If you’re unsure about how your plans are working out today, whether it be a fitness goal, a career move or a relationship, consider this quote from Nelson Mandela.
“I never lose. I either win or learn.”
If something hasn’t gone to plan today, then see this experience as an opportunity to learn. Don’t retreat or accept your attempts as failure, simply learn and move on.
Keep holding on to your dreams.
If someone were to give me a choice in having abs or not, then I would gratefully receive them.
If they then explained what I had to do to maintain and keep the abs I would decline the offer.
One of the most difficult things for a personal trainer to coach is a client wanting abs, AKA a six pack.
So here’s the thing. We all have them, it’s just some are more covered than others. And it is fat that covers them.
It is said that a man needs to be below 12% body fat to actually see a six pack and around 18% for a female. And, although this is achievable for people in general, maintaining this is very difficult indeed.
I regularly go from 12% to 18% depending on the time of year and at my lowest body fat there is a decent amount of definition in the six pack area. However, due to my diet it is impossible for me to edge past down to the 10% mark, where the definition would be very impressive.
And yet my diet is not poor. My calories per day average around 2800 (taken from an annual calculation) and most of my meals are nutritional. But it is nowhere near the strict regime that would be necessary for more definition on my abs or anywhere else!
It was a long time ago that I ditched the idea of going to the gym to get a six pack and it’s around the same time I decided that I liked going for a pint with colleagues after work. Now, I enjoy sneaking in an extra fish finger in the air fryer while I’m making the kids tea.
Abs are made in the kitchen. Indeed, muscle definition anywhere on the body is made in the kitchen. However, that doesn’t mean that having a physically fit physique means a life of chicken, broccoli and rice, washed down with a protein shake every meal time.
An 80/20 rule might not be the clean diet that is necessary for abs of steel, but it is sensible for the majority of people. 80% of your diet is nutritional and balanced while 20% is the other stuff that might not help towards a six pack but it tastes bloody nice!
A popular gym quote goes something like this…”People need to understand the difference between wants and needs. Like I want abs, but I need tacos.”
I could replace tacos with the leftover fish finger, that bit of mayo on the spoon before it goes in the dishwasher, brie cheese with cream crackers, my wife’s homemade ice cream, crumpets with too much butter and pringles and this quote would apply to me. But I make sure that it remains within that 20% of food that I have accounted for. Therefore, even though my abs aren’t defined, I keep a physique that I am happy with. After all, a six pack isn’t the definition of fit and healthy.
So, maybe considering your eating habits a little more and trying to achieve the 80/20 could be a good way for you to progress in your fitness goals. This way, you get to enjoy your workouts and you don’t have to ban your favourite foods.
I’ve just trained at the gym and I’m waiting for my quinoa to cook. I’ll be adding a tin of mackerel and a dash of piri piri sauce to this when I plate it up. Nothing too extravagant, but it does pack a punch in the macro and vitamins department.
And yet, if I’m honest with myself, had I not trained today I would have opted for a couple of cheese bagels with mayo and mustard. Delicious yes, but it hasn’t got the same nutritional value.
I find myself doing this regularly. On training days I will always want the healthier option. And studies show that it isn’t just me. In a recent study at the University of Texas it assembled 2500 people who did not exercise regularly and ate less nutritional foods on a daily basis.
They were put on an exercise program and told to keep a journal including their eating habits. They were asked not to change their diet.
However, within a few weeks it was highlighted that over half of those who kept to their exercise program did change their eating habits. They would often choose fruit, veg, lean meats, fish, nuts to eat on training days.
But what these studies don’t identify is WHY their habits change. So, seeing as I do exactly the same as those in the study in Texas I might be able to shed some light on why.
First of all, I enjoy fried foods. I am currently loving the homemade ice cream that my wife keeps making. I prefer cheap white sliced bread. Cheese would make my top 5 of favourite foods and kebab meat would probably rank pretty high too. I drink beer and wine. I enjoy food. But there’s a physical and psychological process that happens once I train.
