Why you should keep a food diary
Hands up, most of us at some point in our lives have been on a…
Professional articles on health, fitness, diet, and sport.
Hands up, most of us at some point in our lives have been on a…
Reverse BMI Calculator, calculate what weight you would need to be to reach your desired BMI.
Salt is very important to our diets, in nature sodium and chloride are found together to make our favourite table condiment “Sodium Chloride” or Salt. Excellent at enhancing the flavour of our foods, it’s also plays an important role in maintaining water balance in the body for muscle & nerve function.
Certain physiological reactions and illness including excessive sweating, burns, server vomiting and diarrhea and kidney damage can lead to a loss of salt in the body which should be quickly replaced as low levels of salt in the body can lead to dizziness, muscle cramps and exhaustion and if not treated may lead to life threatening shock.
Salt however is generally not a problem, it’s in many foods especially processed meats, snacks and fast food. High levels of salt contribute to high blood pressure and heart disease.
Coffee is a habit of many peoples workday starting from when they get up and often continues well into the day but does this seemingly harmless habit that gives us such a boost affect our diet, health or fitness?
Coffee is a stimulant with the stimulation coming from ‘caffeine’ found in many drinks both hot and cold it’s an addictive stimulant. Caffeine however is not only found in stimulation drinks, coffee & tea, it has an active role in many weight loss pills and fat burners! The reason for this is the physiological affects it has on the body which are similar to light cardiovascular exercise without actually doing it.
Creatine pronounced (Kre’ah-tin) is becoming increasingly popular in the health and fitness supplements market. No doubt you’ve heard of it but it’s unlikely that initially you’ll have any idea of what it is or why it could help you achieve more and reach your goals.
Creatine is a supplement to primary increase muscle size, it’s not a weight loss supplement, creatine should be taken as per suppliers recommend guidelines together with a structured exercise programme for increasing muscle size and a balanced healthy diet.
It’s worth noting that it will only have any effect if you do indeed work out, it will have no effect if taken on it’s own without working out, other than increasing the amount of Creatine stored in your body which is useless as you are not working out.
Exercising & adhering to a regular training plan is not for those who just want to lose weight. The need to be fitter, more able with better performance is often though participation is sport or a regular sporting activity. While generic training has it’s benefits and to some degree might benefit anyone, training specific for the activity or sport you regularly undertake or compete in will bring about better performance and reduce the risk of injury.
Personal Trainers are trained in creating training plans with the wealth of exercise knowledge to build effective and specific training programmes that reflect sport specific movements, from the warm up to training muscles to fire in a certain order with maximum performance, to get the most out of your training you need to get specific.
Specific Training = Better Results
Taking part in regular exercise often has it’s barriers whether that’s down to opportunity, finance…
Using protein supplements is often seen only necessary for males or those looking to gain…
Using protein supplements is often seen only necessary for males or those looking to gain huge bulk in muscle. However this is untrue as we all require protein in varying amounts depending on the demands we put on the body. Often the amount of protein our bodies require from training is more than what we can provide in our everyday diet. To enable full recovery of our muscle and maximize muscle growth that will tone and define, protein supplements might well be the answer. Here is a quick guide to protein for women.
If you have been on a diet or if you are on one now, trying to eat healthy of just lose want to lose a few pounds then more than likely you have heard someone say ‘don’t eat late at night’. This could be true for most of us, however it is important to take into context of the individual concerned. The important factor here is when you normally go to sleep and for most of us the following statement will largely be true. If you work daylight hours, going to bed and waking at what most would consider a normal time then eating & snacking past 7pm is a horrible idea, especially if you are trying to manage your weight.
You know this right!? well’ here is why!
Finding the time to do things that you want to and need to do, can be one of the hardest things we have to plan around. A busy job and long hours don’t really help us either, if you want to exercise, if you want to get fit and if you want to start leading a healthy lifestyle then “I don’t have time to exercise” is just not good enough. It’s essentially a decision already made up, the statement implies you have little intention to try or plan to exercise. The truth is the things in life we do, we do because we want to do them and therefore have MADE time to do them. If you want to do something, you need to make the time to do it.
How often do you weigh yourself? Is it a benchmark for your activity & lifestyle decisions? If you are trying to lose weight, no doubt very regularly, you weigh yourself. Looking down at that all important number, if it’s high, your heart sinks and if it’s low, you feel over the moon.
