chump do you have to be to drink that much cola? You're just asking for problems really. I'm actually impressed that they can drink that much. If I drink like 4 litres of water in one day I feel bloated, let alone trying to drink more.

Finding out what matters to patients with low back pain

It's an interesting article, which, if read the right way, you can take another important message from it.

It looked at the feasibility of using a different type of questionnaire for people with low back pain - namely pin pointing what it is the patient would like to be able to get back to doing. Which, is sometimes different from what the specialist thinks they should be doing.

It's an important message that trainers can overlook - are you doing what your client actually wants or doing what you want them to do?

Lastly for today, I want to give a shout out to Mike Reinold for a series he is currently writing on patellofemoral joint issues.

It will be a 7 part series when completed (i've read up to part 3 so far) looking at the causes, diagnosis and treatment of patellofemoral joint pain.

The reason why it's such a fascinating read is that "patellofemoral pain syndrome" is one of those generic conditions which can cover various problems - like if someone says they have shin splints, low back pain or shoulder issues - there's any number of underlying problems which just gets a generic term slapped on it so it's interesting to find out the why's of it.

You can get started with part one here

I think that'll do for now, I'll post some more interesting pieces from the fitness world later this week.

Should you count calories?

2009-05-19T22:16:00.004+01:00

I wasn't aware of this but there seems to be some debate as to whether you should or need to count calories.

The reason I wasn't really aware of it was because it just always made sense to me that if you need to lose weight then you have to expend more calories than you consume.

This can be done through decreasing the calories you consume or increasing the calories you burn during the day - for most people it's usually a combination of the 2.

Apparently there are some corners of the fitness world that claim you don't need to count calories, just eat healthily or eat clean. Personally, I think combining the two ideas would give a good outcome.

For example, I can eat salad which is a clean, healthy food. But, if i was to consume 2500 calories of salad a day and my energy requirement for losing weight was 1850 calories, that's a 650 calories surplus (plus many hours sitting on the toilet probably). Alternatively, I could eat 1500 calories of junk food a day and my energy requirement for weight loss is 2000 calories, that's still a 500 calories deficit daily.

Admittedly, I don't advocate eating 1500 calories of junk food a day, unless you add a side order of salad :-) I know there are other factors to take into account when looking at the food consumed but I'm just using it as a general guide.

So where do I stand on calorie counting?

Leigh Peele pretty much nails it on the head for me when she says that people who are looking to lose weight but struggle - she always has them start measuring out their food intake. You'd be surprised how you can easily under estimate the amount of calories you're eating.

I think that complete beginners to dieting should always accurately track their food intake and count calories. The reason is that beginners don't usually have their "eye" in to judge portion sizes that well.

If you're quite used to weighing and tracking calories and can usually accurately eye up portion sizes or just looking to maintain your weight then I think you can start to shift away from measuring everything.

That said, I do think that even experienced people should occasionally go back to tracking their calories consumed. It's very easy to start letting portion sizes slip and before you know if you're heading back to square one.

I have a fairly good eye for portion sizes but I've recently been back weighing my food and tracking calories, even if it's just to show to myself that I'm not letting my portion sizes increase.

For anyone looking to track their calories, I always recommend www.fitday.com. It can take some playing with for a start but it's a useful tool.

Not just talking the talk

2009-05-12T21:50:00.003+01:00

One of the big things for me is getting people to realise the importance of investing in themselves to learn more and become better at what they do.

It can be to help your business, to help move up the ranks in your office, just to make your own hobbies and interests more enjoyable.

For me personally, I love learning about fitness and nutrition mainly (all the books to the right of the dictionary), I also enjoy learning about business and people skills (most of the books to the left of the dictionary).

To show you that I do actually live by what I say and not just sprout what other gurus have said and pretend, I wanted to share this photo with you. This just shows the physical books and products on my shelf that I have purchased over the past couple of years. It doesn't include all the e-books, audios, podcasts, manuals etc that are on my computer as well.

I'm not saying that I can remember everything in all of the books but I have learned a hell of a lot from them and often use them as a reference when I'm looking to help people with their training.

When I look back at how much I have learned and where I am now compared to where I would be had I not read so much, I'm glad I invested in myself and continue to do so.

Help fight cancer - An open letter to all fitness pros / experts / gurus

2009-05-07T00:39:00.003+01:00

A while ago Alwyn Cosgrove launched the liftstrong website and product. It is a CD that costs $24.99 and contains over 800 pages of fitness and nutrition information from a complete whose who of fitness experts (it was going to be a book but, because of the size of it, it had to be put on a CD). If you aren't familiar with Alwyn Cosgrove or why he has done this - shame on you, get googling!

100% of the proceeds (not just some) are donated to the leukemia and lymphoma society, so this isn't some shallow affiliate offer. It's a genuine chance to help make a difference.

Recently, it was the anniversary of the Liftstrong launch and that's why you are now reading this. Chances are you saw something intriguing on twitter / facebook / stumbleupon etc etc or I asked you to read this. I mean, chances are you or one or more of the people you know have been affected by cancer. I know I have and to be honest, it's shit.

Leigh Peele is putting a drive on to help spread the word for this awesome product. Below is an open letter she put up on one of her websites for people to send out.

The letter is written a bit tongue-in-cheek so please don't take it all seriously, just the message she is getting out. We are all able to reach a large number of people through e-mail lists, facebook, twitter - so let's use that for something good rather than just telling people about the last meal you ate.

“Dear (enter 6 pack ab toting guru name here)

I have been a member of your email list for a long time now. While I do enjoy all the daily emails about how to look massively sexy, I feel the need for a little more substance today.

Recently, I stumbled over to the Flzine site and read a blog post by the amazing (and might I say highly underrated and talented) Leigh Peele. It was discussing this great product, Liftstrong, in which all proceeds go to cancer. I hadn’t gotten any emails about that from you, and was wondering if you knew about? I think it would be great for you to send out to your list of readers, and also it will not lump you into a category of douches and vagina’s that shaft cancer research. Wouldn’t want that!

Here is the link to the Liftstrong site.

http://www.liftstrong.com/

Looking forward to seeing the email.

(Your Name Here)”

Random stuff on a Thursday

2009-04-30T18:41:00.003+01:00

I know, it's almost unheard of for me to do more than one blog post a week. I must have been up day and night working on this, and trying to not feel scummy for stealing the misc roundup blog post used so well by Eric Cressey and Tony Gentilcore.

The truth is that I've had some downtime this week thanks to a neck injury I'm currently trying to deal with and so I've had more time to surf the web in search of random fitness related news stuff.

Photoshopping mayhem

I've been on twitter a bit more this week and shared this article on from there FLzine.com - http://www.flzine.com/photo-retouch-for-magazine-like-beauty/ It shows you some of the before and after photos thanks to the wonders of photoshop and magazine editors needing all their covers to look artificially perfect.

It's been well known for a long time that photos are touched up, but sometimes the extent to which they are amended is quite surprising. A shout out to my friend Laura who gave me the link to this website http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/ which is exactly as it says on the URL. It's worth checking out, if only for a laugh.

This madness has finally cumulated in Kim Kardashian having unretouched photos published and it seems to have created a mini storm in a smaller teacup. I don't know whether she was doing it for genuine reasons or to be different and get her name out there but personally, I think she looks hawt in the unretouched photos. Check them out here.

Cereal in the news again

Oh dear, once again the words "worrying" and "shocking" are appearing in conjunction with cereals. Seriously, are researchers and journalists the most naive people on the planet? They seem to be the only ones "shocked" by the amount of sugar and crap in supposed healthy cereal. Here's some news - It's not a shock to the rest of the world.

Most people already know that most cereals are crap for you. These people are split into two types - ones that avoid it and eat breakfasts like porridge, omelette's or freshly hunted bear steaks for that extra macho start to your day. Or the other type just don't give a shit and will continue to eat it anyway.

Omnivore's dilemma

In my downtime, Ive been ploughing through a book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. The more I read of this book the more careful I am becoming with my food selection. Admittedly, being in the UK, we don't have the same issues with beef as in the US. Either that, or it's just easier to get hold of grass fed beef.

The one worrying thing I read, and this was news to me - In the US, cows used to take 4 - 5 years before they were ready for slaughter. During the 50's / 60's, this was reduced to 2 -3 years. Nowadays, thanks to the wonders of excess corn, protein, fat and enough drugs to make a professional bodybuilder jealous, cows are grown from 80lbs to 1100lbs in roughly 14 - 16 months.

That just can't be a good thing to want to eat. True it has meant that more people have access to the meat because it's cheaper but considering what the cows are pumped full off to reach that state and people are eating it - I'll stick to finding grass fed beef!

Are you still hip enough?

2009-04-27T23:26:00.005+01:00

Continuing with the badly named blog posts, I wanted to let you know about one more stretch, courtesy of Dr Stuart McGill.

This time, it's all about stretching the psoas muscle.

Psoas: What is it n what does it do?

The psoas muscle is part of the hip flexor group of muscles. Ever try lifting your upper leg up to 90 degrees? Yep, the psoas helps to do that!

Without going too indepth on the anatomy side, it starts around the lower spine and goes across the pelvis and ends on the hip joint. The below diagram (in the interest of fair play, i took this from www.realbodywork.com) will help to illustrate.

So why stretch it?

Well, if like most people you sit for long periods at a time; either watching tv or working at a desk then the psoas can become shortened. This can play a roll in low back play and hip dysfunctions. So as you can imagine, it's a good thing to stretch it out.

Unfortunately a lot of people don't stretch out the psoas properly. I admit that I was guilty of this too until I watch Ultimate Low Back by Stuart McGill. The first time I tried this stretch there was a bit of "oooh sh*t" as I felt it!

Below is the closest video I could find that covers the stretching. Give this a go for 20 - 30 seconds on each side and be gentle for a start as I'm sure you'll feel it too.

Are you hip enough?

2009-04-20T21:29:00.003+01:00

Wow, I can't believe that nearly a month has passed since my last post.

Time really does fly when you're working yourself into the ground! Working in an office for, what seems like, 25 hours a day 8 days a week can really take a toll on you.

One thing I really noticed from sitting a lot was that my hips were feeling really tight. I mean, really, really tight. I kept stretching them out and moving them about (insert weird hula hoop image here) but they were still feeling really tight.

Thankfully, a combination of reading the right blog posts and ordering the ultimate back dvd by Dr Stuart McGill I found some new stretches and movements for the hips and glutes (as well as a reminder of some forgotten ones) and I have really felt the difference.

Lying Hip Internal Rotations

Hip Hurdles

Hip Aeroplanes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra4ixkizd5U

(have to link it as embedding is disabled, gah!)

With regards to the hip aeroplanes, you should err on the side of caution for a start as the balancing part can be tricky when you start moving and I don't want you falling over and blaming me!

The other thing about the hip aeroplane is that whilst it looks fairly easy, to do it properly is a bit more tricky. You need to brace the obliques and concentrate on moving the hip and shoulder as one. A lot of people tend to lead with the shoulder or hip rather than together - this shows poor motor patterns and should be corrected if possible.

I promise I'll post sooner next time!

When work takes over your working out

2009-03-26T21:17:00.003Z

It's been a long week at work and one that I am really glad to soon be seeing the back of!

Same again next week though...... crap!

Office jobs are so much fun at times, they seem to take up all your time when it gets busy. One of the first things people tend to skip on is their workouts and then their nutrition.

Well, I wanted to quickly address the workout aspect before I crash into bed for an early night.

Most people just feel as though they have to workout for at least an hour and so, when short on time they just don't workout. Or, if they're feeling tired, they don't feel like a hard workout.

Sometimes, neither do I!

But, instead of skipping the workouts altogether, you can still get a training effect from a good 10 - 20 mins of working out, you can keep the weight light or volume down if you're just not feeling in top form. Just doing something is better than nothing! I've made some previous posts giving out several ideas for quick 'n' effective workouts

Another suggestion is spend the time focusing more on stretching, foam rolling and mobility work - you know, that stuff you need to do more of but don't! You'll be amazed at how you can clear up some of those niggling aches and pains when you spend some time ditching the weights and focusing on improving your muscle quality.

That's pretty much what I've been doing this week - focusing on foam rolling the absolute hell out of some tight muscles groups, especially my left quad and IT band and doing lots of upper mobility work as the long hours really takes it out of your neck, upper back and shoulders.

So next time, before you think about ditching the workout altogether, do something a bit different. Just do something!

Training around achey knees

2009-03-17T20:51:00.003Z

Quite a few people who train end up with either achey knees or worse, have to under go knee surgery.

Thankfully, I'm the former rather than the latter (not thankful I have a bum knee from time to time) and every now and then I'll get an ache in or around my knee which irritates the shit out of me. If you suffer from the same I'm sure you're nodding in agreement right now. It doesn't matter how careful I try to be with form etc, it will just ache. I blame it on my age.

When someone gets an ache in their knee they use it as an excuse to stop leg training altogether. For some people this can be a good thing i.e. if you're needing medical attention or physio treatment. If you're a regular person like me who gets the occasional ache, here are a few suggestions to be able to carry on training your legs.

