Tag Archives: health

Choosing The Right Personal Trainer

I know lots of people who have spent (in some cases) thousands of pounds before they’ve found the right PT for them. Unfortunately, some people give up after a bad experience and this is a shame because I have seen what I and many other very good trainers can do for someone with a fitness goal.

To an extent you have to find the right personality that you are happy to employ as your PT. Basically, you need to at least like them and get on with them for you to respect what they say and ask of you.

But every good PT will have the same traits. They will listen to you, be attentive, be committed to your needs and they will give you their full attention whenever you need them (not just when they’re on the clock).

And whether it is face to face training or online coaching these traits should come across in your initial discussions with a PT.

Now that I’m moving my business to Portugal and developing it alongside a camping and wellbeing centre I will be ending my online coaching part of it. The reasons for this, and I’m only being honest, is that I don’t think that I can fulfill this criteria anymore. I have one shot for me and my family to get this move right. Currently I don’t think I can be as attentive as the client needs me to be. And seeing as I will be doing a lot of the ground work myself (both metaphorically and literally) once we get to Portugal, I’ll be busy enough.

There is an online coach that I will be recommending though if anyone asks and that is Biological Engineering. Dan Middlewood is the Trainer who deals with every inquiry and treats every one of his clients with the attention they deserve. He boasts of some impressive transformations on his social media too! All backed up with real life people.

https://instagram.com/biological_engineering?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Dan and I started PTing in a gym together ten years ago and it was our first gig. I watched him develop into a PT that was driven by getting results for his clients, but did it in a way that was friendly and not pushy. It was only a matter of time that he would branch out into online coaching too, such was his high demand.

Just like in every day situations, we soon get an idea of a person’s character once we have a chat with them. Finding the right PT is very similar. You need to know that they have your best interests. They work for you. It’s not about their ego, it’s about your fitness results. So whether you’ve been thinking about contacting a PT or you’ve had a bad experience but are thinking about giving it another go, you’ll be in safe hands with Dan’s Biological Engineering.

Pads And Punch Bags

I like to look out for anything that could be useful for my business at the car boot sale. Kettlebells, dumbbells and anything gym related can be often found at these places especially since COVID lockdown. Many of us decided to buy bits of equipment when the gyms closed in order to remain fit and healthy. These items have now found their way to charity shops, online auctions and car boot sales.

Never did I dream of finding a punch bag in such good condition for £15! It looks like it is an ex bag from a boxing gym.

Padwork has always been incorporated in my fitness sessions. I’m qualified in ‘boxing for exercise’, which is the official title on the certificate. This means that I can train people in padwork and boxercise type exercises, but I can’t train the next Tyson Fury. Below is an example of my session in the gym.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zoHN8odT9Bs?feature=share

How I aim to train people away from the gym, however, will be totally different. Especially with a punch bag to hang up. This, in theory, and with the correct insurance (!) will enable visitors to use the facilities without my presence. After all, the price difference will be considerable for me doing padwork with them or them using a bag on their own. So giving people the option will be good.

And talking of cost, as long as you have a willing partner, padwork is a very inexpensive way to have fun whilst exercising! Hanging a bag up in your garage is also an option, of course!

So here’s the bottom line. You don’t always need a gym, a PT, lots of cash or time to exercise. Having a good eye for a bargain in a charity shop or car boot sale could give you just what you need.

A Beautiful Failure

Let me be clear right now about your latest derailing of your goals; it will not define you.

The extra food that you ate, the missed fitness class, the duvet day or the excessive alcohol that you drank will not define your success or your failure.

You have simply experienced a moment in time that didn’t fit in with your goals. Fuck it. Move on.

I like to give the occasional quote by some literary genius or scientist to emphasize my point in my blogs, but this time I present to you a football manager… Liverpool’s Jürgen klopp. This week, in the same week that I lost the sale of my house, thus waving goodbye to a very nice house in Bem De Fe, practically having a none existent exercise routine creating an appetite for poor nutritional food and Liverpool facing knockout in the Champions League against Real Madrid, Klopp gave me a golden piece of wisdom.

“Just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.”

