lifestyle – Page 9 – Never Give Up PT

Insta grrrrrr!

I guess lots of budding authors, film makers and vloggers create content on certain blog sites and social media platforms to monetize their skills. They hone in on their skills and target audience, pay great attention to their editing, hashtags and algorithms and eventually have a product worth reading, viewing and selling.

My wife and I, on the other hand, have just spent two hours trying to get my Instagram account as admin to the new Road To Tranquility page which was set up on my wife’s account. We still have no clue on how to do it.

You see, we’re finding that we are becoming the aforementioned content creators by circumstance, not by our talent.

As small business owners who need to promote our products through exposure and without a team of media people to manage our accounts, it’s up to us to navigate our way through the digital world like The Chuckle Brothers putting up a tent.

Ah, tents. That’s a more familiar world. And, even though we will still hit the snags of setting up a glamping site in Portugal such as VISA, licencing, cost, weather conditions and language, nothing can be more difficult than syncing a bloody Instagram account!

But it makes me think, ‘why do I do it?’

Why bother setting up an account to document our adventures in setting up our business in Portugal? Why create a meditation podcast? Why write this article right now?

Well, the reason is simple really. I’m able to reach out to people like you. It allows me to communicate to like-minded people who also might have an interest in health, fitness and wellbeing. Other people might also have an interest in reading about my journey. There might be somebody who can relax to the meditation podcast. I might be able to make someone laugh. Perhaps something I do or write about might strike a chord in somebody else’s life. And for this reason, the tinterweb is fantastic.

But I can promise you one thing. I won’t be signing up to Threads!

Super Durant-Duckworth Bros.

It’s not often we agree on a movie to watch on our house movie days.

For example, I will suggest something edgy like Indiana Jones or Men In Black. Ok, maybe it isn’t that edgy but for 9 and 7 year olds who run out of the room when the bird lady appears in Home Alone Lost In New York, then anything that is a 12 plus is edgy.

My wife usually suggests something with a talking bear or mouse befriending a middle class family.

Jonas, my 9 year old, would probably go for The Spy Next Door every time and Finlay loves The Bee Movie and Flushed Away. But I used to know every scene of Flushed Away after lockdown so I’d rather not sit and watch it again any time soon!

As a family though, we can all agree on one movie that we have been desperate to see. The Super Mario Bros movie has been much anticipated in our household. We didn’t get a chance to see it at the cinema so when it arrived on Amazon video to rent we declared a house movie day!

The usual house movie day goes like this…

We debate the movie that we will watch for an hour or two. The movies mentioned above are all in the mix every time.

My wife and I tip bags of crisps into bowls, get some popcorn on the go and allow the boys a can of pop each. I say ‘allow’ because fizzy pop isn’t something we would usually have in the house. So movie day is a real treat for the lads!

The curtains get drawn, the picnic blanket goes on the sitting room floor, cushions and soft teddies get strewn about for good measure and we all take our positions for the beginning of the movie.

A few years ago, house movie day would have been an invitation for me or my wife to fall asleep halfway through the film. Indeed, if it was Flushed Away for the twentieth time it would have been rude not to. But there was no chance that would happen for Super Mario Bros.

My wife and I have fond memories of Super Mario while growing up. The simple game play on the now very retro consoles that I had as a kid reminds me of good times. Tetris, Sensible Soccer, Donkey Kong and Pacman too just take me straight back to me in my bedroom as a kid.

So when the Mario Bros music started at the beginning of the movie it triggered the memories.

I want my kids to have similar memories that, when they’re adults, will just transport them to innocent times of being a kid.

The theme tune to a favourite cartoon, the smell of a book, the noises of the arcades at the seaside, the face you pull when you put a fizzy sour cola bottle sweet in your mouth, hearing mum and dad laugh.

It doesn’t need to be Disneyland or a trip to Lapland that makes memories. I can still smell the caravan that I stayed in at Skipsea like I was there yesterday. And the great experiences that I had there will stay with me forever.

I hope that our house movie days can do that for Jonas and Finlay.

Plan

Well here I go. After all my constant talk of planning for your fitness goals I feel as though I am at a point where I can’t really plan for my own fitness goals. Not with any great precision anyway.

I have no gym and my time is compromised coming into a very busy summer period with work and the kids being off school. Oh, and with a house search in another country to plan, my health and fitness goals are getting further away.

