LOW COST TRAINING AT HOME FOR A HEALTHY LIFE

Hi,

Well yesterday was a no training day for me, I had a meeting in the afternoon and was pushed when I got back, so thought I would take a rest day, today was ok though, did some instruction this morning and then this afternoon hit the Gym, Pull ups, press up variations and some core stuff was the order of the day, it should have been a Lateral Speed Day, but my Achilles is still playing me up, so I had to change my structure.

After a couple of weeks circuit training preparing your muscles and your connective tissue(Tendons and Ligaments) you have quite a choice open to you.

You could join a Gym, and start to do some proper weight training, get a personal trainer and if you get the right one, the Sky is your limit. Or you can keep training at home, although this can give you a dilemma. Do you go out and buy a whole load of training equipment, such as Barbells, Dumbbells, a bench, a multi gym, or do you just stick to bodyweight training? There is another option as well and that is get some kit that you can use for minimal cost and create your own resistance training equipment.

I have covered the bodyweight option in an earlier blog, there are some fantastic progressions that you can use and you would never need to buy or make another thing and you can get stronger and more powerful than you can imagine, don’t believe me? Just look at a Gymnast, they probably have one of the best Physiques of all Athletes and are certainly incredibly Strong and Powerful. I can name at least 6 progressions for each of the 5 or 6 exercises I named in my earlier Blog, Training for a Healthy life that to reach the final progression for each exercise will keep you occupied for a long time.  However they are for another article.

Here I want to give you some ideas for making resistance training equipment and buying a few essentials but keeping the cost down to a bare minimum.

First of all, a great piece of equipment that is extremely versatile is a rucksack, kit bag or canvas grip bag. It will need to be in a fairly decent state of repair.

Next, you need a quantity of small freezer type bags, best if they are sealable at the top. Also some black heavy duty bin liners and a role of black masking tape.

Fill all the small bags with sand or earth, weigh one of the bags, so you know the rough weight of each one. Let’s say they weigh 2 lb for explanation reasons.

You can now fill the Bin liners, double or triple bag them to a desired weight say 10 kilos each.

Once they are filled, wrap and seal all the bags with the masking tape.

Once you have the bags ready, you can pack them in the rucksack to any desired weight that you want. The large ones give you your bulk and the small ones will add the smaller increments so that you can improve and change the weights for different exercises.

What use is a bag you may ask? Well there is an incredible amount of different exercises you can do with it, here are just a few.

Power exercises

1. Power cleans
2. High Pulls
3. Squat cleans
4. Split cleans
5. Split jerks
6. Push jerks
7. Hang Cleans
8. Power snatches
9. Hang snatches
10. Squat snatches
11. Split snatches
12. Squat Jumps

Strength Exercises

1. Over head presses (all types)
2. Tri- cep presses
3. Floor presses
4. Bicep curls
5. Squats, overhead, back, front, zercher, alternate
6. Lunges
7. Dead lifts
8. Combination exercises.

Abdominal exercises

1. Round the worlds
2. Under over’s
3. Rotational exercises
4. Weighted sit ups
5. Russian Twists
6. Throwing exercises

(We will be adding all these exercises to the website over the coming months).

All with a kit bag, some freezer bags and some bin liners. The weights to do all this lot at different loads would cost you a fortune, so even if you are relatively skint, you can still afford your own gym full of all the necessary equipment.

The other advantage of this is, that because of the movement of the bags inside the kit bag, the lifts can become quite awkward, therefore requiring you to work harder to stabilize the load.

If you want to expand your gym even further, you can nip down to your nearest DIY store, get some plastic piping, cut it to different lengths and fill the pipes with sand and seal the ends, voila! Homemade Barbells and Dumbbells.

One other thing that I do recommend buying if you’re not really a handy man is a good sturdy chinning bar, you can get these on the internet fairly well priced. The rucksack can even be used on this bit of equipment for adding weight to your chins and pull ups when you get good at them.

So if you think you can’t train at home and have the equipment to do all the major lifts, you are wrong and it’s cheap too.

“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds”

Well that’s about it for today, I hope you have a great one.

Steve

CIRCUIT TRAINING FOR A HEALTHY LIFE

Hi everyone,

Yesterday saw us try out our new Watan Challenge for the month. If you did not know, we run a challenge each month on our website, it’s designed for anyone to have a go at and post their times once they have tried it. It’s just a bit of fun, I am the only one who has put up any times yet, so I don’t know whether that is because no one has attempted it or are too shy to put their times up. This month we have picked a challenge that Martin Rooney came up with a year ago (He is a Strength Conditioner from the States) It is a press up challenge with a bit of a twist and is pretty hard, but worth while having a crack at, just to see where you’re at (I failed it by a minute) and was pretty pissed off about it. I will have a go every week this month until I get there. It will be on HERE on July 1^st.

I left off on the last blog having explained a bit about terminology that you will come across for Strength Training, so I am going to go a bit further now and give a brief description how to train for the most popular types of Strength Training. Starting out with Circuit training, which as I stated in my last blog is my preferred method of training for anyone starting out trying to increase their Strength.  It is also a great method to start with Athletes who have had a break and Kids who are just starting on the Strength training ladder.

What is Circuit Training?

Circuit Training is a number of exercises, usually around 6-10 that are done one after another, with a short rest period in between Exercises.

You would perform each exercise at an Exercise Station.

You would start at the first exercise station, complete it and then move to the next one and so on. After completion of all the exercises and a slightly longer rest period you would start at exercise station number 1 again and repeat. You would repeat the CIRCUIT for the prescribed amount of times, normally three, but can be more or less if required.

Circuits are very easy to put together and many can be done anywhere, especially body weight types.

The amount of repetitions that you do for each exercise will vary, depending on what your ultimate goal is, for example if you are after training for endurance, then you may do 15-20 repetitions of each exercise,  or another way that you could do it, would be the use of timed stations. So each exercise station could be for 15-60 seconds in duration or even longer. Another common practice if training in a group is that one of the exercise stations would be chosen as the timing station, so all other exercise stations will stop work when the Timing station has completed the desired number of repetitions.

The Circuit training method can be used for Maximal Strength training, Muscular Hypertrophy and Power Training, so it is not limited to just endurance training, although that is the most common use.

