Whilst living on my current street in Scarborough I have had three street parties to celebrate The Monarchy and The Royal British Legion (VE Day, Jubilee and the Kings Coronation).
That’s quite a record for a guy who doesn’t consider himself a Royalist. However, I do appreciate the ability for a street or a community to be able to get together and celebrate stuff. I think that it is important in today’s society. Perhaps some people on the street wished to toast The King during yesterday’s Coronation, I chose to acknowledge my privilege.
Since this was my third attempt at a street party I thought that I would be a bit more prepared this time. I bought 4 cartons of Sangria which has a lowly 4% volume of alcohol to share with my wife and neighbours. On previous occasions, I have peaked too early. The parties usually start at 1pm and by 3pm I’m trying to collect enough people for a conga while chanting “Mo Salah, Mo Salah, running down the wing.”
So what could go wrong with a few glasses of low alcoholic Sangria? Eugh. Lots!
Ok, I didn’t get drunk. Far from it. I remained fairly sober with just a mild tipsiness by the evening, but the sugar content of these little cartons was outrageous!
This has left me today with a massive sugar hangover. According to self.com, sugar hangovers can be just as bad as the alcohol type with very similar symptoms. Shaking, sweating, fuzzy headed. Oh great. And here’s me trying to be sensible by not downing the merlot too quickly!
Fortunately these parties don’t come around too often so the damage isn’t too bad. But for the next street party (or indeed the festa de rua), I might just stick to water.
I often wonder how I am able to live within the law and the norms of society and be able to be myself, to express myself and pursue what is valuable to me. The journey I am on is investigating this lifestyle which has led us to central Portugal.
Recently I watched a program on UK TV documenting the lives of a couple called Miriam and Peter who, in previous careers, were city workers. They had travelled the world and eventually settled in the remote mountains of Rhodope in Bulgaria where they lived off grid. They invited people to learn survival techniques with them which paid, but the majority of their time was spent hunting for their food and surviving the vast forests.
As much as I admire them, their nomadic lifestyle wouldn’t be right for me and my family. They didn’t have two children for a start and we still very much want us and them to be integrated into society and live in a community that lends itself to helping each other out and working together to provide a healthy, sustainable existence. So we haven’t just closed our eyes and put a pin in the map. Central Portugal was chosen very carefully.
However, getting away from the rat race, from the ‘big smoke’ and the stress that comes with it is appealing. I want a good life. According to planetofsuccess.com the meaning of The Good Life is “living a life that sets you free. A life that satisfies and fulfills you. That adds happiness, joy and a sense of purpose. But it also means to live a life that is worthwhile, that makes a contribution, instead of being solely self centered.”
In a nutshell, that is what I want. And I would urge everyone who wants their definition of The Good Life to go and grab it now. It won’t come easy. Nothing so powerful ever does, but you can make plans.
One reason why the majority of us never do try to find their own personal good life is down to living in fear. We are told to fear God, political regimes, pandemics and war. Sure, they might all exist (depending on your own personal beliefs), but it is drip fed to us daily from media outlets with their own agendas often led by political bias.
In the UK, we are also told to fear small dinghies with people with brown skin on them, Eastern Europeans, those who live in poverty, European laws and unions, green activists and Jeremy Corbyn. Anybody but those in charge of the country and our lives, it seems.
A man on a dinghy crossing the English channel will never impact my life the way the man standing outside 10 Downing Street will. And yet the media are outraged by this man on the dinghy. It injects fear into us. Is he a rapist? Will he go for my job? Will he live off of the state? Is he a terrorist?
The Italian diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli wrote,”Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
This might mean different things to the reader, but my interpretation of this is that the people need to be kept in line. Allow them to fear certain outcomes and allow them to be angry at each other. Whilst the people of the UK still argue the toss over Brexit, those in a position of power are making more profit than ever. And for those arguing the toss, energy bills get higher and grocery costs go through the roof faster than any other country within the European Union due to goods entering from the EU to the UK and the red tape involved. And leaving the Internal Energy Market has left uncertainty in the UK energy supply meaning rocketing prices.