Fail in the most beautiful way. I love that sentence. We fail all the time. And when we do, we have two options. We can either crumble and give in, or we can learn something from it and go again.

How do we fail? In our daily lives we get situations that let us down, we divert from our personal goals, we forget something important, we are disappointed in our behaviour or don’t give a good account of ourselves. These are all things that we have to deal with. Managing this and responding to it is where the real success happens.

Failure does not define you, but your reaction to it will.

So when you fail, do it in the most beautiful way.

Children And Food

My two boys love going to their grandparents for an overnight stay. Their granddad, a professional refurbisher of bar billiards tables, often has a finished table in his garage so the boys can take their pool cues that they got for Christmas.

They also get to stay up later on an evening than they would do if they were at home. Staying up later is always a treat! But the biggest treat of all for my 6 and 9 year olds are the meal times at Granny and Granddad’s.

An overnight stay will usually consist of a takeaway or a meal out for burgers or pizzas and a dessert afterwards with a fizzy drink to wash it down with. Basically, lots of foods with very little nutrition.

But I can’t pin this all on their Grandparents, absolutely not! The boys also have occasional takeaway meals or frozen pizzas and chips at home too. The boys have been invited to friends houses for tea, they’ve gone to Macdonald’s for birthday parties, they receive toys for buying ‘Happy Meals,’ supermarket meal deals involve crisps and chocolate, going to the movies encourage us to eat buckets of popcorn lager than my youngest child and reformed chicken comes in the shape of dinosaurs. All of these things appeal to adults too, so we cannot ignore the fact that children will be drawn to such inviting foods.

As parents and grandparents we can’t avoid it, but that doesn’t get us adults off the hook.

I have previously written an article about children being ‘The Great Imitators’. As much as parents believe that their children often do the exact opposite as of what is asked of them, their brains are gathering all of this information that they see and hear and then used as a survival mechanism for when they need it.

How we interact with our partners and colleagues, what we watch on TV, our language, the way we dress and what we eat are all closely observed by the young mind.

As my role as a coach for children during half term, I’m fully aware of how I talk to my fellow coaches. Children listen. Children copy. I’m also very careful about what I eat at lunchtimes with the children. I wouldn’t eat a Greggs steak bake in front of them after having a talk to them about healthy eating. There’s a time and a place. Even for a Greggs steak bake.

So how do we get our children to be more mindful about what they eat? Firstly, it is important to not criticize or ridicule any meal choices that they make. Food should never make anyone feel anxious or ‘bad’. Food should be enjoyed, yes, all food. If a child enjoys chicken dippers then ask them what they enjoy about them. How does it feel and taste to them? Talk to them about what you can add to the plate alongside their dippers.

At home, the boys know that if they ask for fish fingers or chicken dippers it will come with wholemeal wraps, mayo, ketchup and a good sized portion of vegetables. It’s a compromise. For about two years and especially for our youngest who looks like a celebrity doing a bushtucker trial when he’s eating broccoli, the veg wouldn’t be touched without having tears. Now, because we continued putting the vegetables on his plate consistently and he sees his older brother and his parents eat the veg on their plates, he eats his veg without any prompts. He watched and he copied.

We can’t expect our children to choose better options with anything in life unless they see the grown ups doing it too! Sure, their teenage brain along with other teenage peers and influences will challenge their decision making. It is one of the most feared periods for a parent and one I’m yet to experience, but if we can promote the right messages into their young brains now then at least we are giving them a fighting chance as young adults.

My message is clear to the adults that I train and the children that I coach, you can still enjoy all food types and be mindful about what we need to enable our bodies to grow strong, to be healthy and happy, to excel in what they enjoy and to survive. The balance is something that is important to find and it is my job as a parent and coach to help people do that, whether for adults or children. After all, what age group doesn’t like to find the letters of their name with a plate of Alphabites?

Screen Time

Not for the first time my wife and I had to tell our boys to put down their screens and get dressed for school. It starts with a gentle reminder that they need to get ready or else we’ll be late, but it often ends with one of us putting on our annoyed voice and demanding that they do as we ask immediately.