Physical
I work hard at the gym. During and after my workout my body feels it and it is my body that demands what fuel is put into it in order to recover. Although the want for fried, less healthy foods don’t go away, the craving for food that compliments my workout and the recovery is very high.
Psychological
I’ve just put an hour of my time into feeling fitter and better about myself. I feel a little lighter and I feel body positive. My need for less nutritional food is not so high that I am going to step out of the gym and go straight into Greggs for pasties and sausage rolls. Today is a good day. I feel good about myself. The endorphins that are released during my workout have triggered a happier, satisfied me. My cheese bagel sounds great, but it’ll be there for another day. For now, I don’t want to feel heavy through stodgy processed food. This food is comforting, but I already have those endorphins racing through my body to comfort me. In other words, I don’t want to feel like I’ve ruined a good workout by eating the wrong food.
When I keep goals very simple such as feeling better about myself, looking fit and healthy for my age and helping myself stay mobile for as long as possible throughout my life then the answer is easy. I can still eat all of the things that make my top 5 of favourite indulgence foods but I am also programmed to give my body what it needs.
Of course, if I were to develop more complex goals then my nutritional needs may become more acute, for example, training for a marathon or a sport at an elite level, a certain weight target or for medical conditions. But I’m not.
The Bottom Line
In an ideal world we would be eating the healthier ‘clean’ foods all of the time, but it isn’t an ideal world. Sometimes you need to grab and go as you work towards a deadline in your course or job. The kids swimming lessons are straight after school and you can only manage a packet of crisps as you scramble them into the car. Or you’ve been invited on a night out and you want a few gin and tonics.
But effort and preparation goes a long way if you keep goals simple. Being more active and giving your body some nutritious food can simply become something that you do. You become programmed to it because it makes you feel good after an activity.
An apple, beans or quinoa might never be in your top 5 of your favourite foods, but they don’t have to be. They just need to exist in your diet to begin with. There’s no such thing as bad food, just bad habits. And I think the key to creating better eating habits lies with us taking some time to exercise regularly.
Perhaps when we find ourselves at a particularly low ebb in life, we turn to stuff that feeds off of that anxiety. It’s like a form of self harm. Scratching away at the scab that protects the wound.
Severe self harm such as cutting ones self, so it has been said by those who have done it, forms a release as they see a trickle of blood come from a cut.
This release, in more clinical terms, is known as the hormone dopamine. The body’s natural happy drug.
I never self harmed in this way. Instead, I found the gym and, albeit not exactly what we think of when we think of self harm, if you break down the muscle fibres which causes muscle hypertrophy during resistance training then you are ‘harming’ yourself. Certainly, that’s what the body identifies, and therefore triggers the release of dopamine in the same way as the body of a self harmed would.
I’ve written before about how the gym saved my life. And it isn’t PT spiel to get people to the gym. It’s just the fact that we need to release these hormones somehow and the gym ticks all of the positive boxes in doing that.
But what about before the gym? Back in the early 90’s there weren’t gyms that catered for 14 year olds in the UK. There seems to be a number of gyms that have certain set hours throughout the week which can be used for under 16’s, such as the gym I train at in Scarborough. But I’m not sure this was the case for me, so I turned to music.
As I mentioned in my first paragraph, we tend to find the stuff that feeds off of our anxieties at particular times in our life. So when I felt low I didn’t turn to the Greatest Hits of Black Lace. I wasn’t doing the agadoo when I felt worthless. Instead, I would listen to grunge and rock music. Bands like Marilyn Manson, Nirvana , Pearl Jam and Jeff Buckley would create more angst and yet in some way soothe me. Perhaps, in music such as this, if you feel that the lyrics speak directly to you, then you can be comforted in that somebody else is feeling your pain. They understand. It’s an arm around the shoulder.
One of my first albums that I bought was the Soul Asylum LP Grave Dancers Union. The lead singer, Dave Pirner, often sang about his depression and it is probably best captured in the track ‘Runaway Train’.
He describes how his own depression felt like a runaway train. That was his metaphor for his anxieties that would spiral out of control.