1) Catch up on all that stretching and foam rolling you've been neglecting! In some cases this will actually help reduce the pain in the knee. I know that when I really target my quad with some myofascial work my knee feels better for it.

2) Work on hip and ankle mobility. In Mike Robertson's book Bulletproof knees, he talks about how the knee is a slave joint to the hip and ankle. When you have inadequate mobility in either your hip or ankle... or both, the body finds its mobility from your knee - not a good thing.

3) Really concentrate on lifting form. Sometimes the injuries occur from improper motor patterns and crappy lifting form and habits. Use this as a reason to go back to basics and really get your technique down.

4) Work your legs with posterior chain work. There's no reason why you can't work at least some of your legs - i.e. hamstrings, calves, glutes. Most people give up all leg work and fail to realise you can get a lot of benefit from rack pulls, RDL's, sumo RDL's, single leg RDL's, bridges, pull throughs to name a few. In fact, a lot of people don't work their posterior enough so another really good reason to concentrate on ironing out the imbalances caused from several hundred sets of leg extensions.

5) In a similar style to the above, work on glute activation exercises such as clams, hip bridges, x band walks to help use your glute muscles more when lifting.

6) Don't walk into solid, heavy objects like I just did putting bulletproof knees back on my shelf...ow motherfu****.

Are you wasting your time dieting? (Hint: YES YOU ARE)

2009-03-10T19:10:00.003Z

I was reading a post on http://www.theiflife.com a while ago talking about diet book insanity.

When you think about it, there is pretty much a diet for everything. I mean the last time I typed in "diet" in Amazon the search returns 35,712 results. In short, that is mental!

When I say there is a diet for everything, I truly mean that! - Low carb, no carb, high protein, don't diet diet, warrior diet, paleo diet, soup diets, GI diets, south beach diets, metabolic type dieting, abs diet, zone diet, all day diet. the list goes on and on and on and on.

The problem with the vast majority of diet books is that they're just that - a diet. In essence a diet is simply a specific allowance or selection of food designed to control weight. In most books, this is done by restricted calories for a number of weeks - usually between 12 weeks and 6 months.

As mentioned, the diets in most books work by restricting calories for a number of weeks and once it's completed that's usually it. This has three big drawbacks:

1) Once it's completed, the person will usually go back to their old eating habits and re-gain most of the lost weight - this happens more times than you think

2) The diets work by restricting calories, usually calculated around a persons body weight which isn't a long term healthy option as you can't continually restrict calories, unless, you know, you want to turn anorexic and die.

Which you don't, the Thought Adjusting Wedgie machine will be coming to visit you if you disagree with that.

3) The other problem with those diet books is that they're usually fads and inflexible. Basically just eat this way and that's it. There is a well known saying in the fitness world that applies well to this. "Everything works... nothing works forever". In short you can't stick to one type of inflexible diet as eventually the body will adapt - the same is also true if you're doing the same workout week in and week out.

It probably does explain why people mindlessly jump from shitty fad diet to shitty fad diet and just hope. It makes about as much sense as being blindfolded, spun around 50 times and being asked to throw a dart at the bullseye on a dartboard.

From a marketing perspective, all the diet books are fantastic as they lead to a great amount of confusion as they often contradict each other and hide the truth that if you just eat sensibly and cleanly most of the time you will get much better results than just jumping from diet to diet whilst doing 1000000 hours on the elliptical trainer.

I know, I know, I've let the cat out of the bag a bit there

Being sensible + being consistent = good results.

Now don't get me wrong, it's simple but it's not necessarily easy. For a start it takes trial and error to figure out what works for you and what doesn't and it's not easy to resist the temptation to restrict calories too much too soon whilst over doing it at the gym. (that's NOT being sensible by the way)

Instead of looking around for the next fad diet and mindlessly buying into it, look around for systems. By that I mean look for products that don't just lay out a set food plan with some restrictions thrown in for cheap marketing purposes.

Look for products that offer a long term planning to the way you eat. That explains what you should and shouldn't eat and why. By understanding the why's it helps you to understand what is good for you. With a system based product you can have some guidelines and strive to work within them which will serve you a lot better than some 12 week fad.

It's usually at this point in an article you are provided the "solution" to all your needs with a handily placed affiliate link. To be honest, whilst I do sometimes put one in, I want this post to be more about making you think about what you're actually doing nutrition wise to get where you want to be. I don't want to lose the credibility of writing a useful piece of info and ruining it by turning it into cheap marketing tat.

If you would like to know what systemised products I would recommend following, drop me an e-mail and I'll let you know.

This weeks workout so far (because I forgot to post on tuesday, I know, I suck)

2009-03-05T20:54:00.003Z

As the title says, I forgot to post my workout on Tuesday. Yes, I suck, I know my many fans will be totally disappointed...

If you read one of my recent posts, I've switched to split training for the time being. On Tuesday I did legs (and they're still aching) and tonight I did chest and back.

Tuesday - Legs

1) 5 Calve raises with weight followed by 10 unweighted squat jumps - 3 sets of 15 reps in total. 30 second rest

2a) DB front squats
2b) Sumo Romanian Deadlifts
30 second rest between each exercise. 2 sets of 5 reps total

3a) Bulgarian Split Squats
3b) Single leg RDL's
30 second rest between each exercise. 2 sets of 10 reps total

4) Sandbag knee strikes - 3 sets of 30 seconds each leg

5) Barbell roll outs - 2 sets of 8 with 30 sec rest

Thursday - Chest and Back

1a) Single arm bent over rows - 3 sets of 5
1b) decline press ups - 2 sets of 10
30 sec rest

2a) Unilateral db press - 2 x 5
2b) Renegade rows - 2 x 6
2c) Bent over barbell rows, wide grip - 2 x 10
45 second rest

3a) side bends off a bench - 3 x 8
3b) planks with punches - 3 x 6
30 second rest

4a) neck exercises with towel for resistance.

The ultimate goal with calve training is to be able to do more of it. Unfortunately I have had a long running issue with my foot that I am working on. No, it's not a club foot or something horrible, I have plantar fasciitis so I have to be careful with what I do.

Investing in yourself

2009-03-02T20:27:00.002Z

Why would you not want to be better at something you do?

It's an interesting question that a lot of people still seem to overlook. Whether you're a personal trainer, lawyer, office worker, social media darling etc, why would you not want to get better at your job or at something you already enjoy doing?

In terms of your work, think about the improvements that could be made if you were better at your job - bigger bonus? bigger pay rise? promotion? generally feeling better about work?

Imagine if you're a trainer and say you do 30 sessions a week with clients. You purchase a dvd product for $100 and spend 10 hours studying it. Your hourly rate is $40. So in total the cost is $500 in time and money. Now imagine that from using this product you can get much better results with your clients and charge an extra $2 a session because you're now better at what you do. That's an extra $60 a week, or, $3120 a year. How is that for a return on investment?

In terms of fitness, if you learned more about training and nutrition you could get leaner, bigger, fitter, more ripped, become more healthy. Imagine finally getting that 6 pack, finally being able to fit into that pair of jeans you like or add 10 years to your life expectancy by better food choices.

It also really does baffle me when you try to help someone out to be better at what they do and they're not interested - especially when it is something they often complain about.

Help me out here, I truly don't understand!

For example, someone I work with always complains that they don't have enough time to do this, to do that, etc. So, I decided to lend them "Eat that Frog" by Brian Tracy. It's a fairly short, concise, easy read that gives some great information about time management, I've picked up quite a few tips from that book which I use to good effect.

I think that book must have sat unread in their drawer for 2 - 3 weeks!

I can't remember who first got me onto this idea, I think it was Dax Moy, apologies if I'm wrong! He was talking about taking 10% of your income and using it to invest in yourself - books, courses, dvd's so that you can be become better at what you do.

It was about 18 months - 2 years ago I was sold on this idea and have been investing in myself ever since. This year alone, I have invested in the following books / dvd's:

Alan Aragon Research Review
Gluteal Amnesia
Under the bar
EFS Stronger manual phase 1
EFS basic Training
Team Elitefts 2008 holiday tips
Diesel Crew Combat Core
Truth About Unstable Surface Training
Building the Efficient Athlete
IFAST seminar dvd
Ultimate back fitness book & dvd
Starting Strength and
Practical Programming.

I'll also be making quite a few purchases from amazon as well - Don't get me wrong, I haven't read all of them yet, but I'm working through them quite quickly and learning so much. That doesn't include all the articles I've read and podcasts I have listened to.

When I think about what I knew 18 months ago compared to what I know now it's unreal how much I have learnt. No doubt in 18 months time I'll say the same thing again.

Will you be able to say that in 18 months time as well or will you still be in the same situation?

If that hasn't helped to convince you to start investing in yourself, maybe this will....

I was reading some posts on http://patnickandjim.com/ and they interviewed some of the top trainers and coaches in the world asking for their top tips. I think that every single person interviewed said you need to continue reading and learning.

Just think about that for a minute - the top people in their field are all telling you to continue learning, it's a no brainer - go and do it!

Tonight's workouts was....

2009-02-26T21:31:00.004Z

I thought that I would start sharing some more of the workouts that I'm doing.

You never know, someone might take an interest :-) Plus I think sharing my workouts with people will give me more accountability as I've found myself slipping lately with my workouts.

To be honest I'm not sure why. I mean, I love working out, in fact I love all things fitness and nutrition related - even the bad stuff so I know what not to do with people I train! The best guess I can come up with is that I had been doing full body workouts for quite a long time and probably grew tired of them so I have switched back to trying split training.

I know, I know, not everyone agrees with them. Like I said, I have been doing full body for a long time; gotten good results; fancied a change. Nuff said.

I also know that when people look over this, there will be questions such as "what about all the corrective / functional / weird shit exercises?", well on my off days I will be working more on mobility and stretching - I may or may not post them. Plus my warm ups cover a lot of ground as well.

Anyway, enough waffling :-) This was tonight's workout:

Chest and Back (Bit of a shock it wasn't on a Monday night!!)

1a) Decline press ups - 2 x 10 reps, no rest then
1b) Single arm bent over rows - 2 x 5 reps, 30 secs rest

2a) unilateral DB bench press w/push - 2 x 5 reps, no rest then
2b) renegade rows - 2 x 6 - 8 reps (depending on how my hands and wrists felt), 30 sec rest

3a) Bench side bends - 3 x 8, no rest
3b) Planks with punches 3 x 6 reps, 1 min rest

4) Neck work using towel for resistance

I know the volume seems low, but that doesn't mean I wasn't pushing myself as hard as I could on each rep. Plus, I feel that if I'm tired from full body workouts I don't really want to jump into a high volume program.

Feel free to drop me a comment or suggestion about my workouts - I'm always open to suggestions for improvements.

Your warm up sucks

2009-02-23T18:07:00.003Z

Do you often find yourself with pains and niggling injuries from working out or sometimes move around and just feel tight?

Well one area of the workout most people neglect (apart from cool downs), and outright suck at doing properly is the warm ups.

For a lot of people, describing their warm up as "mindlessly going through the motions" is being especially kind.

For most, the warm up consists of 5 mins on the treadmill, 5 mins on the rower, some static stretching and hopping right into the workout - if i just offended a bunch of people, don't worry I used to do the same as I didn't know any better either.

It's just no wonder I used to get nagging injuries in the gym.

Then two guys came along - Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson who produced a dvd called Magnificent Mobility. In it they showed you various dynamic exercises to incorporate into your workout. It mostly focused on warming up the lower body as that is more prone to injuries.

Some of my favourite warm up exercises include:

Cat / Camel

Single leg Romanian deadlifts

Spiderman lunges

leg swings

Supine bridge

High knee walks

When I first got the dvd and started doing the warm ups a lot of tight muscles and nagging injuries literally cleared up in a matter of days and I found that my workouts definitely improved in that I was able to lift heavier weights without worrying about tweaking my back or hamstrings.

A while later, Mike Robertson (same guy from above) and Bill Hartman produced a dvd called Inside-Out. This one focused mostly on dynamic upper body exercises to incorporate into your workouts. So again, I wisely invested some money in this and before I knew it my back, especially my upper back was a lot less tense from working out and I was able to have much better workouts.

Again, I was able to incorporate a number of warm up drills into my warm ups, such as:

Quadruped thoracic rotation extension

PNF Diagonals

Dynamic blackburns

Side lying trunk twists

Anyone who knows me, knows that I often go for massages to help get the knots out of my back and even the therapist noticed a big difference in the quality of the muscle in my back - how much looser it felt and how it was no where near as knotted.

I just can't say enough good things about these two products, plus it's not very often something comes along that radically changes a part of my workout like that.

If you suffer from tight muscles, get injured in the gym more than you should, want to improve your workouts then I would really highly recommend these products.

Before I give the links, I just want to make it clear - whilst this sounds like a sales pitch, I am in no way affiliate selling these products. I just find them to be two incredibly amazing dvd's that will help you in your workouts for years to come.

