How to get better sleep - 5 tips part 1

The importance of good quality and sufficient duration sleep is highly underestimated in today’s busy society. 

Research clearly shows the vast majority of the population function optimally on 7-8 hours sleep per night.

There are a very small percentage of people who can thrive on less and it is often the case a person can become accustomed to having inadequate sleep and that becomes their baseline normal.

This issue with this state is that your performance will be decreased and you are potentially setting yourself up for future health problems.

Sleep is a crucial recovery period for the body where tissues are regenerated and especially in the case of cancer malfunctioning cells are broken down by the body. Alzheimer’s disease is also increasingly being recognised as a side effect of poor sleep. Poor sleep duration can also be correlated to a shorter lifespan.

Here are 5 tips on optimising your sleep-

1. Create a regular sleep schedule.

Aim to go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. Your circadian rhythm has a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns hence the feeing of jet leg when crossing time zones. 

Sleeping later on weekends won't fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week  however you may claw back some recovery. If you do lay in aim to go to bed at the same time as a week night though on Sunday to ensure you get back to your routine.

2. Avoid alcohol too close to bedtime

Having a "nightcap" or alcoholic beverage before sleep may seem like a good idea to help you relax. It's sedating at first, so it can help you fall asleep, but can interfere with staying asleep. It will rob you of deep sleep and REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep.

Heavy alcohol ingestion may also contribute to impairment in breathing at night. 

It’s best to avoid alcohol 3-4 hours before bed.

3. Avoid caffeine and nicotine 8 hours before bed 

Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as 8 hours clear your system. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it harder for you to fall asleep at night.

Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly in addition to the effects on breathing. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal.

4. Dim the lights and avoid electronic devices. 

Bright light can promote a feeling of wakefulness, as too can the light from computers, tablets and mobile phones.

Switch off from your electronic devices as much as possible 1-2 hours before bed.

Using candlelight or other softer sources of lighting can also to help create better environment to prepare us for sleep.

5. Take Magnesium before bed

One of the most consistently successful ‘bio hacks’ I’ve used with my clients is for them to introduce magnesium supplementation 45 minutes before bed.

The modern stressors of living and overall poorer food quality tends to leave people depleted in magnesium.

Insomnia is a common symptom of Magnesium deficiency. Magnesium plays a role in supporting deep, restorative sleep by maintaining healthy levels of GABA, a neurotransmitter that promotes sleep. Low GABA levels in the body can make it difficult to relax. 

Magnesium is a cofactor in more than 300 enzyme systems that regulate diverse biochemical reactions in the body, including protein synthesis, muscle and nerve function, blood glucose control, and blood pressure regulation [ 1-3 ]. Magnesium is required for energy production, oxidative phosphorylation, and glycolysis.

Magnesium can also help insomnia that’s linked to the sleep disorder restless-leg syndrome and cramps.

I recommend taking 500-600 mg of a either a magnesium gycinate or taurate 45 min’s before bed on an empty stomach. I will post a more detailed article on the importance of magnesium in future.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3703169/

Further Reading

If you are interested in learning more about sleep I’d highly recommend the book ‘Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker’.

Why your personal trainer should practice what they preach

For me one of the most important things as a personal trainer is to practice what I preach-

That means-

1, Training with consistency.

2, Eating in a way that promotes health both physically & mentally.

3, Crafting a lifestyle that creates good health.

I would absolutely hate to feel like a hypocrite and if I didn’t do these I quite frankly would probably be a rubbish trainer.

Through my 19 years experience I’ve experimented with almost every modality of training, eating, and recovery methods to filter through what actually works and what does not.

The industry is full of so much contradictory information and it can be hard enough for a trainer to navigate this, let alone ‘Joe Public’.

I’ve always made myself my own guinea pig in my research and you can trust when I say I believe it is highly unprofessional to use methods with clients that I haven’t yet first throughly tried myself.

There are several reasons why this is important -

Training

1, From a training perspective if i’m not personally valuing the benefits of training how am I expect to preach the benefits to my clientele?

You definitely want your trainer to be “getting high on their own supply” in this context although this can be a careful tightrope to balance and an exercise addiction isn’t a good thing to strive for either.

My philosophy is to do work in the gym to make yourself stronger & more resilient so you are more capable of doing awesome stuff outside of the gym. The gym absolutely should NOT be the only place that you exercise and I highly encourage all of my clients to find other physical actives to do. Move a little bit each day.

Further to this, how am I supposed to properly coach a client on an exercise if I’ve not done it a lot myself? How would I know how it should feel, its challenges and common mistakes?

Eating

2, From an eating perspective I truly believe in what Hippocrates said: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”.

