Toby’s ‘Heartfelt’ Tip

The human soul, each of us will recognise its existence as well as its mystery. There is in each of us that infinite ability to be touched, to be inspired and overwhelmed by wonder. There is also in each of us a driving force that strives for significance, yearns for intimacy, longs to know and to be known. Such is the power of the human soul. Each man is an individual, made for a purpose, with the capacity to enjoy the miraculous experience of being human. We find personal well-being not through self-seeking but by giving of ourselves to others.

Spiritual fitness is achieved through exercising out capacity to care for and help another person. Too often we are victimised by cultural existence that our work be the sourse of our greatness and purpose. We are taught to measure our success by the money that we earn, the promotion that we achieve or the material goods that we possess. The health of our soul depends upon exercising our abilities in service to others. As we give ourselves away we find purpose and spiritual fitness.

A healthy soul needs to exercise a close loving relationship. Intimacy means being vulnerable to another person experiencing your true self. It means being entrusted with the same self-disclosure made by someone else. Intimacy is one soul touching another. It is the lover listening to and acknowledging his lovers deepest concern and feelings…

Happy Valentine

2012 fitness resolutions tips

While resolutions are well-intentioned, unfortunately most people fail at keeping them. With all the hype surrounding these promises, it’s easy to get caught up in them without really taking them seriously. We live in a throw-away society and even our resolutions, I’m afraid, are not immune. However, especially for promises that include improving our health it’s in our best interest to not take them lightly. So, what’s the secret to successful resolutions? While you can’t wave a magic wand and make your resolution come true, there are some easy steps to take to make it easier to fulfil your promise to yourself.

Choose an obtainable goal. Resolving to look like a super model is not realistic for the majority of us, but promising to include daily physical activity in our lives is very possible.

Avoid choosing a resolution that you’ve been unsuccessful at achieving year after year. This will only set you up for failure, frustration and disappointment. If you are still tempted to make a promise that you’ve made before, then try altering it. For example, instead of stating that you are going to lose 30 pounds, try promising to eat healthier and increase your weekly exercise.

Create a game plan. At the beginning of January, write a comprehensive plan. All successful businesses start with a business plan that describes their mission and specifics on how they will achieve it. Write your own personal plan and you’ll be more likely to succeed as well.

Break it down and make it less intimidating. Rather than one BIG end goal, dissect it into smaller pieces. Set several smaller goals to achieve throughout the year that will help you to reach the ultimate goal. Then even if you aren’t able to reach your final goal, you will have many smaller, but still significant, achievements along the way. For example, if your goal is to complete a 10K race, your smaller goals could be running a 5K in less than 30 minutes, adding upper and lower body strength training to increase your muscular endurance, and running 2 miles with a personal best completion time.

Ask friends and family members to help you so you have someone to be accountable to. Just be sure to set limits so that this doesn’t backfire and become more irritating than helpful. For example, if you resolve to be more positive ask them to gently remind you when you start talking negatively.

Reward yourself with each milestone. If you’ve stuck with your resolution for 2 months, treat yourself to something special. But, be careful of your reward type. If you’ve lost 5 pounds, don’t give yourself a piece of cake as an award. Instead, treat yourself to a something non-food related, like a professional massage.

Don’t go it alone! Get professional assistance. Everyone needs help and sometimes a friend just isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the help of a trained professional. Don’t feel that seeking help is a way of copping out. Especially when it comes to fitness, research studies have shown that assistance from a fitness professional greatly improves peoples success rate.

Limit your number of promises. You’ll spread yourself too thin trying to make multiple changes in your life. This will just lead to failure of all of the resolutions.

On average only about 20% of us keep our New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately, some of the biggest failures are found in fitness resolutions. But don’t let the statistics get you down. By following the tips above you’ll be better equipped to fall into the successful 20% category.

Please don’t hesitate to ask one of the PT’s here for help kickstarting your new year.

Ski fit ready program by Jonathan

Skiing is a great and exciting hobby to have. However a week away skiing can often end in sore limbs and bruised bottoms. Skiing involves muscles you never knew you had. If you are planning on skiing this winter, our personal trainers have the means to prepare your body for the demands of skiing.  It a good idea to start this programme as soon as you can because you can’t practice skiing before you’re on the snow, not only that many of us ski only a few times a year, so we don’t have enough consistency to keep our bodies conditioned for it.

Get your body ready with this ski fit ready program by Jonathan.

Start on the x-trainer using the x-train aerobics program; choose the level that you like to work with for 10-20 min.

Next squats 2-4 sets of 8-15 reps

Lunges 2-4 sets of 8-12 reps

Chin up 2-3 sets of 8-15 reps

Dips 2-3 sets of 8-15 reps

Wobble board squats 2 sets of 8-20 reps

Gym ball wall squats and static hold 2 sets of 8-20 reps

Gym ball crunches

Floor crunches

Row machine or stepper for 10-30 min at moderate intensity

Finish with a good long stretch session.

Lets hit the slopes!

Cross Training with Food

You would never expect one workout to make you physically fit.  A single minded focus on one type of workout – a steady diet of barbells and weight plates, for example, will not necessarily make you physically fit.  For similar reasons, an obsession with a singular kind of food, such as eating tons of pasta or bullying only non-fat dairy products will not give you a well fuelled, well nourished body.

When you incorporate the concept of cross training in your exercise program, you vary your activities so that you develop the three primary factors of first -rate fitness – strength, cardiovascular conditioning and flexibility.  You reap the rewards in many ways, the visible benefits of a balanced physique, the health benefits of a strong heart, lungs and joints, and the psychic benefits of feeling motivated and having the energy to follow through your ambitions.