And, even though the title of this post is about warming up, I find I do a few of these exercises on my off days as well to help loosen up.

Magnificent Mobility

http://www.magnificentmobility.com/

Inside Out

http://www.inside-out-warm-up.com/

Stuck for time? Part 2

2009-02-19T17:50:00.004Z

In my last post I wrote down a few of my favourite workouts to do when I am pushed for time. The workouts usually take me around 10 mins to complete.

It seems that quite a few people liked the workouts and so I decided to share a few more ideas with you.

No Weights? No Problem!

If you're away from home, say on a holiday or staying in a hotel over night and feeling restless or missing your workout; the one thing people think is that because they don't have any weights they can't get in a good workout.

Well no fear! Not only will this help you get a good workout, it can be done in less than 10 minutes too! I've outlined two variations below which were inspired from some Turbulence Training workouts:

Workout A

A1) Decline press ups - 3 sets of 10, superset with
A2) Bodyweight squats or Y squats - 3 sets of 10

B1) Spiderman press ups - 3 sets of 10, superset with
B2) Step ups - 3 sets of 10 reps each leg

Why 3 sets of 10? No real reason, I just find that doing the above in that rep range takes just under 10 minutes.

Workout B

This involves exactly the same exercises as above but the parameters and challenge is different

A1) Decline press ups - 10 reps
A2) Bodyweight squats or Y squats - 10 reps
A3) Spiderman press ups - 10 reps
A4) Step ups - 10 reps each leg

So one giant set - now repeat as many times as you can in 10 minutes.

If you find this getting easy, swap the bodyweight squats for bulgarian split squats with back leg raised for 10 reps each leg

EDT Variations

I can only wish to have come up with the Escalating Density Training concept, that was left to Charles Staley and is one of my favourite systems for fat loss. It's an incredibly simple system - pick two exercises and do as many reps of each as you can in a set time frame. As the theme of this post is 10 minutes, we need to look at some bang for the buck exercises. Some variations of the top of my mind are:

1) Squat thrusts
2) Shoulder presses

1) Bulgarian split squats
2) Press ups

1) Lunges
2) Pull ups

So the idea is perform the exercises back to back for 10 minutes solid. So taking the first one, it might look

5 squat thrusts then 5 shoulder presses, then 5 squat thrusts then 5 shoulder presses, etc. Then as you start to get tired it may drop to sets of 4, then 3 then 2 then singles.

10 Minutes of torture

I have used this before and then reread about it as part of a workout in an article by Alwyn Cosgrove and Chad Waterbury. In their article, part of the workout consisted of doing kettle bell swings for 10 minutes and seeing how many you could do.

You could apply this to any number of exercises / exercise combos. Similar to the EDT but this time you're only really focusing on one exercise / combo. For example

kettlebell / dumbbell swings
squat thrusts with shoulder press
squat down, squat thrust, squat up, chin up
lunges with shoulder press
sandbag clean and jerks

As you can see there are quite a few ideas you could use!

Try them out, take inspiration from them and come up with your own ideas! The main point of this is that you can get a good workout done in 10 minutes if you are pushed for time.

As ever, I would love to hear about any ideas you have for quick workouts. Drop me a line!

Short on time? Try these workouts

2009-02-16T22:03:00.002Z

Some days you're tired, worn out, knackered and just feel like being lazy. One of the first things you do is think about skipping that workout.

You just feel like you don't have an hour or the energy to spare, well I've been there and know how you feel. There have been times where I was out of my home for over 70 hours over 5 days the last thing I wanted to do was have a workout.

So I devised some short, sharp, butt kicking workouts. These take about 10 minutes to do and I'll post some more during the week.

Workout A - Death by Rowing

400 m sprint
1 min rest
400 m sprint
1 min rest
400 m sprint
1 min rest

Fall off rower :-)

When your sprint times are consistently at 1 min 30 sec or quicker then you can throw in a 4th round.

Workout B - Sandbagging

I prefer to do this with sandbags but there's no reason why you can't mix it up with dumbbells, barbells and odd objects

30 sec sandbag clean and jerks (as many reps as possible)
30 sec rest
Repeat twice more then:

30 sec sandbag lunges (AMRAP)
30 sec rest
Repeat twice more then:

10m heavy sandbag walks
15 sec rest
Repeat twice more

That should keep you busy for the time being. I'll post some more workouts during the week, in the meantime why don't you drop me a message or comment about some of your favourite quick workouts. I'd love to hear some crazy and inventive workouts.

The "shocking" truth about kebabs. Yeah, like totally shocking...

2009-02-13T20:41:00.003Z

I know that sometimes in the fitness world you can be ahead of the press in terms of knowing what is and isn't good for you. So sometimes you read an article that seems to be making headlines and think "well dur, that was so 2005"

The latest batch of "shock" headlines have been about the dear salty, fatty, unhealthy kebab. Seriously, which utter muppet honestly believes a greasy fat filled takeaway, only edible after much drinkage could possibly, in the remotest sense, be good for you?? This isn't so much a "well dur" moment as "wanting to power bomb the journalist for trying to make this seem like a new discovery, dur" moment.

The newspapers have been going round like it's the latest super scientific discovery....no it's not, just look at the damn thing when sober, it's horrible! Here are a few examples:

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE50Q2BN20090127

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Shocking-Truth-About-Takeaway-Food-86134.shtml

http://www.newstin.co.uk/rel/uk/en-010-010117971

The biggest shock is that is seems the dimwit media has only just caught on to how unhealthy the kebab is. I remember reading in an edition of Men's Health about 10 years ago how unhealthy and horrible kebabs are.

/rant

Are you facing the brutal facts?

2009-02-09T22:37:00.001Z

This week I've been listening to an audio version of "Good to great" by Jim Collins. In the book, Jim and his team analyzed a number of high performing companies to determine how the companies became great.

One of the phases coined "Confront the brutal facts" talks about how the great companies had an ability to face up to the facts about what they were doing no matter how hard it was for them to do it. In essence, they saw the reality of their situation for what it really was and weren't some gung-ho richard simmons-esque optimistic loons.

This got me thinking about the people who are in the gym week in and week out doing the same old in-effective workouts and hoping for results and not getting it, leaving them frustrated. Is this sounding familiar? Maybe you don’t even realise you’re doing it and just go to the gym on autopilot, do the same workout you have always done and go home.

You just aren't looking at the true reality of their situation. If you're looking to lose weight it can be broken down very simply.

Weigh yourself and take measurements
Repeat 2 - 4 weeks later
Has there been a positive change? i.e. you weigh less and your measurements have reduced
If there has been no change or a detrimental change then what you're doing isn't working
Try something else
Repeat until desired outcome

There's a 6 step process that everyone can follow which will save them doing the same old work out and eating and getting no where. The hardest part is to actually admit if it’s not working for you and try something else.

As for what to do on step 5; try a new program, try playing with what you eat. There are a number of programs and strategies available, it’s all about finding something that works for you.

Punishment for christmas gluttony

2009-02-07T14:37:00.002Z

I admit it, over Christmas I did give in to temptation a bit too much with the Christmas dinners. In my defence, my mum's cooking is so good it makes me want to devour everything on the table in some food feeding crazed frenzy.

I didn't even think it had that much effect on me until I was putting on some jeans a few days later and realised just how tight they were feeling.

So, it was time to punish myself.

Apart from just getting into the habit of eating normally again which had a big impact, I have also been following one of Alwyn Cosgrove's workouts.

If you haven't heard of Alwyn before (well you might have been under a rock or something), I strongly suggest you check him out. In short, his fat loss knowledge is amazing and he writes incredibly effective workouts to get you in shape.

Oh, and he's a complete sadistic b*****d to you in those programs :-)

So, following one of his programs was probably insane but also the best thing I could do. The one I picked to follow was Real Fast Fat Loss and so far I have been impressed with the results.

I've just finished most of workout B. It still kills me to try and complete the kettlebell swings at the end.

This is the workout:

1) Front Squat / Push Press combo

2a) Waterbury DB rows
2b) Good morning / reverse lunge combo
2c) Squat jump to chin with knee tuck.

Unfortunately I don't have a chin up bar handy to do them so I've had to make due with a weight squat jump / bicep curl combo.

Then some ab work. Instead of doing the planks as in the workout I was doing some of the exercises from Combat Core to give my abs something different to do as they're used to planks.

After the workout was finished, I was finished too. Can't wait to do workout A :-)

Reducing your stress (Part 3)

2009-01-26T20:59:00.003Z

In my previous two posts on stress I've covered Sleep and Loosening up your shoulders. In this final part I want to talk about meditation to help relax you and reduce your stress.

Unfortunately as soon as you read meditation you picture tree hugging hippies, burning incense, going "ommmmm" and hitting a tiny triangle "diiing". Or you picture yourself losing man points, either way meditation generally gets a bad rap.

It's understandable really, I did a google search whilst writing this post and just reading some of the websites made me feel like I was losing man points. I mean seriously, for something so simple they really ham it up.

There is no hard and fast rule for meditation plus it depends on what mood your in. The general guides are:

Get yourself in a comfortable position. You can sit on the floor, cross legged arms out. sit on a chair, lay on your bed, hang upside down. Whatever is best for you.
Go somewhere peaceful or somewhere quiet. It's impossible to do it properly if kids are screaming, phones are ringing or there's just a general noise.
Either concentrate of keeping your mind blank, focus on something that makes you happy or just focus on your breathing if you want. Again it's highly subjective and is based on what works for you. In the fast paced world, it's good to just empty your mind and forget everything
Take deep breaths and breath from the stomach. A lot of people breath with their chest i.e. when they breath in their chest raises up. You should breath with your stomach and keep your chest fairly static. This might take some getting used to but it's worth it.

That's a rough idea - get comfortable; get quiet; empty your mind or focus on something happy; deep breaths. You can do it from as little as 5 mins.

This isn't as glossy or as in depth as a lot of sites, but like I said I'm not going to ham it up. It's a useful tool and one that can come in handy if you are feeling under the weather.

There is no real set time to do this either. You can do it first thing in the morning (even practice some affirmations as you do it); during the day (if work is getting too much and you need some "me" time) or in the evening to chill out.

Sorting out the stress part 2

2009-01-21T22:15:00.002Z

In Part 1 I gave some tips about improving the quality of your sleep to help reduce your stress levels.

By now you get the idea that too much stress causes a range of problems from increased fat storage to feeling like the smelly brown stuff. So the less stress you can give your mind and your body, the better it will be for you in the long run.

In today's tips, I thought I would focus on a problem area that affects most people when they're stressed - the shoulders and upper back.

A lot of society is now computer bound and no doubt in a hundred years the kyphotic hump will be considered sexy and a sign of virility. Unfortunately that's in a hundred years time. For now it's considered pretty poor posture. Also when people are stressed they hunch their shoulders a lot more which further promotes tight muscles in the upper back. This leads to more tension and more tightness and more stress and more tension....you get the idea.

By improving your posture and loosening up your shoulders it can have a range of health benefits from reducing the chances of injury when working out to less tension. I don't know about you but when I'm feeling less tense I also feel less stressed.

So below I've posted some of my favourite back and shoulder mobility exercises to really help loosen you up. You can use these as part of your warm up or on your off days to help keep you loose. Feel free to play around with reps and sets but usually 1 - 2 sets of 5 - 8 reps is a good start.

Cat / Camel

Wall Slides

Quadruped Extension

Thoracic Mobility

Reach, Roll and Lift

Enjoy them! If you have any suggestions then drop me a line or comment on here. Stay tuned for part 3 coming soon.

It's time to de-stress yourself.

2009-01-19T21:59:00.003Z

Stress is one of those things where it's good to have a little of it but most people go waaaay overboard on stress levels and end up suffering as a result.

In your busy, hectic life you get so caught up with work, family, work, some more work, bills, not enough sleep, too much to do, that you probably don't realise just how stressed out you are and this has quite a negative effect on your physical and mental health.

High stress levels have been linked to increased fat storage and problems with losing weight, depression, low back problems and a weakened immune system among other things. So in short lots of things you don't want!

In trying to de-stress my own life and cope with longer working hours, shorter sleep (which I'm gutted about as I love my sleep) I tried several different ways to relax and I wanted to share my best tips with you.

For the sake of getting enough time to get some sleep, I'll run this as a mini series of my top tips. Funnily enough, sleep is number one!

1) Get lots of good quality sleep. I can't stress this one enough. For me this would be the main one in helping you Everyone knows about trying to sleep 8 hours and everyone has their own excuse for why they can't sleep that long. What is often missed out is the quality of the sleep as well.

When I moved in with my friend I had fairly light curtains in my bedroom and often found that I would wake up early and feel pretty groggy. Then I invested in some fairly heavy black (I'm secretly a goth ;-) ) curtains and my sleep has improved a lot. I find that I sleep a lot more soundly and feel more refreshed when I wake up. The same goes for making sure all unnecessary light is turned out to the point where, if you can sleep in a totally dark room, do so! You'll thank me for it.