I hope, seeing as I have now left training people in commercial gyms, that the legacy I left is that I am a ‘real life’ trainer. I’m honest, work to a client’s strengths and I am motivated in reaching realistic goals. So then, if I were having a chat with Shay the personal trainer, what would he say to me?

Me: I’ve not got any training plan in place for the rest of this year. I will have no time during the summer holidays as I will be busy with work each day. After the summer holidays I will be finishing off my packing to move to Portugal. Once I’m there there’s going to be lots of driving, researching and preparing for my business.

Shay PT: Your work will involve coaching sports to kids. Last year you were counting over 20,000 steps per day. That’s at least 10,000 extra steps than the recommended daily target for the average person. Also, a lot of preparation for your business will involve landscaping the land. Physical work such as this can burn around 500 calories per hour. So your NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis) is looking very healthy indeed!

Also, you have a selection of resistance equipment that you will eventually be taking to Portugal. Before you pack them up, think of a 30 minute routine that you can do in the garden on a decent summer’s evening after you’ve put the kids to bed. Promise yourself 3 of these sessions a week. And I know you have the time. It just means watching one less episode of the series you’re watching.

So your activity levels are looking pretty good, but it’ll mean nothing unless you keep your nutrition on track. That takes a little preparation. Make your lunch in the evening for the next day. For breakfast, stick to drinking your fruit and oat smoothies. Make sure that vegetables are available for every evening meal. Keep convenient, fast food to a minimum but don’t be too restrictive. No food should be banned.

A plan doesn’t have to involve regimented routines and dull food. Nothing I have just mentioned is life changing stuff. It’s just a sensible few tweaks to ensure that you stay on track for when you have more time and you are more settled in your new home.

I think I’ve just found a plan.

The Road To Tranquility Portugal

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094707496611

Click, like and follow the link above to see our journey to finding and creating our tranquility in Portugal.

We have a VISA process to wrestle first so the page is still very much in its infancy, even if our process has been through years of planning.

Obrigado!

Water Retention

I might jump on the scales a couple of times a year. I generally don’t judge my physical progress by what the scales will say. There are so many factors that can confuse the weighing scales that it simply cannot give me an accurate account of my progress.

One of the biggest of these misleading factors, especially in the summer months, is the swelling of the body due to water retention. This not only makes me look physically more bloated, but it can add several pounds on the scales.

It can be a confusing time for those who are closely monitoring their progress on the weighing scales, as they become demoralised by having put in so much effort in maintaining or losing body weight yet not getting the rewarding numbers on their scales.

So here’s the sciencey bit…

Water accounts for around 60% of a person’s weight. For the average person, this represents 42 litres. We turnover 2-3 litres of water per day. The temperature and the exercise intensity will determine how much we sweat (the biggest loss of water) and therefore will determine the water requirements needed to replace this water in the body.

The body compensates for this loss of water through fluid conservation hormones like aldosterone, which allows the kidneys to retain more fluid.

In my experience I meet many ‘weight loss’ gym goers who panic at the numbers on the weighing scales without actually acknowledging that their body is cleverly keeping them alive and well and doesn’t care that they want to lose a few pounds. It is totally natural to have bloaty times and, whether through environmental, behavioural or ageing processes usually comes down to one thing…our hormones.

But it is extremely important to remember that long term positive habits will always trump an occurrence such as water retention. Once you commit to a process and consistently carry it out then you will see the results that you want. In the meantime, you just have to accept that the human body is a wonderful machine that is working to keep you healthier than what the weighing scales ever will. And maybe the scalese are a machine you can do without.

Butterfly On A Wheel

The extremities that I see when it comes to the lengths that one will go to look a certain way never surprises me. Training myself in ‘back street’ gyms for years and then Personal Training others in a very busy commercial gym just outside of Leeds City Centre, anabolic steroids were always a part of the culture. Needle bins were often provided in the changing rooms, the selling of steroids were openly discussed and, even those who tried to be discrete, it was pretty obvious who used them. After all, if someone looks unnatural, they probably are.

The latest drug on the market, which is illegally sold in some bodybuilding supplement shops according to a recent report, is called Sarms. The tub states that it is ‘not for human consumption’ and is for ‘test purposes only’. However, the results from using such a product seems to be a hit with those wanting to gain extra muscle mass synthetically.