Food beyond more immediate fuel is literally the raw materials you body will use to recycle its cells every few years. I’ll be blunt when saying if you eat crap you body will be built of crap.

I come from a family with a history of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. I’m not one of those guys who’s naturally in shape and muscle comes easily to.

I’ve had to bust my balls for every bit of progress i’ve made and I feel this has made me a more effective trainer as I can relate better to the average person.

I would feel like a complete asshole were I advising a person to eat a certain way whilst not following these principles myself.

That being said I am careful to steer people away from extremes of eating patterns & behaviours.

I really dislike the black & white mentality of many trainers labelling food as either ‘clean’ or a ‘cheat’, this type of black and white approach to eating will ultimately lead to disordered patterns of eating and potential disorders if not kept in check.

What I instead try and promote is primarily to emphasise FOOD QUALITY. That means as fresh and untampered with food as much as possible. If the food has loads of ingredients and a very long shelf life its likely not the best choice.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good dessert and slice of cake but if i’m going to have one its going to be fresh and made of good quality ingredients.

Mental health is an important a factor in overall health as any other area and having a poor relationship with food will certainly detract from all other areas of your life.

I know from personal experience having competed at a national level in bodybuilding and suffering at times with a much less healthy relationship with food.

One big dirty little secret with the fitness industry is that many trainers, especially the ones of who strive to stay ‘shredded’ year round have an awful relationship with food that goes through cycles of binge, starvation and over-training.

Lifestyle

Sleep and stress management are the two main lifestyle pieces of the puzzle to focus on.

Pretty much the better duration and quality of sleep you have the more stress you are able to recover from.

Training is great, but understand that training is also stress.

Now let’s visualise you have a life-force bar like in the video game.

You have daily outputs that take away from this being at 100 percent that for most people mainly includes work and family commitments. Training is also a stress and will take away from this life-force bar.

A student in their early 20’s who can steep in every day and has relatively few responsibilities is going to have a much bigger power bar for recovery compared to a 40 something busy professional working 50-60 hours per week whilst jugging being a parent to one or more children.

Any training that is added to a persons lifestyle needs to be dosed appropriately for each person to respect that persons life force bar.

Again from personal experience I’ve experimented with many different types, frequency and volumes of training so understand well how much the average body can handle.

I admittedly haven’t always gotten it right but I have learned from my own mistakes which has made me more effective as a trainer.

Wrap Up

In summary I would feel like a charlatan and a fool to recommend certain things If I hadn’t first throughly road tested them myself and as a potential client you should demand this of your trainer too.

If you want someone who is highly skilled and professional get in touch today.

How to have the best workout - 5 tips

Lifting weights is literally a superpower in regards to the positive effects on health & longevity.

It can be one of the most rewarding things you can incorporate into your life. However if some key foundations to your training is missing it can become a frustrating and ultimately demotivating endeavour. Here are 5 ways to avoid this trap and optimise what you are doing-

1, Use the biggest bang for buck exercises

Research shows that exercises that recruit the most amount of muscle also will deliver you the most results and a most time effective fashion.

Your exercising should be built upon a foundation-

• Squatting

• Deadlifting

• Lunging

• Pushing

• Pulling

• Carries

There are many variations of these movements that can by cycled between with each programme and some variations may suit certain proportions better than others.

You can be assured you’ll be making progress if your numbers are steadily increasing on these movements.

Now this is not to say that i’m against isolation exercises, I come from a bodybuilding background and so have extensive knowledge on how to build muscle. Isolation exercises certainly have value for certain muscle groups and for maintaining structural balance.

However in the grand scheme of programme planning they should be tertiary, especially if time is very limited.

2, Set a time limit

Giving yourself a deadline of being in and out of the gym in say 45-75 mins will pressure you to stick to your your rest periods and not faff around getting distracted by other stuff.

Certain rest periods will be required between sets so i’m not promoting jumping the gun on these as the body does need time to recover between sets for optimal performance.

However if the programme is designed intelligently this will be taken into account and the time spent should still be efficient & effective.

3, Elminate all distractions

With increasing discussion of transhumanism; ie being integrated into our technology I’d argue we are already there in the way we are constantly plugged into our phones today. Emails, text’s social media and other apps bleed away our time and concentration.

When you are in the gym I recommend you either put your phone on airplane mode or elminate it completely.

There should be no more input than some music if it helps you to keep focused.

You could use an app, spreadsheet or even paper diary (retro idea eh!?) to track your gym workouts.

4, Have a plan

You should have a programme well established that you commit to sticking to for 6-8 weeks.

Going to the gym and then deciding what you are doing that day is a good way to have a crappy workout. Think of it as a project and that you are committing to working on that project for the allotted time.

