The Contradiction of the Dine Out Scheme and a Fight Against Obesity

You know there are lots of different types of people in the world? People who have different struggles, some people struggle to lose weight, others to put it on. Some people watch what they eat whether they struggle with managing their weight or not and others find they don’t need to. Away from our physical self we all work in different industries and have different personal situations.

So I struggle to understand why so many people in the fitness industry keep comparing and contrasting the Governments intentions to tackle obesity and the Dine Out 50% Scheme.

The economy has been hit hard, in particular the hospitality sector. The 50% scheme and the lower VAT rate are designed to stimulate an area of the economy that is on the edge of a disaster that will have far reaching effects on us all as jobs are lost and windows along high streets start getting boarded up (I mean we’ll just ignore the fact here that the Government found the money to fund this but it took a footballer campaigning to find the funds to feed kids who would otherwise go without during the school holidays). Maybe it does encourage people to go and eat out more, but you know that when you go to a restaurant you don’t have to pick the fattiest, highest calorie thing on the menu right? I mean – I don’t follow this rule when I go for a meal but… I could … I do have that autonomy of choice.

That’s the thing for me. Those campaigns to stop BOGOFs and cheap deals on ‘junk’ food. Why can I not pick for myself what I put in my mouth? Does it take the Government making it more costly for me to eat less junk food to achieve that? Will that work long term? Or would me making informed decisions about what I eat be better in the long term. I frequently get laughed at for how much I eat (and particular how much cake) but actually, most of the time (OK not so much in lockdown with no classes to teach) I’m actually easily within my TDEE even with all the cake, on occasions I am not I can say no to food if I think it’s right for me to do so, I don’t need Whitehall to tell me.

So the Government’s current scheme has a purpose and that purpose isn’t related to people’s health – it’s related to the economy, and as much as I don’t like this government (albeit I’ll admit to a slight inappropriate crush on Rishi, although most people would look good if they’re almost always stood next to Boris) and think their messages are becoming increasingly confusing and contradictory, this policy is designed to get people going back to restaurants and pubs, to contrast it directly to issues of obesity is far to simplistic and takes away the ownership we need to take over our own bodies.

So onto the campaign against obesity. I’ve not read too much about this as reading the news at the moment makes me incredibly aggy and to be honest I probably don’t need to be triggered any further. From the Government website it seems to largely involve banning adverts for ‘naughty’ foods, reducing BOGOFs and GPs being able to prescribe weight loss programmes to people – this appears to be both via an NHS specific weight management plan but also being able to sign post them to Weight Watchers and Slimming World.

It’s the Slimming Clubs that seem to be the ultimate trigger to many fitness professionals here. I’ve written previously that whilst I wouldn’t encourage someone to join one, I don’t think they are the devil incarnate that they get made out to be in our industry. At the end of the day they promote a safe and healthy calorie deficit, they just do it in a sneaky way where the customer isn’t actually aware that’s what is happening and in a way that sadly doesn’t really promote moving as part of a healthy lifestyle.

To tackle obesity what is really needed is two tier. Firstly education. Banning adverts and offers doesn’t educate. It’s taking the scissors away from someone rather than explaining that they are sharp so if they use them they need to be careful. Sending them to a Slimming Club could help but not educate. I would hope the NHS weight management plan would be the first port of call for most referrals and more educational however.

Secondly however, as I’ll write more about tomorrow, knowing and doing are just not the same thing. It does’t matter what you know about calories or the benefit of exercise, most of us need accountability, reasons to make the effort. For em the Governments shortsightedness comes not from Weight Watchers but not following through to this point.

Here is where we in the fitness industry can really come into a useful position, offering services that provide that accountability and support to people. I’ve said so many times previously though, that means less talking down on other ways of losing weight (like slimming clubs) and understanding why they are popular options with many. I’ll tell you know, because I’ve been overweight and I went to a slimming club before a gym, because sometime gyms and the people in them seem scary. We need to show understanding of how people looking to lose weight feel and provide services that help rather than put people off.

