Tag Archives: mental health

Fear

One of the biggest obstacles you will have to overcome in your quest for happiness is fear. You fear the past, you fear the future and no matter what state of mind you are currently in, you fear it. If you are happy you fear being too happy because you don’t want to be hurt or let down again. If you are unhappy you fear it because you’ve been here before and you’ve read the script. It cripples you.

Maybe you have to change the script. As the author, you can make edits.

“You are a ghost driving a meat covered skeleton made of stardust on a rock in the middle of space. Fear nothing.” Eric Mina.

It is your ego that makes you fearful. You don’t want to fail. You don’t want to be seen doing something wrong. You don’t want to die.

Yet you WILL do all of these things anyway. And when your ego holds you back, tell it to f@#k off. And if it’s another person holding you back, get them out of your life.

Then you will be fearless.

Everything that you want is on the other side of fear.

If you want success then go and get it. What would make you feel like a success? Take a moment to visualize what a successful you looks like.

If you want good health then go and get it. What would make you feel healthier than you do right now? Close your eyes and imagine what a healthier you would do.

Don’t let fear hold you back.

Don’t fear your next struggle. Some of the biggest struggles that we go through, we learn our biggest lessons. Think about your own personal life. Think about a particular struggle. Now think about how you turned it around. How did you do this? What did you learn? Who was there to help you? These are the questions you need to ask yourself often, because it is the answers to these questions that become your armour. You have faced fear before. You’ve suffered misfortune and you have had moments of despair. Yet here you are. Surviving.

So don’t fear what you have already conquered. The chances are you are stronger than you think you are.

I am a Fitness Coach, Personal Trainer, Meditation Teacher studying Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I’m good at what I do because I deal with fear every day just like everybody else. Today I won. Tomorrow I’ll try to win again.

A Relentless Pursuit

An influential coach in Leeds I used to work with recently spoke about his latest challenge at a recent event he participated in and highlighted “the relentless pursuit of better.”

Despite performing well, he was left slightly disappointed that he didn’t meet his intended target for the event.

Seb Cook demands it of himself and this enthusiasm is passed on to those he coaches.

But the term “the relentless pursuit of better” hit me. This will mean something different to every individual, this is what good coaches do, we find out what our trainees need and want. And much like Seb, every good coach will have their own version of “better” that they pursue.

I still have the drive and hunger to hit PB’s in the gym, but for a few years now my version of a better me is being a good dad, husband and friend. It’s about remaining in control and not getting so angry or upset if things don’t go my way. It’s about balancing my life and remaining grounded.

But I don’t believe that any of these would be possible to achieve without the commitment, dedication and discipline that going to the gym almost every day has given me.

For others it might be a long walk each day and meeting their step count. Or it could be sticking to a yoga class a few times a week. It could be running, climbing, swimming. Whatever each individual finds that gets them excited about doing it is a way of unlocking their potential. It begins their pursuit of better.

And, of course, you don’t even need to move to do it. In recent years I’ve found meditation to be a great source of self awareness and reflection. It makes me a better person.

Seb wasn’t looking for perfection in his event. He just keeps striving for better each time. This will be a success, yet, just one event will never define it as much.

Perhaps entrepreneur Howard Getson says it perfectly when he spoke about success when he said, “Success is not about an event or an outcome. It comes from the relentless pursuit of something better.”

So whatever you do tomorrow, make it a little bit better than today. And my number one piece of advice for making that happen is to prepare. Every day from now, prepare something for tomorrow and carry it out. Start your relentless pursuit.

I’ve Got Piles

I’ve got piles, they’re multiplying and I’m losing control.

Piles of drawings done by the kids, bills, receipts, instruction leaflets, takeaway menus and just about anything that can recreate some odd paper game of Jenga seem to appear around the house every now and again. As I went round the house doing a tidy up this morning I noticed these piles laughing at me.