I have blogged about the benefits of taking zinc as well to help with your sleep. I do find that when I take a zinc supplement I sleep better. This is quite an individual preference as some of you might find it works amazingly and some will think it's glorified snake oil. In the end a tub of zinc supplement from your local supermarket isn't going to break the bank so it's worth a try if it helps you.

Stay tuned for part 2. In the meantime if you have any tips you would like to share feel free to comment or drop me an e-mail.

How are your resolutions working out?

2009-01-12T21:53:00.002Z

The new year started 12 days ago and thousands and thousands of people all went "This year I will lose some weight".

Funnily enough that was the same resolution as last year.....and the year before.......and before that.

Let's face it, hardly anyone sticks to their resolutions and I think there three reasons for it are:

1) You make a resolution for the sake of it.

You've been there, you get asked about a new years resolution and mindlessly say the same old rubbish and you don't take them seriously. Admit it, how many of you have written out a detailed and specific goal and look at it on a daily basis?

2) You make unrealistic goals.

Whilst I'm for making goals that stretch yourself, I don't believe reaching for the stars when you can't reach past the cookie jar is going to help you. It might be that your overall goal is to lose 50 lbs, but that it a lot. Break it down into 5 or 10lb chunks.

3) You go at your resolutions like a scene from Rocky but every day.

You haven't been to a gym in months, maybe years and there you are going every day. All that is going to happen is your body will hurt like hell and you'll stop going. The same with food; you cut out every last piece of unhealthy food right away and your body crashes and you go on a binge to end all binges.

So if that is sounding like you the good news is that it's not too late. Who says your resolutions have to be set in stone on Jan 1st and that's it?

If you find your current goals are a bit too challenging, then start slowly and build up to them. Here are a few good tips to help you stay on track.

1) Write down your goals; be specific and look at them daily to remind you.

2) Take small steps, one step at a time. You want to lose 50lbs which will mean cutting out junk food. Start by removing just one food every week or every 2 weeks. It will make the transition a lot less painful

3) Don't over do it at the gym. If you're not used to working out, going into a gym and doing 3 sets of 10 for 8 exercises is 240 reps. Not forgetting all the running you'll do. Times that by 3 times a week and you have 720 reps on the body and probably an hour of running. It's bound to make you hurt. So start slowly, 1 set of 10 the first week. 2 sets of 10 the second week then 3 sets of 10.

4) Don't be afraid to create new goals and resolutions for yourself as you go on. If you think up a new goal you want to achieve start doing it. Don't wait till next week, next month, next year, start now!

5) Probably the main point - Be consistent! It's a cliché but Rome wasn't built in a day and years of junk food abuse on your body won't disappear in a month. Keep at it, stick to your goals and you will get where you want to be.

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup really the food of Satan?

2009-01-07T21:51:00.002Z

I was reading through some blog posts and found this one by Lyle McDonald:

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/straight-talk-about-high-fructose-corn-syrup-what-it-is-and-what-it-aint-research-review.html

It's definitely worth a read and puts in perspective the wild hype about HFCS.

When did you last question gym dogma?

2008-11-24T21:38:00.002Z

Howdy!

Hopefully I am back posting on a more regular basis. It's been a busy few weeks and it looks set to continue, which sucks monkey butt, but I wanted to make sure I have enough time to get posting again.

Well my first post back, I thought I would get you to try and think about what you're doing in the gym. Just because it's what you think you need to do, are you wasting your time?

1) You do 3 sets of 10 for everything because you're looking to gain muscle.

Have you tried 5 x 5?, 10 x 3? (that's 10 sets of 3), singles above 90% of your 1 RM? shock set? cluster training? supersets? Lifting explosively?

In short, don't just stick to 1 type of rep and set range. Vary it and lift heavy, you'll be pleased with the results.

2) You go on the treadmill or elliptical trainer for 30 mins - hour to lose fat.

If you a always running away mindlessly on the treadmill, switch it up with some sprints. My own personal (hellish) favourite is 400 metre sprints on the rower. Try doing them for a few sets and then collapse.

Why even go on the CV equipment at all? Face it, it's boring shit! Do circuit training? Sandbag work? Boxing? odd object lifting? Tabata's?

3) You do endless bicep curls for bigger arms.

One of the biggest growths I had in my upper arm movements was when I did high volumes of chin ups and tricep dips using the following:

week 1 - 3 sets of 10 chin ups superset with dips
week 2 - 4 sets of 10 chin ups superset with dips
week 3 - 5 sets of 10 chin ups superset with dips

This was part of an overall program designed to increase lean mass but I added nearly an inch to my arms in 3 weeks which isn't shabby. This was even more effective because I hadn't been doing set of 10 previously.

4) A bit of stretching here and there is all you need.

I don't even know where to start with this one! We all know stretching is as dull as mud, on a grey day, whilst watching grass grow. It is useful for tight muscles, but not just stretching alone. Foam rolling, dynamic stretching, activation work, mobility drills - all of them more interesting than just stretching and all of them beneficial to a improved you.

Hopefully they have given you some ideas to break out of the monotony of your current training. Remember, just because it's dogma, or what you think you should do, question it! What else can you be doing to achieve a better effect.

2008-11-04T21:49:00.002Z

Apologies for not updating my blog for a while. It has been a hectic few weeks with moving into a new place and work picking up.

The one thing I have noticed is a definite lack of time at the moment and a drop in energy. As such I've had to change my workouts to accommodate this.

I've still yet to find a decent gym to find so I'm still staying with body weight only workouts until i can get some of my weights up here. I'm finding that I've condensed my workouts to pretty intense 10 - 15 minute sessions which are helping me at the moment.

I'll post more on these later in the week.

To carb or not to carb?

2008-10-23T22:28:00.000+01:00

Thanks to the Atkins diet nearly taking over the world there is still a huge, irrational fear about all carbohydrates. It doesn't matter whether they're bad carbohydrates or good carbohydrates they all get grouped under this one big evil sign.

The reason why carbs are important to humans is that they readily convert to glucose in the body. Glucose is what is used by the body as a source of fuel. Think of it as petrol for your car.

Sticking with that analogy. Say you have a top of the range sports car (your body (either now or after you start listening to my uber great advice)). You would want to only put the best, premium grade unleaded petrol in the car to keep it running (the good carbs). What happens to that car is you keep putting in, say diesel (bad carbs). After a while your car splutters and chokes and you need to get help to fix it (Enter Super Jon~drum roll~).

Now it is true that there are some bad carbs out there. Mostly in the form of cookies, pastries (sausage rolls, pasties etc), cakes, pizza, take aways. (Diesel)

In short, if the food has been processed then it is generally evil and should be used with extreme caution. It isn't just the carbs that cause problems, it is also the wrong type of saturated fat in those products and have you looked at how many calories are in those crappy things??

On the other hand there are good carbohydrates that also get ignored and get an unfair wrap - potatoes, bread (to a degree) and lots of vegetables. (Premium unleaded)

I'm not advocating going out and order the jumbo mega stack sandwich from your local food shop, just use bread with some common sense. Also, because I said potatoes are good, that doesn't mean deep fried fatty chips are...

...no tubby, they're not.

One great fat loss tip is if you stop eating the bad carbs and only focus on eating good carbs, you will lose weight and look and feel better.

Now, the other complication with carbs is around the timing of when to eat them and how much - morning, elevenses, lunch, afternoon, dinner, supper, before bed? 10gram, 30 grams, 100 grams 300 grams, 30% of calories, 50% of calories?

Well the clear cut and ultra precise answer is...... it depends.

I know, I'm great at that.

Let's break it down, starting with when to eat them. It is quite simple..

For foods such as bread, potatoes and porridge - eat them either as breakfast first thing in the morning or after a workout that involves actually lifting decent weights

For fruit and vegetables - eat throughout the day. I easily eat 10+ portions of fruit and veg a day. I mean, have you ever heard of someone getting fat from eating cabbage, carrots and broccoli? (cooked in a pan with water that is, not fried in oil)

Now for how much to eat. As a general rule of thumb it will depend on your activity level.

1) If you work in an office by day, xbox ninja by night - you will be best off focusing on eating vegetables and not over gorging on any others. I also don't care if you have a wii fit, you can't use that as an excuse.

2) If you work in an office by day, gym assassin by night - you can get away with eating more carbs than your xbox counterpart.

3) If you work as a builder, on the road etc - then you have an active job and therefore you'll require a great number of carbs. You will be able to use the energy from bread and potatoes more effectively than a guy who works in a office. Just don't go overboard.

4) If you're a high level athlete then your carbs intake will usually need to be quite high, usually 60+% to allow your muscles to refuel after gruelling training schedules.

I'm reluctant to give definite percentages because everyone is different. You will be best to experiment yourself and see how it goes. As a rough rule 1) 30% 2) 40% 3) 40 - 60% 4) 60+%

Now put that sausage roll down and go pick up some carrot sticks.

Think again before touching that soda

2008-10-20T07:36:00.003+01:00

I was just reading through some blogs that I subscribe to and the following one caught my eye:

http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2008/10/sugar-sweetened-soda-is-bad-for-your.html

For those of you who are nerdy enough, this is the link to the full study

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003431

As I'm rushed for time, I can't write up the full pros and cons of this study.

The main thing to note is that the study looked at the link between drinking sugar sweetened soda and the albuminuria levels.

Albumin is the main protein in the human blood. Increased levels of albumin (otherwise known as albuminuria) is used as a sensitivity marker for early kidney damage.

The study found that an increased intake in sugar sweetened sodas can lead to albuminuria. This suggests going bat shit crazy on sodas isn't necessarily the best for your kidneys - but you already knew stuff like that wasn't good for you :-)

Now before total and utter panic sets in, the study itself does say that there are various other lifestyle factors that need to be investigated before a full conclusion can be made.

That said, in my opinion the more people that drop drinking that crap and take up drinking water and green tea instead the better!

Is it worth getting a heart rate monitor?

2008-10-16T21:28:00.001+01:00

One of the myths that seems to have lasted a few years now is the target heart rate for fat loss zone stuff.

It is still pushed around that people should keep their heart rate in the 60 - 70% zone for fat loss. Which is consistent for steady state cardio.

It has been shown time and time again how interval training will have a better body composition effect than steady state cardio. Keep in mind that interval training can have you training as high as 85 - 95% of your heart rate zone.

But still, people still push the 60 - 70% myth and funnily enough happen to be selling a heart rate monitor to help you.

Alarm bells should be ringing!

Some of the monitors can cost hundreds which is plain insanity. Here's a cheap scale for you:

1 - 10

1 = you're asleep

5 = able to hold a convo, just about

10 = your heart is about to burst out your chest

and you have all the numbers in between. All you need to do is train hard at around 7 - 8 effort on the scale and recover around 3 - 4 on the scale.

That scale is unique to you. Some persons 5 could be another persons 10 so you just need to trial and error with it to get it suited to you.

Now a heart rate monitor does have one use - it helps to show people just how hard they should be working. A lot of people underestimate just how hard they work and as a result they don't obtain optimal results. By using a heart rate monitor they can see for themselves just how much effort is required to reach 80% exertion.

Pull Up Contest 2008

2008-10-15T05:12:00.003+01:00

Speaking of the www.Undergroundstrengthcoach.com website. Check out this link

http://zacheven-esh.com/blog/episode-47-the-world-wide-internet-pull-up-challenge/

Are you up for the challenge?

Film Inspiration

2008-10-15T05:11:00.001+01:00

Never back down

The other week, I thought I'd bite the bullet and check out a film called Never Back Down....basically fast and the furious but for mixed martial arts.

I have to admit my expectations were pretty dire but the film turned out to be half decent which is always a pleasent suprise!

One thing that did really impress me was the scenes of the actors training. I was expecting some mind numbing gym crap involving bosu balls and machines.

Instead they were training using tools such as kettlebells, rope climbing, monkey bars and odd object throwing.

Stuff that is very cool and does actually get results!

When I watched those scenes, it made me want to go and take on an army of ninjas it was that cool! I'd recommend anyone checking out that type of training if you want really cool results.

Some good sites to start with would be

http://www.undergroundstrengthcoach.com/

http://www.dieselcrew.com/

http://www.rosstraining.com/

How to look better and save money in the process

2008-10-08T20:35:00.000+01:00

Like me, I'm sure a lot of people have tried no end of various pills and potions in order to try and get into shape. Unfortunately a lot of people go into supplementation arse backwards - yours truly has been included in that in the past.

In fact, I would shudder and probably weep to think about how much I have spent on useless crap supplements over the years. I'll let you in on a little secret:

At least 90% of the supplements you see advertised are pure crap in a tub.

I don't expect everyone to agree with that, I mean if you're there spending hundred a month on supplements it's hard to admit to yourself that you're wrong.

Now combine useless crap supplements along with people using them wrong and you have a recipe for disaster.

So what do people do wrong with their supplements?

They don't ensure their training and nutrition is in check first before jumping in with fat loss or muscle building supplements (depending on their goal).