To train for Strength etc, just requires manipulation of the loading of the exercises, repetitions and rest/recovery times (longer rest times are very important for the development of Strength and Power). Circuits for Strength and Power can be very advantageous if the exercises are grouped in the right order, as the rest between working body parts are quite long. To get my drift, if you had an exercise that worked the muscles of the back on Station one, had 2 minutes rest before moving to station two which worked the muscles of the Shoulder and then onto Station three and did a leg exercise, before going on to a back exercise at station four, you would have had 6 minutes total rest for the back muscles before actually working them again, but you have also worked other body parts in between, making this a very time efficient method of training and giving decent recovery to the muscles of the back before working them again. (As I said longer rest is essential for Strength and Power development).

As I am going to deal with the most basic form of circuit, here is a sample Muscular Endurance Circuit suitable for the Beginner or someone coming back to training after injury or long layoff.

Before starting the circuit you should do a Warm up.

The warm up should include some light movement such as Jogging, side stepping, jumping jacks, skipping and some light stretching for all the major body parts. The stretches should be held for no more than 15 seconds per stretch.

Once you are adequately warmed up, you can start your circuit. The first circuit should be done at an easy pace, to get your muscles warmed up for the working circuits.

Ex 1.  The Body weight Squat.  Work for 30 secs.

Ex 2.  The Press up. Work for 30 secs.

Ex 3. Abdominal exercise. Work for 30 secs.

Ex 4.  The Overhead Press.  Work for 30 secs.

Ex 5.  The Pull up. Work for 30 secs.

Ex 6. The Lateral Lunge. Work for 30 secs.

Ex 7. The Bridge. Work for 30 secs.

Ex 8. The Shuttle run. Work for 30 secs.

You should have 15 seconds rest in between each exercise station.

You should have 90 seconds rest in between each circuit

Complete 1 to 3 circuits depending on fitness level.

Finally you should always Warm Down. This should be a 6 minute jog, slowing down to a steady walk.

Finally you should stretch all the major muscle groups for 15 to 30 seconds before getting showered and changed.

You can see from the example circuit above that you need very little equipment and definitely do not need to be in a Gym. The Circuit would be ideal for your home or in a Park. If you wanted, you could mix it in with a light jog or walk.  To up the exercise intensity (effort) you can make the times of the exercises longer or you could reduce the rest times between circuits and exercises, or both.

 To summarise, Circuit training is very versatile and can be done with no equipment at all if you use your imagination or ingenuity or just use bodyweight for all exercises. You don’t have to travel far, there is no expense (only energy) and you can do it at anytime. So no excuses get out there and start today. 

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by 

striking.

You can find information on a whole host of exercises, training sessions, warming up and cooling down on My Website its completely free to register and all the information is free too.

Hope you have a top day!!

Steve

Exercise Terminology And What It Means

Hi all,

I have had a great couple of days on the training front, I have not really done any specific programmes, but I have been doing some filming for my website with my mate Ed. It’s all a bit rough and ready stuff, no fancy editing or anything like that, just around 60 different exercises using Barbells and Kettlebells.  I think we did 30 exercises with each bit of kit. Some was indoor work but the majority outdoor.  It was around 100 degrees when we were doing the filming, so it was pretty uncomfortable and I don’t think my mouth could have been drier if you had poured a bag of cement into it.  Anyway, I will be putting the videos on the site over the next few weeks, some of it is fairly basic and some of it is quite advanced so there are exercises for every level of trainer.

 I would just like to say a personal thanks to Ed for letting me do all the exercises while he stood there and filmed me and then handed the camera over and let me do all the uploading too, as he pulled the “I don’t know how to do it card”...... nice one!!!

Well today I thought I would write about some terminology that you may come across when starting out Resistance Training and also some information about the Importance of Recovery.

Before you start to pick up any external resistance (A barbell or something that you have to work with other than your bodyweight) when you first start out it is really important that you are able to handle your own bodyweight, until this time, it is not advisable to start using any substantial external resistance. I have covered the Exercises that I suggest in the Blog, Training for a Healthy Life so if you need to know the best bodyweight exercises just click the link above.

Ok, terminology.

Exercise: A specific Movement done to strengthen a body part or a movement.

A Set:  A set is made up of a specific number of repetitions of an exercise. Once you have completed the repetitions directed for that exercise, you will have completed a Set.

Repetition: A repetition is the number of times you will complete a specific movement in a set.

To make it clearer, you may see something written down like this.

Squat = 3 x 10. This means the exercise you are going to do is The Squat, you will do 3 sets of the Squat and in each set you will Squat 10 times.

Resistance Training = pretty much anything that uses a resistance to the force of a muscular contraction.  Meaning that by doing a particular exercise it will make you work your muscles forcefully.  An easier description is Strength Training.

Strength Training :  You can train many aspects of Strength, far too  numerous to mention here. But the most common forms that you will probably come across as an everyday trainer are:

Hypertrophy training: which means Muscle growth, this is the most common form of training used by Body Builders and most people you will see training in a Gym. To initiate growth in your muscles, you will normally use 8 to 12 repetitions and 3 to 5 sets of an exercise.

So to build your Biceps muscle you could expect to do a Biceps Curl, 4 sets of 10 repetitions. Or  4 x 10.

Endurance Training: Another common training method. To train endurance means you will use a load, either bodyweight or light external load and work anything from 15 Repetitions upward. For 3 to 10 sets. Endurance means to be able to repeat a movement many times against a sub-maximal load (light load)

Maximum Strength Training: To train Maximum Strength you will need to lift very heavy loads. The normal number of repetitions you will do are between 1 and 6 and you can do anything from 4 -10 sets of an exercise to build Maximum Strength. Basically a one time all out effort against a heavy object or load.

Circuit Training: Circuit training is a series of exercises performed one after the other with a specified rest time in between each exercise. This type of training is very common in most Gyms. It is especially good for those who are new to resistance training, as the loads are normally light or bodyweight only. By using this type of training when you first start out on a resistance training programme you will enable you Ligaments and Tendons to adapt and to be able to handle force in preparation for heavier loading later down the line. This is my preferred method with beginners. It can be referred to as Anatomical Adaptation.

Recovery: This term can be used in a couple of different scenarios.