And this isn’t unusual. One in six UK adults suffer from depression. Females are far more likely to seek help for their mental health than men. A charity organisation that I have had contact with through my work is Andy’s Man Club, which offers advice and meetings in their local areas. I would advise any man who feels that they need help to give them a call.
When I first became a PT I didn’t appreciate how much work goes into mental health rather than physical health. Sure, most people want to lose a few pounds or grow muscle but there is usually an underlying reason for why a gym member has approached me for PT.
By no means are all of my clients depressed! But there is a certain need for us all to be accepted. It is when we realise who we are looking for acceptance from that we can start moving forward. And that person is ourselves. Nobody else.
We drive the runaway train. It can derail sometimes and we can feel out of control. But fundamentally we can get it back on track and put on the brakes. And that’s why people come to me. Because no matter what gym goal they tell me, as long as I deliver in enabling them to accept themselves first and foremost then the rest is easy. A few pounds, no problem! Feeling pumped, easy! Because they start to do it on their terms. They gain control of their mind and their body.
And we can take this same principle outside of the gym with identifying any life goals. The very best Personal Trainers also make excellent life coaches because the needs of an individual inside the gym is simply just a reflection of their greater needs outside of it. It’s all relative to the bigger picture. And then, like a jigsaw, we can piece it all together. It starts making sense. We can take control.
We’ve all got a runaway train, but first you need to understand that you are the driver. Contact me if you need to talk.
shay.pt@hotmail.com
It’s a strange relationship that I have with the fitness industry. I love it. I truly do. It has enabled me to follow my ambitions and dreams that I thought were beyond me or that had passed me by. I get to meet like-minded people which means I don’t need to bore my wife with news on my new bench press personal best. And the gym is my go to place for getting my head straight. Not many people get to say that about their workplace.
But it is also full of crap. For all the good it can do, there is an element of the industry that feeds off our insecurities.
Dr Gail Hines said,”If tomorrow, women woke up and decided that they really liked their bodies, just think of how many industries would go out of business.”
The fitness industry would be one of them. And in the past couple of decades I believe that the industry has begun to target the other half of the population too. Since the end of the degradation of women in magazines such as FHM and Zoo and newspapers putting a stop to page 3 in the UK, publishers had to target men in a different way. So now they put half naked pictures of male physique models in their magazines and tell them that is what they’re supposed to look like followed by an ad for creatine tablets.
But, despite it being important for the fitness industry to have men across the world feeling inadequate, it is far more lucrative for females to hate their bodies. Or to put it another way, it is more lucrative for the industry to tell women that they should hate their bodies.
For example, we join a weight loss group and go through the torturous weekly weigh ins whilst discussing our ‘syns’. Gym classes are attended mostly by women who are promised that they will burn fat, tone legs bum and tums and blast their abs. Personal Trainers are qualified in form and rep ranges but are way out of their depth when it comes to the emotional side of WHY a person has approached them for help in losing 2 stone in a month. (Some trainers are very good, by the way, but do your homework on them before you give them your money.)
The industry wouldn’t survive if we woke up tomorrow, looked in the mirror and said to ourselves “I am good enough. I am worthy.”
And that doesn’t mean that if we did this we couldn’t still train and eat nutritious food. But we would have a completely different outlook on how we approach our goals. We can always want to achieve a fitness goal that entails lower body weight or bigger muscles, but we would start to do it on our own terms.
The industry wants to confuse us.
When I go to the telly shop for a new telly, I immediately regret the whole process. It’s not that I don’t want a new telly, it’s because I am confronted by a salesperson who begins to fill the air with jargon. Yet, even though this is off putting, I do get excited about stuff that a TV can do that I never thought would float my boat. It draws me in. All of a sudden, things like OLED, QLED, 4k UHD, refresh rates, bezels, quantum dots, low latency and resolutions are the most important things in my life.
Before I know it, I’m leaving the shop with a screen as big as the one at The Odeon and if I can figure out the settings I’m sure it can make me a cuppa tea and give me a foot rub.