The other issue here is cost. It’s often said that one problem is it’s cheaper to live off junk than fresh food. I think that is both true an untrue. You can find very cheap fruit and veg if you know where to look, but often you need to go to certain chains of supermarkets to get the value products, these might be out of town superstores, now if you can’t drive then you are limited to the more expensive local shops. Socio economic factors definitely come into play in everything going on right now. How was lockdown or you? Will have depended on where you lived, who with, access to gardens and parks. What will have been an idyllic summer for some would have been months cooped up alone indoors for others. Whilst we can argue that people coming to us as PTs or coaches would be more effective for them in terms of weight management and health, three sessions with a PT a week in going to cost at least £90 a week, a gym membership at least £20 a week. A weight in at Weight Watchers costs around a fiver.

Ultimately we need to stop over simplifying complex issues, try and look beyond our own point of view and accept that in a very complex world right now where there are economic, social and health issues vying for attention with a still ongoing pandemic that not every decision or policy is always going to sit well or make sense against another. We need to think more on a micro scale of what we can do to improve the situation rather than getting bogged down in what Boris is cocking up this week.

Lost Momentum

I’ve not written a blog since 20th July when I took some time out due to an injury.

I rested for about a week and a half then intended to get to the gym as they reopened in England, but just didn’t. The rest combined with not teaching for such a long time now (and not yet having classes to go back to) meant I found it really hard to motivate myself to get back into the gym.

So here’s the thing. Exercise is an anchor for me. Something which grounds me when I’m feeling a bit rubbish. It’s not something I feel I have to do, I enjoy it and it makes me feel good and quite frankly sane, it’s also a great stress reliever and when I’m busy a quick run or workout can help you come back refreshed and refocused. But it’s also really easy to lose momentum, even with something that you know is beneficial to you. In turn this makes me feel a bit down about things in general, so it’s something that I’ve struggled with a bit.

Right now in the world most of us have probably lost some momentum. Life changed over night (I went from teaching 10-15 classes a week and being out an about almost all the time to working from home to now working in an office but not yet back to teaching) and even as it changes back it’s different to what it was, and it’s continuously changing. Getting back to things you know are good to you and enjoy sounds like it should be easy but it really isn’t.

For me I’m just getting myself back into the gym as often as I can, I’ve reduced the duration / intensity of my workouts so i can build back up (both from the injury and extended break) and I’m not kicking myself if I have a long day and have to miss a training session. I know overtime I’ll get back into that habit and hopefully by the time I start teaching again (in a few weeks hopefully) I’ll feel much more in the swing of things, but I can’t expect myself to just bounce back to where I was in March.

If you need a bit of motivation to get yourself back into the swing of things, firstly, that’s ok- I think most of us are in the same boat. Secondly, I have designed a two week gym plan to help ease yourself back in which you can download here.

http://eepurl.com/g4PLOz

Man Down!

I’ve picked up an injury. Well of sorts, I think its more over use as I have been doing a lot more running / cardio classes with gyms closed and my knee (which isn’t without issue at the best of time) and hip are feeling it.

Here’s the weird thing though. I can rest.

Do I want to rest? No. I’ve not trained since Tuesday and I’m itching, training is as mcuh something I do for my mental health as physical health.

But because I am not teaching I can rest. Under normal circumstances resting for me would be only teaching classes which would still equate to around nine hours exercise a week. Looking at it you can see why instructors struggle to get rid of persistent niggles!

There have been many negatives about gyms being closed but the one positive it has bought me is the importance of rest, and not my weird instructor concept of rest but actual proper recovery, the sort I would advise others take.

This is something I want to take with me when I’m back to training in gyms when they reopen. I’m curious if anyone else has learnt anything fitness wise they want to remember?

