Category: Exercise

Gym Energy

What things give you energy?

Before training….

1) Pre Workout – a supplement that boosts your energy and could help you with a more sustained and focused workout. Usually contain caffeine but also ingredients like beta-alanine, creatine, BCAAs, and B vitamins. Costs can vary.

2) Coffee – if you just need a caffeine fix this is a cheaper version of a pre workout and easy to grab wherever you are.

3) Eat two hours before- A mix of carbs and protein a couple of hours before should give you enough energy to feel good for training.

4) A banana with peanut butter – 30 minutes beforehand can give you an energy boost

5) Water – If you’re dehydrated that will contribute to an energy slump.

6) Sleep – Less of a quick fix but being well rested will help your energy levels.

What Healthy Is

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Being healthy is not:

Being a certain weight

Being a certain size or shape

Being ripped / having defined visible muscle

Being able to run a distance in a certain time

Being able to lift really heavy weights

Eating really strictly

All these things can be a result of being healthy but in themselves they are not indicative off being healthy.

I know people who live incredibly disciplined lifestyles and look in great shape. They are undoubtedly fit. That doesn’t mean they are healthy.

You can be in great shape but have difficulty managing your training and beat yourself up if you don’t stick to your training schedule and feel like you must do a certain amount each day.

You can be in great shape but beat yourself up for eating certain foods or having some time off from your normal diet, or find yourself being careful on nights out to avoid causing damage to your fitness.

You can have an Instagram worthy routine and lifestyle and find yourself turning down social events because it would interrupt that.

Equally you can be a little bigger than you’d like and eat a more rounded diet and still be fit and healthy, and importantly healthy in more way than just one, because you know that not doing things perfectly doesn’t matter.

That’s not to say I think being overweight is healthy. If you don’t do any exercise and eat too much that is likely to lead to health problems and not be healthy.

We don’t have to live to an extreme though and a balance where we eat well and move (preferably in a way we enjoy) to allow us to feel good and enjoy life is probably the healthiest way to be.

Imperfect

Did you over do it over the bank holiday?

Changes to our routine can disrupt how we feel about our fitness levels. Long weekends and breaks are great but when you feel like you didn’t eat healthy enough or move enough it can make you feel like you need to be extra good in the days after to make up for it.

Did you say I’ll start Monday then realise you were off work Monday so now you’ll have to wait until next week?

The idea of the perfect week often means we decide to start again at the point things don’t go to plan, meaning we never quite get to the end of a week and just keep starting again.

Are you thinking I’ll start next year now because there’s only 4 months left and what can I do in that?

The idea of a perfect starting point, like January because then we’ve been good for a whole year can be tempting but when you start healthy habits doesn’t really matter, we won’t all reset back to zero on December 31st.

Do you have loads of things coming up so you think I’ll just wait until after to get started because there’s no point?

Well you might see slower results if you can’t be super consistent for the next few weeks but you’ll see more results from just doing what you can than you will if you just wait.

You’re never going to have a clear path, no distractions, no obstacles. You’re never going to be perfect for a whole week, month or year.

Being consistent and doing what you can when you can and more importantly getting back to your routine as soon as you can after any little changes (be them blips or planned occasions) is going to bring much better results than trying to be perfect.

When do you train?

What’s your favorite time of day?

This question was posed by WordPress today so given this is a fitness blog I’ll rephrase it, what’s your favourite time of the day to exercise?

Mine is morning. Now I hate getting up in the morning, my most committed relationship in the world is with the snooze button to be honest, but, once I’m up I love training first thing.

You just throw something on and go do it, nobody looks ‘put together’ in the gym first thing, and then once your done you can go shower, get dressed and feel smug for the rest of the day because you’ve already trained. I feel like when I train in the morning I just feel more positive and alert throughout the rest of the day. It’s so much easier to put training off as the day goes on and things pop up that you need to do, so when you’ve already done it before the day really starts you’ve just removed some of the pressure from yourself.

I do train in the evening, and more often than not at lunchtime, but I find both of those times never feel quite as good as morning sessions do. In reality lunch time is the most practical time for me because we’ve got a gym at work so I do tend to go quite frequently, but when work gets stressful I find myself skipping the session. I also try to limit the type of things I do because I need to be showered and back at my desk within the hour so whilst it’s a convenient options it’s not optimal. Evening sessions often leave me not ready to sleep and also when I get in from work I’m hungry so it throws out my eating a bit.

So the best time to train for me varies, and I’m lucky I can train either before or after work or at lunch time, but the time I always feel best for getting up and doing something first thing in the morning.

What you Enjoy

I’ve been really quiet on my blog the last few weeks, a bad infection completely took me out of the game. I’ve barely been able to eat let alone train or anything else!

Just before I got ill though I went canoeing. Now I have never been in a canoe before- a combination of not being able to swim and being terrified of water always stopped me, but I said this year I would try new things and push myself outside of my comfort zone so I went for it, and I’m glad I did.

It was actually a lot less scary and more fun that I expected (once I got the hang of left and right and kind of how to steer anyway).

I was also a pretty good work out if my back muscles are any kind of indication the next day. At the time it was a bit knackering – It wasn’t something I was used to doing and it was a hot day so towards the end ( I think we travelled about 13km) I was flagging a bit, but it was also fun and pretty and the concentration of what I was doing kind of made it not feel like exercise.

One of the things we get caught up with when training is doing things we think we should do. As in training should be lifting in the gym, running and so on and if we aren’t doing those things we aren’t keeping fit and healthy.  There are lots of activities, like getting out on the water, joining a sports team or joining a walking club though that do constitute exercise but it can sometimes feel like it’s masked a bit because they also count as our hobbies.

The thing about doing things like this though is, that unlike just going to the gym, if we enjoy them they’re a lot easier to stick with.