Now, I’m not saying that these fancy things aren’t useful on a TV, but I would question if I really needed something so glitzy as the TV that I bought. They are buzzwords. They make us want and need something that we think we don’t already have. It makes us feel inadequate if we leave the shop without a TV to go home to our own TV. Our own TV that might have a wobbly button and it’s a few years old but it still works perfectly fine.
The fitness industry sells us our fitness like a TV shop sells us our TV. They make it sexy and an absolute necessity for our lives. Their jargon and their buzzwords, their special offers and their ‘must have’ product means that we fall for their pitch.
I’ll get a new telly that does what I want it to do in my own time and with the advice of those that I trust. And if we say the same thing about our fitness goals, then we could all sit back and watch the industry do a bit of sweating of its own.
We get so wrapped up in extremes these days and, perhaps in the age of the internet, it is more apparent than ever for us humans.
Everything we do and say is often interpreted as a hyperbolic representation of us as individuals. Others do it to us, but we are likely to do this to ourselves too as some sort of self fulfilled prophecy.
If you publicly laugh at an Alf Garnet joke you are judged to be a right wing fascist and if you welcome black mermaids in a new kids Disney movie then you are labelled a woke looney lefty.
I do both. I confuse the extremists.
But something very dangerous is happening to our culture that I, as a personal trainer, feel should be addressed regarding what we eat. Diets are becoming more and more extreme by the week.
I decided fairly quickly in my life as a PT to avoid creating meal plans for my clients. Even if they specifically asked for them, if they were not an elite athlete that had to continuously hit certain weights (boxers, jockeys) and macros then it was not necessary. The average gym goer will not benefit from such an extreme method. And if a fitness professional demands that you follow a meal plan then I would suggest that they are trying to upsell their product.
Apps such as calorie and macro counters are usually a good place to begin a weight loss or muscle hypertrophy journey. Even then, they are only necessary for a few weeks until you can discover what each meal can provide in terms of nutrition.
But the problem with meal planners is that they are…
A. Designed by someone else.
B. Do not account for your different moods or hunger throughout the day and
C. Can cause you to feel demoralised when you cannot follow it.
My life, for example, is not so well structured that I am able to prep and eat a certain meal at a certain time of day every day. Will I always have those ingredients in the kitchen? Will an emergency at work or home derail my timing? With food costs going up, will I be able to afford these meals? Is my PT telling me to buy, prep and eat all of this while he plans my life in his bedroom and his mum makes him his tea?!
(The last one actually happens, trust me.)
And what if I miss a meal or find an alternative food? Does this waste all of my previous efforts? Should I just give it up as a bad job? Maybe I’m just not ready to lose weight/become healthier/ build muscle.
No!
It means that I’m human. I’m not programmed to eat half a chicken breast, one handful of broccoli and one cup of rice at 12:30 just because it is written on a piece of paper on my fridge door.
Yesterday, I had the following breakfast…
Two white buns, buttered. Inside each of them I put one slice of bacon, one hash brown, one fried egg, mushrooms, one slice of black pudding and baked beans. Here’s the evidence…
I enjoyed every guilt free moment of it because I have no restrictions on my diet. But I can only have this ‘no food ban’ in place if I keep to some sensible rules…
* I make sure that I eat fruit and veg throughout the day.
* I don’t eat extra high calorie meals every day.
* I try to vary my meals regularly so that I do not fall into a rut resulting in boredom or habit forming.
* I acknowledge the calories and macros of each meal, but even more importantly, I recognise how each meal makes me feel. For example, do I feel sluggish? Am I drinking extra water due to excess salt consumption? Do I feel satisfied? Will this meal sustain me in whatever activity I have planned to do next?
My breakfast from yesterday isn’t a bad meal. It becomes a poor choice, however, if I were to have it today and tomorrow and the day after and so on. So I won’t.
Instead, my breakfast this morning looks like this…
This drink consists of one apple, a banana, a pear and plenty of spinach topped up with water. This is my usual start to the day, but yesterday I just fancied a change.
