Never Give Up PT

Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption EPOC

When we have performed strenuous activity in our exercise routines we might feel tired and our muscles can become sore (delayed onset of muscle soreness DOMS). I want to describe in layman’s terms what is happening to your body and why it is important to your goals.

You might have heard the expressions ‘after burn’ or ‘oxygen debt’. These both describe the state in which your body goes through after training. Depending on how intense your training was this afterburn can last 48 hours and maybe even more. During your recovery, your muscles requires oxygen due to the oxygen used during your workout.

The recovery includes hormone balance, cell repair and the breaking down of fat stores to act as fuel. This is what is known as Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption EPOC.

Many recent studies show that anaerobic exercise or resistance training creates greater EPOC, which is what burns calories after a workout, whilst aerobic exercise burns more calories during the workout.

This is thought to be because of the amount of muscle used during resistance training especially full body, push/pull or high intensity interval training HIIT programs.

When I design a programme for a trainee, it is important to find the balance between what the person’s goal is, what they enjoy doing and what the best course of action is. But what seems to be a constant based on the research done in the past 30 years tells me that every goal needs a certain amount of residence training.

Expect most of my Programming to be resistance training unless you run marathons.

And for the average person where time plays an important factor in their lives, the quickest route to achieving a successful programme plan is through scheduling weight training.

So why should we be very careful when judging our successes in the gym solely on the scales?

Weight training causes micro tears to the muscle and inflammation. Your body acts to heal this process by retaining water and using glycogen to fuel. Water and glycogen adds weight to your scales.

However, over time your body gets used to the stresses of your resistance routine and realises that it no longer needs to retain the amount of water that is has and so reduces it’s water retention, resulting in weight loss.

But, but, but! If you have a progressive programme you will see a slight fluctuation due to new stresses being put onto your body due to progressive overload, which is something I have documented many times.

So weight gain during resistance training, unless you dramatically change your diet, has nothing to do with how much fat you have on your body (and I have to assume that it is fat that you want to lose in terms of weight loss, not a leg).

The science behind the process can be a bit much for us to understand sometimes. Especially as fad ‘experts’ come along and confuse us even further! But if you are doing it correctly (a trusted professional having your back usually helps) then we must continue to have faith in the process.

I hope that this clears a few bits up. Now off you go, let’s get some deadlifts in!

Nach Dem Spiel Ist Vor Dem Spiel (After The Game Is Before The Game)

The 52k dumbbells sit in the same place in the gym on the rack each day. Apart from the Outhouse, the brave, the stupid or the mixture of the three the 52k dumbbells rarely get picked up to be pressed, pulled or curled.

I’m not in the back street bodybuilder gym. Had these 52’s been in there I’m sure they’d be getting more attention than the occasional tickle with a feather duster from the gym staff. I’m in a mainstream chain gym. The type that pretends to serve it’s members by pulling down a screen and playing a recording of professional dancers from Australia and calling it a Tone Class. But credit where credit is due, the gym area is very good and I’ve been to plenty of gyms where the dumbbell weight doesn’t reach 52k.

At the beginning of this year I began my Hypertrophy Programme. The past two years have been difficult to consistently follow a proper periodized programme. It’s been a bit stop starty with lockdowns, gym closures and my own encounter with Covid. Finally, I’m finding some consistency to my training.

Now, in early March, my training and nutrition has exceeded such expectations that a one rep max with those abandoned 52k dumbbells are a possibility. Two weeks into my strength phase and I’m pushing and lifting heavier and better than ever. Once my Power phase begins the 1-3 rep max will be my focus. Physically I am training to give my body the best chance. Mentally I hope I am ready for it. A Power phase can cause incredible fatigue both physically and mentally and I need to get it right to make the months leading up to it feel worth the time and effort. I know that any time in the gym is worth it, but when fatigue kicks in and the psychological doubts begin, the positives seem harder to come by.

But I’m strong. Physically and mentally I have trained for these moments. Sometimes you win, sometimes you fail. But it’s how you go again that matters. I know this. And my success in my latest programme isn’t one that I will celebrate just yet.

Sepp Herberger was a very successful soccer coach in the early 20th Century. He said”, Nach dem spiel ist vor dem spiel.” Translated as, “After the game is before the game”.

