Training Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Personal Training

18 Feb

5 Tips For Better Workouts

Consistently working hard in the gym or with any exercise you’re doing?

Great! You could be seeing results but sometimes working harder doesn’t lead to the results you’re after, what you need to do is work smarter. Here are a five tips to do that and keep the results coming your way. This is not one of them!!

tips

1. Warm up more effectively.

Your warm up is important to prepare your body to get the most out of your workout. If you’ve a shoddy warm up, you leave gains in the gym. Your warm up shouldn’t take forever. It should raise your core temperature, activate your muscles and mobilise your joints. Do this by foam rolling, light cardio, bodyweight exercises, dynamic stretching and finally ramping up sets using lighter weights until you reach your working weight.

2. Order your workout to do the big movements first before the smaller ones.

Compound exercises (exercises using more than one major muscle group) should be done before the smaller exercises like biceps curls or calf raises. Compound exercises include deadlifts, squats, bench presses, rows for example. These exercises use more muscles, help gain more strength and burn more calories. Do these first when you’re fresh and can put the most effort into them as they take a lot more energy and have a bigger effect on your nervous system. The goal should be to get stronger in these main lifts or exercises.

3. Train the pulling movements before pushing movements.

This relates more to the shoulder joint and in particular a small group of muscles called your rotator cuff, which helps stabilise your shoulder joint. The shoulder joint is the most mobile joint in the body and therefore also the most at risk to injury. Pushing movements rely on and can compromise the stability of the rotator cuff. By doing pulling movements, such as rows, pull-ups, and deadlifts, you’ll warm up and activate the cuff muscles surrounding the joint and help reduce your risk of injury.

4. Plan your core training better.

Core work is thrown into a workout all over the place as people think a stronger core will help everything else or they think training their stomach will make it smaller and shrink the fat there. (I’ve busted that myth in a previous blog post) The big compound moves I mentioned earlier require a strong core, but if we do sets of stomach exercises between sets, we fatigue the core and can’t perform those moves as well. Meaning we don’t get as much out of the exercises that would give us the most benefit. This is bad. Do your core training on a separate day or at the end of your training session.

5. Don’t expect every session to be amazing.

So many things affect how well we feel on any given day. Hydration, amount of sleep one had, what food you ate, hormone levels. The list goes on and on. Some days we feel like crap, our body or a muscle just hurts for no reason and other days we feel awesome. Your training session might require you to do a predetermined number of sets or reps in a given exercise but if you just had a big hen or stag party the day or two before don’t have a meltdown if you’re not at your best. Learn to listen to your body, take down the intensity a couple notches and pat yourself on the back for still training when others wouldn’t make time to try and better themselves.

Use these tips in your next workout and keep getting stronger, fitter and healthier.

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15 Feb

Strength Training For Women

Here are a few points on why women don’t need to shy away from strength training and how it’s so beneficial for all you ladies out there!

It’s great for your confidence! Anytime I speak with women about the benefits of lifting weights, increased confidence has always come up. I’ve seen it in the female clients I’ve trained and any other women I’ve spoken to who’ve started training with weights. When women begin to lift heavy things or do things in a gym they once thought they would never be able to do, the confidence boost is clear to see. That confidence spills over into all parts of their lives also.
It changes a negative mindset to a positive one. A lot of the time women think about losing this much or cutting that out of their diet. “I’ll never be able to do that, I’m not strong or fit enough” This negative thinking doesn’t help anybody. We need to change the negative mindset to a positive one in chasing performance based goals instead. Being able to do more push ups, squats or getting that elusive chin up! When we focus our energy on performing better and eating in a way to help us accomplish these goals, our physique will follow.
It helps gain lean mass and decrease body fat. Gaining lean mass or muscle helps to maintain a healthy body weight and can decrease body fat levels as muscle increases the metabolism and burns more calories. As we get older our bodies lose muscle mass (a condition known as sarcopenia) and weights training can slow this down and offset some of the losses if we actually gain some muscle.
Increased bone density. Strength training also increases bone density and prevents bone loss as we age. Low bone density or osteoporosis increases your chance of breaking or fracturing your bones, which is no fun when you’re young, and can be devastating as you get older.
Because it’s awesome.Being able to lift heavy stuff off the ground, pulling yourself up over a Chin-up bar, being able to jump higher and run faster are all pretty cool. When you know you don’t need help moving furniture round the house or lifting all the shopping you’re in a pretty good place!

For any more info please contact me and make sure you ‘Like’ and ‘Follow’ us on our social media pages here;

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04 Feb

FAT LOSS MYTH SERIES – NO.4

If I want to lose fat, I need to do cardio

Cardio

Fat Loss Reality

Walk into your typical gym and you’ll see that most of them have the guys and girls who do nothing but cardio for their entire session. 10 mins on the cross trainer or elliptical, 10 on the bike, and 10 on the treadmill. One striking thing that becomes clearly apparent is that over a number of weeks doing this type of training, their shape barely changes! Living proof that this steady state cardio isn’t very effective and becomes less effective at reducing body fat the more we do it. These people may become slightly smaller versions of themselves but that’s not really a massive improvement.