What I mean by that is, at best supplements might (MIGHT) add 5% to your goals. Unless you're actually heading in the right direction in the first place what is even the point in using supplements?

Take for example you're wanting to lose fat. You've started training and trying new eating but the scale isn't moving. Why would you throw in a supplement if the basics weren't even working for you??

At least make sure that what you're doing with your food and training is getting you towards your goal in the first place before even thinking about fat loss supplements.

In the vast majority of cases if people just concentrate on eating good, healthy sources of food they won't need those overpriced tubs of nothing.

That isn't to say all supplements are useless. Here is a list of supplements I am currently taking year round

Omega 3, creatine, bcaa, glucosamine, post workout shake (if i have worked hard), protein powder (but no where near as much as I used to)

Here are the supplements I'm trying out to see how I get on:

Zinc, vitamin D, vitamin C

The rest of what I need comes from lean meats, fruit, veg and nuts.

I think you'd agree it's much cheaper to just eat normal food and throw in some basic supplements.

A better start to your training week

2008-10-06T18:04:00.000+01:00

A lot of office warriors start their week off with a good ol chest workout comprising of:

Bench press
Incline bench press
Decline bench press
Dumbbell flyes

Maybe throw in some lat pull downs and seated rows as well.

They put all their energy into that first workout and knacker themselves out for the week. This means they can happily make excuses for not working their legs or back as hard as they should.

In case you're wondering, more people really really really should work their legs and back harder!

Next time you workout on a monday, instead of hogging the bench press try putting your efforts into doing squat variations and pull ups / chin ups.

You'll get a much better start to your week.

Simple system for getting where you want to be

2008-10-02T20:14:00.000+01:00

I'm quite a fan of Derren Brown and as such I started reading up on NLP. If you haven't heard of NLP before it stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

NLP is basically the study of what successful people do and then tries to model it for other people to follow.

It does sound hocus pocus to some people but there is a lot of science behind it and it does work very well.

One of the models that I find very useful when it comes to helping people achieve their fitness goals is the learning loop system.

It looks something similar to:

Present state-------------Test--------------------Desired state

So you have the present state which is where you are now and the desired state is where you want to be.

The test stage is where you try out your ideas to see if they bring you closer to your desired state or not.

So for example you're starting with a 38" waist and you want to get to a 34" waist. That's your present and desired state.

So you start a new training program and diet.

After 2 weeks you measure your waist again to see if you are closer to your goal - that's the test stage.

If you're still at 38" try something new. If you're now below 38" then you're heading in the right direction.

Say you're heading in the right direction. You continue for another 2 weeks and re-test. If you now find you're at the same measurement then what you're doing has stopped working and therefore it's time to change it up.

There you go, a simple system to track your progress and to determine if what you're doing is helping you towards your goal or not.

When it stops working, the trick is knowing where to go next. That's not necessarily easy but hey, I never said it was easy, just simple :-)

Procrastination is the goal killer

2008-09-30T19:57:00.003+01:00

When a lot of people decide they need to get into shape they often find the smallest excuse to keep putting off exercise of eating correctly.

Do the following situations sounds familiar?

You start eating healthily and then have a bad day eating some crap so you think to yourself "well ok, i'll start again next monday" repeat infinitely.

You want to start training but figure you need new trainers first - so you order some and it'll take 2 weeks to arrive. You'll start then. You get them but then want to wait for the weather to be right which could be another 2 weeks. The weather starts turning in your favour so you think you'd better start getting some magazines and reading up on how to practice which is another 2 weeks.

Then, you take about 2 weeks to decide what workout you want to follow and keep swapping because you're still not sure.

You could be messing about for 8 - 10 weeks and then just decide not to bother. If you had started those 10 weeks ago, you could have already been 10 - 20 lbs down in weight.

The same with your diet.

It all adds up to you keep putting off and putting off and before you know it you've lost weeks due to procrastination and cheap excuses.

As clichéd as it sounds, and I will hate myself for this Nike's slogan of "Just Do It" speaks volumes.

In short - pick a training program, pick a diet, start now, stick with it and get results.

If you find you have a bad day eating or skip a training session don't make a cheap excuse out of it. Put it behind you and pick up again the next day.

Warming up: Get it right or get it injured

2008-09-24T21:24:00.001+01:00

If you work out in a commercial gym the chances are your warm up will generally consist of 5 - 10 minutes on the treadmill and maybe some light stretching before hitting the weights and cardio machines.

Over a period of time you'll start to feel different aches and pains from the gym. Maybe your lower back is tight? You keep twinging your hamstring? You shoulder is getting stiffer?

A properly designed warm up has come a long way since the 1980's mentality of 5 mins on the treadmill and chances are you need a bit of a catch up.

There are several elements that should be incorporated into your warm ups to not only lead to a better workout but will reduce the risk of injury. You never know this might even clear up some old injuries and tight muscles.

The following are the concepts for you to become familiar with:

Self Myofascial Massage

The idea is to use a foam roller (or a tennis ball or harder if you're feeling macho) and roll muscles over it to release trigger points and enhance the quality of the muscle. Without getting to in depth in this article a trigger point is effectively where muscle fibres bunch together to cause knots in the muscle. If you're wondering why these are bad, tie a knot in an elastic band and pull the band apart - does the knot disappear?

Areas that are known for tightness are - calves, hamstrings, quads, IT band, TFL and upper back

Dynamic Stretching

This is where you use controlled arm and leg movements to take you through a joints range of motion. When performing these movements it's important to remember that you shouldn't bounce the joint through the motion. It should be smooth and controlled. This improves your dynamic flexibility and prepares the muscles and joints for a workout.

Some good exercises include - cat/Camel, bird dog, dynamic calf stretch, reach roll and lift, diagonal shoulder stretches, hip bridges, single leg Romanian deadlifts and spiderman stretches. (If you don't know what any of these exercises are a good search on Google should help you out.)

Activation Exercises / Movements

Due to improper movement patterns and sedentary office jobs a lot of people suffer from weak muscles or inability to activate muscle groups during exercise. Two of the most common areas are the glutes and the middle and lower trapezius muscles. By performing the following activation exercises it will help your body to engage this often neglected areas during exercise. This will lead to better lifting technique and eventually more weight on the bar. It will also help to improve your general posture as well as reducing the risk of injury. It's an all round winner!

Some of the exercises to try are - wall slides, scapular push ups, side lying clams, cook hip lifts and lunges.

Putting all the above concepts together, your warm up should now look like this:

Self Myofascial Massage - 2 - 4 minutes in total
Dynamic Stretching - 5 minutes in total
Activation Exercises - 3 - 5 minutes in total

So a total of 10 - 15 minutes should suffice. If you're new to the exercises it will take longer initially but once you get used to them you'll blast through the warm up.

Then go and enjoy a much improved workout and feel great afterwards.

The cinnamon water experiment

2008-09-22T19:49:00.002+01:00

I've been reading some studies recently about how adding cinnamon to your diet has a whole host of health benefits.

Here are some of the studies involving cinnamon, if you're interested (really really interested)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17924872?ordinalpos=7&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18234131?ordinalpos=5&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18206731?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Yes, I do really love PubMed. It has many useful studies that make me look uber nerdy...and chicks dig nerds right? right??

In short the studies are saying how cinnamon helps to improve insulin sensitivity, reduces the bad cholesterol and also reduces blood sugar.

All of those are good things - if you're diabetic then very good things!

Here is a really informative article about cinnamon and the studies about the benefits

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/41026.php

So you might be wondering what is the big deal about insulin sensitivity etc etc. Well insulin resistance is where the cells in your body don't respond well to insulin. The reason why this matters is because insulin is secreted from the pancreas as a response to glucose - glucose usually coming from eating carbs. (No, that doesn't make carbs evil, as such).

Because the cells aren't as sensitive to insulin, the pancreas then has to secrete more into the blood to attain the desired effect. This can eventually lead to diabetes or obesity so as you can see, it's not the greatest thing in the world to have insulin insensitivity.

So adding cinnamon to your diet can lead to increased sensitivity which is a good thing!

So I'm testing this out by adding a stick of cinnamon to my 2 litre bottle of water and seeing if there are any improvements in my body composition. The reason why I thought I would try this is because whenever I add in more carbs to my diet my love handles seem to grow at a phenomenal rate which would suggest a degree of insulin resistance.

I'll keep you all posted!

Positive thinking to conquer fat loss

2008-09-21T18:16:00.004+01:00

Ok, so you've read all the diet books, looked at all the training programs and have even gone as far as to set yourself SMART goals. Something is lacking though, you find you just can't get the motivation to get started or even worse, you're making progress but then find yourself slipping back to the old you. Sneaking in calories here and there and before you know if you're back to the same weight, looking the same, being more depressed.

Does that sounds familiar? Well what a lot of diet and training books over look is the mental aspect of changing your body composition. At best they give a few lines about thinking positive and leave you to it. This can be a big stumbling block for a lot of people. Not having positive self images and having negative self talk will usually defeat you before you even start towards your goals. This can also apply to life and work as well as your body.

Now before I say too much more about positive thinking let's get two things straight

1) I'm not one for buying into mumbo-jumbo psychobabble so I didn't just buy into this. It's something I've tried for myself and found it to work.

2) When I talk about positive thinking people get the impression they have to be some Richard Simmons-esque, happy clappy loon! That's just not the case. It just means focusing on the positive aspects on a situation rather than talking up the negative i.e. look for solutions not problems.

To expand slightly on the second point. It is believed that the subconscious mind readily accepts what the conscious mind tells it. It is this concept that you can use to really help you focus on achieving your goals.

To give this some context we'll imagine that you've set up your weight loss goals and working towards them. The problem is your self image and self talk is still picturing you as some over-weight, unhappy person. Whether you realise it or not your subconscious will always guide you back towards that image.

Here are some exercises for you to practice. I can't take the credit for this, I first learnt about it from Scott Ventrella in his book "The power of positive thinking in business" and have adapted it to help with your fitness goals.

The first step is to determine what your goals are and what you want to achieve. The more detailed you can make your goals the better. For example wanting to lose 20lbs and 3 inches off your waist in 3 months is better than wanting to lose some weight.

The second step is to phrase your goals positively and in the first person. It is always better to phrase a goal "I am" rather than "I will". For example your goal would now be "I am losing 20lbs in 3 months" rather than "I will lose 20lbs in 3 months". Also don't phrase anything in a negative manner as the subconscious accepts positive messages better than negative ones

The third step is to visualise how you want to look once you've dropped those 20 lbs or those 5 inches off the waist. You need to make the image as detailed as possible. Think about how those clothes will look better on you; how your body will look, how much more confidently you'll look and feel. The list goes on. Again, don't make the images and self talk negative. By that I mean focus the images on how you'll be happy, lean and confident don't focus on telling yourself you're not overweight and not unhappy.

The final step is to write all of the above down - your newly thought out goals and the new image of you. Keep a copy of these goals with you at all times and look at them a few times through out the day. If you catch yourself thinking negatively don't worry, just remind yourself of your positive goals.

Now don't expect the above to be an overnight miraculous success. It takes time to change the way you view yourself but the more you do it the more your mind will accept this and help you towards your goals.

Also by practicing the above this doesn't get you out of dieting at MacDonald's everyday. You need to have your training and food in order as well as your goals and ensuring all three work synergistic for an improved you.

Saturday rant

2008-09-20T20:41:00.002+01:00

You know, it still really pisses me off just how many women are stuck in some crappy medieval mindset when it comes to them and weight training.

I've lost count the number of times over the past few weeks where I've recommended to a female that she should try lifting weights to help her get her goals in the gym. Every time I have had an answer similar to:

"I don't want to turn into some muscle woman"
"I don't want to get all big muscles"

Etc etc to the point of making me want to apply the Thought Adjusting Wedgie with extreme prejudice! By strange coincidence, these same women seem to think that doing hundreds of crunches will get them a flat stomach.....because they've done that for the past year with no results so let's keep at it in hope....

Well here are a few points for you to consider:

1) You've done hundreds of repetitions on your abdominal muscles, have they grown out of all proportion?? No, so why will lifting some weights make you think the rest of your muscles will do the same?

2) You often associate weights with steroid pumped up "women" or fitness competitors. Let's get one thing straight - the huge women are on steroids, you're not. Fitness competitors train for years and years dialling in their training and nutrition to scary exact details to get where they are, you're not doing that either.

3) Just because it's recommended that you try lifting weights, you DON'T need to do it constantly for the rest of your life! (Despite how good it would be for you) Switch it with body weight workouts for periods.

4) If you lift heavy and do feel you are getting too big....How about this - STOP! The muscle will atrophy if it isn't being worked as hard and you'll shrink. Worst case scenario is that you've help to strengthen your bones a little to offset osteoporosis a little longer.

5) **BONUS TIP** There's a saying "Do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten" In short, if you've done the same old working in the gym and getting no where what makes you think something will change now? This ties in with another well known saying "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome"

Think about it :-)

Rant over! I'm gonna go lift something heavy!