When you have just completed an exercise for a number of repetitions (A set) you will have a short rest period for your muscles to recover from the effort they have just undertaken. This short rest will allow you to carry out the exercise again, without having to lighten the load due to you being fatigued. Recovery times will vary in between Sets and Exercises depending on what you are training for.

Another time when you will hear Recovery time referred to, is in between Training sessions. For an Athlete who is training many aspects of Conditioning, they may have to train different components of fitness 2 or 3 times per day. So that they do not become too fatigued they will have a certain amount of hours rest/ recovery in between each session.

For the normal human like you and me, recovery between sessions may take 24-48 hours. This bit is very important to understand. Many people who train get this next bit of information wrong and think more is better.  When you train, you put your body through stress. This stress breaks down muscle tissue and causes it damage. You do not improve your performance while you are actually carrying out your training,  In fact you do the opposite.  You get your improvements by having the correct Nutrition and the right amount of rest.  

Your Nutrition supplies the Nutrients for your body to repair itself from the exercise stress that you have put it through when you are training. The recovery period allows these nutrients to get to work to carry out the repairs that are needed. This is called Adaptation. Without the correct recovery in between sessions your performance will regress eventually. 

It is better to undercook than overcook when it comes to training.

I think that will do for tonight, information overload springs to mind. In the next blog I will cover the different types of strength training and the types of loading that you will need to use to get a desired effect.

“Every artist was first an amateur”

Until then, have a good one.

SUPPORTING YOUR NEW NUTRITION STRATEGY WITH EXERCISE

Well here we are again; the last couple of days have been quite hectic, doing my daily work and in my spare time I have tried my hand at E-zine article writing. I have submitted a 1000 word article for review before it can be published, so I am waiting to see if it is good enough for the Web. This writing malarkey doesn’t come easy, so I hope it get’s accepted. 

Training wise I have done a few sessions, one called the Watan 500 challenge which is on our website, there are 3 versions, Recruit, Veteran and Special Ops. I did the Special Ops one on Wednesday and it was a fair effort, 40 minutes of constant work (you can rest when you want, but the idea is to get it done and dusted as fast as possible) I was totally drained after it. Then a speed session on Thursday, where I injured my Achilles Tendon, this is due to the ground being so unforgiving out here, sprinting on concrete at my age? Probably not the best option, but beggars can’t be choosers. Then yesterday was range day as per normal Friday routine, I had a great shoot and think I must have been in the zone, one of those occasions when it all comes together with no effort, it is a great experience when this happens, it’s a shame that it doesn’t happen more often. There are strategies that you can use to get you in to it and I will cover the mental side of things in a later blog.

 But for the moment I just want to cover some of the options open to you once you have sorted out your nutrition and want to take your fat loss and healthy living to another level. I spoke about training for a healthy life in an earlier blog, but just want to give you a more in depth insight into what type of training you can do and what it will do for you.

First of all I will go into everyone’s main obsession when they start out on a new fitness regimen and that is Cardio Vascular Training.

Cardiovascular Training is really anything that takes you Heart Rate to around 60% of its maximum beats per minute.

As a rule of thumb, your maximum Heart rate is 220 Beats per minute, ladies are slightly higher, around 226 Beats per minute (BPM) minus your age. I say rule of thumb, because this is not really all that accurate, but will do for starting out on any training regimen.  When and if you become more interested in your training and maybe want to compete in some sort of event, you will need to be more accurate, but until then this method will suffice.

So that you understand what I mean.  If you are a female and are 20 years old, your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) would be 226 – 20 = 206

So if the same female wanted to get some sort of cardio vascular workout, then she would need to elevate her Heart rate to 206*60% = 124 BPM. She would have to hold this Heart Rate for a minimum time of 20 minutes. Now this is pretty easy to start out on, unless you are really out of shape, where it may feel slightly more challenging.

Just by doing this for 20 minutes is going to help your fat loss immensely, and has the added benefits of improving the performance of your Heart and Lungs along with a whole host of other benefits to be covered at the end of this blog. So you can see from this explanation that you don’t have to go around with a look of horrendous pain on your face and feeling shattered to get some great benefits.

Now as long as you are getting your Heart rate up there, it doesn’t matter what activity you are doing. It can be a brisk walk, a bike ride, a jog, dancing, anything! The choice is yours, just try and stay at the right Heart rate for the required time.

If you did this on a daily basis, you would start to see the results fairly quickly.

Now if you want to ramp up your Cardio training a bit more, once you have started to get used to this low level exercise all you need to do is increase your intensity (effort) Take your Heart rate to 70-75% of max. Using our female example again 206*75% = 154 BPM, if she sustains this for 20 minutes she will increase the benefits by making her Heart work harder and she will burn more calories, she will be a bit redder in the face and breathing heavier and it will take more effort but if she has done a few weeks of the lower level stuff it will not be long before she is comfortable with this effort.

Once she is used to this, she can start to do what is known as Interval training. This is going up another gear again. 

Interval Training is just a name for doing repeated efforts at a higher intensity for a set time and then following the effort up with a period of rest or decreased intensity. For example, she could do 1 minute of work harder than her usual 154 BPM, say up to 175 BPM (85% of max) and then reduce her effort until her heart rate drops to 130 BPM. As soon as her Heart Rate reaches 130BPM, off she would go again up to 175BPM for 1 minute followed by the rest period again. She could start off with 5 * 1 minute efforts with her recovery periods inserted after each effort. It would take about 30 minutes to complete at the most, but she would increase the benefits again and she would elevate the calories that she burns at rest for several hours after she had finished her session.

Two sessions of this type and one steady 20-30 minute session at 70-75% of her MAX Heart rate per week would suffice to get her all the health benefits she needs and will get her burning more calories to accelerate her fat loss.

How do you measure your Heart Rate?

The easiest way is to buy a simple Heart Rate Monitor; they are quite cheap these days, very effective and easy to use. I won’t go into detail about how to use them as there are many different versions.

The other way is to check your pulse at the Carotid Artery Click here to see how.

If you can’t be bothered to check your pulse, you can use what is known as the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). To work this out, if you think of a scale of 1-10, one being no exertion and ten being extremely hard exertion. If you want to work at 60% of max, it will correspond to a 6 out of 10 on your RPE Scale, 80% of max will be 8 out of ten on your RPE scale. Not that accurate, but if you are not an Olympic Athlete it would be close enough.