One rep, set, session or phase is always followed by another one. There’s no time to admire your success for too long as you simply have to go again anyway. Begin the focus all over again. Battered and bruised maybe, but there’s another game to prepare for. A quick obligatory progression photo in the gym loo is all I have time for. The 52s are waiting.

But you might be wondering what my great obsession is with my current program or indeed these 52k dumbbells. Why is it so important?

At 43 years of age, if I am able to record a 52k dumbbell press, I will have achieved a physical feat that my 20 or 30 year old self could not do. At 43 my bones are meant to be getting thinner and weaker. My body is supposed to be producing less testosterone. My body, says science, is in regression.

Well, I trust science. My career is based on science and it’s research. But I trust myself even more. I am my own research and, despite what researchers have tested on a hundred men in California, I intend keeping on defying science by testing myself in a gym in Scarborough.

There is no exact science.

And my goal of becoming fitter and stronger than ever before is not an attempt to prolong my life. Christ! Between pandemics, wars and global warming I’ll be fine with not overstaying my welcome. But for as long as I’m at this party I want to have fun and be as happy as I can be and the only true way I can ensure that is by getting stronger, even during the stage of my life that I am statistically expected to get weaker.

But I don’t accept being weak or weakened by age. The Grimm Reaper will catch me one day, but age can fuck right off.

The game isn’t up for me. As long as I continue through my phases of training and I keep getting stronger, this game is just the beginning.

My 10 Top Tips For Fat Loss

Here are my top tips for weight loss…

1. Start calling it Fat loss. Unless you want to lose an arm, muscle,an organ or have 10 shits a day then what you want to lose is fat. What you weigh is just a numerical reflection of your relationship to gravity.

2. Love who you are right now. You wouldn’t say to your best friend “I’m not leaving the house with you because you are fat.” So don’t say it to yourself.

3. Be in a calorie deficit. Calculate your calorie consumption for one average week and then you are able to make smarter choices about your nutrition and training.

4. Eat what you want. I’m a PT but also a realist. We will still have down days. Unless you are an athlete with a strict daily diet then no foods should be banned. If you follow step 3, then you will know how much of anything that you can have.

5. Don’t buy a meal plan. Create your own by listing the foods that you enjoy with your ‘must have’ proteins and veggies. Some guy sitting in his bedroom in Sydney knows jack about your lifestyle, dietary needs and health. He might like chicken and broccoli 10 times a day but you don’t have to.

6. Do have a training schedule and stick to it. Either create one yourself or ask for help from a professional who you trust. It needs to be fun, engaging, consistent and work different muscle groups regularly.

7. Practice ‘mindful eating’. Discover new foods, cook new ingredients, sit at a table to eat rather than a plate on your lap. Make meal times an event when you can.

8. Go for a walk. Not only is this useful to incorporate into a training schedule but it allows you to escape the times and places that you are struggling with. If the cakes regularly come out at work in break times, take a 15 minute walk around the block. If they can get cig breaks, you can go for a walk!

9. Don’t fall into the fad diet trap. Any new book promoting weight loss has one thing in common…it has a calorie deficit. But just saying that would make a very short book and they can’t make money from you.

“Remove these 5 foods from your diet and watch the weight roll off!”

So you are taking away the food that you enjoy out of your diet and you lose weight?! No shit Sherlock.

10. Enjoy the process. It doesn’t need to be army camp training every day. It doesn’t mean giving up the foods that you enjoy. Just celebrate the 1% victories because they soon add up.

The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is.

Am I going to start getting hate mail if I admitted to you that I have never seen a Star Wars movie? Add James Bond, Lord Of The Rings, Game Of Thrones and Harry Potter and you have the full set of movies or series that the rest of the world seem to have watched that I haven’t. I fear a perma ban imminent.

My kids, however, love Star Wars. But not enough to have an attention span to watch a full movie. Hence my ability to boast such a statistic.

My youngest loves Baby Yoda. He has a Baby Yoda teddy. I know that he is a character in Star Wars but I’m not sure where Baby Yoda came from. Anyway, Yoda seems pretty cool.

And I know from the amount of books and annuals that my boys have that Yoda has a few wise words to give. My favourite happens to be ‘The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is’.

Failure can teach us so much about ourselves. How we react from it can mould our personalities. I might be the only dad on the touchline who wants his kid’s team to lose sometimes. They are by far the most superior team in the under 8’s league so I know how my eldest reacts through victory, but I like to see his response to defeat. He will realise as he grows up that there are far more disappointments in life than there are successes. So having the emotional grounding to deal with that will help him embrace the victories.