Take vitamin D & feel like you can rule the world (in a non evil dictator stylee of course)

2008-09-17T20:09:00.005+01:00

I had been planning on doing a blog on the benefits of taking vitamin D supplements. At the risk of looking like a total fan-boy (in a totally manly way, naturally) as Tony Gentilcore has also put up a post about it today - I promise I'm not just copying - I thought screw it, I might as well. Vitamin D is just that good!

The positive vitamin d effects are being promoted more and more by fitness professionals and when you do a search on pubmed, it's easy to see why!

So a quick background:

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, in short this means that vitamin D is able to dissolve in fat and as such is absorbed in the intestinal tract. This is in contrast to water-soluble vitamins.

The science behind how the body assimilates vitamin D is blatantly stolen from www.healthatoz.com

"Once consumed, or made in the body, vitamin D is further altered to produce a hormone called 1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D (1,25-diOH-D). The conversion of vitamin D to 1,25-diOH-D does not occur in the skin, but in the liver and kidney. First, vitamin D is converted to 25-OH-D in the liver; it then enters the bloodstream, where it is taken-up by the kidneys. At this point, it is converted to 1,25-diOH-D. Therefore, the manufacture of 1,25-diOH-D requires the participation of various organs of the body-the liver, kidney, and skin."

With that out of the way, let's have a look at the list of vitamin d deficiency symptoms and problems:

Muscle pains or muscle weaknesses (not to be confused with being a generally weak gimp)
Muscle spasms
Poor growth and weak teeth in children
Bone pains
Rickets
Osteomalacia

So not a nice list at all. On top of that, you may find you have a crappy mood too. If the pains don't put you in a bad enough mood, a vitamin D deficiency can also contribute. I happen to know several people who should start high-dosing on this straight away!

If that doesn't convince you of the importance of good vitamin D levels here as some studies on pub med that I found with a quick search

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18786559?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18777231?ordinalpos=19&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18783743?ordinalpos=8&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

It's easy to see why this is getting more and more publicity!

Ok, so what are some good vitamin d foods and vitamin d sources?

Well, I'm glad you asked :-)

Sunlight! This is why we totally kick vampires asses
Animal meats
Egg yolks
Cod liver oil (I'd rather cut my tongue off though)
Salmon, mackerel, tuna and sardines
Dairy such as milk, cheese and margarine
vitamin d tablets / supplements

As sunlight is a fantastic source of vitamin D, those who are stuck in a building all day and have a less than optimal diet may have a slight deficiency.

Since supplementing with the vitamin d tablets I have definitely felt a big improvement in my moods. I mean, I'm in a good mood most of the time and since supplementing that mood has gone to a new level.

It gets a thumbs up in my book!

Do you need zinc supplements for improved performance?

2008-09-08T18:47:00.004+01:00

Zinc is one of those often over looked micro-nutrients that plays a vital role in bodily functions.

The list of zinc uses includes things from muscle protein synthesis to testosterone production and wound healing. In fact zinc is a component of over 200 enzymes and also involved in thousands of functions.

In short, it's a busy nutrient.

It has also been found that when there is a deficiency in zinc health can suffer, it has been linked to:

Prostate enlargement
Low libido
Low testosterone levels
some skin conditions

So what that introduction over, let's have a look at whether zinc supplements can improve performance.

There are studies and articles that promote the use and, of course, say it isn't needed.

The following study and article both show that there are links to zinc supplements and improved performance

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16648789?ordinalpos=9&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.athleticscholarships.net/diet-sport-zinc.htm

In short they found that a decrease in zinc caused the tested athletes to have a "measurable decrease in peak oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide output". It was also found that supplementing additional zinc prevented an "inhibition of both thyroid hormones and testosterone concentrations" in exhaustion exercise.

Conversely, here are two links showing studies that found that zinc supplementation didn't have a significant effect on performance or health.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18500945?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/zinc-athletes.html

Both of the links had studies that showed an zinc supplement didn't help to improve performance or body composition which can piss all over some of the extravagant supplement claims of products like ZMA.

My own personal experience with zinc supplements is that I generally sleep better (which is often noted in people who have taken ZMA) which leads to me less likely to give you the Peoples' Elbow if you bug me.

From what I have seen about it, if you train exceptionally hard in the gym then it wouldn't hurt you to have some additional zinc, especially if you have a crappy diet.

Besides taking a supplements, foods with good zinc properties include:

beef, liver, lamb, pork and oysters. To a lesser degree it can be found in eggs, diary, grains and beans.

So if you eat plenty of juicy, yummy, red meat you're likely to have a good zinc intake already.

It should also be noted that you do decide to give it a go, avoid taking zinc with meals that are high in fiber or contain diary as those can impair absorption.

Go on, take a week off!

2008-09-03T21:07:00.003+01:00

I've just spent a few days down the coast enjoying some time with the family and gorging on all things seafood related (read: fish and chips (even I'm allowed to be unhealthy, bite me) ).

It was a nice few days away in which the most strenuous thing I did was walk a bit, in other words not a lot. This got me thinking, when was the last time you took a scheduled rest week from your workout??

Most people are in the gym week in week out for at least an hour a session, several sessions a week. That's effectively week in and week out of pounding the body with lots of training stress and not taking any real time off.

In the book Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training by Tudor Bompa various periodization cycles are discussed based on the age and ability of the trainee. In all cases the cycles have a back-off week to allow the person to have an adaption to the training and progress at a higher rate.

Depending on age, level and how you train there are several variables to take into account such as number of sessions per week, time spent training, number of high intensity training sessions.

Three easy ways to have a back off week (otherwise known as a de-load), using the squat as an example

Reduce weight used

Week 1 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 200 lbs
Week 2 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 210lbs
Week 3 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 220lbs
Week 4 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 210lbs

In the 4th week, you reduce the weight to that of the second week to allow the body to adapt to the weight in week 3 and then continue to progress up.

Reduce volume

Week 1 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 200lbs
Week 2 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 210lbs
Week 3 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 220lbs
Week 4 - Squat 2 sets of 6 reps - 220lbs

In this week, the weight remains the same as in week 3 but the volume of the exercise is reduce. Again, this reduces the stress on the body and allows for adaption.

Rest / Active Recovery

Week 1 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 200lbs
Week 2 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 210lbs
Week 3 - Squat 4 sets of 6 reps - 220lbs
Week 4 - Bugger all :-) Or bike ride (anything but lifting weights in the gym basically)

In the third case, you can either choose to completely rest in the 4th week or do something completely different to lifting weights in the gym like walking / bike ride etc.

This case is especially usually if you have pushed yourself hard in the gym on week 3 and are looking to use week 4 as a means of super-compensation.

Bear in mind the above 3 examples are all useful but quite a basic look at how to periodize your workouts. If you ever pick up the book and read it, you'll see there's a lot more to take into account. As a general rule though the above will certainly help in your recovery and progressions.

Exercise and injury, a little known recovery technique

2008-08-26T22:40:00.004+01:00

Exercise and Injury almost seem to be synonymous. For most people who exercise hard, an injury is almost inevitable (i know, it's a happy start to a blog)

The injury can vary from a niggling over-stretched hamstring to an all out blown disc.

With a serious injury there is very little you can do. For muscle strains and pulls though, the RICE technique is often recommended and it is a good way to treat an injury immediately after if has occurred.

For those of you who don't know. RICE stands for

Rest
Ice
Compression
Elevation.

A quick search on google will give you plenty of sites that explain this properly.

It is generally recommended that heat treatment is saved until 48 hours after an injury as the heat can increase the swelling around the injury due to the heat promoting blood flow.

Where a lot of people go wrong is how they go about using heat treatment to promote blood flow to the injury site to increase recovery time.

Most people don't even think to try and keep the area warm when they go to sleep. Instead they leave the area as they sleep and as a result, the injured area gets cold again and the blood flow is reduced.

Considering most people sleep 6 - 8 hours a night, that's a long time to leave an injured area cold.

Consider how much quicker the recovery would be if you can keep the injury warm as you sleep!

For example, if you have a pulled muscle in your hand, wear one of those winter gloves. If you have a sore knee, wear a neoprene knee support. You should get the gist, I would recommend caution with wrist injuries though. Wrist wraps tend to be fairly tight and as a result you run the risk of waking up and a balloon hand in the morning.

In my case, I've had an injured muscle in my foot that seems to have lasted forever. Then I remembered the above tip and have been wearing a big sock on my foot to keep the area warm and the improvement has been dramatic!

My latest workout

2008-08-21T19:45:00.004+01:00

It's not very often I post my workouts for everyone to see. Not because I use uber-ultra-secretive-soviet-block-techniques or techniques only used by the secret services who would kill you if they found you were using them.

It's just because as a rule my workouts are designed around my current goals and weaknesses so not readily applicable to anyone else.

I figured that some people....a few....one....maybe, might be interested in what I do.

Please bear in mind that this is just a snapshot of what I did for one workout and I do change them up fairly frequently.

Warm up

Foam roller for tight muscles - calves, hamstrings, glutes, thighs, TFL & IT band, upper back
10 - 15 second stretches for the tight muscles
Dynamic warm up - various exercises from Inside-Out and Magnificent Mobility (see my other http://practicalfatloss.blogspot.com/ for more info) along with some body weight exercises.

Workout

Circuit 1

Chin ups - 6 reps
rest 30 secs
Full back squats - 10 reps
rest 30 secs
Press ups on a Swiss ball into jack-knives - 8 reps
Rest 1 minute

Repeat twice more for 3 circuits in total

Circuit 2

Romanian Deadlifts - 8 reps
Rest 45 secs
Renegade Rows - 6 per side
Rest 45 secs
Saxon side bends - 5 per side
Rest 1 minute

Repeat twice more for 3 circuits in total

Isometric neck flexion - 3 sets of 30 second holds with 30 seconds rest in between.

The above may look like a lot and give the impression I was in the gym, like, totally, alllllll day. The above workout, including the warm up, took just 50 minutes.

Just how a workout should be! In the gym, hit the weights hard and out in less than an hour.

Eat that cardio bunnies who live on the elliptical machine for 2 hours.

Sneak your calories in to grow

2008-08-18T18:38:00.002+01:00

When people decide to go on a bulk, they use it as a glorified excuse to go on an all out fat bastard binge.

Feeling peckish, order a pizza
Not eaten for 30 seconds, have a MacDonald's

You get the idea, hopefully.

Whilst eating like that guy who did indeed eat all the pies and combining it with heavy lifting will produce great results many people don't know when to quit and end up 30 - 50 lbs overweight and have a wheezing attack then they walk 15 feet to the toilet.

They might end up with a lot more muscle but they also end up with a lot more gut and a lot more health problems.

My preferred method for bulking up is to sneak calories into your normal eating to the point where you're a few hundred calories above your daily requirement. This way you'll still be eating enough calories to grow without gaining a load of fat with it. This does mean you can also stick to a pretty healthy diet, and yes, you can have the odd takeaway in there too.

Here are some of my preferred ideas for bulking up, feel free to do this in any combination. I don't recommend going overboard on all ideas straight away (see pie eating reference above)

Have a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter throughout the day

Snack on some nuts through the day

If you eat lots of salad add on some olive oil or Udo's ultimate blend oil

After hard, heavy training sessions, go ape on protein and carb sources.

Have a small bed time snack - this doesn't have to be a lot, just a 2 egg omelet with some chopped pepper for example.

They're just a few ideas so feel free to be creative.

One bonus tip is to track your waist line when going on a bulk. If you find your waist is expanding quickly but the rest of you isn't then you need to reduce your calories!

Alternatively, if you find your measurements aren't going up at all, sneak in more calories!

Office workers, ab work and low back problems

2008-08-14T22:53:00.003+01:00

In my ever nerdy quest to learn useful and applicable anatomy information I've been reading a book called Low Back Disorders by Dr Stuart McGill.

I'll be the first to admit that it's not all that easy to read and I have had many an eye-glazing over moment trying to get my head around some of the information but if you've ever had any lower back problems, Stuart McGill is your man! He is probably the foremost expert in lower back disorders so when he speaks, I listen.

The more I work my way through the book, the more I cringe whenever I hear people in the office proudly claim they do hundreds of sits up or crunches most days.

Without getting way too technical, sit ups cause compression forces on the discs in the spine, estimated to be close to the safety levels recommended by the NIOSH......imagine the potential damage of doing that several hundred times. Way to go genius!

A further reason why I wouldn't recommend spinal flexion based ab exercises to people who work in offices is because they are often sat in piss poor postures for long periods of time which puts a lot of strain on the posterior ligaments and spinal discs. Doing endless, mind numbing crunches on top of this further adds to the damage.

Without crunches, most people are like lost little lambs when it comes to ab work. My personal preference a lot of the time is to work the abs in static positions and work towards more unstable environments. Here are a few exercises along with some progression ideas.

Bird dog - start on all fours and lift a hand or knee only about an inch off the ground. Progress to raising either one arm or leg at a time then onto raising the opposite arm and leg off the floor.