“Whatcha gonna do about it?!” They mocked. I had no answer. Each item in the pile needs some sort of attention and probably when I get a moment to actually sit down to sort through them, I will find that most of it is fit for the bin or recycling. But the six week school holidays have just hit. Sorting through this needs time and organisation. It needs me to actually set aside some time and put these things in their proper place, if at all they have or deserve one.

We have a bill drawer. Drawings from the boys either get put in their personal keep sake files or culled after a while. Takeaway menus usually get thrown away, not because I don’t order from them, but I already have my favourite. Nobody does chilli sauce like Kammy. Best Kebab on Low Street can do one. Receipts? How long do I need to keep a receipt from Aldi for a pack of 3 mixed peppers and a green top milk?!! Why is it in my life?!!!

Of course, these piles are often a reflection of where my head is at. A jumble. And when I start to delve further through the clutter it poses more questions than answers and I haven’t got a moment to deal with it properly just yet. I try. But within a couple of minutes I hear a squabble start about whether Mr Bean or Paddington should go on the TV. So the pile gets left a little longer. But, sometimes, it only takes that next bit of paper to make the whole thing topple over. It needs to be dealt with before it does.

But I’ll tackle this in my usual way. I’ll sort each bit out methodically. First of all will be my kids drawings. That isn’t a chore at all. In fact it’ll make me smile. Half of them will get put on the fridge door. So I’d better shape up, cos I need a plan. And their art is put on view….

School’s Out!

The 6 week school holidays is a time that Lou and I have come to enjoy rather than endure. Eventually, now the boys are 8 and 6, we seem to have found a balance to our family time and business commitments. But it won’t be without a bit of stress from time to time. After all, Lou and I still need to work and find those special moments with the boys. I enjoy my work. The gym is my happy place whether I’m training myself or someone else. But creating family memories is extremely important to me.

It’s time to spin those plates and this is how I intend on not smashing any of them…

* I still need to train. That is a non-negotiable that I have talked about in a previous blog. There’s an aspect of attempting to look my 43 year old best. I make no apologies in saying that I enjoy the aesthetic rewards of training. But more importantly it keeps me sane. Training is MY time. Lou knows that this is the case and I’m grateful that she understands. Of course, she will book Yoga classes or find her time too.

* My very first blog was called ‘Shouty Dad Has Gone’. Perhaps other parents know what I mean when I say that, sometimes, our little darlings can only push us so far. We lose it. We see red. Well, I still do at times. I love my boys, but wow, they can have me rocking in a corner some days. Anyway, I no longer feel the need to act like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Kop. I remain calm. Count to 10. Meditate. Cry. Whatever, I remain calm.

* I make sure that I have a support network. Ok, Lou and I haven’t got hundreds of friends inviting us for evenings out or for tea and cake afternoons all too often. But we have each other and we have a few friends who are mostly made up of parents who need to offload occasionally too. A rant to someone other than your immediate family is good for the soul!

* We have made plans. When we do have days off together we don’t want it to get to midday before we actually decide on what we’re going to do. So as well as a week away in a holiday cottage we have planned a few day trips to keep the boys away from the X-box.

* I’ll stay in control of my diet. Just because the kids want turkey dinosaurs and ice cream doesn’t mean I have to. A dramatic change to my eating habits will change my mood. I’ll feel lethargic and less motivated. My above points will also change for the worse if I let this happen. If I allow my nutrition to suffer, other aspects of my life will too.

These are just a few pointers to myself that I aim to stick with to ensure a successful and fun school summer holiday. Maybe you might find some things that are useful to you or you might want to think of your own ideas.

Thanks for reading. Speak soon!

Why I Had To Become A Meditation Tutor

Maybe I was meditating as a kid when I didn’t even realise what it was. Did you ever get a telling off from your teacher for gazing out of the class window instead of paying attention to the lesson? Perhaps, in some way, me drifting away from the noise and busyness of the class room during mathematics to focus on cloud formations was my first experience with meditation.