You can only become a good winner if you are first a good loser.

Competition was always something that I excelled in as a kid, at least in a sporting context. I was very average at my academic work and my motivation at school was a case of doing what I had to until the bell rang. In the football field however, I’d give my all. And it was the same in every sport. These days I only run for a bus or if I am chased by a zombie. I tend to miss a lot of buses and I’m concerned about my ability to survive a zombie holocaust if it would ever happen. Yet at school I was a champion runner. I wanted to win, but even then, I realized that failure was a part of the game. It hurt, but it made me better at my sport. Any sport.

Due to sciatica affecting my performances and my recovery I stopped playing many sports. Contact sport were out of the question. I was a keen kickboxer in my early twenties but kicking became painful as the sharp shooting pain ran down my leg. My opponents never hurt me but my injuries did.

Before my passion for sports disappeared altogether and the pull of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll totally gripped me I had to make a decision. How could I still feel a part of a sport and experience success and failure? I took up darts, snooker and chess but they could all be played whilst eating a pizza and drinking beer.

I was introduced to the gym by a friend at a vital time in my life. For me, the gym is my sport now. It cured my injuries as I learned the correct form. And I could have my buzz of failure and success again. There are so many failures involved with a fitness regime. Much much more that there are successes. In fact, blink and you might miss the success. In the gym I climb a hill just to discover a bigger hill. And I like that. Sport doesn’t have to mean me competing against an opponent, it can mean competing against myself.

Today I will compete against my yesterday’s self. Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose. Either way, I will have been taught something.

Perhaps I should watch Star Wars just for Yoda. He seems like a real dude. But that Vader bloke? He needs to take a leaf out of my book, quit the ciggies and get to the gym.

Saturday Night

As the Black Eyed Peas once sang ‘Tonight is gonna be a good, good night.’ Over the years I’m sure I will have belted that song out as I got ready to go out to the bars and clubs on Saturday night.

These days, though, I’m happy if I get a few black eyed peas in my curry. Saturday nights with kids and with absolutely no desire to replicate my nights in a club before searching for a taxi at four in the morning means that fun and an appreciation for our relax time comes in a different way.

Tonight is a ‘curry off’ in our house. My wife and I usually make this a quarterly event. We each make a curry and side dishes, sit down with a glass of fizz and compliment each other’s cooking whilst secretly thinking that theirs is the best dish. (My wife is the chef in the house, but my vindaloo is unbeatable).

Once we have finished our meal we will crash on our sitting room sofas. This week has been half term, we’ve continued juggling our work and the kid’s extra curricular stuff and, although there’s an early start tomorrow for my eldest’s football match, crashing on the sofa with a couple of beers after good food and great company means that I am totally unapologetic about it. My week, for the most part, is done.

Once the kids are in bed my only gripe will be how Noel’s Crinkly Bottom was so much better than Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. I have other worries too. Those who frequently read my blogs might have gathered that I am an over-thinker. But I can’t fix wars or the world’s issues tonight. I have to concern myself with my own family. And tonight is a curry off, crap TV and, if I can convince my wife, a horror movie. That’s my Saturday night.

We enjoy cooking together. It doesn’t always happen due to work commitments but even if I know that I am cooking for the both of us I am able to explore recipes and learn something new. Mindful eating is an important part of a balanced lifestyle but that has to start by mindful cooking. The textures, the smells, the tastes and the colours always excite me when I am cooking. Not only is the process quite therapeutic, but knowing what I am putting inside of my body is rather empowering.

Now, in no way can I do this at every meal time! Sometimes a couple of crumpets and a protein shake is about as much as I can manage if time is limited. But when I can get that time to cook, especially together with my wife, it is precious.

And when we get around to making our curries this evening, it might not seem as exciting as a night out in Leeds type of party, an Ant and Dec Takeaway party or as Blobby Blobby as a Mr Blobby party. But it will be OUR house party. Crinkly bottoms and all.

So tonight IS gonna be a good, good night. I can feel it.

Two Covered Eyes…

I have spoken lots on the need for progression in my talks, in my Personal Training and through blogs and social media and this is because, undoubtedly, it is the most important factor in opening the soul to the countless opportunities that we can give ourselves.