5, Have someone to hold you to account

Self motivation is a finite resource.

Having a peer who also likes to exercise or a trainer to keep tabs on the consistency of your frequency and progression is a valuable way to help push yourself harder.

Gym training should be an egoless pursuit when it comes at the expense of your exercise form breaking down but it does require some grit and hard work in order to progress.

You must expose your body to something difficult in order to give it the signal to repair and come back stronger in order to better handle it the next time. This is a key foundation of why the body adapts positively from training.

It Feels Hard So It Must Be Good Right?

A common misconception when comes to exercising is that if it feels difficult or hurts then it must be good.

Yeehaw!

Now there certainly is a niche in society for this type sadomasochistic pleasure and I’m not judging as we all have our tastes, but the gym is not the place you should seek it!

Picture this-

Your Online Personal Trainer gets you to perform a circuit of as many Push-Ups, Sit-Ups and Burpees as possible, changing the exercise every minute until you’ve done this circuit 10 times.

It would feel hard right?

Certainly this would feel difficult even to an experienced trainee, but is it really going to get you closer towards you goals?

Are they giving you this because they like to inflict pain or under the mistaken concept of trying to ‘burn calories’ in the gym!

It is really helping you to move forward when because of fatigue, your form is going to shit and you start to feel your lower back complaining?

A time lost due to an injury can be weeks and sometimes months.

Working hard for the sake of working hard isn’t a smart strategy.

John managed to burn 20,000 calories in this weeks WOD…

Exercise itself is a STRESS and this needs to be prescribed with CARE & CONSIDERATION of the persons current level and progressively increased over time.

Thats the whole point, and why exercise works. You expose your body to something challenging which gives you body a signal to get stronger in order to better handle this experience next time it happens.

It’s very easy to just ‘smash’ someone in the gym but this isn’t necessarily good.

It’s finding a good balance in the ‘prescription’ of the programme which is a bit of an art.

Now don’t get me wrong in thinking if you come work with me you won’t be working hard. All of my clients work very hard but this effort is aimed strategically into exercises that are appropriate for their level, mitigate the risk of injury and will give them the best bang for buck of the time invested.

The plan must fit the person and the goal

Things feeling hard is relative

Perceived effort and fitness can be very specific. You can make the most elite athlete participate in a sport/activity that they are unaccustomed too and they are going to feel fatigued very quickly.

Lance Armstrong would be knackered after a few minutes of vigorous Zumba and Micheal Phelps would gas quickly in a Muay Thai Class. You get better & more efficient at what your practice.

The time you spend in the gym needs to fit what are trying to achieve and leaving with a good sweat and pounding lungs isn’t a good measure of progress.

• Is a full splits necessary for most sports? Nope

• Do you need to be able to run a half marathon in order to build a healthy cardiovascular system? Absolutely not.

• Do you need to 3 x bodyweight in order to be able to play with your kids safely? Negative!

Aim Your Efforts Wisely: Strength Is The Answer

Through my 17 years experience training clients, research and self experimentation on my own body i’ve honed down the principles that actually work.

Your time in the gym should primarily be strength training. This is not a place to think about burning calories.

Your effort’s in the kitchen are what counts to ensure you are loosing weight if that is your goal.

It’s far more efficient to not eat calories than to burn them off.

The best way of thinking of strength training is-

“Armouring the body”

I promise your skin will be look better than this little fella…!

Your super structure; your bones, tendons & ligaments get stronger and become more resilient as does your muscle.

This doesn’t mean you get ‘bulky’ though, especially for Women. Muscle isn’t that easy to grow, it takes years of specific training, eating and patience to build anything resembling a bodybuilding physique.

This armour building is important for everyone from the average person raising a family to the professional athlete.

1, If you are picking up your squirming 15 month old toddler its important your hips & back are strong & mobile.

2. If you are a Jiu Jitsu player and you want to be able to invert safely without messing up your neck you need to ensure the rest of your back & shoulders are feeling connected and moving well.

3, If running is your thing then its crucial that your foot can efficiently absorb impact and transfer force into the ground. A poorly functioning foot it’s akin to driving around on a flat tyre and with duff shock absorbers.

If there’s one thing the covid era has highlighted for us very comfortable ‘1st world people’ its that life can be tough and sh*t happens. It’s a sound investment to prepare your body to deal with the challenges that life throws at you be it Physical, Mental or Immunological.

Why Choose Online Personal Training?

Why Choose Online Personal Training?

If you needed to repair your car you’d use mechanic to ensure a good job is done right?

Similarly if you wanted to get the fastest results learning how to play a musical instrument you’d employ the services of a music teacher.

The same rule applies for exercising.