Side planks - start with resting on your elbow and knees then progress to straightening your legs. The advanced option is to roll from one side to the other, keeping your abs braced.

Planks - again, start with resting your knees and elbows on the floor then progress to straightening your legs. The advanced option is to raise alternate legs off the floor.

There's a few ideas to help you along. Remember though, it doesn't matter how much ab work you do if you're scoffing down the crisps and chocolate bars you won't be seeing your abs!

What don't you want to do?

2008-08-06T21:32:00.003+01:00

Very occasionally you'll read something that really hits home and make you think.

I remember reading an article by Charles Staley called "Why I don't want to power clean 315 pounds". In the article Charles talks about how his current power clean is 275 lbs and he'll sometimes say how he'd "love" to power clean 315.

He comes to the realisation that he just doesn't want to power clean 315, he only thinks he does.

He could make up any number of arguements and excuses as to why he can't power clean 315 lbs

When it comes down to it, if he really wanted to power clean 315 lbs he would do everything in his power to work towards that goal until he reached it.

What goals would you "love" to achieve?

Think long and hard about that - what is it you tell yourself you would love to be able to do?

What are you really doing right now to achieve it?

What did you learn today??

2008-08-04T23:40:00.002+01:00

In a blog post a while ago I said about the importance of investing in yourself to get better at what you do.

Since that post I've read several books and picked up some really useful tips which I'll be looking to share.

One thing I did read about that I admit I had no clue is to do with variations in hip mobility.

Yes, I can admit that I don't know everything fitness related - this is one of those fields where the more you read the less you find you really know!

Back to hip mobility

Where the thigh bone (femur) joins the hip (os coxa), it is found that the neck of the femur can join the os coxa at a horizontal angle or a more vertical angle.

The angle will ultimately decide on the persons true hip mobility. Without getting into the science and terminology behind it a good summary would be a horizontally joining neck of the femur results in reduced hip mobility due to the neck butting against part of the hip bone.

When people have this type of joint and try to do exercises that exceed the joints mobility range it forces the hip to abduct onto the head of the other thigh bone.

As you can imagine this sounds painful and overtime the constant bashing and trauma can result in inflammation and even further reduced hip mobility.

Without an x-ray it is impossible to determine what type of joint you have, as with a lot of things, if in doubt, don't do exercises that may aggravate the hips.

Quick update

2008-07-28T22:07:00.002+01:00

Just a quick note to let you know that I'll be starting up two new blogs.

http://practicalfatloss.blogspot.com/ and http://sizeandstrength.blogspot.com/

As the title suggests one will be focusing on more fat loss specific issues and the other one will be looking at more strength training and muscle building. I'll be moving some of the content over this week and start updating them from next week onwards.

Never fear, I'll still be updating this blog with more general fitness thoughts and ramblings so be sure to bookmark all three blogs for updates!

Sweets, cakes and the office guy

2008-07-24T23:08:00.002+01:00

Whilst commenting on a blog post this morning, I had one of those infamous "well durr" moments.

Whilst working in an office, it's easy to see why obesity is on the increase.

I almost feel guilty and apologetic for eating the way I do - preferring to snack on fruit and nuts during the day instead of scoffing the cakes, sweets and biscuits that get brought in every so often.

Let's get this straight -people say I eat healthily...noooooo, I eat normally. Think about it, what is actually normal, eating natural fruit or some factory made processed sugary crap? Don't make me administer a Thought Adjusting Wedgie here. As much as you think normal is eating the sugary crap, I'm sure it's not.

To put this in perspective, we were being rewarded for a period of hard work in the office and some people went food shopping. They ended up spending £85 ($170 roughly for any American readers) on pretty much nothing but cakes, sweets and saturated fat laden pastry stuff. All I asked for was some fruit and that was pretty much ridiculed and people couldn't seem to grasp the concept of asking for fruit.

Is the perception of food really that skewed nowadays? Unfortunately it does seem so.

Well, I'm sure the joke will be on me when those people have health related problems from poor eating and all have guts hanging over their belts (yes, even the females).

I know exactly how she feels...

2008-07-21T22:17:00.005+01:00

Whilst reading Tony Gentilcores' blog today, he gave props to this blog:

http://michellethinksyoureanasshole.blogspot.com/

She is definitely someone after my own heart!

Whilst I now choose to workout in my home gym, I did used to work out in a commercial gym so I understand how pissed those places can make you.

The ignorant people and the stupid stuff some did that I saw made me so angry that I wanted to beat them with a dumbbell and give them the peoples' elbow!

Just kidding about the dumbbell.

Not kidding about the peoples' elbow.

Just off the top of my head

I kept my towel on one piece of equipment whilst using some free weights. Whilst on the free weights a guy went on the machine - that's fair enough and anyone is welcome to do that - in doing so he took my towel off and when he was finished, kept my towel off the machine so when I went back there was someone else already working on there.

Another time I was supersetting and my towel was on one machine whilst I was working with some free weights and some old lady decides to remove my towel and work on the machine. Again, I'm a chilled guy so I just patiently wait for her to finish without saying a word. Before she finishes the old bag tries to actually talk down to me for having my towel there. After pointing out her complete and ignorant knowledge of supersets and gym etiquette I could have easily thrown the machine on her.

A third time off the top of my head, unfunnily enough involves the durr guy from the first rant. The gym I used to go to has machines in a circuit fashion working on a red / green light system for timed sets. I thought I would give it a go and as I was working around the circuit, the durr guy sat his lardy butt on a machine in the middle of the cicuit - don't misinterpret that, he wasn't doing the circuit, just normal sets on the machine - and he could see I was working on the circuit and when I come round to that station, durr guy didn't even move. I swear if I wasn't such a nice guy he'd be doing a superman impression out the window.

Feel free to post your own stories in the comments or drop me an e-mail. I could always do with a laugh!

Quite possibly the most useless piece of equipment

2008-07-19T01:21:00.003+01:00

.....and the winner is:

The smiths machine!

Yes, the staple of nearly every gym ever gets my vote as quite possibly the most useless piece of gym equipment and overrated coat rack.

I mean, even the mostly useless elliptical trainer was intended to at least help you in your goals. The smiths machine seems mostly designed to hurt you whenever you use it whether you realise it or not.

The person who designed the Smiths machine reminds me of the failed car designer who is reduced to designing toasters and vents their hatred through them (seriously, any setting above 5 just incinerates your bread! Why put them there, why?)

So why the hating?

Because the smiths machine works in a fixed plane of motion it has two problems. 1 minor and 1 major.

The minor problem is that the small stabiliser muscles that are used during free weight exercises are not engaged when using the smiths machine. From a bodybuilding point of view this isn't such a problem. From a performance point of view such as an athlete training, this is a bad thing as the aim is usually to engage as many muscles as possible,

The major problem is, as highlighted above, the smiths machine works in a straight up and down fixed plane of motion. When you perform the two most common exercises on a smiths machine - the bench press and the squat - the bio mechanics of the movements are very rarely straight up and down.

The line of travel of the barbell during a squat is usually in an S movement and for the bench press it's more of a J movement. So by forcing these movements to go in a fixed line you place a large amount of stress on the various joints involved in the exercise.

For the squat it's usually the lower back and knees and during the bench press it's the shoulders, elbows and wrists.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that Unnatural joint movement + weight bearing exercise = big owie down the line.

Still, the over-priced coat rack does have some uses. Rather than list them here, Eric Cressey wrote about them in an article at t-nation that covers them

http://www.t-nation.com/article/performance_training/10_uses_for_a_smith_machine&cr

Enjoy

Look at the bigger picture for a better you

2008-07-14T21:49:00.003+01:00

With all the training and nutrition information available on the Internet, it's easy for people to focus on the minutia and forget all about the bigger picture of training to get the results they want.

For personal trainers and everyday gym-a-holics, it's something we all know but until you see it written down you often don't think about it. Or maybe you do but choose to ignore it.

I had one of those moments the other day when I was e-mailing back and forth with a friend about some training ideas.

When I thought about it, 2 common problems are:

1) Focusing on maintaining exact nutrient ratios in what you eat to obsessional levels

For a lot of people just cleaning up your diet and eating at a slightly less than maintenance level will yield great results without having to go completely anal about whether you had 33% or 34% of your calories in carb form (before you start complaining, those numbers are just for example)

Of course when you want to get to uber lean levels or have screwed up your metabolism then being more careful with your nutrients comes into play. Even then, having 34% of your calories in carb form rather than 33% isn't reason to go on a cream bun rampage in disgust with yourself.

On a side not, jumping from one fad diet to the next is just as bad. Yes, you there, with the Atkins, GI diet, South Beach Diet and Rosemary Conley books on your shelf.

2) Getting too caught up with corrective exercises and mobility work that you don't actually lift.

I have learnt a boat load of information from guys like Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson and Gray Cook when it comes to corrective exercises, mobility work and movement screens. I'm sure they are also some of the first people who will also tell you to go lift some damn weights!

Too many people are getting caught up with doing nothing but corrective exercises and mobility work that they forget to go and train. I'm a complete stickler for making sure people are working the muscles correctly and strengthening / activating weak muscle groups but that shouldn't stop me from getting people to squat, deadlift, bench press, rows, etc etc.

One example that came to mind when I was e-mailing back and forth was that someone has asked me to help them to do press ups.

I could analyse the hell out of them and focus on assessing core strength, sticking points, mobility, whether certain muscles groups require activation, down to whether the person appears to have fast or slow twitch dominant muscles or, because they're a beginner, I could think about just plain getting them stronger with a balanced approach so they can do press ups... shocking thought isn't it?

And no, I don't need to do anything with them on a swiss ball to achieve that.

Really, I don't.

If you think you've been guilty of this then it's not the end of the world I promise! Just focus on eating clean and training hard and the pieces will fall in place.

Are you getting your portions in?

2008-07-09T23:16:00.003+01:00

It is well known that government guidelines recommend a minimum of 5 portions of fruit or vegetables per day.

The above statement might make you go "well, yeah, durrrr".

If it's such a "well dur" moment, then why is it believed that only 13% of men and 15% of women aged between 19 to 64 in Great Britain meet this standard on a regular basis?

To me, eating 5 portions of fruit and veg is such an easy, straight forward idea that it's difficult to think how you can't meet this standard!

I know that some people feel trying to eat that amount of food is a complex, expensive, tricky business. A lot of it comes down to priorities.

The same people who argue it's expensive are usually the people who spend at least £40 on alcohol and a takeaway the next weekend and smoke during the week.

Let's put that into perspective - in my last shopping trip I bought:

1 pineapple
3 pears
8 bananas
8 braeburn apples
4 Fiji apples

The grand sum of all of that? £6.92

That's more than enough for me to have an apple and a banana every day and a bowl of pineapple at least 3 - 4 days with some apples and pears left over.

( By the way, I love pineapple. If you wish to fund my pineapple habit please e-mail me - JonathanCoulson@yahoo.co.uk )

So from the above, that's a very easy 3 portions a day.

Still think it's complicated and expensive?

On a side note I wouldn't consider pepper and tomatoes on your takeaway pizza to be part of your 5 a day nor mixing white rum, white wine, oranges, lemons and various other ingredients with pineapple to make an Orgasmic Punch. No matter how tasty and orgasmic it is.

BMI - useful or useless?

2008-07-07T22:54:00.003+01:00

The BMI (Body Mass Index) is a tool that is used to roughly determine if a person has a healthy weight for their height. To calculate it you take your weight in kilograms and divide that number by your height in metres. You take that figure and then divide that by your height in metres again.

This will give you a number and you can use the table below to see how you fair.

BMI
Underweight Below 18.5
Normal 18.5 - 24.9
Overweight 25.0 - 29.9
Obesity 30.0 and Above

Whenever you go to a doctors or health club for an assessment this has a habit of cropping up - so is it really any good?

As with a lot of tools in the health and fitness industry you will have strong advocates who swear by it and you have strong advocates who swear at anyone who uses it.

The truth, as with most things, is somewhere in the middle.

By itself the BMI is quite limited and needs to be used in conjunction with other assessments to gain a full picture of your health.

The main reason for the limitation is that it doesn't take into account the persons body type by that I mean if someone has a skinny-fat type body it's possible they can have a figure in the healthy range whilst someone who actively works out and is lean could be in the overweight category due to the extra muscle.

From the above two types, which sounds the healthiest to be? skinny-fat but at a healthy weight or lean and muscular but registering slightly over weight

If you still maintain it's the skinny fat, I'll be round to administer a Thought Adjusting Wedgie.

So what else should you use with the BMI to gain a better picture?

1)For a start take your waist measurement - no sucking it right in there porky!

For men anything over a 40 inch waist circumference is bad, diabetes and heart disease terrority. In women it's anything over 35 inches.

2) Take your blood pressure. You can get a home kit quite cheaply or pay a visit to your doctor for a check up. As a guide a reading of 120/80 is normal and consistently reading over 140 / 90 is classed as high blood pressure. Anything over 160 / 100 and your head is likely to explode next time you sneeze - I'm just kidding, kinda, not really.