But, are we looking at the right number?
Many factors influence your weight, it’s important to understand what else is going on and how this might affect your weight before we evaluate our performance on one lonely piece of data.
Here are just a few of the benefits of adding coconut water into your diet.…
Starting a new fitness regime and eating healthy can be tough, especially at the start. The hardest part is motivating yourself to get up and go! Exercising with a friend is proven to improve exercise adherence, meaning you will stick to your training for longer and achieve better results. Simply arranging to meet your friend at the gym, the park or at a Personal Training Session will make you emotionally accountable with a social contract, you will be much less likely to let your friend or trainer down.
Is having a personal trainer a luxury? well sure it’s easy to come to this conclusion when for many, it’s expensive and something they don’t have to have. For years personal training has indeed been seen as a luxury reserved for the high income individual or celebrity but that’s just not the case anymore. The personal training market is booming, there are many more personal trainers than there once were, for the consumer this generally means cheaper and more choice when it comes to hiring a personal trainer.
Eating breakfast is nothing new, I’m sure you have heard it all before, it’s likely someone has told you “you really should eat breakfast if you want to lose weight” a smart person they are too. The advice is often not received and I am baffled as to why? It makes no sense not to eat breakfast, well perhaps it’s knowledge that is the problem so let me help fill that gap and hopefully make some better decisions with your diet & nutrition.
Getting out and exercising in winter when the nights draw in can take some motivation, it’s a real test to your exercise regime once the weather becomes unfavorable. Colder weather can prevent you getting out of the front door. and going on you normal run or getting to your local group exercise session. However, we must remember that it’s a god thing! Colder weather burns more calories.
This is because your core temperature remains the same, rarely moving 1 degree away from the average body temperature of 36.2 degrees. In order to achieve this when the environment is much colder than our core temperature, heat promoting mechanisms are activated, all exchange of heat happens through radiation, conduction, convection and evaporation. Your shell acts like a temperature gauge & a warning system for this heat promoting mechanism allowing them to trigger when shell temperature drops.
You are dead serious about running three times a week at 6 am! You’ve thought…
Stretching is thought of as a component of warm ups and cool downs and indeed, it plays an important role in these phases of preparing the body for actions about to take place during a workout and lengthening muscles post workout back towards their original state. However Stretching is not just a component of warm up and cool downs, its a fundamental component of ‘fitness’ thus true fitness is not achieved through muscle building and aerobic exercise alone.
Depending on your goal, be it health related, function or for sport and performance, flexibility training will play an important role in all these. Adaptations to FITT principles, Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type to achieve the desired result.
Do you get the right amount of vitamins? If you have a very balanced and…
You are a fully qualified Personal Trainer, you’re clued up on your anatomy & physiology,…
Each year over the Christmas period the average person will gain 2kg and really it should be no big surprise. We are eating more and doing less, science will tell you if you don’t burn as much as you intake, you’ll be in a calorie positive state and this will lead to weight gain, easy to put on, not so easy to shift.
Most of us are lucky enough to have a break from work over the Christmas period, this historically is also one of the least busiest times of the year for gyms and fitness facilities so it’s clear were not spending this extra time at the gym. Therefore we need to manage the positive calorie balance, this can be achieved through increased activity and more awareness about portion sizes and food choices.
Diet & healthy eating is a hugely confusing area with every book you read contradicting the last one, ditch all carbs, only eat protein or starve yourself 2 days a week. Nearly all complete rubbish, so why do we go for it? Because it’s easier than hard work! When people want to lose weight they pick up the latest diet book, there is a huge market for this stuff and no shortage of so called experts explain their latest diet. In this blog post, I’ll cover one of the most basic weight loss tools which is ‘actually eating’ and often.
My view on diet is that no one needs to go on a diet, unless morbidly obese in which case a massive calorie reduction diet designed by a qualified nutritionist is required. Therefore for the rest of us all we have to do is eat healthy, eat balanced portions and eat often, that’s it!
Ok, we might only go skiing or snowboarding once a year, but let’s be honest, it’s normally quite a hard week or two of physical exercise. It’s an exciting holiday and something we can really only do once a year, so maybe it seems we don’t really need to train for these one or two weeks in the snow. I’m sure many of us have been on a winter holiday before without any real training, including myself, but let’s look at how we can benefit from training before our winter holiday on the slopes.