Both breakfasts made me happy.
Extreme dieting methods can be damaging to your relationship with food and ultimately your health. So let’s look at a few steps to a sensible approach…
* If you find yourself craving a certain food and have started to eat this for the past few days then this can create a habit that is unwelcome. Even a fruit and veg smoothie using the same ingredients every day can be detrimental. Try new and different fruit and veg for example. This will ensure that you remain interested in making a fruit smoothie each day if that is your goal. And as much as I loved my full English breakfast in a bun, the calories and trans fats are not something that I can put into my body each day. Keep it to the odd occasion.
* If you are going out for the evening and you know that there will be lovely food and drink on offer, then approach this occasion sensibly. You want to have a good time without calorie counting every single drop! For a day or two, cut back on calorie dense foods. For example, stay away from a full English in a bun or a takeaway in the lead up to a night out. Also, I find a good workout on the day of a big night out helps me stay focussed. It doesn’t ruin my enjoyment, but If I feel the effects of a workout it enables me to keep my goals in the back of my mind even if I’m ordering the gin and tonics.
* Appreciate ALL food types. And you can do this whilst acknowledging that high nutritious food is excellent fuel for your body and your mind. Don’t be down on yourself if you’ve been fuelling your body with great nutrition but suddenly find yourself chowing down on a full English breakfast butty. Eat it and move on.
* Stay away from extreme diet sites and companies that want your money while you question yourself and feel inadequate. And don’t take too much notice of Dave from admin who lost 2 stone by following the new fad Facebook diet. You will lose weight on any diet that puts you in a calorie deficit. But you’ll only keep it off if it doesn’t require extreme measures such as very low daily calories, counting your ‘syns’ or taking pills. Your approach right from the off has to be sustainable for your lifestyle.
* Buy high nutritional food and bring it into your home. Cupboards and fridges should be stocked with 80% of the high nutritious foods and 20% of the rest of your favourite foods. Once it is in your home, you can start making some of your favourite healthy dishes and freezing them. Sauces are easily made in large quantities and frozen in those tubs that you get from the takeaway!
So, before I get asked about this, I’ll comment on it now. Are syn’s from Slimming World really all that extreme?!
Well, this is a method which…
1. Calls higher calorie foods a syn. Ok, it means synergy to SW, but does the term syn trigger something to you which means it is bad for you? I’m afraid it’s poor taste in light of the mental health problems we have as a society regarding the way we look. And
2. Bananas are a ‘free’ food unless it is mashed. Then it becomes a syn. Three points on that…
a) A banana has never ever been a reason for a person’s weight gain. Mashed or unmashed.
b) If we demonize the poor mashed banana then what of the full English butty?! What chance do we have with our physical and mental health or weight control if we see mashed up banana as a reason why we are failing?
c) banana gets mashed when you put it in your mouth. Sooooo…..
Whether it is the PT writing out your next week’s meal plan, the media with their hyperbolic headlines or the big companies with very clever marketing campaigns, you can be sure that they are all capable of taking us to the extreme when it comes to the food that we eat.
I hope, with a little common sense and a step back from the nonsense, we can all start making some delicious choices from now on.
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.
I didn’t dress for Halloween to be scary. Although a man in his 40’s wearing an inflatable Yoshi and Super Mario costume running around the streets might have creeped some people out. Anyway, my kids loved it and with the response from the other kids doing their trick or treat rounds, it went down well this Halloween.
There’s something very inevitable about Halloween that is as predictable as a Mariah Carey song at Christmas. I eat and drink rubbish. White bread looking like tombstones, pizza, cheap hotdogs, crisps in the shape of ghosts, cake draped in marzipan, beer and wine to be exact. I tried to convince myself that, seeing as I had Yoshi with me, I was eating for two. He’s a hungry little dude.
But I accounted for the evening binge by how I behave the rest of the year. Indeed, there will be other occasions where I’ll abandon my structured eating habits this year and it is all within my caloric limits. This is how I know that I won’t put on unnecessary weight.