And that leaves me in this position. Wondering where I can possibly live my life with my family with as much of this ‘good life’ as possible. It is no longer in the UK.
And I am no way blinkered to the trials and tribulations that await in the next part of my journey. There is no fantasy island. Perfection isn’t what I’m expecting.
Just as the shepherd protects his sheep, media outlets will claim that we are being protected from the external attacks and the internal disorder. And even if the grains of truth that are fed to us do protect its people, I’ll always remember that the Shepherd only protects his sheep for his own interests. And when the time comes he will sheer and slaughter them as his interests dictate.
Your boss, your political party leader or any other higher power won’t give you the good life.
YOU will.
YOU will give you and your family the good life. So start planning.
It’s a strange relationship that I have with the fitness industry. I love it. I truly do. It has enabled me to follow my ambitions and dreams that I thought were beyond me or that had passed me by. I get to meet like-minded people which means I don’t need to bore my wife with news on my new bench press personal best. And the gym is my go to place for getting my head straight. Not many people get to say that about their workplace.
But it is also full of crap. For all the good it can do, there is an element of the industry that feeds off our insecurities.
Dr Gail Hines said,”If tomorrow, women woke up and decided that they really liked their bodies, just think of how many industries would go out of business.”
The fitness industry would be one of them. And in the past couple of decades I believe that the industry has begun to target the other half of the population too. Since the end of the degradation of women in magazines such as FHM and Zoo and newspapers putting a stop to page 3 in the UK, publishers had to target men in a different way. So now they put half naked pictures of male physique models in their magazines and tell them that is what they’re supposed to look like followed by an ad for creatine tablets.
But, despite it being important for the fitness industry to have men across the world feeling inadequate, it is far more lucrative for females to hate their bodies. Or to put it another way, it is more lucrative for the industry to tell women that they should hate their bodies.
For example, we join a weight loss group and go through the torturous weekly weigh ins whilst discussing our ‘syns’. Gym classes are attended mostly by women who are promised that they will burn fat, tone legs bum and tums and blast their abs. Personal Trainers are qualified in form and rep ranges but are way out of their depth when it comes to the emotional side of WHY a person has approached them for help in losing 2 stone in a month. (Some trainers are very good, by the way, but do your homework on them before you give them your money.)
The industry wouldn’t survive if we woke up tomorrow, looked in the mirror and said to ourselves “I am good enough. I am worthy.”
And that doesn’t mean that if we did this we couldn’t still train and eat nutritious food. But we would have a completely different outlook on how we approach our goals. We can always want to achieve a fitness goal that entails lower body weight or bigger muscles, but we would start to do it on our own terms.
The industry wants to confuse us.
When I go to the telly shop for a new telly, I immediately regret the whole process. It’s not that I don’t want a new telly, it’s because I am confronted by a salesperson who begins to fill the air with jargon. Yet, even though this is off putting, I do get excited about stuff that a TV can do that I never thought would float my boat. It draws me in. All of a sudden, things like OLED, QLED, 4k UHD, refresh rates, bezels, quantum dots, low latency and resolutions are the most important things in my life.
Before I know it, I’m leaving the shop with a screen as big as the one at The Odeon and if I can figure out the settings I’m sure it can make me a cuppa tea and give me a foot rub.
Now, I’m not saying that these fancy things aren’t useful on a TV, but I would question if I really needed something so glitzy as the TV that I bought. They are buzzwords. They make us want and need something that we think we don’t already have. It makes us feel inadequate if we leave the shop without a TV to go home to our own TV. Our own TV that might have a wobbly button and it’s a few years old but it still works perfectly fine.
The fitness industry sells us our fitness like a TV shop sells us our TV. They make it sexy and an absolute necessity for our lives. Their jargon and their buzzwords, their special offers and their ‘must have’ product means that we fall for their pitch.