3) Measure your heart rate. Take a stop watch and time yourself for 30 seconds to see how many times your heart beats and multiply that figure by 2. In adults the average is around 70 for males and 75 for females.

Using these three tests in conjunction with the BMI will give you a much better understanding of how you're doing health wise than the BMI alone.

It's sad but true.

2008-07-06T01:25:00.003+01:00

A recent investigation by the Local Government Association (LGA) into food sold to children around various theme parks, leisure centres and museums yielded some very scary results.

The tests conducted on nearly 400 meals across these locations found that NONE met the School Food Trust (SFT) recommendations for healthy meals for kids.

Read that again -out of nearly 400 meals, NONE met the minimum standards for a recommended healthy meal.

Some of the food was found to contain 600 - 700% more saturated fat than what was recommended. On average the meals also had 60% more sugar and 40% more salt that what is being recommended in meals to children. Those are some damaging levels of cr*p to find in your food.

I don't know about you but my stomach is retching just at the thought of eating one of those meals!

It's no wonder the country is becoming more and more obese. With food like that being sold, children and even adults stand no chance!

On the plus side, the independent does report that venues such as The Eden Project and Natural Histroy Museum do offer healthy food for kids.

You can go here to read the article http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/childrens-meals-at-theme-parks-shockingly-unhealthy-858334.html

If you're planning on going to any of those sort of places over the summer, think twice before buying the food there!

Makes me cringe just to see

2008-07-02T23:07:00.001+01:00

The other day I was watching a show called X-Weighted. If you're not familiar with the show - they take ordinary, over weight members of the public and get them to lose fat. In essence, it's a good idea and I've seen some good ideas on there such as when they had one guy doing martial arts - as I used to do martial arts and still beat up my punch bag (like, totally manly dude!) - so I'm biased in that area :-)

They also have some really bad ideas such as having over-weight, out of shape people doing bench dips.

Bench dips are bad? Well not if you fancy having shoulder problems!

Some people might find that statement extreme and argue it's a safe exercise that they've done for years without any problems. They're the lucky ones.

Bench dips (where you either have your feet on the floor or on a bench in front of you with your hands on a bench behind you and use your triceps to raise and lower yourself) put a huge amount of stress on the shoulder girdle, even more so if you have the wrong type of acromion, which is part of the shoulder joint.

When you couple the above with poor shoulder, back, triceps and/ or serratus muscle strength (basically what an over weight, untrained person would have), having them do bench dips is just asking for trouble.

What is a good alternative then?

Well there are a number of exercises you can do to build up strength in all those areas.

As an alternative to doing bench dips, my choice for beginners would be floor presses* - Think of a bench press but done on the floor as the below clip shows

As you can see, the stress put on the shoulders is a lot less than a full bench press and it really targets the triceps.

*I enjoy doing parallel bar dips but it's a lot for an untrained or overweight person to do without sufficient strength.

Invest in yourself

2008-06-30T22:36:00.000+01:00

Whether your interest is weight training, business, dog training, playing guitar....basically whatever. One of the best tips I have heard over the past year is to put aside 10% of your income, put it in a separate account and use it to invest in yourself, hobbies, interests etc.

After all, why would you not want to gain more knowledge and be better at something you supposedly enjoy or do?

For example, if you want a bigger bonus or pay rise, maybe a promotion, it might pay for you to invest in some business books or courses. Interested in losing fat, invest in nutrition and training books, trainers etc. If you enjoy playing golf, why not invest in improving your swing mechanics?Why go it alone and in the dark?

As you can tell from this blog, my interest is mainly in training and nutrition. Over the past year I have invested a lot of money in products to improve my knowledge and it's no coincidence that I've probably gained the most knowledge in this past year and continue to gain a lot of knowledge.

For some people, the thought of sparing 10% of their income is a tall task. You'd be amazed at how it doesn't always make a huge impact over time. If you feel this way, spend a few months putting that 10% aside and after a few months assess how your finances are. Worst case scenario is that you just transfer that money back.

Want fast, effective fat loss? Try Turbulence Training!

2008-06-25T23:08:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I kept seeing Craig Ballantyne's name popping up all over the place and I kept hearing about the Turbulence Training programs so I decided to give them a go.

I went with the Duluxe edition that gives you more programs and information than you can shake a proverbial poo covered stick at. The Duluxe package covers everything you will need such as beginner, intermediate and advance training programs, nutrition plans for both males and females including an example of what Craig himself has used. It even comes with several mp3 audio interviews with Craig.

For those of you who like to workout at home and don't have any weights, bodyweight workouts are also covered and believe me, they work!

I have two testaments of my own as to how effective these programs are.

1) My oldest brother was getting married and I decided to use the Turbulence Training programs to get myself into shape and look my best for his wedding. In several short weeks I had lost 7 lbs in weight and 1 1/2 inches off my waist. I also noticed that I had added some muscle too. You can't argue with those sort of results.

2) An even stronger testament to my belief in this system. About 7 months prior to my brother wedding I was in a car crash that left me with whiplash to my neck and back. After several months of having to rest, the bodyweight workouts were what I used to help me get back into shape and I made a full recovery.

If that doesn't convince you, then nothing will!

So go here and see for yourself.

Affiliate week

2008-06-23T21:30:00.001+01:00

I thought I would have a bit of an affiliate week this week.

For those of you who don't know an affiliate is essentially a person who sells someone else's product and earns a commission. It's done through you clicking a specific link with a referral code in. Of course this does mean that the affiliate does have a vested interest in selling the product to you. :-)

That said, I am also careful about building myself a good reputation and therefore I'm not going to try and sell you any old tat. As in my first blog post, I definitely won't be trying to sell you anything I haven't purchased and tried. I'm also doing it as a few extra pennies here and there go a long way!

So to get it started, I'd like to start with two books by Leigh Peele - The Fat Loss Troubleshoot and The Metabolic Repair Manual. (see, affiliate links - at least I'm honest about it!)

On a quick side note, Leigh is an absolutely amazing person who has helped me quite a lot with advice on both the business side and training side of fitness. She is great to talk to and is always willing to help. Definitely check her out!

Both books do exactly as they say on the...errr....well, cover. They are absolutely jam packed full of up to date information designed to help you assess where your fat loss and metabolism problems are and how to overcome them to (as clichéd as it sounds) get the body you want.

Whilst nearly every program on the planet claim to do this. Leigh's is different, she actually talks about the reasons why you're stalling and how to over come them in very clear, well laid out, step by step progressions. In my experience, unless you know the reason why it's broke, you're not going to fix it!

There is lots of practical advice, some of it is technical and with Leigh's sharp humour, it's very easy to read and digest. I found that I learnt a lot from these books and would recommend them to anyone in an instant.

Sometimes just blindly following a nutrition and training plan isn't going to work. These books give you the tools to think for yourself. Apply them, be amazed!

If I have peaked your curiosity then Click Here!

Work in an office?

2008-06-18T22:47:00.000+01:00

If you're like me and currently work in an office environment, next time you're there look around at how many people exhibit poor posture from slouching in their seats and suffer from neck and back pain.

What are some of the signs of postural issues? Starting from the top and working down

1) The head protrudes forward

With correct posture the shoulders are pulled back and the ears are in line with the shoulders. The chin should be over the collar bones. If this isn't the case it usually means the person has weak neck and trap muscles

2) Rounding of the upper back (kyphosis) / Rounding of the shoulders

As per above, the shoulders should be pulled back, when tends to happen is the shoulders start to round and in doing so the upper back starts to round as well. This is usually a combination of weak upper back muscles and tight chest muscles. A quick test to see how your shoulders fair up

Hold a pencil in each hand and stand how you normally would - don't force yourself into a correct position. If you have good posture the pencils should pretty much be pointing straight forward.

3) Lower back problems

When people sit for a long time two things tend to happen - the hip flexors become shortened and tight; the glutes become weak and inactive. The result is the hips are pulled out of optimal alignment leading to lordosis of the lower back.

If you suffer from this or know people who do, the good news is that with the correct stretching, mobility drills and strengthening of the appropriate muscles these problems can be cleared up!

what the heel??

2008-06-14T00:03:00.000+01:00

On the news today there was a feature about a new high heel shoe designed for babies.

The shoe itself isn't designed for walking on and the creators say the heel will collapse if any weight is put on them. I won't get into the whole moral argument about encouraging younger and younger children to wear adult clothing.

Instead, I will question why people would want to encourage children to grow up with and like a type of shoe that, if worn too often, will cause more problems than you can care to have.

A quick lesson in how the body adapts to excessive wearing of high heels:

The foot is kept at an elevated level putting extra pressure on the joints of the toes
The ankles are at a stretched position along with extra pressure on them
The calf muscles are put in a shortened position which can lead to Achilles tendinitis
With the calf muscle in a shortened position this leads to a shortening in the hamstring
A shortened hamstring muscle leads to a forward pelvic tilt
The forward pelvic tilt, along with the forward weight shift of the high heels causes excess curvature in the lower spine leading to compression issues.

In short the high heel doesn't fair too well.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to never ever wear high heels, just questioning that with the above in mind - would you want to encourage your child to take up wearing high heels at an earlier age than necessary?

If you are also someone who wears high heels to excess it might be worth your time completing exercises to help restore the correct muscle length tensions again.

summer, summer, summertime

2008-06-11T23:06:00.000+01:00

We've had some gorgeous days here in the UK which means more people are getting outside and playing more sports.

..and cue the amount of niggling injuries they'll be incurring through incorrect warm up and trying to do too much too soon.

Take this evening for example where I went and played some tennis.

My warm up consisted of

10 cat / camels
10 press ups w/ scapular push ups
10 calf stretches
5 forward lunges w/ twist
5 reverse lunges w/ twist
10 PNF Diagonals

The guy I was playing with did some arm circles and side to side twists before playing an hour and a half of tennis

Guess who is going to be sore in the morning :-)

More to come...

Weight loss mindset

2008-06-10T21:32:00.000+01:00

The other week I was watching a show on TV called The Fat Bribe. The idea is the Government is looking to offer people money as an incentive to lose weight so the producers tried the experiment on some groups of people.

On paper it sounds an ok-ish idea. When you start to think about it further you start to see the real flaws in it. I'm all for schemes that encourage people to try and lose weight as more and more people are becoming obese. The fundamental questions are.....what happens to these people when the money incentive has gone? Is money enough?

In the short term there will be weight loss as it's an incentive for them. However, over the long term you'll probably find that these people start to to head right back to square one.

The reason is their mindset hasn't changed from that same old person sat watching TV eating a pizza. Why would it? Money as an incentive is only a small part of helping a person to lose weight and keep it off (unless it's a huuuuuuge amount of money, in which case I'll gain weight and then lose it ;-)).

Weight loss is also about having the correct mindset and way of thinking.

Here are a few tips and tricks to help get you started.

1) Ask yourself, really ask yourself why you want to lose weight? Is it to look more attractive to the opposite sex? Is it to help your joints? Is it to boost your own confidence? Is it so you know you stand a better chance of growing older and seeing the smiles of your grandchildren?

The deeper you probe about why you want to lose weight the more reasons you give yourself and in turn the more motivation to reach that goal

2) Be specific about your goals. Saying "I want to lose weight" doesn't have the same psychological effect as saying "I will lose 30 lbs in 3 months at which point I will weight xx lbs"

The more specific you are in your goals the better your mindset will be.

3) Visualise yourself being at your ideal weight. I know I know, it sounds quirky psycho babble. You will be amazed at the psychology behind having a strong visual aid to guide you towards your goal. Again be as specific as possible - imagine how you'll look; how you'll feel; the way you'll walk; the way you'll feel better about yourself; your increased confidence; how your clothes will feel better.

That'll do for now!

One bonus tip - when you go to eat that next cream bun ask yourself this "will eating this help me reach my goal?"

2008-06-07T13:39:00.000+01:00

Hi and welcome to my blog!

As you can see this is my first blog post and as such, it's never easy to know where to start or what to put so bear with me.

I guess I should explain a little about what I'm doing here and why you might want to read my blogs.

I'm someone who is interested in fitness and training and I have been for quite some time. I'm currently looking to get a certification in the UK and go into personal training. There's just something about being able to help people with their body composition goals and knowing you are helping to make that difference that just gives me a buzz!

So why a blog?

Well for me, I think it's a good way to network with people and have their thoughts on my ideas, training, opinions etc that I am looking to post here. I know some of you will agree with me, some won't, that's just life. As I am always looking to develop myself, constructive criticism is always welcome.

It will also give me a chance to give reviews on various books, dvd's, info products that I have purchased in order to expand my own knowledge. I openly admit now that some of these will have affiliate links and some won't. I do use affiliate links as it'll help me to pay the bills! My promise to you though is that I would nevermindlessly promote any old product without actually trying it out on myself to see if it works or not.

Well that's enough from me for now! For anyone reading this and would like to drop me a line my e-mail is jonathancoulson@yahoo.co.uk