Last week a 30 year old bodybuilder influencer famous on social media died of an aneurysm. Although the connection between steroid use and the aneurysm has not been confirmed, it is possible that the negative effects of steroids such as aortic dissection, hypertension and atherosclerosis could have played a part.

I’ve always thought of the poem by Alexander Pope called Epistle To Dr Arbuthnot when I think of what one is willing to put their body through in order to feel stimulated by aesthetics, fame, money or competition. ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’

Surrounded by friends in the back street gyms, I saw first hand what they would do to be regarded as the strongest or the most ‘ripped’. And it had the desired effect. They had lots of attention in the bars and clubs as they bulged from their t-shirts. I should say that I dipped my toe in the world of steroids briefly only for guilt and a lack of cash to pay for it soon made me see sense. And so I remained the book end as my friends and I hit the town.

I feel that I got rewarded in later life. I am confident in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans (I have always admitted that I like to keep an aesthetically pleasing standard for my age) and I’m happy and healthy.

I just hope that my gym friends from 20 years ago can say the same.

Rain For The Next 2 Weeks

Here in the UK it is tennis season. The time where people who have never held a tennis racket before put on their white cap and head off to their local council tennis courts.

Many of them are surprisingly well kept. As a kid there were many courts on East End Park and they were generally in good working order. A few torn nets and a bit of broken glass in places but it made for an interesting game. And they were in much better condition than where we all played football, seeing as we would use the old discarded glue bags and the dog turd as goal posts.

It might have helped that the tennis courts were close to the caretaker’s house, so any vandalism would have been heard by him. I say ‘him’, but we never saw anybody coming from the caretaker’s house. A big house that resembled the one out of the amativille movie. I would quicken up my walk as I walked past.

I was one of these people who would pick up a racket for a couple of weeks during July. It is, of course, the Wimbledon tennis tournament. I would be sure to be wearing my long white shorts and t-shirt in an attempt to look like my favourite player, Andre Agassi. He was the first player to wear long shorts while his opponents were still in very tight 1980’s short shorts. I wanted room for my tennis balls to move about, so I thought baggy shorts were sensible. Agassi had a bit of a rock n roll attitude about him on court too. I had a rock n roll attitude, but I was crap at tennis.

One thing you can be sure of in England is that as soon as Wimbledon starts, the rain starts. It remains warm and muggy in the evening but the weather likes to postpone tennis matches for a couple of weeks with its incessant rain. Problematic for an outdoor tournament played on grass.

And to think, just last week I put the tent up in the garden for the boys to sleep out and it was cracking the flags for a full week. Hopefully the sunshine will come back but if we want to be entertained by Cliff Richard singing in the stands then the rain is bound to stick around for a couple of weeks yet.

So where does this leave me? A sports lover for sure but I’ve not watched a tennis match since Tiger Tim got a semi.

My only option then is cricket, where England and Australia play a game for about a year for a tiny trophy.

Yes, I’m missing the football season, which is odd seeing as I spent the beginning of this year wanting the season to end. There wasn’t much to cheer about being a Liverpool fan. A right back moving into midfield was as exciting as it got for me.

And you can bet that Wimbledon will take over the whole of the BBC. So when the continuity announcer tells us that EastEnders will be shown at a later date, I’ll be screaming ‘You cannot be serious!’ at the TV screen.

Be Committed

I write this as a kind of message to myself. I’m currently needing to muster all of my positive energy to remain committed to our project of creating our Wellbeing Centre in Portugal.

And that’s not because I don’t want to do it or cannot be bothered to continue with the process. Far from it. But it’s because I’m scared.

Yesterday we had a phone call from our estate agents. We are 8 weeks into the sale of our house in Scarborough and each day is a nervous one as we hope that the chain stays in tact and we complete the sale. We’ve had the estate agent call before on a previous sale and it was to say that the buyer had pulled out. So we’re on tenterhooks now.

However, yesterday’s call was a good one. All being well, they said, the sale could be complete within two weeks.

Two weeks!

That’s much earlier than our expected date of early August. My wife and I looked at each other. Hearts racing at the news. I think I mouthed a swear word. My wife just said,”What are we doing?!!”

Portugal now seems very real. Visas seem very real. Finding and buying a house, a car…oh and driving a car on the opposite side of the road, arranging for our stuff to be sent over, schools for the kids, building our business, learning the language and generally putting ourselves in a very different life to what we are used to. It’s all very real now.