I’ll get a new telly that does what I want it to do in my own time and with the advice of those that I trust. And if we say the same thing about our fitness goals, then we could all sit back and watch the industry do a bit of sweating of its own.
We get bogged down by the details sometimes. We forget to actually do, because we’re wrapped up in the how.
A how is only important if you’re actively doing in the first place. And then you start finding how to do it.
The 13th century poet Rumi said, “As you start to walk along the way, the way appears.”
In other words don’t dither, just do.
By all means have a plan. Have a plan B. But the more you sit on the finer details, the more it is less likely to happen. So sometimes, as Rumi alludes to, it is only once you are on your path will the journey start to become clearer.
Perhaps I told people too early about our relocation to Portugal. It means that what I told people 4 months ago is completely different today. Yes, the way is Portugal, but the plan has changed daily. I’m sure anybody asking me about it is wishing that they hadn’t bothered!
From selling our house, budgets, liaising with UK and Portuguese solicitors and consulates, renting or buying in Portugal, where exactly in Portugal we will settle, the business plan, the kids schooling and when we will actually buy our one way ticket is still keeping this journey a mystery. But there’s one certainty and that is that it will happen. We know that because we are walking along the way.
The way has obstacles. It isn’t easy. But if anything is worth getting, then it has to be with full commitment, belief and a great deal of bloody stubbornness.
We’re learning along the way and we will make mistakes. But mistakes, and the unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, are what mold us into grittier and more determined people. We cannot get lost in our pain, because one day the pain will become the cure.
Think about something that you are passionate about doing. It doesn’t have to be anything at all like mine. This is your passion. Now visualize it. Live it for a few moments. What do you see? How does this passion that you have imagined as your reality make you feel? Can you see yourself smiling, laughing, dancing as a confident happy person?
Because that’s what following your passions should be like. Living your life how you want to live it should make you feel fulfilled. Don’t be afraid to find your happiness. You just need to start to walk along the way.
Having spent the past two weeks with kids obsessed with football at a multi sports camp and having two footy mad kids myself, the question “Who is better, Messi Or Ronaldo?” Is asked to me almost daily.
But this question isn’t just something that kids ask. People debating on the terraces, in the workplace, online and in pubs must be one of the most frequently asked questions in the footballing world for over ten years.
So, my answer is usually pretty boring to most people.
The problem with finding the answer here is that we are talking about two of the most gifted footballers to ever play the game. They both have different strengths to each other but they are considered some of the greatest ever because even their weaknesses are pretty strong.
But these footballers are once in a generation freaks who are exceptionally gifted. They are so good that players such as Neymar, Modric, Salah, Mbappe and Haarland simply get overlooked as the best in the world because, even though Messi is in his later years as a footballer, is still winning some of the greatest trophies in world football.
Kids score a goal and instantly celebrate with Ronaldo’s ‘Suuuuiii’ celebration. They are more than great footballers. They are icons. Kids want to be just like them. And when I watch some adults play football in the local park, I suspect they do too.
And whilst this enthusiasm for mimicking heroes is all good fun, I can see an issue with how we view ourselves and how it can affect our own expectations of our own abilities.
I’ll take you back to when I first started going to the gym. I would see the most physically imposing guy in there and want to look like him. He was the gym GOAT (greatest of all time). I would watch how he trained. I would notice the protein shakes he was drinking.
Yet all I was managing to do is raise the bar to a height that might have been way too high for me, my genetics, my lifestyle and crucially my health and physical development.
I didn’t need to be anybody else or aspire to anyone else’s goals. Sure, I can always ask questions and get training tips, but trying to become the same size as Triple H was a poor start to my gym journey. It can be demoralising and, for many people, ends in quitting the gym altogether.