The gym can often be a confusing and intimidating place and it’s easy to waste time doing exercises that will not deliver you the best results.

Exercising can potentially be a particularly injurious endeavour is not done properly. It’s not ‘natural’ to be able to step into a gym and know how to properly train. In itself it is a skill that needs to be practiced and Online Personal Training will accelerate your learning.

Whether you are a complete beginner, someone with some experience of exercise but stuck in a rut or a athlete who wants to maximise their performance online fitness coaching can really be a game changer in the results you get.

Life is busy, especially as you age and take on responsibilities of a family and a higher positioned career. This inevitably will lead to more limited time to exercise and you want to ensure that time is well spent right?

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How Online Fitness Coaching Works with me?

I will have an initial consultation with you either online or in person if you are local. We’ll discuss your goals and how we can structure solutions for your particular needs.

From here I will provide you with a questionnaire to get some additional information and then with this I will create a custom training plan for you and also provide nutritional guidance as appropriate.

The training programme will have clear instructional videos linked into it with descriptions and tips on form.

I provide email support at all times to answer your questions, access videos on your exercise form and we’ll have a check up email every 2 weeks to ensure everything is moving forwards.

I also offer one to one direct zoom/teams sessions to trainees who’d like to exercise under my watchful eye.

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What makes my Online Fitness Coaching superior?

With 19 years of coaching experience I have bundle load more experience than personal trainers. I have worked with people from a diverse range of backgrounds.

I also have a deep personal experience of transforming my own body with very average genetics and competing nationally in bodybuilding and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I have filtered through figuring out comprehensively what things work and what do not.

I am passionate about delivering a high level of coaching that I would expect were I investing in Online Personal Training.

I will teach you HOW to exercise, not just give you a programme and let you get on with it. I will give you feedback on exercise form and help you refine what you are doing so it delivers you the safest and most effective results.

Your programmes are tailor made to your goals, there are no cookie cutter routines.

I developed an excellent reputation as an online trainer whilst working at Ultimate Performance (UP) for 3 1/2 years, being head of the online department. I initially took over the online training department when it was a mess and turned it around, putting systems & standards in place and leaving clients very satisfied.

Brazillian Jiu Jisu Breakdown - Caged 6, Fight City Gym 5/12/2021 - Second Fight

Second Fight

The first fight was a tough one! I just learned this week my opponent was awarded his purple belt which make complete sense as I felt his level was ahead of mine.

Although I was happy with my survivability and wasn’t submitted it’s of course never a great feeling to loose your first match.

I was determined to do better in this second one.

For this second fight, I felt a lot sharper. I think at 40 years old I’m bit slower to start than some. I’ve noticed I tend to perform better from the second round of sparring onwards.

I need to take this into consideration for future competition warm-up’s and have a light sparring session before the actual event to get things kicking. (Like a race car who needs warmers on his tyres?!?) lol

Observations from the fight in chronological order as the fight progresses-

• I missed the opportunity early in the fight when he first sat down to guard. I should have controlled him the ankles rather than above the knee which allowed him to stand up again. Had I done this I would have been in a much better controlling position to set up a stack pass or leg drag.

• When wrestling on my feet I was standing too square. I need to keep practicing adopting of more a wrestling stance. This will allow for better movement and quicker changing levels.

• When wrestle I need to look to impose more dominant grips, grab the hands of my opponent less. I need to establish bette under-hooks & head control and then work my attacks off of these. I’m still too static in standing, I need to start connecting techniques and build a chain of attacks.

• I was standing too square when I got swept, should have been based down and left leg should have been back in combat base.

• I did well to capture both of his legs to stop him coming up but I should have capitalised off of this and initiated a straight ankle lock more quickly, maybe with a cross grip.

• As he escaped this I did well to come up and get top position. In the past I’ve been lazy to accept the bottom position. This would be ok in a submission format if I had good attacks off of my back but in a point scenario this would be terrible.

• I shouldn’t have allowed him that second sweep, I created a hole in the back right hand side for him to bring me down.

• His legs were really long, it felt like I had a mile to get to his hip line! lol

• When trying to pass guard I kept making the mistake of trying to grab both legs, I should have gone 2 on 1 and focused just on controlling or pinning one leg to set up a guard pass.

• Again did well recover position and get on top again.

• My double under pass worked well. I turned my right shoulder down to take away the space. I maintained good pressure to retain that position in spite of him framing to recover.

• From there I build upon this by getting good head control to consolidate the position. The wall helped me to stop him from hip escaping away very well.

• I used my left knee well to block and follow his hip line to stop him getting a knee inside.

• From side control I was patient to maintain pressure and set up the gift wrap. I really like this as an avenue to taking the back.