If you do keep finding yourself putting off joining the gym or going for a run but there’s a hobby which you really enjoy and want to do more of which is also physical, a good starting point would be taking the pressure off yourself on what you think you should do and instead actually do the things you take enjoyment from and let the results come that way.

YouDon’t Need to be Crazy

What you see on social media in terms of fitness content is massively distorted.

Most people who post things about their training are fitness professionals, obviously they are doing it to try and help people.

But when they ae in the gym training every day, well it can create the impression that you need to be in the gym training everyday.

Now it’s not practical firstly, PTs who work in fitness free time are firstly going to have more ability to train every day. They are literally in gyms every day. Fitting something in is easier when that happens. Also if you teach classes, well you are going to do some exercise on those days and get paid for it, so.

For the clients of said PTs life is very different. You don’t have the same incentive to work out every day, probably less easy access to equipment and to be honest you probably don’t have the same desire to train that much, and to be honest, that’s ok.

I used to train every day, more than once most days, teach 14 classes a week minimum, run. Now to be honest I go to the gym maybe 4 times a week, run a couple of times (when I’m not laid up with the cough!) and teach twice. I couldn’t post hardcore videos of me training daily if I wanted to!

My routine now if far more realistic for someone who has an office job for 40 plus hours a week. I don’t want to kill myself trying to do everything anymore.  Want to go home, put my pyjamas on and watch Only Fools and Horses sometimes.

When you judging your own progress, how hard your working compared to other people you see online it’s useful to remember that most of those have an invested interest in training as much as they do- they get paid to do it in some form or another, it’s their passion, and that’s great.

You don’t need to be all in like that to get results though, to be fit and healthy or lose a few pounds.  You can make some changes and do a bit more and enjoy it but not be doing absolutely crazy shit every single day.

Therapy or Therapeutic?

Ask a lot of people who are into fitness why they train and you’ll get an answer that refers to mental health. There’s been a massive shift in recent years from people training purely for aesthetics to people training for how it makes them feel.

Exercise is a great stress relief, moving more literally releases endorphins, it can improve confidence, possibly get you outdoors and getting fresh air. So yes training can be incredibly beneficial to your mental health.

Viewing training as what your body can do and something that makes you feel better makes exercise a positive action rather than a form of punishment, where you train to eat more or change your appearance and size.

What exercise isn’t though, is therapy. It can be therapeutic of course it can. If I’m a bit stressed or anxious going to the gym or for a run can help alleviate the symptoms. If i don’t train for a few days I can feel the difference to my mood, largely because I actually enjoy the time I’m running or lifting, it makes me feel good, is a break from whatever is going on and a chance to blast some music and focus on me.

But exercise can’t replace therapy or solve actual problems. If training is literally the only thing keeping you sane or making you feel better it’s time to look at the issues exercise is acting as a sticking plaster for. The issue when you get to this point, is if you can’t train for whatever reason, you end up feeling terrible. When you feel like training through an injury because that would be better than how you’d feel if you took some time off, or rest days sound like a terrible idea because even though you’re knackered and burnt out a day off would make you feel guilty.

The benefits of training for mental health can’t be denied but we always need to remember that for it to be a benefit it needs to complement our life rather than dominate it, which means knowing when to rest even if you really want to train, when to pull back, when to take it easy and then appreciate what you are still able to do when you can train.

International Women’s Day 2023

Rather than being a day where people post pictures of women with hashtags hopefully there will also be posts focusing on this years theme (if you’ve read my blog for a while you’ll know every years there’s a theme).

This years International Women’s Day is about embracing Equity. So what does that mean?

For years women have campaigned for equality – being given the same opportunities as men. But equality relies on us all starting from the same point to begin with. In reality that doesn’t happen. It’s not just that girls and boys tend to have different experiences growing up and face different challenges to one another but even amongst women we all start from different places and have different levels of advantage or disadvantage and that means even two women given the same resources won’t be on an equal playing field to one another.

The idea of equity is that to create equality we need to ensure people have what they need to succeed. People with past advantages may need less now than their peers and rather than that being seen as unequal it should be embraced to allow others the same opportunities they have had. Of course beyond International Women’s Day this message counts for all. Where can this fit into the world of fitness though?

Gyms can be intimidating places, especially for new people, people with injuries, those coming back from illnesses, people starting back again after a long hiatus. For people who for whatever reason might need to take more tests, modify their movement, need a little more help in whatever way. Male or female it’s the fitness community and instructors / PTs role to help anyone who doesn’t feel like they’re in a position to just start exercising and provide the tools and a safe environment for them to train in a capacity that works for them.

International any day can end up being lip service but days creating actual conversations that help people think about things in different ways or consider different ways of thinking of things can have lots more benefits to a nice photo and a hashtag.

Project 40 – Week 18

So I haven’t posted an update for a few weeks (since week 14 to be precise). My cough is back.

Well technically it didn’t actually leave it just eased for a while in December and January (so it was like I had something caught in my throat) and then all of a sudden BAM, I sound like I smoke 20 a day again. Honestly, it sounds like I’m trying to cough up a lung again.

I’ve coughed so much everything hurts, including my throat and then after trying to suppress the cough because I know how much I’m annoying everyone with the never ending noise, I lost my voice and sounded like I was trying to communicate in secret with some alien life form who can only hear incredibly high pitched squeaks.

Really struggling to train or run right now because I can’t control my breathing and everything feels heavy, which is apart from anything else mentally tough.

Hoping that by the end of this week I’ll have a better idea from the doctor of what I can do to get rid of the cough so that I can get back to some semblance of normality. I’m signed up for two (yes two because I’m not that bright) half marathons in May so really need to be back to full health so I can get some decent long runs in soon!