The screens are hypnotic to them. And yet when I check to see what it is they’re doing on their phone, iPad or chrome book it is usually school work related. This becomes a dilemma for the parent who would like their child to have less screen time. It seems that kids are given their own log in details at school so that they can access story books and maths games online. I used to get a printed worksheet and a homework book from my teacher. We were allowed to put our own covering over our books. I went for an embossed floral design that was leftover from my parents sitting room. Cutting edge at the time. Times have changed.

But it is difficult to demand something from your child when they see adults doing the same. How can I tell them to come off of their devices when they see me tapping away at my phone. Ok, it is 90% productive tapping either designing a workout schedule for a client, booking somebody in for a session or, in my free time, learning a language. But they would argue that their time on the screen is equally important if a certain amount of maths puzzles need to be completed by a deadline date.

Had that maths puzzle been done using pen and paper, would I be more lenient on them finishing the job before getting dressed for school? Sure, they needed to get ready or they would be late, but would I have sat with Jonas to try and work out the answers together had I been looking at it on a piece of A4 hoping to move the process along?

Yet I know that not every moment of their screen time is doing school work. Far from it. Add in YouTube and football games and it becomes a full time job. So much so that doing things like getting dressed has to wait! And I do understand.

Despite my current 90% of my own screen time being work related, it hasn’t always been like that. Just a few months ago I would be debating Darwin Nunez’s success rate for Liverpool FC or asking why Ariel’s skin colour in the new Little Mermaid movie was a problem to a total stranger on Facebook. I would spend time winding myself up engaging in discussions with people I probably wouldn’t really want to know in real life. The productivity on my screen suffered, my time suffered and probably my mental health suffered too. Releasing myself away from trolls was a positive move.

But I fear that my kids have got it all to come. There are enough negative people in the real world without entertaining bullies online.

I had to make a change. And although I acknowledge that screens are a part of our everyday life now, and perhaps a little resigned to the fact, it can actually be used for good. I try to contribute positively to people’s lives through online PT. I put more effort into learning a new language and, of course, I write this to you today from my phone. This little gadget can be useful.

But no matter what we can gain from looking at our screens, we still have to do the fundamentals correctly. We still need to take care of ourselves, eat properly and, yes, even get dressed for school.

If we don’t, Mrs Barber won’t be very pleased (and that’s what I’ll keep telling my boys).

Yes, but…

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.

Luvly Jubbly

Those days of running for the bus through Durham City center with a suitcase full of shortbread biscuits still makes me smile.

Lou and I didn’t drive at the time and we were desperate to sell our handmade biscuits at the market a few miles outside of the village we lived in. It reminds me of Del Boy and Rodney running from the old Bill, except what we were selling were pukka!

It wasn’t for the money. Had it been for financial gain then biscuits wouldn’t have been our first thought to make and sell. After the labour and baking costs, the ingredients, the bags and labels, the mark up on a bag of biscuits were pretty crumby, but we wanted to prove that we could sell them. The locals and tourists loved them. We even had VIP treatment at museums such as Beamish as they wanted us to supply them with our little sweet biscuity treats.

The Biscuit Tree was born.

But we also knew that it couldn’t last. We had to make enough money to pay the bills. We had day jobs, sure, but the time that went into making literally hundreds of bags of biscuits each week became difficult to juggle. After a couple of years of standing in all kinds of weather, we hung up our kitchen aprons. We have never been sentimental about a business venture. We moved on.

I’m not a natural salesperson. I sell stuff that sells itself really. It’s not difficult to sell something that has lots of butter and sugar in it. Personal Training is trickier, but I am everything that most gym goers are. Insecure about their body, looking for an endorphin fix and have niggling injuries. I am my own client. Add a bit of knowledge on how to solve these issues and you have a decent PT business.

As a teenager I also sold gym memberships and, although this was doorstep cold calling, they weren’t difficult to sell with the price cuts this particular gym were offering. I also sold mobile phones when just about everyone in the world wanted a Nokia 3310. It wasn’t difficult.

But at our children’s school Christmas fair my biggest challenge was to come. We had a stall selling crystals, gems and healing pendulums and jewelry.