My son Jonas is a terrific footballer for his age. As an under 9’s player he is currently playing in an under 10’s league and looks comfortable. But I do try to keep his feet on the ground. He watches lots of football on YouTube. Rather than watching video after video of Ronaldo and Messi, I would much rather he watched the leadership of Jordan Henderson on TV or even go to the local stadium of Scarborough Athletic and aspire to have the passion of their team captain Michael Coulson.
SMART
When you are wanting to create your fitness goals I would recommend the SMART approach. This stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time. And I’m going to look at the achievable bit for this article.
As I have stated above, I believe that many of us raise our bar to unrealistic levels and if we were to lower it then we would get to where we want to be much easier. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be brilliant at what we do, in fact, if we can look at our achievable goals realistically, then there’s a much greater chance of being brilliant at what we do.
Firstly, you need to recognise your competition. The only competition is YOU. Nobody else. You want to achieve just as much, if not better, than yesterday’s you. This could be by maintaining your physical activities from week to week, looking to achieve an extra mile on the treadmill, putting an extra couple of kilos on the bar, aiming for higher reps or keeping a stable nutritional diet. It doesn’t matter what Hulk is lifting on the platform. It’s your journey, not theirs.
A few years ago I trained a very active 50 year old lady who wanted to gain muscle hypertrophy. As time progressed and her personal bests were increasing she began to show me pictures of Karissa Pearce, who is a CrossFit athlete. My client wanted her physique. I had to attempt to manage my clients expectations. It wasn’t that she didn’t work hard enough in the gym but it didn’t meet the criteria for her achievable goals. Karissa Pearce was a professional athlete in her mid 20’s who was able to train full time and stuck to an incredibly tight diet to get the physique that she had (and still does). My client, despite her levels of enthusiasm and spirit, did not live the same lifestyle and I would not have been doing my job correctly if I enabled unrealistic goals.
The saying goes “Reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars”. But it can only refer to your moon and your stars. Not Messi or Ronaldo’s, Triple H or Karissa Pearce’s moon or stars. They have their journey, you have yours.
So many young people give up on their dreams because they could not interpret that dream into reality. And adults do it too, until we become a society of people giving up because we couldn’t manage our expectations.
A child should be able to dream about becoming a World Cup winning footballer, but the reality based on statistics in the UK is that a talented kid at football who manages to be invited to an academy has less than 1% chance of making it to becoming a professional at ANY level. However, that shouldn’t burst a kids bubble. If they aren’t one of the lucky ones to make the professional level, then it is worth noting that there are over 5,000 football teams in non-League divisions. This is an excellent standard to reach which is often paid (depending on the league and the club). Just because you don’t have Ronaldo’s career, it doesn’t mean you are rubbish at football.
As a kid I would dream about playing for Liverpool FC and, although I don’t earn the weekly wage of Mo Salah, I did follow my ‘sporty’ dream eventually by becoming a Personal Trainer and I currently coach sports to children. And so we should dream, as long as you manage the reality.
I encourage my own kids to dream about their goals. But, just to give you an example of the sort of stuff they aspire to achieve, it involves mansions, high performance cars, professional football, becoming a YouTuber with millions of followers and traveling to the moon. These are all great ideas, but I also want them to realise that just having a home is winning at life too. Affording any car is a luxury. Having your health and talent to play at any level of football is amazing. Having real friends that appreciate you is special and just being able to see the moon is a blessing.
Reflecting on my own fitness journey, i now understand that my achievable goals are to be able to run and lift as well today as I was doing ten years ago. It’s to fit into the same size jeans as last year. It’s to meet new and interesting people. It’s to keep a positive mindset and feel good about myself. If I continue what I’m doing then I have a good chance in achieving this.
Please, keep dreaming. Aspire in doing whatever you want in life. It really does keep the fire in the belly burning. But when it is time to form your plan of action in your life, be SMART.
Up until two weeks ago I had never given bee keeping a serious thought. Indeed, even just putting on a bee keeping suit and observing wouldn’t have been something that I ever expected to do.
I mean, I don’t scream when a bee comes near me, but the thought of being surrounded by thousands of them whilst sweating in a space suit and disturbing their home making them angry was never on my to do list.