To meditate, you don’t need to sit a certain way or to think about anything in particular. You don’t need to be spiritual and you don’t need to repeat ‘ommm’ if you don’t want to. Adults tell children to stop day dreaming, but maybe that is just their brains trying to get a time out. I think we all need to day dream a little bit.

My practical exam was to guide my wife’s meditation

My first official experience with meditation was about 7 years ago. My wife had postnatal depression after giving birth to our second child and her doctor prescribed medication. But this wasn’t a route that she wanted to take. There must be an alternative to tablets.

We got in touch with a local meditation tutor who did guides on a 1-1 basis. My wife started to attend the meditation guides for one hour a week. She also began practicing on her own and this is when I would join her. This later led me to attending guided meditation too. I was hooked.

The misconception of meditation is that it is an opportunity to clear your head. Yet it is quite the opposite. You fill it will good stuff. Positive thoughts, visualization of a particular journey or of your dreams, ambitions and goals. It is true it is a chance to declutter your head, but it will be replaced with something much more worthy of your thoughts.

As I gazed out of the class room window looking at the clouds as a kid, I was creating shapes with these clouds of me scoring a goal or getting a hug from my mum. Wouldn’t anybody, at any age, want to have a moment of a much more innocent time? That didn’t seem like a waste of time to me then and it doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me now.

We all have goals that we want to achieve in life, but to get through the difficult moments or the sticky patches how are we to actually get them? Do we ever stop to think about a pathway to achieving them? As I say, that’s not to say that you have to sit and chant or be a Buddhist to do it. Having 10 minutes to focus on your breathing and taking charge of your energy each day should be a minimum requirement in achieving your goals.

If I am to assist my Personal Training clients in getting their goals then a part of that process must be for me to enable them to accept themselves as who they currently are. There are lots of ways to do this but by far the easiest way to self discovery is through meditation. That is why I felt so strongly about becoming a meditation tutor. How can we tell the body what to do if our minds are constantly on high alert?

So maybe you should be gazing into space sometimes and having a little daydream. Put the breaks on. Take a few deep breaths. Ground yourself. That maths equation will still be there when you have finished but it might be a bit easier to solve.

Dirty Fries

Scarborough is a small town. It’s the sort of place that if you go into the town centre you will probably know somebody to say hello to. Train in a gym with almost 3,000 members and the chances are that I will definitely see somebody I know.

Had they seen me in a bar this lunch time they would have found me with a large gin and tonic and some ‘dirty fries’. When I ordered them I imagined some chips with a sprinkling of grated cheese. What I actually got was a bag of potatoes, a pack of bacon and a block of cheese squeezed into a good sized pasta bowl. This wasn’t the amuse bouche that I had visioned in my mind, but it was one my belly was happy to try.

I wished a client of mine would’ve walked in as I slurped the stringy melted cheese into my mouth. If only to keep proving my point. I keep reiterating my point regarding food and weight management…eat it. All of it. If it fits your daily calories, eat it and enjoy it. But there’s a slight caveat. Just one little rule.

If you aren’t going to cut out the low nutrition foods, then you must keep the nutritionally dense foods high. Whether you are very active with fitness goals or more sedentary, keep the nutritionally dense foods high.

You see, I don’t believe in banning food types. If you want to stop off at a bar and order a truck full of McCain’s Chips then do it, as long as your  weekly macros are met. Yes, weekly. Some days your carbs might be up, but if you keep the nutritionally dense and high protein foods a priority over the course of the week then your calories and macros will average out. Judging your Journey on just one day will serve you no purpose.

I knew that I could eat some greasy cheesy chips today. I count my calories.

Now, if you read the newspapers you might gasp in horror at the knowledge that I count calories and I also endorse it for others. The one exception being anybody suffering from an eating disorder. In which case they don’t need me, they need professional medical support.

But the media seem to be very negative towards counting calories. Which is interested, because they print lots of other methods such as 5:2, Intermittent fasting and promote large dieting companies who count ‘syns’.