Developing the tools to equip those who desire to find their progression is my job. Standing next to someone and counting reps is what I let other PT’s do. But it goes beyond the gym floor. Indeed it has to extend to the world beyond the gym floor for successful progression to take place. I have not encountered one person yet who has fulfilled their fitness goals when the rest of their lives have been in chaos.

Progressive Overload is a term used to describe a training program that takes us through a number of challenges such as weight load, rep counts, how many sets and rest periods. In fact the progression one can develop in a fitness regime is infinite as there are so many factors attributed to fitness. Strength, speed, stamina, even life longevity all fit into this category. And without personal progression outside of your training program the progressive overload that we seek within our program is stumped.

But we must be open to change and this is where we fail. It is said that caged birds think that flying is a crime. We invest so much time in our surroundings that it becomes a part of us, etched firmly into our mind disabling us from spreading our wings and flying away.

We are so afraid of change that we criticize and often ostracise those who do change or who challenge the need for change.

We have been caged. In the gym we use the Adductor machine every session because the gym put it there and the instructor gave a vague explanation of what it does. A gym member asked me once what the Adductor machine does and I replied ‘Nothing unless you incorporate it into a full body routine including squats and deadlifts’. I gave them my card. I never heard from them again. For them to call me and ask for a full body routine would require them changing their own routine.

I was also asked recently what equipment is good for the belly. ‘Honestly?’ I replied, ‘None of them.’ I gave a few tips on core strengthening in which she replied ‘But I can do them at home’. And there she had her answer.

A gym membership is only useful if you know what to do in a gym. But moving regularly and mindful eating can be done outside of a gym and is great for the belly. It saves a few quid too. That can be classed as progression, but as I have outlined in two examples, if we haven’t got the right tools to progress or refuse the tools in the first place then progression is so much harder to find. Moving is great, but how we move can be better and more progressive.

We are animals that work within our comfort zones. If we applied a heat map to our movement in a gym the same areas would be covered. A part of my childhood was going to the local Working Men’s Club on Friday and Saturday evenings. If anybody sat out of place their name would be mud for the evening and if a newcomer ever won the bingo the shock around the room would be palpable. Something different had happened to the regulars of the club and they were unsettled by the change. Their Saturday night was ruined.

“I’ve never seen them in ere before Mavis”

How many of us go to the same treadmill if it is available? In a fitness class, who stands in the same place waiting for the instructor to begin? And when we go home after our workout, do you sit in the same chair? I know that I do.

But these little quirks don’t hinder our progress. Its the big ones that do. Staying in a job you hate. Going back to a toxic relationship. Looking in the mirror and hating what you see. These are the things that we need to change and it is only you who can change your own progression when you allow yourself to. Two covered eyes can be taught how to see, but a blind mind cannot.

It Doesn’t Get Easier, You Just Get Stronger

Some days I still feel like a kid. The vulnerable child that would put his head under the duvet and weep. My childhood wasn’t one of fear or sadness, but I had the usual anxieties in fitting in with my peers, scared of my parents dying or feeling lonely in a very big world.

If only my life would allow my older self a few minutes sometimes to just put my head under the duvet. After all, the same anxieties are there. But it doesn’t. You might feel the same too. Life doesn’t take a time out just for you so that you can reset and face the world again. It keeps going. And the older I seem to get, the faster it keeps going.

Life doesn’t get any easier, we just need to get stronger.

I’ve been approached by uninformed people at a previous gym that I trained in that have asked ‘how are you a PT at your age?’ or ‘why aren’t you ripped if you know what to do?’

It is a misconception that to be a PT you need a six pack all year round and you need to be young. Unfortunately, even within the PT circles, this is the belief. But that is why I’ll still have a Coaching business in 10 years time. I appeal to 99% of mainstream gym goers and I use my previous work experience to run a successful business. I am one of the gym members. That makes my job easier.

But another misconception of being a PT is that I train people to be fitter, to run more or to lift heavier.

I want my trainees to acquire these physical attributes if that is their goal, but my main focus is for them to become mentally stronger.

Benching 70k one month and 80k the next is fairly straightforward for our physical form to do. But mentally you need to be strong. If you aren’t, you will become frustrated and you will give up. Training your brain to accept that 1% improvement is a big achievement and much more productive in anything, not just the gym. But for me, life and my training are linked.