Most people will lose a couple pounds when they start any cardio program. Obviously, you’re burning more calories than you previously were. Usually this program becomes a long, drawn out battle with some cardio equipment or much worse for your joints, the road! The initial drop in weight is because the training is new. Things don’t stay that way for long as very soon, the weight loss stops even though you start doing longer sessions. Our bodies are machines of adaptation. As you get better at cardio, your body adapts and becomes more efficient. It doesn’t burn as many calories doing the same activity and eventually fat loss stops. Our bodies can start to use free flowing proteins in our blood for energy and soon our muscle gets smaller or atrophies. This is the worst thing we can do to ourselves, more muscle means more calories burned. Think of any long distance runner you see on TV or even in the park. The top athletes we see running 5km races, 10km races or even marathons like Mo Farah are all very small. Their bodies adapt to the training they do and as a result, they carry hardly any excess weight. The problem is they’ve little to no muscle mass either. Hardly an attractive physique. Look at most of your average road warriors out on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon who don’t have the nutrition plans like the aforementioned elite athletes and although they run or cycle for a long time, the majority are either really skinny or have a nice big tyre around their waists. The truth may hurt the cardio bunnies out there but a balanced training program putting in equal amounts of time to resistance training and different types of cardio result in a better physique than long bouts of steady state cardio on their own.

I feel some steady state cardio has it’s benefits and has a rightful place in someone’s training. I hear people say it’s good for their mind and they feel great doing it but I’ve yet to come across someone who actually looks like they’re enjoying themselves.

Studies have shown that higher intensity interval training has led to more significant decreases in body fat vs steady state cardio and the added benefit is this type of training takes less time to do. Higher intensity exercise can be done a number of ways using our body weight, weights training as well as cardio.

If you’ve read yesterday’s blog post, you’ll now know that strength training is just as beneficial if not more beneficial to your physique. A balance of resistance training, the right kinds and amounts of cardio and a healthier nutrition plan is the way forward. Also, in the case of running, some people just aren’t built for it. If you have flat feet/fallen arches or hyperextended knees for example, your knee joint will not absorb the shock as good as not having these characteristics. Take into account that for every pound we weigh, multiply that number by 4 and you have the force going through your knees at every foot strike. If you weighed 100 pounds, 400 pounds of force go through the knee with every single step. Hardly a great idea for those that weigh a lot more than 100 pounds. Learn the better way to train with The Fit Effect.

For any more info please contact me and make sure you ‘Like’ and ‘Follow’ us on our social media pages here;

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Tune in tomorrow for Fat Loss Myth Number 5

03 Feb

FAT LOSS MYTH SERIES – NO.3

By lifting weights I can turn my fat into muscle

5-pounds-of-fat-5-pounds-of-muscle

Fat Loss Reality

It is impossible to turn fat into muscle. Fat cells become bigger or smaller when we eat too many calories or burn more calories respectively. Weight training or resistance training will help you gain strength or build muscle. It won’t magically transform fat cells into muscle cells. Building muscle is easier for men as they have a lot more testosterone than women. Testosterone is a steroid hormone helping us build muscle, grow hair and it also helps to prevent osteoporosis. Studies have shown increases in testosterone levels after strength training. This is why strength training or lifting weights is good for everybody as it helps us get stronger, build lean muscle tissue and as already stated is great to prevent osteoporosis. There’s no reason for anybody of any age to shy away from weight training, I have trained clients in their 60’s.

The Scales Is A Bad Measure Of Success

Take a look at the above picture. People need to stop worrying about the weight on the scales. Instead, they should start thinking about how many inches they’ve lost or how they feel when their clothes start fitting better. Our muscles are more metabolically active. This means they burn more calories than fat. If one of my clients stays the same weight but has lost inches off his/her waist, arms or hips, that is a success.

Nobody cares what they weigh when they look better. If you don’t build muscle, which is difficult, the fact that you are training your muscles means they are more active. As a result, this will increase your metabolism. You can have a lot of muscle and still have fat covering it if you still take in more calories than you need, a caloric surplus. A successful fat loss plan mixes exercise, both weight training and the right kinds of cardio, with a healthy nutrition plan.

For any more info feel free to contact me and make sure you ‘Like’ and ‘Follow’ us on our social media pages here;

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See you back here soon for Fat Loss Myth Number 4. Can’t wait? Skip ahead in the blog!

To Your Success,

Martin

01 Feb

FAT LOSS MYTH SERIES – NO.1

If I train my stomach really hard and every day, I will lose belly fat and get a 6 pack!

Fat Loss Reality

Everyone has a “6 pack”. The reason it’s not visible on a person is because their body fat percentage is too high. This means the muscle is covered with a layer of fat. In order to lose fat, you must be conscious of how many calories you’re taking in and how many you’re burning. Unfortunately for our friend here, just doing sit ups or training your stomach each and every day won’t make that layer of fat go away. For someone to stay the same weight they need to be in caloric balance or maintenance. If you’ve gained weight we can probably assume you’ve been in a caloric surplus. Too many calories in, not enough burned. For fat loss to happen we need to be in a caloric deficit. More calories burned than taken in.

Let’s take Jane as an example who needs 2000 calories each day to maintain her current weight. If Jane wants some fat loss she can eat fewer calories than the 2000 calories or eat the same amount of calories but burn more through exercise. The best approach is combining both methods. This way, our bodies use stored fat for fuel. Unfortunately, when our bodies burn fat we can’t choose which area the fat comes off. With consistent effort your entire body will become leaner including those areas where you most want the fat lost.

It’s easier to cut down our calorie intake by cutting out the obvious junk food everyone knows they don’t need. Drink more water, eat more fruit and veg which are healthier and fill you up without having a lot of calories and pay attention to the nutritional information on your foods when do your weekly shop.

For any more info feel free to contact me and make sure you ‘Like’ and ‘Follow’ us on our social media pages here;

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Stay tuned for Fat Loss Myth Number 2