I’ve heard it said a thousand times. I’ve probably said it myself. To emphasise the words to the listeners, we point, seethe and widely open our eyes with a rage that boils inside of us.
“I would die for my kids.”
What passion and dedication. And yet I have never heard the alternative to this being said with such dedication before.
Imagine if we were to say,”I will live for my kids,” with the same rush of blood that sparks the same passion as to die for your kids.
I believe anyone who tells me that they would die for their child, but would they LIVE for their child? Would they change attitudes and teach their children about love and respect? Would they choose healthier foods to feed themselves and their children? Would they become more active so they remain strong and healthy? Would they change their lifestyle so that their children can imitate a well rounded person?
Children are great imitators, so give them something great to imitate.
Dying is easy. You only have to do that once. You have to live every day. Do it with the same passion and commitment that you would if you had to die for your child.
I tend to leave our sitting room with the door wide open. My wife, who sits on the sofa as I dash past her for a loo trip, finds it most irritating.
My wife argues that, seeing as it is very cold and we’re trying to heat the room with expensive gas, we need to keep the doors shut to keep the heat in.
“Yes, but…” Is how I often start my comeback. “Yes, but I was in a rush.” I quickly unpause the fourth episode of Wednesday and hope that she doesn’t reply to my feeble excuse. I had time to close the door. I just forgot or couldn’t be bothered.
My kids do the same. When I ask why they aren’t dressed for school even though I told them to do it half an hour ago they reply, “Yes, but…”
“Yes, but there’s only 5 minutes left of this program.” Or, “Yes, but I can’t find my tie.”
And I’m also in an industry that makes us all say the same with equally terrible excuses.
We use work, illness, the cold, the heat, the dog chewing up our trainers. Anything we can do to excuse ourselves from not getting the workout done. Or the walk. Or the run. Or eating the nutritious option.
We will even say “Yes, but,” to ourselves in an attempt to make ourselves believe it.
Yet 9 times out of 10 these occasions can be reasoned with a little bit of planning. You see, missing one session at the gym or not completing a home workout for the past two days or choosing the cheesy chips instead of a side salad aren’t the deal breakers here. Everybody needs a rest, a bit of down time and definitely a bowl of cheesy chips now and again!
The habits we allow ourselves to form almost always start with a “Yes, but.”
We begin to push the boundaries. My kids want to fit in one more YouTube clip before they start to get dressed. Yet Mr Mellor won’t wait for them at the school gates if their clip runs over and they don’t make it to the gates on time. They have to take responsibility now before the habit takes over and they become regularly late due to poor time keeping.
I need to start closing the doors in order to keep the rooms warm. My bad habit will cost me money and I will regret it when I receive my gas bill.
“Yes, but” simply isn’t good enough. If we take time to reflect on our habits then we can plan to fix them. We can begin to accept that, whilst missing a gym visit due to snow or an illness is totally fine, allowing ourselves to go into weeks of poor decision making and bad habits with a “Yes, but” is not fine.
So if you see a bad habit trying to get in, firmly put wood in ‘tole and slam the door in its face.
I’m already starting to see the frustration in many newcomers to the gym that I train at. Their new years resolution and ‘new year, new start’ good intentions are beginning to wobble already.
This isn’t new. Professionally I’ve witnessed this for 10 years and personally for almost 30 years. The average person who begins a fitness journey generally calls it a day before they’ve had a chance to make any serious impact on their health, fitness or aesthetics.
Why?
My theory is that restricting oneself to a set date can be dull, uninspiring and demotivating if you simply are not ‘in the mood’ at that specific time. We cannot simply switch on and become something that we have not been for the past several months or years and in many cases, forever.
I use the term ‘catching the wave’ when it comes to specific life goals, be it in the gym or in general ambitions. Timing is important.
Catching the wave is an idiom that refers to taking advantage of a moment of good fortune or an occurrence in time and creating a sustainable, practical routine that can help you achieve your goals.
Riding the crest of this wave might not last forever, but because your memories of your successes are still fresh in your mind, you will find it much easier to catch the next wave. Much like the surfer, getting back onto the surf board after falling into the sea becomes much easier with practice.
But if we ignore the signs, most commonly our bodies and our minds, then all we have is a dreaded day in which we have to do something that we don’t really want to do.
Let’s take Jeremy as an example. He promised himself that he would join a gym on the second of January. He had never joined a gym before and, apart from the occasional 5 a side football game with his friends, had never been into a fitness centre at all.
But he had started to feel sluggish and lethargic. He couldn’t run with his young children or pick them up. His diet suffered due to the difficult cycle of feeling depressed because of his health and appearance so he comforted himself with food.
His new year’s resolution was to join the gym. The problem is that not only did the wave not come, he didn’t actually know how to catch it even if it had. After a few weeks of going to the gym and slogging out a few sessions a week he felt demoralised by not seeing any changes to his health or appearance and a few niggling injuries had started to occur. Jeremy became one of the many numbers of people who join the gym in January and don’t continue to go after February.
