Health & Fitness

So, you are looking to spice up the Burpee and I have 28 variations for…

The plank exercise is a very common exercise for anyone at any level or ability,…

I doubt you remember this test as the Multi-Stage Fitness Test but you probably remembered…

The sit and reach test is a common test to measure flexibility and specifically the…

Have you suddenly found yourself working from home? Restricted to one form of exercise a…

If you’ve ever done a Burpee, you know exactly what it is! or, have erased…

It’s not easy to keep your child active in a hyper-connected world. Parents are battling…

Core stability is fundamental to not only performance in sport, but to everyday life, the plank exercise also known as a prone bridge is a highly effective core stabilisation exercise. If you are an elite athlete or someone just looking to increase fitness and lose weight or fif you’re elderly or recovering from injury, this exercise and core stability training as a whole can provide significant benefits, these include;

Getting movement ingrained as one of your habits in the everyday things we do is…

Getting movement ingrained as one of your habits in the everyday things we do is the most achievable way to get moving more. Being more active requires a deliberate effort, walking or cycling instead of using the car. Commuting to work on the bike or walking the kids to school are simple everyday changes we can make to be more active.
These six simple changes to your lifestyle can make a massive difference to your overall health and well-being; no expensive gym equipment is needed, only simple lifestyle changes.

There is a common power habit amongst those that lead a healthy lifestyle, enabling them…

Reverse BMI Calculator, calculate what weight you would need to be to reach your desired BMI.

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…

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Circuit Training is the original interval training workout.

Working for short duration on individual exercise stations with fast transitions increase aerobic capacity and overall fitness while burning calories and increasing muscle tone & strength. Circuit training is suitable for everyone and a session will include standard body weight and light equipment exercise that allow for exercise progressions from beginner to expert. Ideal for your first group exercise session or seasoned fitness freak.