mental health – Page 20 – Never Give Up PT

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.

Today I Am A Monster

Today I am a demonic monster. That is the image that I put into my blog and on social media. Therefore it must be true.

Yet it isn’t, is it? Because behind the keyboard and with a click of a button I can tell you what I am and it is believed. Social media allows us all to be whatever we want to be. But social media isn’t real life.

If I wanted to super reduce my calories for a few weeks, suck my belly in, take a posed picture of myself and filter it I would look ripped. An instant six pack.

But I don’t want to dupe my followers or trainees. I don’t want to give people the wrong idea of what having a healthy body looks like.

I get dozens of images of posed pictures of trainers on my feed asking me to ‘sign up’ or ‘try this’ because of the algorithms on social media. It assumes that it is giving me the content most relevant to me. I’ve been in the industry too long and I’ve witnessed every trick in the book.

There might be 99% of people that their post will reach that smells the bullshit, but the 1% who buy the magic diet pill will make them a lot of money.

On social media I see people chuffed to bits sharing their bouquet of flowers on valentine’s, but are miserable as sin with their partners for the rest of the year.

I see family photos of a family and their angelic kids. A lovely moment captured yes, but we never see the kids kicking and screaming at each other and their parents losing their minds five minutes after their lovely photo. And it happens. I’ve just described my family and I know we’re not the only ones.

But it leaves the observer confused, frustrated and depressed.

Why can’t I look like them?

Why don’t I get flowers like that?

Why won’t my children behave as well as those kids?

But all we have seen is a snippet, a moment deemed suitable to share to the world. Add a bit of filter and we can all look like the idyllic movie star or The Waltons.

Social media is not real.

I am not a stage ready bodybuilder but I can be. I haven’t got hair but I can have. I am not the perfect father but I can show you my perfect father moments. I’m not the perfect husband but I can show you the flowers I bought my wife.

I am not a monster and nor am I perfect, but if I wanted you to believe that I was either one, then I am a filtered picture away from you believing that I was.