Working as a team when your self employed

A few weeks ago a friend (a fellow instructor) said of me and another instructor (a mutual friend) “it’s nice you work together”. This was in response to us arranging coffee mornings at the gym where we both teach the majority of our classes.

To be honest, doing this as a team was never in question when we had the idea- we’ve always worked as a team with ideas (technique sessions, communicating with the gym etc.) because at the end of the day, we both want the same results, want to do the best for our class members and the gym and know that working together makes that more achievable. In fact, the same is said for all of the class instructors at the gym in question – we support each others Social Media posts, communicate and look to work as one where we can. It’s beneficial to us, in a job that can be quite isolating we have support. It’s beneficial to our members, who know we are all working towards one goal of providing the best experience we can.

I know, from stories and from Facebook groups, this isn’t the case everywhere. For every team that works as a team there seems to be people that sometimes seem to go out of their way to outdo others. You hear bonkers stories of instructors encouraging people to not turn up to the cover instructors class when they’re on holiday, or to complain about another instructor or that get upset when a member says they also like the classes of someone else too.

I’m thankful that they are stories for me, in my time teaching I’ve met amazing instructors who helped me, advised me, taught me things and haven’t ever been like that. I’ve never turned up to cover and found a hostile class, those I’ve covered for are more likely to have told the class to be nice or that they’ll enjoy my class. I always big up cover that the class might not have met before, I’ve left aux leads and batteries and stereo instructions stashed away for people attending the studio for the first time as my cover. It’s in my interest for my class to like the cover and them to enjoy teaching the class – it makes finding cover easier!

Let’s face it- we all get it wrong sometimes and it’s hard to never feel competitive or compare ourselves to others, but generally, and especially as I have gained experience, I’ve realised more and more, the benefit of us fitness professionals working with each other rather than against each other.

I would class myself as a decent instructor. I’m comfortable enough to know there are some things that the instructors I work with are better at that I am, I know there are things I’m strong at and things I’m less strong at. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and beyond that we all have different approaches and styles of teaching. By working as a unit we provide variety (if you don’t like my teaching style they’ll be other instructors who’s classes suit you better and vice versa, what we care about is you find the classes you do enjoy – in reality most people come to all our classes and like the fact that we offer a different experience which keeps things interesting), we can plug each others gaps – refer people to one another if we think someone else would be able to answer a question more effectively.

Will there be fewer classes when we return? We really don’t know at this stage. The industry as a whole will take time to build back to full capacity. We don’t yet know whether the timetable for us will be as before straight away or gradually built up over time. We don’t know whether we will get all our classes back yet. What we haven’t done is decide to look out for ourselves in a bid to make sure we are the one to get our classes back if some do need to be dropped.

We’ve agreed this is an opportunity. We’ve stayed connected with class members throughout in different ways. We have ideas of how we can help the gym promote classes when we return, we’ve been fortunate in that the gym has stayed in touch (and furloughed us) even if they can’t provide certainty on classes right now, and we know there’s an opportunity to build on connections built in lockdown and be an asset to the gym (another thing we sometimes forget when trying to argue or worth – we need to be able to show the gym why we are worth what we’re asking for, be that in monetary terms or what classes we get). There are no certainties right now of course, but it feels like this is a much better approach than competing with one another for classes.

And in fitness overall this perhaps the attitude we need to take in general. Of course we are technically competing with others for clients, for classes, but we are equally all different and offering different services, so some clients will be suited to us, others better suited for someone else. Away from the gym I teach most of my classes at I am also involved with lots of other group fitness instructors as part of Jump 4.2 and with a group of other fit pros on a Business Mastermind. Again these are environments where even though the majority of the group (or all the group in the case of the Mastermind) are fitness instructors competition is replaced by support, being able to ask questions or put forward ideas and get honest feedback without worrying about sounding silly. In recent months I’ve seen so many fitness professionals do amazing things with the encouragement of their peers, which shows why working with rather than against each other could give the self employed fitness professionals a bigger chance to flourish than just focusing on outdoing our closest ‘rivals’ for classes ever will.