My conclusion is that counting calories isn’t sexy. It isn’t a buzz word or trending on Twitter. And if it isn’t a large company paying a newspaper to advertise their diet or a book publisher paying them to flog Michael Mosley’s new fad diet, then it gets demonized as wrong.

If I go into a shop and see something that I want to buy I will check my bank balance before I purchase it. That’s just simple accounting.

If I go to the carpet fitters I will take the measurements of the room that I wish to have carpeted with me. That is just common sense.

If I take my son to buy a pair of shoes I will ask the assistant to measure his feet first. Efficient.

And if I want some dirty fries washed down with a gin and tonic I will make sure that my meals around this tasty treat are low in calories and high in nutrition. No anxiety or concerns.

I get what I want now and again and I also get to keep my body on track with my fitness goals. And a part of my fitness goals is my mental health, therefore stressing at banning all of the foods that I enjoy is not something that I consider healthy. I have a good relationship with food. I don’t want to feel anxious about being in a social environment and seeing half of the food on the menu to be cancelled for me.

I don’t develope programmes or challenges for my clients if I wouldn’t do it myself. So occasionally doing my own Balanced Plate Challenge works for me. My clients succeed, why shouldn’t I enjoy my own methods too?!

And so it’s time to make my smoothie. With plenty of spinach and fruit in there my body will still know that I love it. And it might even get another bowl of dirty fries again next week!

Fitness Auditing And Why We Need It

You have this cool programme that you developed/got off YouTube/received from a trainer about 6 months ago and it was fantastic.

It excited you, gave you a new purpose in the gym and got you some kick ass results. For the first time in a long time, you had a new belief in reaching your goals.

It was amazing. WAS.

But now, 6 months on, it all feels like a slog. The thought of going to the gym isn’t exciting you any more like it did. The results are slow if any at all and you’ve started to feel the injury niggles from repeating the same old exercises. Day in… Day out.

>sigh< “here we go again” you say as you enter the gym doors.

You start to blame yourself. Are you tired? Is your mind just not in the game anymore? Is it just an age thing? Are you eating right?

The odd day off creeps in where you would usually have gotten to the gym. A few mates are having a pint after work. It’s tempting. The gym bag gets thrown back into the boot of the car. Or the early morning start where you once jumped out of bed to get a workout in before work has gone. Now the snooze button seems like a better option.

If any of this sounds familiar then the chances are is that your programme has run its course. I’d estimate that it’s probably a good four months out of date.

Not only does a progressive programme last over months and in some cases years, but keeping a check on the finer details like rest periods, weights, reps and sets becomes essential to a trainees goals.

If you have a workout plan that you repeat every week without a direction beyond that plan then it will become stagnant. You become demoralised and you give up. Or you become demoralised and injury gives you little option but to give up.

Internet workouts perplex me. They appeal to people because they are free. I’ve been there. The free option was like finding a cheat sheet. A short cut that didn’t cost a penny. And the guy posting it was jacked. ‘That’ll be me soon,” I thought.

Programming isn’t a one size fits all. And if you are lucky enough to find something that works to begin with, then eventually, without auditing, you will be forever treading water. It will become a tired workout. You’ll become tired.

Assessing your progress every 6-8 weeks should be as much a part of your training as perfecting your squat or your bench. Knowing how and when to tweak your workouts is a skill. I only acquired this skill when I was studying for my PT qualifications. Since then I’ve written thousands of programmes.

If only I’d have known how to audit my fitness 20 years ago when I was at my physical prime. In truth, I didn’t have a clue back then.

I don’t blame myself or anyone else for not auditing and following a progressive programme. There’s so much confusing information out there and, as I say, it’s a skill. A skill that I learnt and became qualified in.

Why wouldn’t you try out free workouts online? After all, I wouldn’t trust most PT’s in mainstream gyms anyway. I honestly can’t tell if they’re giving the gym member an induction or a training session, such is the lack of passion in their approach.