When I perform a back squat, for me the barbell represents the world with the weight on my shoulders. So I squat the hell out of it. Its not going to bring me down. Not today. It enables me to take this strength and power into my every day life. I no longer need the duvet. Today I am strong.

And it doesn’t matter how many plates were on the bar. That isn’t what makes me stronger. Its the fact that I did it. That is the key to becoming stronger. Just doing it.

Nothing gets easier, we just get better at it. This rumbling snowball of life quickly rolling towards you as it accumulates more and more stress and angst is something that we learn to outrun. We learn to pick it up and throw it. We teach ourselves to take the hit if we have to and we grow more powerful than it.

We put it on our backs, feel the weight, squat it and put it back on the rack. And we’ve survived another day.

The Great British Sausage Off

Comparing my sausages on a Sunday morning and putting a timer on my phone to take a picture of them is not what I imagined doing this Sunday. But my wife is in the bath and my kids are perfecting their Fortnite dances in the living room so I thought I’d make them a breakfast. Out came the sausages.

Meat or vegetarian? Will my kids know the difference?!

For those who have followed my previous posts you might remember that my wife did the whole Vegan-uary thing in January. She totally embraced and enjoyed it. And although I didn’t commit to this, due to living and eating together for most meals, my meals became animal free too.

I eat meat. I like eggs, butter and my one true addiction…cheese. Eggs are a versatile, quick and easy protein source and butter is dolloped onto my crumpets far too often. But I could probably take them out of my diet fairly easily. And I can go days now without eating meat thanks to my wife. But cheese?

We will only have a ‘full english’ breakfast once a month. There are a number of reasons for this. We usually have early activities to do with the kids at the weekend so we opt for quicker meals. Also I can rarely eat as early as the kids wake up times so I will prepare their breakfast way before my wife and I are ready to eat.

But today my eldest has no football match to go to and it has been a casual Sunday morning. A Steve Wright love songs on radio 2 sort of morning. As I lay in bed my thoughts turned to sausages.

My kids are needing a little bit more convincing when it comes to meat free alternatives, but the breakfast I’m cooking this morning will be with Linda McCarney’s vegetarian sausages. I’ve had them before and I’m confident that they will like them…as long as I don’t tell them!

Are we preconditioned to eat meat? Does society sway our young minds to choose meat? At school my kids have options for meat or meat free, but unless they’re happy to eat a jacket potato every day the meat free options are limited. There’s still a stigma to vegetarian meals and certainly to vegan meals that they are boring. Maybe some schools and, for us adults who go to restaurants, this might be the case. The animal free section of the menu might be a little uninspiring.

I’ll be sure to update you on how my vegetarian sausages did with the kids but for now I must sign off as they’ll never eat them if they burn in the oven. A charcoaled sausage in whatever form it arrives onto your plate is never going to be a success.

Sport

Watching the rise and fall of Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva who, at 15, has been embroiled in a doping scandal leading to disappointing performances at the Winter Olympics has been heartbreaking to watch.

It just looks to me that so many adults around her have let her down. And it makes me wonder if 15 is too young for that level of competition in the first place.

But sport, at any level and any age, can be brutal to our mental health. I worry about my kids entering a sport. Already my eight year old, being extremely talented at football, is creating an interest from local scouts. But when he got a chance to shine at a Leeds Utd trial he froze. The game, I can only imagine, had been taken from being fun for him to being judged on his performance.

Even at an under 8’s sport, we begin to judge the ability of it’s participants. And if a kid is lucky or good enough to join an academy or a professional club, the statistics of them getting anywhere near the first team of a Premier League club is virtually zero. In fact a kid in an academy right now has less than 1% chance of making even non league level when they’re old enough. So as much as I’ll encourage my kid’s sporting activities, I’ll be making sure that they do their academic homework!

One thing that the average person seems to forget is that their training regime is also a sport. The gym is the arena. But who then are our opponents? Every sport is a competition, right?

Each session needs to be carefully drawn out to get the best results. Pep Guardiolo won’t send his team onto the pitch without a plan of action. A gym goer shouldn’t enter the gym without some sort of a plan either.

But one thing that we do know is that whatever the plan might be you must enjoy doing it. I can’t imagine Kamila Valieva enjoying the past week, just like my 8 year old didn’t enjoy traveling 2 hours to play with other kids he didn’t know. If somebody told me to run an hour on the treadmill every day I would quit the gym. It needs to be enjoyed.