Science can be useful when selling something. I can give tangible evidence as to why going to a gym can be helpful or why mobile phones are useful. But science tends to stutter at healing crystals. However, using my own experience can be something that I can draw upon.

I would never, ever sell anything that I don’t believe in. I want to be able to sleep at night. So when my wife asked me to join her in the stall I had no issues in doing it, but I did need to understand WHY people invest in crystals. Therefore I had to ask myself why I use them, despite a lack of scientific evidence of their powers.

First of all I need to break it down to the basics. We don’t NEED a gym membership to be fitter. We don’t NEED a mobile phone to communicate. We don’t NEED biscuits to be happy. We don’t NEED crystals to heal or give positive vibes. But the latter is the only one that can be traced back to ancient Egypt, India, Rome and Greece and it will continue long after the rest too.

As I stood on the stall last night, a lady approached and looked very interested in the different crystals on display.

“I’m always drawn to crystals,” she said, “but I don’t know what to do with them.”

With no prior experience in selling crystals, I had to go with my gut.

“Pick one up and hold it. Tell me how it makes you feel.” I replied.

She picked up a beautiful rose quartz, known for its qualities in emotional health. She held it tightly and started to smile.

“It feels comforting.” She said.

“Then that’s what you do with a crystal.”

Sold. In fact she bought 5 in total.

During the evening, children and their parents spent a lot of time at our stall and many crystals went to good homes. It was satisfying to do. Much more so than selling phones.

The important thing here is that, even without scientific confirmation, you can still lead with your heart. And it is only recently I realized that. I don’t pray for that exact reason. I don’t know who I am praying to. That doesn’t mean that others can’t pray.

Yet I do feel a power or an aura when I meditate with crystals. It feels right to me. It is empowering.

Just like shortbread biscuits, they can make me feel a bit better.

M.O.T

I dread the day that my car goes in for its MOT. It’s the day I get to find out how much more out of pocket I’m going to be. However, the grand old Juke seems to have a bit of life left in it yet! It got the all clear.

But this isn’t an article about my car. Although, I wish that I was as prepared to get myself checked out as regularly as I do my car. The difference is, the car legally needs to be checked for road worthiness, but I can continue my life blissfully unaware without being stopped and penalised for not going to the doctors. That is until I break down. And then the penalties for my ignorance could, in fact, be my life.

The journalist, Bill Turnbull, adds to the long list of well known people who were diagnosed with a terminal illness who came out and said that they wished that they’d gone to the doctors earlier. This week he lost his fight. In a 2018 interview he said that he felt his bones ache and had pain in his hips which he put down to old age instead of going to the doctors. He left it too late, but he would speak out until his death about others going for their regular check ups so that they didn’t make the same mistake.

In the UK, the NHS Health Check is for people turning 40 and it is advised that we have one every 5 years. At 43 I’m still yet to have one. Indeed, I can’t even remember my last doctor’s appointment. I can blame Covid restrictions, sure, it has had an impact on health appointments.

But if I’m being honest, the older I get the more reluctant I am to see a doctor.

No. Let me rephrase that last sentence…

Being a dad of two beautiful little boys, I am reluctant to face the thought of being told that I might not see them grow up or that they and my wife have to go through the grief of losing me.

I know there’s no logic to it. If anything was discovered where I had to act on my health regarding treatment, the earlier the problem is found the better. But fear doesn’t always appear with common sense or rationale. It just bites and we act in whatever way we can. Usually to sweep it under the carpet.

This morning I booked my Health Check and I’m relieved now to have the appointment. I feel healthy. Sure, I don’t live a totally clean lifestyle in today’s definition of ‘clean’. But I exercise regularly and eat with an 80/20 rule where 80% of my diet is of nutritional value.

This, however, gives us no certainties. I might be giving myself a better chance to not just live longer, but to have a better quality of life. It doesn’t earn me guaranteed immunity though.

If I could, I would urge everyone who reads this and who has procrastinated in making their doctors check up appointments to do it today. I know that it isn’t as easy to get an appointment these days in some parts of the UK, but your appointment will take even longer if you don’t attempt to make one.

We would be quick to book our car’s MOT or service. But we have a vehicle that we own for life. Make sure you look after your body.