How to fix it!
As I have stated, a new year’s resolution gives a restrictive time frame. You must start at the beginning of a new year! Yet a few new tweaks towards a healthier outlook can, and should, happen at ANY time of year.
Rather than beginning a regime of a fad diet and 5 gym sessions a week, try starting by walking more. Research a few local areas that are popular for walkers and give them a go. It doesn’t have to be a full day of rambling. Just an hour will do.
Pick out a few of your favourite fruit and veg and start adding these to your plate more. These will add numerous nutritional benefits and create satiety, which allows you to feel fuller for longer. Also, making fruit and veg smoothies can help you get your required amounts if you don’t usually eat them in a meal.
Hire a PT. The feeling is that Personal Training can be a ‘no pain, no gain’ sort of attitude full of Burpees and just about everything else that is horrible. The reality is that a good PT, as long as you tell them that you are new to exercise, will give you advice similar to my first two points. Move a little bit more and add fruit and veg to your diet. If they go straight into Burpees then sack them. Also, PT can be done online these days which is cheaper. A good PT will get to know you and develop a routine for you that you enjoy and will even know when you are on the crest of a wave or if you’re in the sea!
And finally, to really find that wave, if you feel like doing it, just do it! Start saying yes to the 5 a side games more. Go for a walk or a run. Start swimming. Or just join the gym at any time of year!
You might find that one of these activities becomes a passion and something that really motivates you. Eventually , you find yourself riding a wave. And if you ever fall off, rather than wait until a new year, you’ll know how to get back on much easier, much sooner.
I am a Personal Trainer, meditation teacher, health and fitness blogger, husband and dad.
Seeing as our previous holiday outside of the UK was just before the 2020 lockdown hit, we decided to take a week in central Portugal with our boys this January. We weren’t disappointed.
Staying in the centre of a city can give you a good idea of a place and our apartment was above cafés on a busy street. Wherever we went, we came across lots of cafés. The vibes were positive. My morning routine soon became going to the nearest cafe with the boys and choosing a few patisseries for them to take back up to the apartment while I sat outside the cafe soaking up the atmosphere with a double espresso.
I can see the attraction of this cafe culture in places like Tomar. This is how many of the locals would start their day, congregating around a table on the pavement and having a chat. I enjoyed people watching. My eavesdropping, however, wasn’t so good in Portuguese. You get good thinking time in the few minutes that it takes to drink an espresso too. In just a week, most of my best business plans came in that moment each morning. Whatever our plans. Whatever we aspire to achieve, whatever we want to do with our lives, we need thinking time in order to do it.
And Tomar was indeed partly a business trip. But with two kids with us, everything is generally a little unconventional. We had to merge a holiday with the stuff that we went there to do. The kids loved it. In fact, they enjoyed the bits where Lou and I had appointments and had to travel.
We enjoy a holiday in the sun by the beach with a water park outside of our hotel, but they seem to also appreciate talking to people in another language, taking notice of the architecture, trying different food and finding out about the history of towns and cities that they visit. Many locals didn’t speak English and Tomar is steeped in history, so we all enjoyed learning along the way.
Of course, I had to try the different food and drinks on offer during my stay. It’s a good job it is ‘bulking season’! However, the pastal de natas that I ate each morning aren’t a great dietary need for any time of the season, they just tasted good! So did the wine!
Getting back to a steady diet and a training routine will take a few days. Whenever we have a period of time off it can have that sort of impact on our energy and motivation. I know that I’ll have a couple of ‘sluggish’ gym sessions which can deter people from carrying on. It’s easy to think that all of the hard work and good progress is lost after a period of time eating lots of food and having time away from training, but it really isn’t. The body needs down time too. And there’s no better place than in a cafe in Tomar.
Queuing for the equipment, sweaty people, pushy PT’s selling their programmes on the back of a beer mat. The gym might not be your cuppa tea.
Loud music or music too low, ogling men, Insta fitters, pricey membership, too far to travel or you just can’t be bothered with going today.
Let me present to you the home workout!
Ok, first of all, let me just say that not all gyms are like the above. Most gyms that I go to these days are friendly, clean and affordable. But still, it doesn’t matter how good the gym is, sometimes you just can’t make it in.
But it doesn’t mean that you can’t train. So I’d like to suggest to you a couple of the most valuable pieces of equipment that you will need in your home to be able to get a good workout in without being in a gym (and it doesn’t cost a lot or take up too much room).
1. A selection of dumbbells. If you find a weight range that covers light dumbbells that you can rep for 15 plus and heavier dumbbells that you can rep for 6 then you will have a whole range of exercises that you can do. But the best bit of kit…..?