.

Here is a list of some of the benefits of Cardio vascular training.

1. The heart muscle develops larger chambers for blood to enter
2. Your Heart beats more slowly when you are resting.
3. Every time your heart beats, it will deliver more blood around your body.
4. You will recover quicker after you have exercised.
5. Your Heart works more efficiently. Your lungs will deliver Oxygen more efficiently.
6. Your Arteries will have increased elasticity so more efficient blood flow is achieved.
7. The number of Capillaries is increased within your muscles achieving better blood supply.
8. With the increased supply of blood supplied with each beat of the heart you will get better delivery of Oxygen to your working muscles.
9. Blood Cholesterol Levels decrease.
10. Chemicals called Endorphins may be released causing you to feel happier and healthier.
11.  Your Muscles and joints will become stronger
12. Increased calorie expenditure and higher metabolic rate (the rate at which your body burns calories) means you will burn fat more effectively even at rest.

As you can see, the benefits of Cardio Vascular Training are many fold and you really do not need to do a lot of it to reap the rewards.

On the next Blog I will go into a bit of depth about Resistance training. Terminology and benefits and how you really can become a fat burning machine.

Until then, have a great weekend whatever you may be doing.

FALL SEVEN TIMES, STAND UP EIGHT!!

Steve

GOAL SETTING

GOAL SETTING

Now that you know all about the “BIG ENOUGH WHY"?  It is time to look at how to go about setting GOALS.

First of all remember, that I said your Dream Goal had to be realistic. Well there are some rules that you need to stick by to set effective GOALS.

The best GOAL setting is done using the Acronym SMART.

For today’s example I will use a hypothetical GOAL for someone who is carrying too much body fat and wants to reduce it.

S = Simple & Specific. Try not to make your GOALS too complicated, the more complicated your GOALS are the more difficult they are going to be to achieve. Make them a simple statement but specific to your needs.  “I want to lower my body fat.”  Is a simple and specific statement.

M = Measurable. This means that you need to be able to see the results that you are getting and need to know when you have achieved your GOAL. So with our above GOAL of lowering body fat, we now need to change it slightly, so the statement now becomes:

“I want to drop my Body fat to 10%”

From the above statement you can see now that you have a clear measurable GOAL.

A = Attainable. This means the GOAL should be attainable and challenging. Looking at the Hypothetical GOAL. Is 10% body fat achievable but also challenging? Yes by following the correct nutrition plan and taking the right steps, it certainly is.

R = Realistic. Meaning, whatever your GOAL is, it needs to be realistic. So if you had the GOAL to drop your body fat to 0% then this would not be realistic, so keep it real

T = Time measured. To set effective GOALS, they need to have a time imposed on their completion. Otherwise you could just leave them open ended and never have to meet a target. So now we need to change the GOAL again slightly to allow it to be time measured.  The Goal will now read. “I want to drop my Body fat to 10% by Nov 2012”. This gives a clear indication of when you want to achieve the 10% Body fat target by.

Once you have decided what your GOAL is and you have decided it is SMART. The next thing you must do is have an ACTION PLAN.

The way to put your ACTION PLAN together is to have small stepping stones to your ultimate success.

So from Your GOAL of reaching 10% Body Fat by Nov 2011, you have to split it down into smaller manageable steps.

The way to do this is to work backward from your end goal.

Let’s say that at the moment you are 20% body fat. That would mean that you have to drop 10% body fat in 17 months.

This means you would have to drop around 0.5% body fat per month to reach your target in 17 months time. If you look at the whole figure of 10% it looks quite a lot. So you would need to split your targets down to make them more manageable and measurable to make sure what you are doing is effective.

You could pick a medium term goal of hitting a drop of 6% body fat by April 2012 (10 months) and a short term goal of being at 17% body fat by DEC 2011 (6 months)

Once you have put some short and medium term goals in place, you then need to put in place how you are actually going to get to these targets. This will be your ACTION PLAN that you are going to follow.

So you can make a chart like this:

TARGET GOAL IS 10% BODYFAT NOV 2012

Steps to achieving this.

Interim target is 12% body fat by July 2012

1.        Maintain exercise regimen 4 times per week
2.        Increase my meals to 6 times per day, no more than 3 hours between eating, by doing this it will raise my    Metabolism.

Medium term goal is 15% Body fat by April 2012.

1.        Increase my training to 4-5 times per week from April 2012
2.       Keep measuring my body fat on a weekly basis
3.       Reward myself with a holiday on achieving 15% body fat

Short Term Goal is 17% body fat by DEC 2011.

1.         Educate myself on how to eat healthily.       Start to train 3 x per week for 40 minutes from June 22^nd 2011
2.         Measure my body fat on a weekly Basis
3.         Get support from my friends and family
4.        Cut down my drinking and socialising to Friday nights only

BIG ENOUGH WHY? Because I want to live long enough to interact with my Grand children when I am retired

The next thing involved with your goal setting is that you need to try to pre-empt obstacles to your success and some strategy’s to get round them.

For instance, if you procrastinate – you can make a time management chart and set deadlines.

If you like to socialise and go out for meals with friends. Make a concerted effort to reduce the number of times that you go out.

If you don’t like to train, start gradually and build up. Find a strategy to take your mind off the training while you are doing it.

The more you know about the Obstacles that may stand in your way to achieving your GOALS, the easier you can work out a plan, to get around them.

Although your GOALS are written down, they are not set in stone. There may be reasons that you are unable to achieve a certain target in your big plan.  No problem, all you need to do is identify why you missed the target, and then plan around it and set a new deadline.

When you have written down your GOALS and your ACTION PLAN, print them out and stick them with your BIG ENOUGH WHY? Where you can see them on a regular basis, always reinforcing them to you.

Finally, and this is very important. Always plan for success, but also plan for succession. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ONCE YOU HAVE ACHIEVED YOUR GOAL? So many people set GOALS and once they have achieved them, fall back into old ways, because they no longer have a focus. So if you are going to set some GOALS, please bear this fact in mind.

That’s it for GOAL SETTING, I hope that it may be of use to you someday.  It definitely works, when you do it properly and spend a bit of time planning.

So until the next blog, remember this

Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.

Have a great day,

Steve.

THE BIG ENOUGH WHY?