Permission To Eat

How many times have you not eaten a meal or snack because you ate too much the day before or because you haven’t trained today or you’ve been really lazy?

So you skip a meal or eat the lowest calorie thing you can find to compensate.

Then later, when you’re either really hungry because you’ve not eaten or you really want to eat certain foods because you now feel bad and want comfort food, you eat all the foods you enjoy but which also make you feel bad because they are ‘naughty’.

Then the next day the cycle begins again.

Or you are sticking really closely to a low calorie diet and creating a 500 calorie a day deficit. You do this for 30 days creating a 15,000 calorie deficit. But it’s hard to stick to, you always crave your favourite foods. You get to a weekend away, and you’ve been so so good recently so you think what the hell and eat anything and everything all weekend. Now you have 5,000 calories a day for 3 days, which is the same amount of calories that you just spent a month creating a deficit of.

You’ve deprived yourself so much that you feel you have to have a blow out and the blow out almost cancels out the progress.

Both of those situations are linked to how we view food; good and bad foods, naughty foods, how we deserve or don’t deserve food, how some foods should be avoided or we need to earn higher calories foods.

The problem with thinking about and labeling food in this way is your emotions affect what you eat and what you eat affects how you feel.

In other words we need to not feel guilt when we eat certain foods or certain amounts and accept that food is something that we use for energy. We can enjoy it and should enjoy it and yes, depending on the situation, we do also need to be aware of calorie values and how much or little we consume.

However labeling food does not help us, equally telling ourselves we much do a certain amount of activity to earn food is also damaging to our own self worth.

You need to eat a base number of calories every day for energy even if you stay in bed all day. Telling yourself you do not deserve to eat certain foods because you’ve not trained much is equally as bad for your own self worth as feeling bad about eating certain foods.

In finding a way of eating and training that you enjoy and is sustainable removes the guilt and the urges to binge and allows you to feel happy with your diet and nutrition routine.

We need to give ourselves unconditional permission to eat.

Knowledge doesn’t equal application

Knowledge doesn’t equal application.

Several times over lockdown myself and my friend Jane have said to each other, why are we so much better at giving each other advice that dealing with the same situation ourselves? It’s because when we look at other people’s problems we can approach them with a certain degree of dispassion that allows us to offer practical advice. When we try and apply it to ourselves our emotions challenge the logic of said advice making it harder for us to follow.

Having knowledge on something is good, generally if you are approaching a situation you want to have at least a basic amount of knowledge. Yet knowledge doesn’t take into account the surrounding factors which can cause complications and challenge even what we know to be correct.

So why is it important to acknowledge this?

By now if you read my blogs regularly you know how to lose weight. You’ve heard the words calorie deficit many times. Knowing a calorie deficit is required doesn’t make it easy to lose weight. Exercise has lots of health benefits. That knowledge doesn’t in turn make getting started with exercise easy.

Don’t get me wrong- knowledge is important. Understanding why you are doing things and how they work is vital in making sustained changes. But knowing in itself if only the first step. You need to actually apply the knowledge for it to work. It’s a bit like buying a load of lovely new gym kit. That can be a great first step to getting yourself moving, but it is only beneficial if you do actually put it on and move.