2. You. Just you. And I don’t mean you have to ‘turn up to get results blah blah.’ Of course you need to get it done. But your bodyweight is by far the most underrated piece of equipment that is available to you. A good bodyweight workout programme would prove this.
If you weigh 70k then you carry this weight when you walk, squat, lunge, press, jump and run. It is why larger people either carrying excess fat or muscle are able to lose weight faster. The more you weigh, the more energy it takes for your body to move, function and exercise.
Sure, long distance trainers and strength competitors need a whole host of equipment and venues for what they need to achieve, but if you are looking to feel a bit fitter and start the new year with a healthy outlook, you already own your best piece of kit.
Ah social media. As much as I love it, I hate it too. For all the good advice that we can find out there, there’s the bloody awful stuff that can be misleading and potentially dangerous.
Let’s take the latest weight loss pill that entered my feed recently. Take one a day and watch the fat roll off, apparently. Oh, and you don’t need to exercise. The ads have always got before and after pics as evidence of course.
The problem with before and after pics on advertisements are…
A. Did this person genuinely lose weight through taking this pill or were they actually just on a calorie deficit?
B. How long did this transformation take? Because I’ve seen timelines that are either impossible or would need a dangerously low calorie deficit to get there.
C. Anybody can get a generic before and after pic from the internet. Does this person even know that they’re being used in this ad?!
As far as a magic pill goes, the ingredients are probably harmless. It might be mostly caffeine and therefore make you feel like you’ve had a shot of espresso. But the real dangers are the idea that you don’t need to exercise if you are taking them.
Pills, drinks, vibrating attachments to bellies and bums and fad diets are all contributing to the ever increasing obesity levels in the western world. The reason for this is the idea that’s given that it is some sort of short cut. A fast track trick for a firmer tummy.
I’ve been in the industry for too long to know that none of the above work. And whatever you choose to put into your body or attach to your wobbly bits it isn’t going to work unless you move more.
Moving. That is exercise. Staying active and eating a balanced diet works. That is the key.
And if you have been given the advice from a PT that you need to run marathons, pump iron everyday or sign up for the next Tough Mudder, that’s bull too. You just need to walk or run a bit more, join a few fun fitness classes with friends, lift a few weights and keep moving.
Although weight loss, fitness and muscle hypertrophy can be a science, the basic principle is simple…
With my work done for the day (it’s never done, but) I sat down to eat my lunch and decide on what I should do with my afternoon. And with our house about to be put up for sale, I decided that doing something that would give the house a fresher feel would be a good start. Certainly a better start than watching Steph’s Packed Lunch all afternoon!
Hmm. But where to begin? I had a timing issue here. I had to begin something that I could finish before I picked the kids up from school, so painting their rooms, a job that will need doing, wasn’t going to happen today.
So as I placed my empty dish in the kitchen sink and looked out of the window, my answer was right there in the garden.
I’m no green fingered gardener. My wife is responsible for the pretty things that grow out there. But I’m pretty good at ripping things up and tearing things down. And at the side of the garage was a huge big tree like climber that I had been meaning to wrestle for some time. In fact I trimmed it down a year ago after the neighbours complained that it had started to grow inside their part of the garage.
I must admit, any day that I miss training at the gym I feel guilty. I can reason with myself, however, when I consider my NEAT activities. I have explained NEAT previously in my articles, but a brief summary of this is the Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Any movement that you do outside of your usual training schedule is classed as NEAT. This can be from breathing, walking and, well, ripping down trees.
I’m confident that I remain quite active even away from the gym. Barring a couple of hours on an evening watching a football game or a movie then I am rarely sedentary. Therefore, my NEAT is alright.
And it’s amazing how tough a day in the garden can be! When my wife and I begin to plant seeds for vegetables or create new wildlife areas during spring time I have muscle soreness that most gym exercises don’t produce. This makes it just as good a calorie burner as a steady paced treadmill run for an hour.
So the bottom line here is don’t despair if you haven’t made the gym today. There’s lots of stuff you can do to keep you going.
I find myself talking about it more and more with my wife. Within my circle of friends the subject keeps cropping up. And for my clients it is often a topic of discussion.
Age. Or the ageing process.
Lately I’ve found that a couple of stubby beers at 4% and a couple of glasses of wine on an evening is fairly excessive to me lately. My younger self would be calling me a lightweight. I’m happy to be a lightweight.
One too many these days can leave me feeling rubbish and it can ruin the next day. Long gone are the days of me partying on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights as a twenty something. It didn’t bother me then.
But as I got older my body gave me a little tap on the shoulder and told me to slow down. If I didn’t, it would let me know by feeling ill for the next 24 hours and, whether through having young children, running a business or simply just having a zest for life, I didn’t want to waste a day being so hungover that I was missing an important day. And that’s another thing you realize when you get to a certain age. Life’s too short. Sure, at 20, a day or two having duvet days due to excessive partying doesn’t seem to matter. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.