I hope you have had a great weekend, whatever you got up to. If you are a Dad, I hope you had a great Fathers Day and spent it getting spoilt by your family.

Well I have  had a pretty steady weekend, got a couple of decent workout sessions in, one was a weights session, where I concentrated mainly on Overhead pressing and the other was a speed session. I call the speed session, a lateral session, which means all my movements are either sideways or backward. I do quite a lot of agility training, meaning I do lots of direction changes and starting from different positions. By doing one lateral day a week and one Linear day (straight line sprinting) it gives me a more 360 degree approach to my speed training. I also had a good afternoon on the range on  Friday, had some guys over from the British Army and had a bit of a shooting match against them, unlucky for them ha ha, they lost. The wind was terrible and we spent a lot of time dodging  targets  as they were ripped out of their stands and broken bits of wood were hurtling down range at us, so we called it a day after a couple of hours. We have the odd shooting competitions against the Brit lads or the Americans now and again, and it is always our GOAL to beat them, as we are all retired and past it as far as the forces are concerned.  So it’s good for our ego’s to beat the Young Guns whenever we have chance.

Having mentioned our Goal of beating the younger generation at shooting,I thought tonight I would write a bit about setting GOALS.  Setting GOALS will help you to achieve whatever you put your mind to.

Before you set out to do anything, you are going to have a thought, obviously. For example, you may not have been living healthily and you think, “Right!  That’s it! I have had enough of this bad lifestyle and I am going to set out on a new and healthy path” Great!  Well that’s all it is at the moment a thought. So you have to get that thought to manifest as a reality. You can’t just suddenly have a Healthy Lifestyle, without knowing how to get a Healthy Lifestyle, so you will have to make a plan of how to get there. So in this case, you can use Goal Setting to help you get to the Healthy Lifestyle that you desire.

With all goal setting, the first thing to come up with is a DREAM GOAL, your Dream Goal is personal to you and it is something that you may ultimately be aiming for in your life. One thing you must be aware of, is the Goal must be realistic. There is no point having a Dream Goal that you can never achieve. But on the Flip side, only you know what you are capable of achieving, so no matter how outlandish other people think your dream goal maybe, if you think you can get there, that is all that matters.

Once you have settled on your DREAM GOAL. The next thing that YOU MUST DO is find your BIG ENOUGH WHY?

What is a "BIG ENOUGH WHY"?

“YOUR BIG ENOUGH WHY”? is the reason that you are pursuing your goal.  Without it, you are most likely doomed to failure. When going for a specific goal, there may be times when you come across a difficult obstacle, something that seems totally insurmountable. If  this happens, and your, “BIG ENOUGH WHY”? Is not the right one,  It will be very easy to just pack it all in and convince yourself that the Goal wasn’t really important to you anyway. So it doesn’t matter about it.  You can just pretend that you never had the Goal in the first place, nobody will ever know (unless you have told everybody of course). However, if your “BIG ENOUGH WHY”? Is the right one, it won’t matter to you, that the problem in front of you is huge, the “BIG ENOUGH WHY”?, will drive you to find a way around the obstacle, no matter what difficulties you may encounter, or effort  you may have to put into to crack it.

To really bring my point home, I will take the case of the Guy who got stuck with his arm trapped between two rocks not so long ago.  His goal was to get free, Christ! He cut his own arm off to make his escape. Why did he cut his arm off? Of course, if he didn’t cut his arm off he was going to die. So his “BIG ENOUGH WHY” at that time, was “Because I am going to die if I don’t”  “THE BIG ENOUGH WHY”?, was his driving force to make him do what he had to do to achieve his goal of getting out of that situation. Very extreme but I hope you understand my point.

Another example, not so extreme this time is myself. My dream goal is to be able to have a great lifestyle when I am 55 and choose my own working hours if I want to work at all. MY BIG ENOUGH WHY? Because I want to be free to be able to do what I want with my time in my later years.

That’s why after my work has finished I sit here and do this blog, and work on my website until midnight most nights. There are many times when I feel like packing it in, and can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, but whenever I lose my drive, I revert to my “BIG ENOUGH WHY”, and hence I am sat here typing this, because it is what I want more than anything else for me and my family.

So spend some time and thought to come up with the reason that you may want to do something, it is going to be your motivation until you achieve your GOAL.

Once you have your “BIG ENOUGH WHY”? Write it down, or type it and print it off, stick it by your bed, on your mirror in the bathroom and by your place of work, you need constant reminders of it, every time you see it, it will reinforce WHY? you want to achieve your GOALS.

I hope this has been useful, if you’ve never done it and are about to set out to achieve some goal or other, try it out, I guarantee it will help when things get tough.

In the next blog, I will write about setting goals and how to reach them step by step.

Until then, have a great day and in tone with tonight’s blog I have a saying for you to mull over

“You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.”

Steve

No Blog Today

Hi All,

No blog today, I have been out on the range all afternoon, we were doing some Pistol shooting, which was good, but red hot and the wind was really bad. Hence I am tired out tonight, didn't even get to the Gym.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know, I have just Uploaded my E:book, first proper attempt onto my Website www.ultimateperformancecentre.com. It explains all you need to know about how to do this exercise correctly and how to progress from stage to stage. It has images and Video too.  so if your going to get into training, want an exercise that will build you up rapidly, why don't you go and register and get the book, The Power Of The Press Up.  It's free to Register and It's free to download, can't get better value than that, even if you think it's S**T.

I will be back on Monday, with something new to write about, meanwhile have a fantastic weekend, wherever you are and whatever you are up too.

Steve

Relentless Cardio, Overtraining & Injury

Hi again all !

I have been hard at it the last couple of days in my downtime, finishing a new e-book called the Power of the Press up. It’s a short book about how the Press up is overlooked these days in favour of Bench Pressing  and fancy machines. It has 30 or so variations of this age old exercise, and even though I say it myself, I reckon it is pretty good, ha ha. It will be available free on my website in the next few days.

Training wise, it has been pretty good over the last couple of days, with some Speed training and a small challenge we have put together on the Website called the Watan 500.

Anyway, the speed training is excellent, it gives a great workout, backs up my resistance training and is finished in 40 minutes, not only that, it doesn’t hurt my back, knees or anything else for that matter. Just makes me feel sharp(I know I am not though, never have been) which at my age is all I ask for.