When somebody tells me that their goal is to lose weight I know how to plan this for them and within 5 minutes of talking to them I will know what they will enjoy doing to achieve it. A macro goal such as weight loss is as good as a football coach telling their players that they need to kick a ball. It is how to kick it, where to kick it and who to kick it to that needs to be executed with a process and detailed planning.

Every sport, even the gym sessions, need tactics.

So who is the competition of this sport?

Is it the 25 year old dude who benches twice what you do?

Is it the person on the treadmill that is running faster than you?

No.

The competition is yesterday’s you. And figuring out how to out perform your yesterday’s you is your victory today.

And not all victories come in the form of a PB lift or a run. If you are smiling more today than you did yesterday then you are seriously winning.

So keep on getting those little victories, because it’s the little ones that will see you win gold one day.

The Concorde Project

My laptop is old. When I load it up it’s whirring and it’s wheezing makes a supersonic jet plane taking off sound quiet. And still every night I crank the old thing up and do my work. Eventually. It takes a while.

The other night I was obviously quite animated as I waited for the screen to appear. It was loading, I’m sure of that. Mrs Baggins at number 44 could have told me that.

The noise. My tapping foot. The occasional frustrated looks I gave towards my wife as she turned the volume up on Corrie. 20 minutes. 30 minutes. I waited.

Eventually my wife said,’The boys have got their Chrome book that you can use to do your work.’

I knew that. I knew it before I opened the laptop up that evening and I’ve know it since Christmas day when Santa had left them it. But I have fallen for an old psychological trick. And even though I know it, I’m sure to be winding up my old cronk of a machine instead of their new sparkly Chrome book tonight. And I probably will until it gulps it’s last bellowing breath.

I have invested so much time on my laptop which has my emails, passwords, data, downloads, files and pictures on there that I am refusing to let go, even though I know that this can be created and transferred onto a newer model. And when my wife said that I could use the Chrome book, I didn’t want to feel like I had lost 40 minutes of my life just to start again on a different device so I stubbornly carried on.

Economists call this The Sunk Cost fallacy. Because of what has already been invested into a project, one fails to stop and cut ones losses and proceeds regardless wasting more money. And in my case energy and time.

In 1956 the UK and France decided to build a supersonic jet. They called it the Concorde Project. After hundreds of millions of tax payers money and wasted time and effort they eventually built The Concorde. They knew long before it finally took off in 1973 that they would never recover their losses. It became one of the biggest financial misadventures of the 20th Century. Yet they continued to build it. Its final flight was in 2013 and remained millions of pounds in debt.

We all fall for this trap. We remain in jobs that we are undervalued in because it is what we have done for years. We stay in relationships that are toxic because we become numb to it. We live in a town that we hate because our parents and grandparents lived there and it’s where our crappy jobs are and our toxic ‘friends’ are. We have invested so much time, energy and money into something so much so that we fear just letting it go.

And one thing that I see, day upon day, are gym goers falling into the same fallacy. Burt sits on the Arm Pedal bike each day because he has done it for the past 3 years. Terry rocks in the ab machine each day and why? You’ve guessed it, he’s done it for years. He has invested years in getting a six pack. It won’t happen on that machine but if I can be stubborn enough to crank my machine up every night and governments can be wasteful enough to crank their machine up why can’t Terry sit on his machine?!

When we invest so heavily in something, we find it difficult to let go. Even when we know it is wrong, wasteful, dangerous or counter productive. We will spend hours in the gym each week doing the same thing as we were doing 5 years ago. The same class. Same weights. Same reps. Same machines.

I can offer an alternative to the gym goer, much like my wife offered an alternative to my failing laptop, but the sunk cost fallacy is a psychological burden for even the most determined and logical of people. I can get Burt where he wants to be in 6 months, but he’ll still be arm pedalling in 6 years. And he’s probably been conditioned to believe that it will work.

Why?

Because just like my laptop tells me to ‘wait one moment’…

And like the UK and French governments were told by the Supersonic Aircraft Committee that they would ‘revolutionize’ how we fly…

Burt was probably told by a professional to sit on that and pedal for an hour while they took his money and did fuck all.

And because of the time and effort he has already wasted, there’s no chance he’s giving up now.