So how do you get to the application stage? I believe there are several points you need to reach:

You need to have a reason, something that you feel strongly enough that it provides the motivation for you to start making changes. For some people this might be push factors – the doctor says you must lose weight for your health or you must lower your blood pressure, other times it could be pull factors – a dress you’d like to fit into, you want to run a 10km. Having a focus or goal can motivate you to apply your knowledge.
You need to care about your reason. Ever tried to do something that you didn’t really care about well? It rarely turns out well, we need to care about what we are working towards – when you do something to please someone else or becasue you’re made to sticking to it becomes so much harder.
You need to have a plan. You’ve contemplated taking action enough to formulate a goal, a reason to make a change. Now you need to plan how that change will be effective. There’s rarely just one thing you can do to work towards a goal, yet sometimes the problem with having knowledge is it can be overwhelming in deciding what you should do. Trying to do too much at once can be detrimental, so creating an action plan helps you implement knowledge with confidence.
You need to have support to action your plan. Maybe that’ a coach / PT – someone who can provide more direction and accountability, or perhaps it’s recruiting people around you to motivate you and hold you to account.
You need to know progress isn’t linear. You won’t see progress and change every week. You won’t hit every target when you want to or expect to. You will have weeks where you feel like you are going backwards. That’s ok.
You need to be flexible. You might need to tweak or change your plan. Knowing what you need to do and having a plan doesn’t mean than things can’t change- you might shift your own goal once you get started or you might find something isn’t quite working. Flexibility will allow you a greater chance of creating change.
You need to understand your own mindset. If you accept that knowledge doesn’t equal application it’ also easy to understand that wanting to reach a goal doesn’t mean you will never sabotage yourself. Understanding that you will have relapses, set backs and things won’t even go to plan but that doesn’t mean you are back to square one will help keep you on track.

If you’ve ever beaten yourself up because you aren’t where you want to be even though you know what you should be doing to get there stop.

Knowing and doing aren’t the same thing. Knowing is desirable. Applying knowledge is a whole other skill set.

Why do people doubt the energy balance equation?

As a PT and group fitness instructor I frequently talk about the Energy Balance Equation. How if you want to lose weight you must have more energy going out than in, if you want to gain weight it’s the opposite and to maintain you want them to be about equal.

It’s essentially the base of any nutrition knowledge, and the first thing anyone needs to get to grips with if they want to work on their nutrition.

Macros, meal timings, supplements. They all have a place sure, but if you haven’t got your calories in v calories out in the right place what time you eat dinner, the amount of protein or fat you eat or whether you take BCAAs or won’t make much difference to your success.

Equally, people will say I had massive success with this way of eating / this method / this diet, and essentially behind each of these methods the fundamental reason for success is the individual found a way of controlling their calories in v. out that was appropriate to their goals and which suited their lifestyle. It can be dressed up in many different ways but that fundamental lies behind every successful method of actively managing food intake.

So why are we so reluctant to believe this?

Almost universally, at some point of another, most people have chosen to believe that either the reason they are not reaching their goals or are reaching their weight management goals is something beyond calories.

No again, I’m not saying that other factors cannot help refine a diet. If you are managing your energy balance well the types of food you get your energy from, when you eat, extra supplements can help you improve energy levels and performance. They do this however building upon the foundation that is you eating the right amount of food for your gapl each day.

If you are over eating by 1,000 calories every day whether you eat those calories at 6 am or 6 pm makes no difference. Whether the calories come from avacado and lettuce or Nutella on biscuits makes no difference. Your body shape makes no difference, your genetic make up makes no difference. You are eating too many calories for your goal. Energy in v. energy out is like gravity- it’s a fact.

So why do we self sabotage on this so often? Because actually, when it’s this simple, we all have the ability to successful manage our food intake in line with our goals.

I think it comes down to two main reasons:

Firstly, people selling their ideas means that very often the calories truth is hidden behind a gimmik.

We buy into products or brands or books and theories that promise us results. In order for those brands to stand out and or you to go to them specifically they need to have a selling point- the thing that makes their methods work.

For that they need to sell you lots of reasons beyond calories as to why their methods work. You do their diet, you lose weight or gain weight and so accept that those methods must be the reason. But behind all of these diets there is still always the energy balance equation, and whilst other factors can also provide benefit you still need that energy balance to be right. What these brands don’t do is actively promote calories as the key. They let is silently do the work in the background and let their ‘unique selling point’ take the credit. Essentially they are like a really bad boss taking credit for what their team does as the ground work!