This is a lot different to when I was doing endurance training in my Military day’s, when all I felt was knackered after grinding it out to my limit, and always running injured, not only that, no matter how much strength training I did, I never really got any stronger. Even worse, I got so obsessed with endurance training, I made myself ill, all my targets in the gym started to go backward, which then made me train even harder to get them back. DUH!!! I JUST GOT WORSE. What an idiot. This went on for a few months, eventually I had lost all motivation to train, the only thing that kept me training was because I thought I was just being weak by not going, everything was going backward timings, numbers the lot.  I just felt awful all the time and in the end I just broke down and was ill, couldn’t train even if I had wanted too. This was my wake up call, in those days, I wasn’t really all that clued up on Physiology and all that kind of info, also the information wasn’t as freely available as it is today. I just trained balls to the wall all the time, the harder it was the better. What a mug!! 

Now I am no Olympic athlete and no great shakes at anything, never was and never will be. But now with the knowledge I have acquired over the years, I can train smarter, not harder.  I train every day, and if I feel a bit tired, I don’t feel guilty for not doing anything so I just give it a miss. I train for an hour, that’s it. I very rarely go over it.  But it’s what I do in that hour that gives me my buzz. Resistance training including Bodyweight, Weights and always finish up with something that makes me feel good when I go out of the gym.  All my Cardio comes from my weights and speed training, that’s it. I feel great!

Unless you are training for a Marathon or some other far out endurance event (if you are, ignore this bit) there are smarter ways to help you stay healthy, look fit, and slow the ageing process. I mean how many people can really say, they actually ENJOY going for a long run, and pushing them- selves so hard it’s painful. I used to think I did, until I got smarter.  As I have said, it made me ill, it made me hurt with all the small niggles and injuries that I picked up and I never let them heal and the only time I ever really enjoyed it, was when it was finished. What sort of enjoyment is that?

So here is my advice gained through some negative experience. Try this out.

 These are the Does!

Think about changing your training if you are a Cardio Junkie, especially if you are getting on a bit.

Have a look at Resistance training. Just some simple exercises,

1. The Squat
2. The Lunge
3. The Press up
4. The Pull up
5. The Overhead press

These exercises are just the job to start off with.

 Nail the technique of all these exercises so that your movement is spot on, as I have stated in previous blogs, these are fundamental movements for us. If you need to do a bit of cardio work, that’s fine but 15 minutes after the resistance training is all you need at most.

Do resistance training 2-3 times per week, to get the most from it.

When you are a bit stronger and used to putting a bit of stress on your muscles, think about adding some Speed Training to your programme. Nothing fancy; just ensure that you warm up well first with some dynamic and static type stretching if you have any tight spots.

Here is a very simple Speed type workout to start out on.

For the first couple of times you do this, do not go out at your maximum, keep the speed around 80-85% of your max.

1.  Run hard for 15 to 20 secs. Then walk recovery.
2. Recovery will be around 6 times longer than the effort. So if you run for 20 secs, rest for 120 secs
3. Build up until you can do 9 efforts (9 efforts will remain constant through the whole programme) of 20 secs. The recovery will be, 120 seconds between each effort. Session = 21 minutes total, less warm up time
4. When you can do that, reduce the rest time to 1:4 =80 seconds.  Session = 12 minutes total
5. Build up to 9 efforts again
6. Then bring the recovery to 1:2 = 40 Seconds. Build up to 9 efforts = 9 minutes total
7. Finally bring the recovery down to 1:1 = 6 minutes total time

Meaning apart from your warm up, you will be done in 6 minutes, that’s it.

Keep your speed as high as you possibly can for all your efforts.

The benefits for increasing your Cardio are proven using this type of training, so why go out plodding along for hours, getting bored or injured through repetitive strain when you can get all you need from 6 minutes work 2 x per week.  Plus another 2 -3 hours of resistance training.

Total weekly outlay of time. Resistance training + cardio =  3hours 6minutes (there are 168 hours in a week) it’s not very much is it when you look at it like that?  You will feel so much better for it.

Now the don’ts

1. Do not do Cardio before resistance training..... When you warm up, use some dynamic stretching and some static stretching that prepares you for the movements that you are going to do in your training.
2. Unless you are a beginner, stay away from machines(and I still would not advise using them anyway). The majority of Machines make no demands on all the small receptors that you need to control a free weight, which is what you come across mostly in your daily life, for tasks around the house, going out shopping, moving furniture and especially if you are into some sort of Sport. Machines will get your muscles strong, but do little for your Tendons ,Ligaments and these tiny receptors,  as the machine allows you to lift in a fixed line only (or one movement plane) in sport and daily life we do not move in one plane at a time, we use multiple planes of movement to carry out a task.  If you are only training in one plane and that is supported by a machine, as soon as you come away from the plane you have been training in, you will not be as strong.
3. Unless you want to be one, do not train like a body builder. Train for movement not muscle. Remember body builders are training to show off their physique, not just for a healthy life and daily movement.
4. Don’t take programmes out of Muscle magazines and try to do them. They are not designed for the average person and definitely do not use the so called programmes of the big bodybuilding stars or you will end up injured.

For  information on Stretching, Speed and Agility training and resistance training, there is plenty of free information on my website Click here if you want to have a look.

Well that’s it for now, I hope this has been useful for someone, whether you are new to training or if you are a seasoned vet who pounds out the miles, or a female that just spends hours on the cardio machines. Have a try and see how you go, you have nothing to lose but lots to gain.

 IF YOU ALWAYS STAY CLOSE TO THE SHORE, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT’S OUT THERE FOR YOU.

Have a great day, and if you have any questions at all feel free to e-mail me Here

Steve

WHY YOU ARE OUT OF BREATH AFTER A COUPLE OF MINUTES OF EXERCISE

Hi all again,

Hope your day has been productive and enjoyable.

Well I was struggling to come up with something for tonight that I thought would be of interest to anybody, until I was doing a bit of Speed Training with one of my mates. It brought to mind a question I was asked the other day by another one of the guys I train with and that question was.

“How come when we do this Speed Work, That while I am in motion and running as hard as I can over 40 meters with a walk back recovery several times, I am not that out of breath? But as soon as I finish, I am sucking in air like you won’t believe.”