And then my wife and I began planning our Wellbeing Centre in Portugal when the suggestion of keeping bees came up. A good idea I thought, but the conversation didn’t really progress until I found out that my wife had organised a trip to the local beekeeping society so that we could start learning the ropes.
I’ve been looking forward to today, albeit a little nervous. But our move to Portugal will be a time for many firsts. Why not give our visitors a beekeeping experience too?!
My eldest wasn’t as excited by the experience as the rest of us. With a tear in his eye, he reluctantly put his suit on but said that he wouldn’t get too close to the bees. That’s fine! After all, I wasn’t sure how close I would get!
As it turns out, both boys were excellent in following instructions, staying safe and getting as close as they possibly could. Myself and my wife were also keen to watch and learn as the keepers opened up the hives.
I don’t know if we will develop the beekeeping in Portugal. There is lots to do before we get to that stage, but we’ve organised another trip to the hives in two weeks time so we are obviously keen to pursue it.
Not only was it a great way to spend an afternoon, but it left us all buzzing!
Sometimes the little wins create huge, long term success. And so that is what I’m hoping is happening in the case of my oldest boys sleeping behaviour. A little win here and there.
The other night I meditated with him just before he went to sleep. Following the similar pattern which we have now done for a couple of weeks, we created a number of positive visualizations together to bring about a comforting night sleep.
The theme of this visualization was to imagine traveling along a big, white fluffy cloud with all of his friends and family which would take him to a mountain where he could peacefully dream. This mountain I called Mount Sleepmore.
As I guided him through his journey to this mountain, I too closed my eyes and imagined the forests, seas, rivers and sand below. Above me I could see the twinkling of the stars. It was calm and serene as this great big cloud chugged along the night sky taking us to our peaceful mountain.
Usually, if the visualisation is working for me as the guide, I feel that it is being effective for the listener. The steady breathing and the stillness of the environment certainly indicated to me that it was working.
As we arrived at Mount Sleepmore, I left my son to continue his visualisations by reassuring him that, although the meditation was ending, his imagination could keep him in his happy place.
The next morning, he told us that he had had a bad dream through the night and thought about coming into our bedroom to sleep with us for comfort. But instead he tried to get back to sleep on his own, which he managed. I’m hoping that the techniques that he is acquiring are enabling him to comfort himself in these situations. If he can get back to Mount Sleepmore on his own, this is a big deal in his sleeping development.
However, it also proves that meditation doesn’t get rid of negative thoughts, bad dreams or worries. We cannot forget our daily tasks, the grind or our fears. These feel very real to us that can affect our lives greatly.
But it can help us to know how to respond to them. Through repetition and consistency, I believe that the power of the mind and positive mantras, visualisations and meditation can enable us to approach our difficulties in a much healthier way. It can alter the way we perceive ourselves and our environment. It can create a mindset that is able to deal with whatever curve ball is thrown at us.
I started by saying that it is the little wins that are vital. And each positive thought that you can express is the little wins. Finding a moment in your day to encourage these thoughts through meditation is a very useful way of doing it.
You can find your own Mount Sleepmore anywhere in your own imagination if you allow yourself the time to do it.
A big motivation for me to write my blogs was always to dispel the myths surrounding our health and fitness so that we could safely enter a fitness program or nutritional journey without wading through the murky waters that are bogus articles, magic pill advertisements and other fitness professionals giving out misinformation.
A fitness goal should be fun to embark on without unnecessary jargon, untruths and charlatans making it stressful.
And so I feel it necessary to come to the defense of the humble cheese, grilled or not grilled, for my latest findings. As this week, a gym member approached me to ask if it was true that grilled cheese adds more calories to non grilled cheese.
This is a very valid question, especially when you consider that it was a fitness professional who told her. After all, they’re the ones in the know right?!