• I use this gift wrap grip to stop to stop him from recovering to turtle and then followed him nicely as he rolled away, taking his back and getting my hooks in.

• I should have have flattened him out for the choke. I was aware time was running out and instead decided to attack the left arm.

• I probably could have closed a triangle on him as my right leg was on the wrong side for an arm bar. I need to figure that positon out more, I’ve started getting a rear triangle in sparring more but the technique is still not fully uploaded yet to become automatic.

• I was running out of time but I should have been able to finish the attack on the arm.If I wasn’t getting the rear triangle I should have brought my right leg over his face to pin him down which would have stopped the roll.

• In addition in order to break the defensive grip between his two hands more effectively for the arm bar I should have used the blade of my forearm to attack more at the wrist line. This would have stopped him being able to reconnect the hands after I separated his hands the first time. I would of then be able to get better extension of his arm for the finish. You can hear my grunt of frustration as this happened!

Closing Thoughts

Overall I really enjoyed the Caged 6 completion. It was run really well, with good communication on what time you were fighting.

The refereing seemed very fair and balanced which you don’t always find at every competition.

It wasn’t too big of a competition and because if was inside Fight City Gym it has quite an intimate feel old school ‘dojo storm’ feel to it.

I will look to do more of these smaller intra-club competitions in addition to bigger competitions to keep sharpening my skills. Depending on what craziness is going on in the world in 2022 i’ll be doing many more competitions next year.

There is so much to improve on. I am humble to be able critically self access and work on this weak spots. My Jiu Jitsu journey continues to be exciting and I am very grateful to have become part of the team at Fightzone London this year.

Happy to receive any feedback, please leave in the comment either here or on Instagram.

Brazillian Jiu Jisu Breakdown - Caged 6, Fight City Gym 5/12/2021 - First Fight

My First Fight

One Sunday 5th of December I competed in my first Jiu Jitsu competition as a Blue Belt at Caged 6 in Fight City Gym London. It was also the first time representing London Fightzone.

The rules were No-Gi, 5 minutes, submission only, white and blue belt attacks allowed (no heel hooks, knee bar, toe hold, slicers etc) and if no submission it would go to a referee’s decision.

My category was small, I’m master 2 at 40 years old so they moved me up to Master 1, 73.5kg where there were more competitors.

I lost this this first fight to a refs decision. This fight was a banger, @everythingsk had subbed his first opponent in just under a minute and has done loads of competitions so I knew this was going to be a battle. He moves great and sets up submission attempts from all sorts of angles. I had to defend a guillotine, 2 D’Arce chokes, my back being taken and an arm bar. All credit to him, he’s definitely currently a level above me.

Emotionally for the fight I felt pretty calm all day and then about 15 minutes before the fight I felt my fingers start to get cold. This is a sign that my body was producing more adrenaline and bringing to blood into my organs in preparation for danger. I think initially I was a little slow off the start, feeling a bit foggy. It will take some more competitions to get used to this feeling again.

Things I learned from this fight-

• I need to be more active on my wrestling, switching from high to low more. I’m slowly gaining confidence in this level changing but theres loads of scope for development. I shall continue to embrace the grind of wrestling classes.

• I could have been more aggressive to connect my hands on the double under-hooks. If I had done this I would be able to use a body lock takedown which I am reasonable effective at. @jshnrth classes at Fightzone will help me improve these two points.

• My Guillotine defence was good but when I escaped I should have keep a connection to slow him down and take the attack to him rather than creating so much space & squaring up in guard.

• I need to improve my turtle escapes, shouldn’t have waited so long and let him take my back.

• As soon as I excepted the D’Arce choke attempt I should have switched my half guard to offence and looked for a sweep or submission.

• My posture was too high when he suceesfully completed the second double leg takedown on me.

• Overall I was happy with my survivability.

• Guard retention is definitely improving a lot, inverting has become much more comfortable and I’m framing better rather than grabbing my opponent or going for a sub in a bad position.

  Second fight will be posted soon.

  Really grateful for the support from my team as many of them came down to watch.

  I’m happy for any feedback in the comments, I’m here to learn.

Are You Sabotaging Your Results In The Gym?

“Spending time doing bicep curls and tricep extensions without concentrating first getting as strong as hell on compound movements is like try to do algebra without first mastering the basics of arithmetic & multiplication”

I can step into any commercial gym and observe the amount of people who are actually training effectively is a very small minority. 

It takes focus and a bloody persistence to get under a heavy barbell week after week and squat it to a good depth for repetitions. It’s far easier to jump on a leg extension and get a deep burn in your thighs bro.