But very good PT’s do exist. Ones who are fully self employed are generally 100% committed and knowledgeable to their clients. They have to be. If they fail then nobody will pay them. If they don’t get paid they don’t have a job. I literally go to sleep at night thinking about programmes or tomorrow’s sessions. I have to. I’m the one who will help my clients audit their workouts. I need to know every tweak for over 20 programmes at any one time.

The Bottom Line

Any new workout usually works for a time. They often work muscle groups that haven’t been worked before and muscle soreness feels intense but satisfying. But the body adapts and with it so must your programme. How you adapt it is what will keep getting you the results.

Goal Setting

https://mindist.page.link/EDHu

Above is a link to my recently recorded meditation guide I entitled Goal Setting.

We get so fixated on the goal sometimes instead of the little challenges that we overcome to have to reach the big stuff. Those little steps, the 1%, amounts to great things if you perceiver and confidently follow the process.

Every day there should be a time to reflect on your goals and expect that some days won’t always be the best. But as long as you acknowledge them and move on then you will still get to where you want to be.

Thank you for reading and listening!

Shay PT

Resistance Machines

My usual gym routine is from Monday to Friday. The weekends are generally for family time and relaxing away from formal exercise. It works for me. There’s no set rule that works regarding a training plan. Perhaps my ideal plan would be having two rest days that aren’t together but personal circumstances have to be accounted for.

What training a full five days in a row allows me to do is have a definitive day in which I can begin a wind down in the intensity of my workouts. I can’t hammer my body every single day with heavy compounds. Indeed, I believe in my 420 reps workout that I have developed for others so much so that I am doing it myself. This means that once Thursday’s session is over I have completed over 1500 reps. By Friday, my body is telling me that I need a little assistance from machines!

And this is exactly what the resistance machines are perfect for. They provide much more relief for the body and it isn’t just the physical aspect that needs the respite. Neuromuscular Innovation, or more commonly known as the mind-muscle connection, takes its toll on the brain. The thought process of connecting with your target muscle in a bench press scenario is much greater than on a press machine.

Foot positioning, core engagement, time under tension, breathing and the contraction are all crucial components of a bench press. Sure, there’s still the necessary check list to go through on a machine but in no way is it as thorough. Therefore, instead of risking injury with sloppy end of the week technique, I still get to workout without breaking myself.

It does concern me, however, how overused these machines get. I get the impression that lots of gym goers use them because they haven’t been shown how to squat, deadlift, bench press or barbell row. Their inductions usually include a brisk talk through these machines, so why would they use anything else?!

When I did gym inductions I went through deadlift form as a priority. It is a free weight compounds that requires the whole body to move and work together as one. I can analyse the hip extensors and knee flexors of the participant and get an understanding of overall strength and fitness levels. Without it, I would struggle to know what machine or what type of exercises a new gym member should be doing. So I am perplexed as to how the gym staff know. Introducing them to an ab crunch machine is way way off of where most new gym members need to be.

And don’t get me started on an ab crunch machine. An over reliance on a resistance machine can cause injury, but an ab machine can be particularly dangerous. The deep abdominal muscles, together with the back muscles support and protects the spine. I cringe as I see yet another gym member rocking wildly like a wound up toy trying to work their abs. Back pain is the biggest reason for staff sickness in the UK and until we begin to train our lower backs correctly this statistic won’t change.

The Final Word

Resistance machines are a great way to supplement your workouts. A heavy session on the bench or in the dumbbell section takes a lot out of us physically and on the nervous system. Rounding off a session on the machines or cables can be a perfect finish. But we can’t rely on them to reach our goals, be it injury rehabilitation, weight control, muscle gain or movement. If you are completely new to the gym then I would recommend starting in the free weights area with a trainer who knows what they’re doing.

That you for reading this article. If you have any questions on this or any of my practices then do get in touch!

Shay PT.

Calm Mind

https://mindist.page.link/bxUb

Here is a link to my Calm Mind meditation that I recently recorded. A bit wierd meditating to my own voice! But I’ve done it a couple of times and find it quite relaxing.

Keep smiling!

Shay.