But after thinking about how this could possibly be, the gym member looked for a second opinion. I must admit, the logic and the simplicity of the answer that I wanted to give (a resounding no it doesn’t!) Couldn’t leave my mouth. It could be that the fitness professional had done their research into this and knew more than me on the subject. So I said that I doubt it, but I’ll do some digging and find out for sure!
Rule number one for any budding Personal Trainers out there…don’t be afraid to say that you aren’t sure but you’ll get back to them with an answer. And even if you do know the answer, say that you don’t know but you’ll get back to them. You want their contact details remember! But it also stops you from being a bit of a know-it-all and, as this post suggests, one day you’ll give a wrong answer without doing your research.
Ok, back to cheese.
My findings were clear and just as I had thought. The calories do not get any higher from grilling it.
However, and this is perhaps where the confusion lies, it becomes easier for the body to digest cooked food therefore the body works less than when digesting raw food resulting in the body burning less calories. But the numbers are small. It’s like having 8p in your piggy bank when you need to save £20,000. It won’t make a huge dent.
Still, this doesn’t apply to grilled cheese. But could there be another reason to believe that grilled cheese is higher in calories than non grilled cheese?
Hmm. There is a theory that we tend to over indulge when we eat cheese on toast or toasties. We might add butter or use oil before applying the cheese perhaps, or maybe choose white bread instead of wholemeal. Yet it doesn’t change the caloric make up of cheese. The issue here is on a person’s food prep habits, not the cheese. It’s like feeling bloated after eating a full strawberry cheesecake and blaming the strawberries.
I love cheese. I’ll eat it in some form almost daily. Although I wouldn’t advise following my addiction to cheese and eating too much of it too often, I would recommend eating a cheese toasty or a cheese on toast occasionally.
It’s even better on cheap white bread, but don’t tell anyone I told you so.
I have created a meditation guide that might be useful to those in need of a little inspiration. If you have ten minutes then give it a go using the link above!
A very interesting piece of information struck me the other night. Sometimes, actually getting 10 minutes peace and allowing our mind to focus on something other than the daily grind is extremely difficult. Meditating or visualising positive outcomes is not always an easy thing to do especially with a busy lifestyle or a generally anxious mind.
When somebody approaches me and tells me about their anxieties I will often recommend meditation, but their response is mixed. It appeals to many people but there are also those who will say to me that they have tried but find it very difficult, even with a meditation guide such as myself.
And recently I have noticed my eldest son wanting to choose his own theme when it comes to meditation. For those of you who have read my blogs for some time you might remember me telling you that he has suffered with anxieties in the past which could have been caused by previous lockdowns. And I think this might be fairly common for many other children too. For our children, we decided to try short meditations with them during their night time routine which went really well.
However, just in the past couple of nights he has been requesting his own different scenarios in which he can enter during his meditations. This made me think. A beach setting, walking through a meadow, floating on a cloud or just visualising sitting in a favourite quiet place might seem like the perfect destination for a meditation, but if it isn’t where you want to be in that moment, then it won’t be as effective. Why can’t we become a superhero for the night? Why can’t we play the part of the pebble as the waves of the sea ebb in and out? Why can’t we be the rain drop that descends through the atmosphere? You can be.
For many of us, it’s a stretch of the imagination, but with a guided meditation together we might be able to unlock the potential in your mind and, as I have recently discovered, if the meditation guide knows exactly what a person would like to discover then it becomes a much more personalized experience. A kind of bespoke meditation designed specifically for that one person. Nobody else’s. It’s just their experience.
So, although completely in the early stages of development, I aim to provide this new service to those who wish to try it out.
And if it’s anything like the past two evenings for my children then this bespoke approach to meditation might be the key to releasing other children’s anxieties too. It’s like choosing your own adventure where only good things happen in your own safe space, being the character that you want to be, being satisfied with the ending and waiting for the next episode with imagination, enthusiasm, excitement and calm.
The channel on YouTube will be called Tranquil Youth Meditation. Click the link to discover more about it!
Never Give Up PT 