Doing weighted chin-ups, feeling like your shoulders are going to rip out of their sockets as the extra kettlebell you’ve attached around your waist fights to pull you to the floor is a lot more gruelling than doing some bicep curls. Though the weighted chin-ups much more likely to add size to your arms.

Pulling a heavy barbell off of the floor whist remaining disciplined enough to keep a good back position is far less pleasant than sitting on a machine to do some leg curls.

Doing a Turkish getup where every part of your body is straining to keep in position is going to add much more of a cap on your shoulders than doing some lateral raises with a weight that’s less than the average large handbag. If you are a Jiu Jitsu person this will also carry over much better to your sport.

Life is busy, people work 40-60 hours per week, have family commitments so realistically will only be able to get to the gym on average of 3 times per week for 45-75 minutes per session.

You must ensure that your limited time is well spent if you really want to maximise your results.

To hell with the latest fitness magazines “Grow Huge Arms with This 6-Move Superset Workout”. These publications are shit and are notorious for recycling the same bullshit articles month after month, often contradicting themselves every other print. 

Common Excuses For Avoiding Compound Movements

Excuse 1

“Oh but I don’t know how to do these lifts safely”

Bad Squats

This is a common cop out.

Listen, if you want to learn to drive effectively you’d invest in driving lessons with a good instructor, the same applies to exercise.

It’s not a good given gift that every guy instinctively knows how to lift weights properly, although some would like to think the contrary.

If the gym is something you are going to seriously invest 3-5 hours per week it makes sense to hire a good coach to teach you the proper fundamentals.

Excuse 2

“I don’t have the flexibility or I’m too old to do these lifts”

This granny thinks your excuse is full of shit, click on the picture to go to an article about her..

The beauty of doing exercises with a full range of motion is over time this will actually help you build flexibility in these ranges of motion. Its a loaded stretch!

Its also possible that due to the nature of your desk bound job that you’ll need to invest some extra time daily in a stretching routine to help counteract the 8-12 hours sat slumped over a desk. 15-20 minutes daily can make a world of difference!

I understand that we all potentially have some structural limitations. Height, past history of injuries etc should be taken into consideration when designing an exercise programme.

There are also certainly variations of exercises that can suit a persons proportions better than others. For example a taller lifter with long femurs may get more out of a Front Squat when compared to a Back Squat.

There are few injuries I’ve come across in my 16 years as a trainer that’s stopped someone from being able to perform some version of compound exercises. I’ve worked people with history of back, shoulder and knee problems.

As with above it makes sense if you are concerned what variations are best for you to invest in a coach to help you design the most effective exercise programme for you.

A Credit To CrossFit (yeah, really)

Credit where its due

People know i’m not a big fan of Crossfit. Their kipping antics are embarrassing and use of olympic lifts for multiple repetitions to the point of fatigue and form breaking down is a damn liability. On the plus side it certainly keeps plenty of physios in business though…

However I give prop’s where its due and one of the best Crossfit gym’s in London focuses primarily on getting people very strong first using good form over pure WOD performance and their results in competition are excellent because of this. 

Crossfit in general has helped get the trend back to using big compound movements and this is why many a CrossFit enthusiast will be sporting quite a muscled physique (drugs aside). I also do like the community spirit they have been able to build, having a peer group to help push you do work harder than you would alone can certainly be a valuable tool (provided they encourage you to use good form).

Back To Basics, Back To Big Lifts

When I first started training I bought a copy of The Encyclopaedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was before the big expansion of information the internet, the cringe days of dial up modems.

What this book laid out well for me was the importance of building a foundation using compound exercises. Arnold cautioned about moving to too complex a workout regime before first building this foundation (yes he was a steroid taking adulterer, but he certainly knew a thing or two about building muscle).

This was further reinforced by my own personal training qualifications from WABBA.

Most average people have both limited time and no aspirations of becoming a competitive bodybuilder on stage, thus negating the need to overly specialise their exercise programme. Monday should not be national chest and biceps day.

If you really want to make some progress in the gym drop those puny 5 kilo dumbbells and get ready to lift something heavy. 

A Caveat On Loading

Now when I say heavy it needs to be scaled to your current level of strength. It's not use trying to load the bar with a weight you have no chance in hell of controlling with good form, attempting this is EGO lifting. If you struggle to squat to a good depth with with 60 kg’s then you probably will need to begin at say 40-50 kilo’s and build from there.

If you are unable to do even one single chin-up where you start from a dead hang with your arms fully extended and then pull yourself up until your chest touches the bar (none of this half rep shit where you don’t unbend your arms fully) then your journey to a chin up might need to start with just doing negative repetitions (the lowering phase of the movement).