For many years I have assisted people in balancing their diets. I am proof that we can eat whatever we like on special occasions without the guilt, the ill health or the weight gain. We can live our lives without the restrictions of formal diets.
If we can plan for the occasional ‘day off’ of protein powders, fruit smoothies and the training schedule then it is very easy to appreciate it, enjoy it and move on. But planning it is the key. It’s my birthday in two weeks and, again, this will be a planned day (or two) away from thinking about my nutrition too much. As long as I put the work in-between these events then I am confident that I will be absolutely fine with no regrets.
My only regret about Halloween is that I didn’t go as Bane.
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.
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.
Brian Clough was right about football. It is a simple game.
“All you have to do is get that pig’s bladder into that onion bag” is something I always remember my dad telling me just before a game. Maybe he got it from Clough. It sounds like Clough. Or maybe he made it up himself. As a footballer who would often get the pig’s bladder into the onion bag, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of my dad’s original mantras before entering the field. He was one of the best football players I’ve ever seen live. He kept it simple. He scored goals and won football games.
In my profession, what I try to convey to 90% of my clients is to keep it simple. Now, if you are training for a particular sport, event or for aesthetic bodybuilding purposes who make up my 10%, then I have lots of great advice on training splits and various techniques in other articles but the principal should remain the same. Keep it simple.
Just like the footballer or the athlete, they have to turn up if they want to compete. They have to enter the football pitch or athletic field. So your priority, too, is to make sure that you turn up. Turn up to the gym when you have scheduled it. I see so many missed opportunities from people which, can I be truthful? It’s usually because they found an excuse to not go as they couldn’t be arsed that day.
And life gets in the way. I understand. But this is where we begin to overcomplicate the game. If completing an exercise routine is as engrained into your life as eating, sleeping and breathing then it remains simple. You just do it.
Here are the main culprits when it comes to overcomplicating your fitness goals and how to simplify it…
You don’t go to a gym. Either you don’t feel that you can afford a membership or there isn’t a local gym to you.
Simple. Exercise is free. Training in a gym can be good motivation and it has lots of equipment, but bodyweight exercises or a few weights that you can store away after use at home will suit most fitness goals. And for general fitness, walking is one of the best exercises you can do.
You don’t have time. You work long hours. You have meals to prepare, kids to sort out and by the time everything is done you have run out of time and energy for exercise.
Simple. An exercise routine doesn’t have to be some elaborate plan that takes over your life. The general advice is to complete 150 minutes of moderate intensity a week for aerobic fitness. That’s just over 20 minutes a day per week. For weight loss, increase the intensity by taking less rest periods or adding more difficult exercises over time. You’ll find that you have more energy for your work, social life and your home life by sticking to it.
You can’t stick to a diet plan to lose weight. Everything from 5:2 to the paleo diet has failed leaving you frustrated and demoralised.
Simple. Every diet plan needs to have one common criteria…they need to put you in a calorie deficit. That is consuming less calories than you burn. You don’t need an overhaul of your cupboards and fridge contents. You just need a sensible approach to what you eat. I would recommend a calorie counter app, log your food entries for a few weeks and see where you are going wrong and where you can put it right. It could be just cutting back on a bottle of wine each week, switching to wholegrain instead of white or reassessing your portion sizes. You don’t need to completely ban any food that you enjoy.
It hurts your knees when you squat. You are put off by exercise because certain exercises hurt.
Simple. Don’t do them. I would advise that you ask a professional about your pain and either they can correct your form (which is what is causing the pain) or they will find alternative exercises that don’t cause pain.
We often form some long elaborate web of plans to reach a fairly simple goal. Most of it is highly unnecessary, leading to over thinking and a target that becomes impossible to reach. We forget the simple things. You can’t lose two stone without losing your first kilogram. You can’t run a marathon without running your first mile and you can’t put the pig’s bladder in the onion bag without entering the field of play.
If you’re struggling with your fitness goals, have a think about how you might be able to bring it back to being simple.
Never Give Up PT