But whatever it is that we want to achieve, being committed to the plan and the ultimate goal is an absolute necessity. It would’ve been easy during the past few months to talk ourselves out of it and simply carry on with our current life. We are happy. The kids are happy. But we committed to a goal that we have dreamt about for many years. It’s not a whim. Indeed, it has been planned for over ten years or more. And even before my wife and I had met each other, we had hopes of moving abroad. It’s only when the UK left the EU did we pluck up the courage to do it.

The other necessary ingredient to reach your goals is to admit that sometimes it is getting tough or you are scared. I say it to myself. I say it to my wife. I even put it out to the world in my blogs.

Rewarding stuff in life isn’t meant to be easy to obtain. It should be difficult.

It could be going to the gym for the first time or having your first PT appointment. It might be applying for a job in your dream career. It could be setting up your own business or entering a new relationship. There will be times that you will be scared about the outcome, but you must trust the process.

The house, the yurts, the massage rooms, the gym and the schools won’t fall into our lap once we are in Portugal. And we’ve already talked about the strain that such a massive move can have on a relationship. Truth be told, I’m absolutely bricking it.

But I’m also committed. I’m committed to the project and I’m committed to doing this with my wife, best friend and business partner.

I just need to trust the process.

Picking Out The Peas

My youngest is a fussy eater. He’s always been the same. Even as a baby we were concerned about his milk intake and then, when it came to solids, his fussiness continued into eating very little and with only a couple of things that he would entertain. And none of them with great nutritional value.

At almost 7, he has improved and will try the odd bit of different food that the rest of us have on our plates, but only for 50p. Yes, we have to bribe him to eat anything remotely healthy.

Tea times are awkward. Whatever the boys want for tea it will always come with a good portion of veg. They enjoy fish fingers and we will be happy to prepare these as long as they eat the veg as a non-negotiable. But our eldest has a varied diet as well as wanting the usual processed stuff that most kids like. So my wife and I are often making two or three different meals over tea time.

And then there’s the peas. A big bag of frozen veg to last the week is a good investment for the boys. Or so we thought. Now our youngest will only eat the peas from his serving of veg. And if there’s any evidence that another veg has touched a pea he will not eat it. Which means that I am left picking out the peas before preparing them to serve. With a hundred things to do at any given time, picking out the peas out of a mixed bag of frozen veg is never up there as a priority.

We’ve tried keeping him seated until has eaten his full meal, but this has led to tears and I don’t think that him having negative memories around food and meal times is productive either. So his mum and I will continue to cater for this fussiness.

So, while he is counting his columns of 50p’s, you’ll find me in the kitchen counting frozen peas.

The Parka Coat

I always seem to arrive late to a trend. Although I’ve made up for it since, I never watched Friends when it first aired in the UK. At school I would wonder what a ‘Rachel hairstyle’ was and why everyone was debating whether ‘they were on a break’ or not.

And it was the same for music and fashion. Oasis were selling albums in Poundland by the time I liked their music and I even bought a parka jacket in 2003 to put on and show off my britpop swagger. I was a good 5 years too late though and my hair wouldn’t live forever. I was a bald Liam Gallagher. I had the shades and a rollie cigarette hanging from the mouth.

Could I look any cooler?!

Ah, but that parka jacket. It has 20 years of memories. If you were to dig deep inside the pockets you could probably still make a rollie out of the grains of tobacco that remain.

So when it came to packing up our house, we had to be ruthless. For our move to Portugal, we have decided to be more ‘minimalist’. Not everything in our home can make the cut to be transported over to Portugal. DVD’s took a hit. All I could salvage was my collection of Friday The 13th DVD’s. Labyrinth made its way to the charity shop. A decision I could later regret.

And lots of clothes had to go. I had a phase of buying Penguin shirts from TK Max. I must have been in a slimmer phase when I bought them. They’ve gone. Jeans that I can’t get past my calves when I try to squeeze into them. They’ve gone. There were a pair of undies in the bottom of my drawer too that looked as old as the parka. Fear not, they didn’t get sent to the charity shop. They’ll be recycled into a polishing rag. They’ll be making many a knob shiny in our new house.

But it’s actually getting rid of the parka that was the hardest of all. It was quite a symbolic moment as I made the decision to let it go.

I feel sad that I will never put that big coat on again. And I feel a bit guilty that it will never be worn by me again. Maybe I could go back to the charity shop to buy it back.

I’d just tell it that we were on a break.