The second factor is our own emotional response. It’s so much easier for us to think if i can get this one really sexy aspect of my diet right everything else will fall into place. Why else do diet pills appeal to people – you take this one pill, make no other changes and you’ll see results. We like that idea. If I add this supplement that will make the difference. Because accepting that actually we aren’t eating enough or are eating too much means we need to actually work and make real changes to what we eat.

We also often tend to over estimate (for people looking to gain weight) or under estimate (for people looking to lose weight) how much we eat in terns of calories I find. That’s why tracking, whilst unsexy compared to intuitive eating, is useful. Again though it’s harder work and seems very old school and boring next to I eat what my body tells me it wants. Now i’m not saying doing that is a bad thing – but you have to know how to listen to your body to do that, and if you aren’t already getting the results you want I’d suggest you don’t yet know how to listen to your body. The way to learn is unfortunately the very boring learn about calories in v. out until you find the right balance for you – once you’ve grasped that eating intuitively and not tracking becomes very possible because you do then have a better idea of your energy (by which I mean calories) levels.

We all want to think we are different. That calories might be your issue but mine is my metabolism, mine is how I react to certain foods, my blood type and so on. It might be to a certain degree – but that thing is in reality going to be such a small factor in comparison to your energy in v. out. So for many of us is our issue is we are focusing on something that makes a 1% difference to our diet instead of focusing on something that can have a massive difference. We then assume that because we aren’t seeing our desired results we need to delve even deeper into our biology and chemical makeup to see results.

The best way to get results is to stop bullshitting yourself.

Workout what you burn.

Workout what you consume.

Change those to get the result you want.

It’s boring. It’s simple.

That’s why we always look for other answers. We assume it’s so boring and simple and obvious it cannot be the key.

We literally cannot see the wood for the trees.

Successful People Do The Basics Consistently Well. That Is All.

Successful people do the basics well and consistently

Sometimes it’s easy to look at these things and think- they’re too simple there must be more to it than that. The reason I’m not getting the results I want isn’t that I’m eating too little or too much it must be how my body responds to certain foods… and so on.

Now the truth is there are lots of variables to our health and fitness. But, you can take account of all these things and yet if you don’t nail the basics it won’t be effective.

Think of your fitness and nutrition like levels in a game- to get to level two you must master level one. Each level acts as a foundation for the next level. You’ll often hear of things like the nutrition pyramid – that’s the same concept, you need to establish a solid base (in nutrition that’s getting your energy balance right as we discussed yesterday) before looking at macro and micro nutrients, meal timings or supplements will be useful- you basically don’t want to build on a shoddy base!

It’s human nature for us to want to look into the specifics, the idea that little tweaks will be the things that makes everything fall into place for us is tempting. But it’s the little tweaks at the basic level that will first make the difference. Once you’ve cracked those then feel free to move onto looking at the specifics of what and when you eat if you still want to- although you might find that you feel less of a need to.

This week in my fitness group we are looking at some basic principles of fitness and nutrition as a recap / refocus If you would like to join you can add yourself here.

Lockdown Fitness

How are you tackling your fitness during lockdown?

Maybe you’re not. If this is all too much for you right now to think about training or you’re still going out to work everyday and can’t focus time on it that’s perfectly ok, there’s no need to feeling guilty about that.

But if you’re at home, have time and have the desire to keep moving for physical or mental health reasons (or both) what are you doing?

I said at the start of lockdown that for me moving was more about my mental health and routine than getting fitter or stronger. The fact is I don’t have the equipment I would normally have access to, so cannot rain in my preferred way. That meant I took the view that training would be something to make me feel good and that was it. I’d train as and when I wanted and how I felt like at the time.