A Sample Programme

Below I outline a programme that’ll sticks to the principles of basic and big. It should suit most people and gives you the ideas of the principles I’m talking about.

If you work hard by progressively adding weight to the bar I guarantee that you’ll add some muscle and strength by using this.

If you are training to add some size then make sure you are eating enough, you must have a slight surplus of calories in order to give your body the raw materials to grow. Don’t worry about taking some magic weight gainer shake, save your money and just eat more real food.

Videos are linked into the exercise names

Monday - Programme A

A1 Barbell Squat- 4 Sets of 6 to 8 repetitions, 3010 tempo, rest 120 seconds between sets

A2 Medium Supinated Grip Chin Up- 4 Sets of 6 to 8 repetitions, 3011 tempo, rest 120 seconds between sets

B1 Barbell Forward Lunges Alternating 3 sets of 16 to 20 reps total, 2010 tempo, rest 90 seconds between sets

B2 Single Arm Dumbbell Row  3 sets of 8 to 10 reps per arm, 3011 tempo, rest 90 seconds between sets, 15 seconds between arms

C Side Plank on Elbow 2 sets of maximum time per side, 90 seconds rest

Wednesday - Programme B

A1 Barbell Deadlift 4 Sets of 6 to 8 repetitions, 2010 tempo, rest 120 seconds between sets

A2 Close grip Barbell Press 4 Sets of 6 to 8 repetitions, 3010 tempo, rest 120 seconds between sets

B1 Barbell Good Morning 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps, 3010 tempo, rest 90 seconds between sets

B2 High Incline Dumbbell Press 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps, 3010 tempo, rest 90 seconds between sets, 15 seconds between arms

C Bent Knee Hanging Leg Raises 2 sets of maximum repetitions, 90 seconds between sets

Friday - Repeat Programme A

Following Monday- Repeat Programme B

Following Wednesday- Repeat Programme A

Keep rolling the days over between the two programmes.

notes

*The tempo outlines the speed of each exercise. Every exercise has 4 phases to it: the lowering, time between lowering and lifting, lifting and time between lifting and lowering. If we use the example of a Incline press at a 4010 tempo, in this case you lower the bar to your chest for 4 seconds and lift the weight for 1 second. If we look at another example in this case a seated cable row at a 3011 tempo, in this instance you release the cable from your chest towards the machine for 3 seconds, immediately pull the handle back to your chest for 1 second, then finally pause with the handle on your chest for 1 second. What you need to remember with the tempo of each movement is that you should be lowering the weight at a slower speed than you lift it.

*A note on Pairings. A1 - A2 denotes you do these exercise together. Programme A as an example you complete 1 set of the Barbell Squat; rest for 120 seconds; then you complete 1 set of Chin-up. You again rest 120 seconds and start the Barbell Squat again. In this example, as there are 3 sets you complete this rotation 3 times.

Have you considered personal training or online personal training to help optimise your training? Get in touch today to hear what options are available to you.

The Hierarchy Of Fat Loss

Type in how to loose fat into a search engine and you’ll get a flood of articles telling you different 100 different things.

Most go out on massive tangents, either trying to sell you some magical fat loss product focusing on minute things that probably won’t help fat loss at all unless you first have the fundamentals in place.

Here are 3 key fundamentals to stick to-

1, The Energy Balance Equation And Creating A Calorie Deficit

At the most basic level we have the 1st rule of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed so it has to be accounted for.

In order to loose fat you must be expending more energy than you are intaking.

but the insulin’s brah!?!….

A word on Insulin

Now there are people out there who claim that this law doesn’t apply and that its all about keeping your insulin levels low. These same people a lot of the time with also be promoting the idea that the solution to your fat loss woe’s is in a pill or powders to help control your insulin levels. Beware these snake oil salesmen!

Now It is true that when someone does get to a certain level of obesity that they might experience some insulin resistance. Obese people often develop pre diabetic symptoms and eventually type 2 diabetes. Research has shown is that type 2 diabetes can often be reversed by loosing a lot of weight.

For someone who is obese, a lower carbohydrate approach may well be the best initial approach to loosing fat. Swapping out processed heavily calorie ladened foods for more whole-food options is a simple way to quickly cut back on calories. As average chocolate bar contains around 200-250 kcal compared to a piece of fruit that typically is 80-100 kcal.

I do not recommend one type of diet, the best diet is one that you can stick to for a prolonged period of time. Consistency is what really counts.

A common pitfall is underestimating the amount of calories you are consuming. Type 2 diabetes of not, if you put someone in a completely controlled environment and ensure they are in a deficit they absolutely will loose weight.