This got me thinking about the amount of people that think they will start to train, and go out for their first Jog (not the best thing to do, but the most popular) and then in the first 5 minutes are puffing and panting, they then think it is all too hard and either walk or just pack it in.

It is very important to understand your body and the energy systems that it uses to get you physically performing, if the aforementioned budding athletes understood some simple physiology, they would see that what is happening with regards to their breathing happens to everyone, even the fittest athletes, and this is why!

Your body has three energy systems available to it, to allow you to perform Physical Exercise. Here are some fancy names, you don’t need to remember them, just how they will affect you.

1. The ATP/PC System. (Adenosine Tri Phosphate -  Phospho Creatine) who came up with that mouthful?
2. The Lactic Acid System
3. The Aerobic System

• The ATP/PC system  uses stored energy in your muscles.  Any movement that you make that lasts from between 1-8 seconds (these are rough times) are governed by this system. You will notice that just by moving an arm or leg, you don’t get out of breath and this is why. The energy for you to do this, is already there in the muscle. However it does not last very long as I have explained.

• The Lactic Acid System. Once the immediate energy that is there for us is depleted (around 8 seconds) our body has to work to produce more energy if we are going to carry on. This is where the Lactic Acid system fires in. The Lactic Acid system will produce energy for you from around 8 seconds up to around 3 minutes. The way it gets it’s energy is a Metabolic Process called Anaerobic Glycolsis. However a by product of this is called Lactic Acid. If you are not very fit and you work too hard, Lactic Acid will build up quickly and if you don’t slow down, you will come to a complete halt. This is because your muscles become saturated with Lactic Acid. Imagine a fire. When you burn Wood or coal, you are left with ash (the waste product of the fire) eventually when it is all ash, the fire goes out.  The same thing happens to your muscles when they are full of Lactic Acid they stop working.

The above two systems are called Anaerobic (meaning without Oxygen) meaning they do not need Oxygen as an energy source. They are used when you are Sprinting.  100, 200, 400 and 800 meter runners rely mainly on these 2 energy systems.

• The Aerobic System. (With Oxygen) After around 3 minutes of effort, it is your Aerobic system that starts to supply your energy, by sending Oxygen to your working muscles. (I am trying to keep this all very easy to understand) to convert into fuel. The more efficient this system is, the longer you can go at a steady pace and the faster you will recover between intense bouts of exercise.

Pretty cool hey?

Now think about a situation where you have had to run very fast to catch a bus, you sprint like mad, and because you have the speed of Usain Bolt, you just get to it before it leaves, you get on the bus and you are gulping in large quantities of Oxygen to get your breath back. This is because you used your Anaerobic energy systems(the first two on the list) to supply your World record dash to the bus. But now you have to replenish these energy systems and that is done by Oxygen. Hence being out of breath after you have done the work. This is called Oxygen Debt.

Now let's look at our new trainer and how this Physiological sequence makes them think it is all too much.

Off they go on a jog, the first thing that happens is the body will use the stored energy of the ATP/PC system. As I have already pointed out, after about 8 secs, Glycolsis kicks in, and for around the first 3 minutes of their jog, they are using these systems. Now because they have not used any Oxygen for fuel yet, once the Aerobic system starts to kick in, you have to pay back the Oxygen Debt. That is why, when they start their chosen exercise, they will always be a little out of breath after a couple of minutes. However, if they hang in there for another few minutes, the Aerobic system will start to function efficiently and their breathing will become more normal.

How does this help people who have just started to train?

Simple, if they understood the process that their body was going through,  they would realise that all they need to do is push through this short uncomfortable stage and then breathing, although a little higher than normal would feel much more comfortable.

Well I hope that anyone reading this who is going to start out on an exercise programme or has already started one,  now understands why they are out of breath almost straight away and that this helps them to keep on going toward their Healthy Life.

All the best to everyone, see if you can work this little saying out?

“YOU CAN'T  HOOT WITH THE OWLS IF YOU WANT TO SCREAM WITH THE EAGLES ”

I wish I had, when I was a young man!!!

See you in the next Blog.

Steve

WORK BEFORE SUCCESS

Work before success

Now then all,

Hope you all had a great weekend. It has been pretty hot out here, especially training, it drains you and sometimes it would be a lot easier to just sack it and not go, but once I get started it usually turns out to be the right decision, as some of my best training sessions are the ones where I think I am going to perform below my best.

Which brings me to my first point?  A bit of advice I was given by a famous American Strength Coach called Istvan Javorek (not a very American name) at a seminar I went to a few years ago. He said you should always warm up to be ready to train if you are feeling a bit low and not up for it. Make the decision after your warm up whether or not you are going to do your training session.  I have followed his advice since that day and have had some outstanding sessions, where if I hadn’t gone training I would have missed out all together.  So unless you are ill, try it out.  If you get home from work and think you are too tired, do your normal warm up, and see how you are after it.  Even if you decide not to do the session, you will have benefitted from some active recovery and remember this, “EVEN A HALF ARSED SESSION IS 50% BETTER THAN NO SESSION AT ALL.”

What about the title of this short Blog?

Well I want to give some advice and try to save people some hard earned cash.  We are bombarded daily by expert marketers, with this product and that product that tell us things like get SIX PACK ABS in only 5 MINUTES A DAY using our latest fitness machine or Get the latest electric gadget and stick a couple of pads on your body with some wires coming off them and by sitting around while the electric impulses contract your muscles for 5 minutes you will get fit and strong and have the body of a God or Goddess.  Well let me tell you now, they do not work.  If you have read my last few blogs and understand them and believe what I say, how can they possibly work?

The other reason not to buy these products is, it is fact that 50% or more of the people who buy them, no matter how good their intentions are, only use them a few times and then they just become clutter in their House, Attic, Garage or Storeroom, laying there dormant until the next car boot sale or rubbish collection.

Well you might say; many of these types of products come with a 30 day or 60 day money back guarantee that you will see the results that the Manufacturer claims you are going to get.  Surely they wouldn’t make claims like that if they didn’t work, Awesome!! They do this because the marketers know that it is extremely rare that anybody can be bothered with the hassle of sending the product back so they really don’t give a damn about whether it works.