Last week I started to change that mindset a little, only a little – I’m still limited in what I can do but I also felt ready to get a little focus. I think the issue was that to start with just moving felt ok, but overtime the lack of a goal meant motivating myself to do anything was getting harder. The lack of accountability to a structure wasn’t helping either.

So I got a plan. The plan still focuses on what I can do- run, at home cardio in a small space, online classes and some weights with the two sets of dumbbells I have, but it gives me accountability to a lockdown goal (keep moving and keep positive) and a structure to my training.

I’ve also focused on the specifics within my plan that are going to benefit me most. Not training first thing in the morning was affecting how my day felt it was going and also my attitude towards my diet. Making the first thing I do each day some form of training has improved how I feel in general, how productive I feel and made me want to visit the fridge less often.

I guess what I’m saying is I needed a plan not just for my fitness itself but because fitness is normally so much part of my routine that the lack of plan was affecting my overall day. Putting that plan in place has improved my overall feeling of well being.

Equally, I know for some people the idea of a set plan would be restrictive and in itself may negatively affect them. Some people are loving trying different things, others are trying to recreate what they normally do.

We all enjoy different types of training and react differently to certain types of structure in our training. The key is working out what’s best for you, there’s no right or wrong. When you have identified this you can plan accordingly, either yourself or with a PT who can help you find a way of training that works for you, this can be particularly useful if you’re starting to train in a new type of way as expert guidance at the start can help you train sensibly and effectively making it more likely that you enjoy your training.

However you approach training right now this is a great time to start thinking about what does and doesn’t work for you, what you’re missing and not missing, what you’d like to do when gyms reopen. It’s like having a blank canvas to start again after lockdown which is kind of exciting when you think about it!

Training and Nutrition: Lockdown Edition

So here in the UK we are now coming up to a week into lockdown and a couple of weeks of concerted social distancing. This has without a doubt had a dramatic impact on so many aspects of our lives. I briefly did a blog on working last week but being a fitness related blog I wanted to take a moment to talk about how I’m approaching my fitness during this whole thing.

Obviously everyone will be different and depending what equipment you have at home and what your goals are how you approach your training and diet right now will vary.

For me, like a lot of people I would imagine, I have no equipment at home, very little space indoors and my garden is not really suitable for exercise (it’s all gravel) although there is a car park which I can make use of on the grounds.

So with that in mind I’ve decided to approach my training by forgetting about maintaining strength or fitness, forgetting about trying to improve in any particular way. Instead I’m focusing on just moving and using moving in a way to feel good, stay mobile and benefit my mental health.

My general plan of action is to do a little yoga flow in the morning, go for a short run at some point to get some fresh air (literally 2- 3 km or some intervals / sprints/ pyramids) at lunch time and then do either some body weight training fro 2-30 minutes or an online class such as Les Mills On Demand in the evening. This does mean I’m doing much less each day in terms of exercise but I am still keeping myself ticking over and feeling good.

Stretching and mobility work is going to be really important. I’m sitting a lot more and my new set up of home working is not good for my posture so it’s vital that I stretch more often to avoid discomfort.

My real challenge is going to be my diet.

I normally walk a lot- I do 25,000 steps or so without trying a day. Last week not only did I train a lot less but i also moved a lot less in general. My step count was closer to 5,000 steps.

I’m therefore burning fewer calories. So i know I’m going to need to eat less. I can’t control not being able to go to the gym. I can’t replicate my training at home. I can’t move as much as normal with one opportunity to walk or run each day. I can control how much I eat.

So I’ve tried to cut my calorie intake by around a fifth. The first couple of days that was tough but I am moving less so I’m not lacking in energy from it. This is the strategy I know that will stop me feeling like a potato by the end of lockdown because I’ve done much less than normal and eaten the same or even more .

So in a nutshell that’s my plan – it might evolve, maybe it will change but right now I have a strategy to help me feel like I’m drifting aimlessly or getting wound up because I cannot replicate my normal routine.

What’s your plan of action for the next few weeks?