Cross training in the food department pays the same dividends.  The steady supply of quality fuel from a variety of sources will benefit your appearance, health and energy level.  More specifically these are some of its advantages;

Eating the same foods, even the healthier ones, with a little variety gets you into a nutritional rut.  You would never dream of exercising only one isolated muscle group.  The same disadvantages, boredom, and imbalance, result from monotony.

Cross training will help provide all the essential nourishment.  No single food or food group has all (or enough) of the more than 40 nutrients your body needs to function well.  Including amino acids, fatty acids, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, not to mention the more minute substances science is only beginning to identify.

If you neglect certain foods you will not be able to perform at your best in the short run or optimise your chances of well – being over the long haul.

Dietary cross training will reduce your risk of disease.  Nutritional variety helps you maximise the unique health benefits of food, such as the cancer fighting properties of fruits and vegetables rich in vitamins A and C, or the cholesterol lowering properties of dried beans.

Cross training will keep your eating pleasure high.  Healthy eating does not sentence you to a regime of alfalfa sprouts and rice cakes.  Just as your sports program needs to be enjoyable if you are to maintain long-term interest, so should your kitchen cross training be a pleasure. There are too many foods to choose from in your average supermarket, you have plenty of opportunities to explore variety.  Begin by altering your choices within each food group on a daily basis.

Variety is the key to success. Do you eat the same cereal every morning?  Do you always make salads with iceberg lettuce?  Do you routinely have sandwiches on wholemeal bread? Instead check out the array of other selections you could make.

Amongst your Breakfast Cereal Alternatives are whole grain waffles, pancakes, muffins, porridge, ouinoa, brown short grain rice (with fruit) and millet. The produce section carries a spectrum of salad greens you may not have even tried, things like, romaine, red-leaf-cabbage, Chinese cabbage, spinach and radicchio.

Celeriac is great mashed or roasted with Marsala. Celeriac does not taste like celery and is low in carbohydrates!

Parsnips, try these roasted or pureed, they are also great refried in butter or Olive oil. Swede mashed with carrot and lots of black pepper and salt.

Sweet Potatoes; they make really good chunky chips and one of my favourite puddings, sweet potato pie.

Aubergines; stuffed with mince, avocado, cucumber and sorrel soup, fried courgettes with tzatziki, the list is as long as you want to make it, be adventurous.

As for the bread used in your sandwiches, try sour dough bread, bagels, pumpernickel, raisin and rye will help spice things up a little. But these are things you should not have every day. No cereal grain can be called a complete food so do not make these foods the bulk of your diet. Full fat dairy products are good sources of calcium. Natural fats and oils found in both animal and tropical oils such as coconut oil – cold pressed oils such as Olive oil are natural parts of our diet as is butter, it is simple, it’s just cream from milk. Avoid margarine, it is not a dairy product and it is not a fresh food.

The major challenge of nutritional cross training is to consistently add new foods to your daily repertoire.  If you have been neglecting one of the food groups such as grains, try to add one serving to your line up each day.  For variety’s sake make the same attempt to add one new food to your menu each week.  Permanent change takes time, just as it does in physical training.  So try it and enjoy the process.

See you soon.

Toby your friendly Gym manager!

Abdominal top tips

Abdominals Top Tips

Do you want to lose some body fat and develop some core strength definition? It takes time, discipline, hard work, and most importantly, an entirely new approach to abdominal training. There is no such thing as spot reducing. No known diet will blast fat off a particular body part.  A million sit ups are not going to give you great abs if the rest of your body is not looked after.

Even when you are working your abdominals in a comprehensive weight training program, overemphasizing your abdominals while under working other body parts will only hinder your success. Muscle is a high maintenance tissue. The more you have the more calories your body will burn just trying to feed and repair it. Good abdominals are usually the result of good total body training.

Many of us take in a substantial number of useless calories so one obvious and immediate solution to middle body spread is to eliminate as many of these flab generators as possible.

One strategy that is doomed to failure is drastically reducing the number of calories in your diet. The quickest way to sabotage your waistline is to try and starve it into submission.

Do not think that if cutting a little fat out of your diet is a good idea, then cutting all of the fat out is an even better one. It is not. Fat plays an important role in your overall health, it helps in your recovery from exhausting workouts and ensures that fat soluble vitamins like A, D and E are properly transported and utilized. But not all fats are created equal, for example, Olive oil and coconut oil is better for you than palm and vegetable oils, butter is better for you than margarine. Margarine is not a natural food; fake foods such as this are not a healthier choice. Yes they come from vegetable sources but their seeds are extracted through petroleum based solvents then their oils go through hydrogenation, emulsification, degumming and a load of other processes.

How do you get fat? The simple answer is that by eating more calories than you burn off, and genetics do play a part. Some people are predisposed to put on weight more easily than others – the so-called ‘fat gene’ – because you inherit a body type, a fixed number of fat cells and a metabolic rate just as you inherit other characteristics. But that does not mean you will inevitably become overweight. If you eat a healthy diet and take regular exercise, your body fat should stay in a healthy range. You just may have to work a little harder than others.

So, if your goal is to lose weight, a little movement is better that none, but a lot of movement is better than a little. A good target is one to three hours a week. Note the choice of words: This is something to shoot for, not something you should be able to do over-night. If the most you can handle is 10 to 20 minutes on a stationary bike, well that is great. What you must remember is that the best abdominal workout in the world will not give you well defined midsection if there is a layer of fat between the muscle and your mirror.

Why not take an hour out of the gym or from pounding the sea front and try one of our classes on a Tuesday or Friday morning with Jenny and myself at 11am. These classes are designed to help you develop a strong well aligned body while engaging several muscle groups at the same time. It will build muscular strength in your upper and lower body and we’ve incorporated some exercises to help flatten your abdominals to.

See you soon.

Toby your friendly Gym manager!