The next good advert for SUCKING IN the uninformed is what is known as FAT SPOT REDUCTION. This means that the product that you are going to buy will reduce fat on your body in a certain area, such as the electronic devices I have mentioned.  Just slap it on your belly for 5 minutes and watch your fat disappear. WRONG. You can’t spot reduce fat. Fat will come off your body over time if you eat correctly, Train correctly and Sleep correctly. That is it, there is no magic bullet! There is very little research to back these claims up.

So if you are thinking of going out and buying something like the training devices I have just written about, that make wild "too good to be true claims", please think again.

To get your Healthy Lifestyle takes work and a bit of planning. THERE ARE NO SHORT CUTS, end of story.  Yes you can TRAIN SMARTER rather than HARDER, but even then you will have to put some effort in.  So please don’t waste your money on commercial crap.

I hope you have a fantastic day tomorrow.

All the very best.

Remember if you have any questions you want to ask me, you can email me here.Click Here

I will leave you with this piece of wisdom;

“THE ONLY TIME WORK COMES BEFORE SUCCESS IS IN A 

DICTIONARY”

Steve

www.ultimateperformancecentre.com

A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE AND THE EFFECTS ON STRESS

Hi all,

Well I meant to post this brief blog yesterday, but events overtook me and hence I am writing it a day late. I was pretty busy at work yesterday, 10 hours, then went and did a training session, which involved a stack of Press ups and core work, filming it all for content on my website. By the time that was done and I had something to eat and to be honest I was knackered, so for the first time in about a month I crashed and burned. However the batteries are recharged now, I have had a great day, got out on the range for 3 hours this afternoon with my colleagues, came back in and trained in my room and now I am starting this.

So what is stress?

Here’s the book answer

It is a substantial imbalance between physical and mental demands placed on an individual and his or her response capability under conditions in which failure to meet demands has important consequences.

In laymen’s terms, I suppose it’s your perception of something that get’s you wound up and flustered. For a soldier it is most likely combat, lack of sleep, not knowing what is going to happen next, being away from home, being extremely hot or extremely cold, working long and unreasonable hours and on the top of all that the worries of not knowing how the family are and there is even more, they have the everyday stressors to cope with too. Pretty tough!!

 For a Mum it maybe being stuck at home with young children, looking after their every need, not getting out when she wants to, no one to talk to until her partner get’s home cooking, cleaning, ironing, you get the picture. 

For the man or person who brings home the cash in these uncertain economic climates, worrying about their job and redundancies, mortgage payments, bills and his boss may be a bit of a tit.

Here are 3 main ways that stress can affect you in the long term (there are more immediate symptoms if the stress is caused by a situation that is happening right now, such as an attack on you, or you have to deal with a crisis.)

1. A decrease in performance; so your work may be affected. Your Sex life may be affected.
2. Mental distress: Become forgetful, irritable and lethargic, can’t be bothered to do anything.
3. Physical distress: High blood pressure, digestive problems, illness, heart problems,

Some people show more resistance to stress than others.

Now to fit all this in with the previous Blogs about a Healthy Lifestyle. Guess what? I have to go back to our Hunter Gatherers yet again, because we are genetically programmed by them, as I keep harping on about.

In times long ago, when all we did was:

• Sleep
• Eat
• Hunt
• Reproduce
• (The kids played)

We had developed a peripheral nervous system that divides into 2 divisions.

1. The Sensory Division (not going to deal with this one)
2. The Motor Division

The Motor Division splits down to a further two parts.

• The Somatic nervous system
• This is the system that is used to create movement (not bothered about this one here either)

• The Autonomic nervous system: nearly there, bare with me please. Split into another two divisions.

1. The Sympathetic nervous system
2. Parasympathetic nervous system

Now we are at the crux of the matter. These two systems are responsible for.

The Sympathetic nervous system

Responsible for, what is known as the “FIGHT OR FLIGHT” effect, this system, when we are under threat or highly stressed:

• Increases the Heart rate
• Blood pressure goes up
• Digestion slows down

Parasympathetic Nervous system

This system is responsible for  the “REST AND DIGEST” effect. After periods of high stress it will:

• Lower blood pressure
• Lower Heart rate
• Increase Digestion speed

When our ancient ancestors lived their pretty simple life, they had short periods of high amounts of stress, like when they were hunting or if attacked by wild animals or other settlements. This would trigger the FIGHT OR FLIGHT response. However after these short stressful situations were over, they had long periods of rest, hence the REST AND DIGEST response.

So the two systems went from one extreme to the other. High excitement to rest, and this is how WE ARE PROGRAMMED TO WORK.

However in modern day, although we still have these two programmed systems, modern day lifestyle doesn’t allow this to take place. Because of all the stressors that I mentioned when describing stress, we generally end up continuously hovering around in the middle ground STRESS ZONE all the time. We hardly ever go into the REST AND DIGEST this is really bad for us

EFFECTS OF EXERCISE ON STRESS

Exercise actually causes stress and acts on the Sympathetic Nervous System “FIGHT OR FLIGHT”. So when you exercise, your stress levels go up toward the HIGH STRESS zone. You are probably thinking that if you are already suffering from stress, why would you invoke more?

Well this is the good bit, once you have finished exercising, guess what? Your Parasympathetic Nervous system “REST AND DIGEST” comes to the fore and your stress levels return to the LOW STRESS zone.  How we were programmed by our genetics to work.

By taking regular bouts of exercise, we can help ourselves to get back into the correct zones at the right times and get out of the middle STRESS ZONE. By doing these regular bouts of exercise:

1. You will sleep better
2. Hopefully eat better
3. Drop body fat
4. Feel better
5. Have more energy
6. Look better
7. Improve your self confidence as you see and feel yourself changing
8. Your Heart rate at rest will lower
9. Your blood pressure will reduce

YOU WILL BE LESS STRESSED OUT

Now if you have been reading this series of Blogs, and are experiencing any of the following problems, (and it is not due to a medical condition).

• Low energy
• High body fat
• Stress
• Poor Nutrition habits
• Bad sleep patterns
• Irritableness

Why not put all of this series together and turn it all around. There is no need to settle for your current situation, all you have to do is get off your backside and act now.

I hope that this series has been informative over the last week.

If you have questions, please contact me on Here

Will return next week, with some other Subject, until then have a great weekend and remember

“WINNERS DO, WHAT LOSERS DON’T”