Age can’t be ignored though. The ‘whole life ahead of us’ thing at 20 seems like a much shorter route when you reach middle age. We do feel and think differently with age. Attitudes change. Aches and pains appear much more. We can’t escape the process. But the key here is this…we don’t need to accept it.
Dying. That’s what we all need to accept. But we all hope that it will be when we’re very old and we’ve lived a long and happy life before we get there. Being shackled by getting older, being defined by age, this is something that doesn’t have to be accepted.
I rarely teach fitness classes now, but when I did I promised my participants that I would give them what they came for. They deserved a top quality delivery that helped them towards their goals. A class on an early Tuesday morning would attract older people as opposed to a class on the evenings where it would bring in a younger demographic. However, I rarely changed the exercises or the intensity in the morning to how I would approach an evening class. I found that there were many people in their 70’s who were very capable of keeping up with a lively barbell class just as the younger group could.
If I slowed the music down, created easier exercises and spoke to the older people like they were some ‘old dear’ in a retirement home, then they would, over time, become the old dear in a retirement home.
If you tell someone something over a period of time there’s a good chance they start to believe it. Also, similarly with the body. Under perform it and the body gives in to what it has been taught to do. Underperform.
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Jon Kabat-Zinn.
When your body begins to tell you something about ageing that you should know, you need to listen. The waves get higher as we get older. Instead of regressing to the toddler’s paddling pool in defeat, I’m going to try and ride out those waves. For sure, sometimes I’ll fall into the sea. But if I keep the challenge interesting, fun and with set goals then I am giving myself a chance to thrive as I age.
There’s no doubt that there will be tweaks to be made as we age. Wear and tear is real! But the earlier we can strengthen muscle, bones and joints, the easier it is to deal with general ageing wear and tear. If we fail to address these issues early enough then the body, through the ageing process, will pick up on them. I’d recommend listening to your body before it happens.
The only certainty in life is death and in the western world we are living longer than ever. This is great. However, it means that in many circumstances, our chances of living the final 20 years of our lives with any meaningful quality and dignity are decreasing.
When we reflect on our previous week, month and year, we will often find patterns to our behaviour. Some behaviours add to positive outcomes but some can be negative and impact us greatly. Indeed, the positive things might get unnoticed, while the negative stuff gets pushed to the front of our mind.
Currently residing in Scarborough, I’m holding personal training, meditation and CBT for anxiety sessions as well as remote coaching to create happier, healthier futures to children and adults.
Reflection is good. It will not only assist us in our own lives but it can be a welcome trait for those around us. I might snap at my wife or the kids, for example, but if I am capable of reflection then I can put things right, apologize and do better next time.
So how can reflection help with lifestyle changes in relation to your health and fitness goals? Well, it might surprise you that you do this all the time. You have the cognitive capacity to think, process and act on everything you do in your daily life. But how much of it sticks is usually where the problem lies. Sometimes we end up thinking about a hundred things at once. Our moments of reflection just whiz on by without us really being able to act on them. In the end, nothing gets done.
Unless, of course, reflection becomes a conscious act. As each day goes by, this act will become a subconscious habit. This habit can lead to better decision making.
Bestselling author John Maxwell perhaps says it best when he said, “You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.”
Each day you are capable of finding the new norm. A lifestyle that you find fulfilling. It’s the little things that you can reflect on each day. Day by day, little by little, changes happen.
There’s a magic number of days that psychologists and lifestyle coaches often cite as the amount of time it takes to create a positive habit (or get rid of negative ones) and that is 28 days. After this time, research shows, we have trained ourselves to be consistent in our new behaviour.
And, as a Personal Trainer, I find the 28 day rule quite accurate in our approach to our health and fitness. You see, we think that we just need motivation to reach our goals. And whilst a burst of motivation can be helpful, we cannot rely on it. Motivation is a fleeting emotion. It doesn’t last 28 days. Therefore a little bit of strategy is needed.
To find your new norm, firstly you need to stop creating problems. They exist only in your head. If you find yourself doing this, call yourself out in it. Write the problem down if you need to with a set of solutions next to it. Do this daily.
Start a thought or mood diary. Never dismiss writing down your thoughts. This helps with reflection and it keeps you on track on the days that those bursts of motivation escapes you.
Plan ahead but don’t plan your year or your whole life. Just your week or the next day or two. Whatever feels comfortable. Again, write these plans down. It could be when you schedule your exercise times or plan a menu. Keep it where you can see it. As an online PT I keep all daily tasks on my app so that my trainees are alerted each day.
You have a new opportunity each day to change something that you don’t like and to add something positive and meaningful to your life. Act on these few ideas above and start today in finding a new norm.
Believe it or not, I’ve trained my brain to like this green stuff.
Never Give Up PT 