 Protein needs are increased during a diet in order to help protect lean body mass and increased fibre has been shown to help keep the feeling of hunger at bay. So the age old advise on eating your meat-fish & greens is a good foundation to build upon.

In order to create a calorie deficit you can do this via changes to your diet and also increases in activity to expend more daily calories.

If you want to exercise for the sake of burning calories I’d recommend choosing something steady state with minimal movement complexity. Brisk walking, cycling or a cross-trainer are good options.

The energy cost of pure strength training is largely overestimated and that it also requires an extra level of movement complexity. In my opinion weight training under fatigue whilst trying to keep your heart rate up is a quick recipe for injuring yourself. The cost to risk ration is too great, it’s too easy for form to start breaking down.

This is a nice segue onto the reason it is however important to still strength train whilst loosing weight-

2, Strength Training To Preserve Lean Mass, Not Burn Calories

One of the issues when creating a calorie deficit is that your body doesn’t just discriminate to only burning off body fat. It will also start to break down muscle mass and bone density over time unless you give it a reason not to. Lean body mass is an important factor in how many calories your body burns at rest.

The common quagmire I see repeated dieters get into goes something like this-

The dieter creates a calorie deficit and looses some weight, but because strength training wasn’t incorporated concurrently a proportion of the weight they lost was lean body mass. After a time they resume their eating and steadily put the weight back on but this time with less lean body mass.

This repeats for several cycles and eventually you get a person who has high body fat, very low lean body mass and thus a much lower energy requirement to maintain their weight. They literally can end up being able to put on body fat on the amount of calories that a few years ago would have simply maintained their weight.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Don’t despair, there is a way to counter act this!

This is where the role of strength training comes in. Strength training gives your body a signal to hold onto lean body mass even when in a calorie deficit.

Calorie deficit + Strength training = Greater proportion of fat loss

I’d recommend 3-4 strength training sessions a week when in a calorie deficit to optimise your results For a complete beginner I’d recommend to start with 2 and gradually increase as you become accustomed to it.

3, Better Sleep, Better Fat Loss

Better sleep helps you loose more fat

In a study, 2 groups of people were put on a calorie deficit. One group in addition to this had restricted sleep. Both groups on average lost a similar amount of weight. However, for the participants who got only 5 1/2 hours sleep the amount of fat mass relative to lean body mass was significantly reduced (1.3 pounds of fat and 5.3 pounds of fat-free mass) compared to the group who got 8 1/2 hours sleep (3.1 pounds of fat and 3.3 pounds of fat-free body mass).

In addition to this the sleep restricted group had increased levels of hunger as their Ghrelin levels (‘hunger hormone’) increased.

It is well known that when we are sleep deprived we often get more cravings for foods, most commonly something sweet. This is a potential landmine when it comes to sticking to a diet if you are hungry and craving sweet things all the time.

Wrap Up

Focus on these three key areas first before considering further optimisation of what you are doing, anything else is just a waste of time and money.

Your Health Is Your Greatest Investment

The saying goes-

“You don’t know how important health is until you don’t have it anymore.”

Life today is increasingly busy and stressful. Work is demanding more hours and onto of this you have family commitments you have to attend to.

A huge amount of jobs today are sedentary or requite only light activity. Correlated with this is super easy access to calorific food, increasing levels of obesity and lifestyle related illnesses.

The number of deaths caused by heart and circulatory diseases in under 65s is increasing, peaking at 18,668 in 2017, up from 17,982 five years earlier. This represents a 4% rise in the last five years.

Just over a quarter of the worlds adult population is insufficiently active.

Much of the illness and poor health we experience today is lifestyle related, due to lack of exercise combined, poor management of stress and an overabundance of calorie dense food.

Life up until very recent history except for a very small percentage of wealthy population was physically hard. In order to survive you had to graft as there were few labour saving devices, even washing your clothes by hand took some effort!

Our bodies over a very long time have adapted to work best in an environment where they are physically challenged. We are designed to move and our health expresses itself positively when we do.

A Very Personal Story

I come from a family with a history of poor health. My father died of heart disease when I was 14, from his third and final heart attack. He was obese, ate poorly, didn’t manage his stress well and had poor sleep. It was the perfect storm for illness.

His first ‘warning’ heart attack when I was 10.

A second and much larger one that also led to a stroke hit him when I was 11. He was resustitaed a number of times and he was then intensive care for a number of weeks.

Following this his battled with poor health for another 3 years but aside from some physio therapy to help him to learn to walk again after the stroke he didn’t really make any other changes.

I firmly believe had he taken more proactive measures to improve his health by exercising, eating better, managing his stress and sleeping better he would have lived for many more years than he did. He died at 63 years old.

A brother of mine from the same side of the family died at the age of 55, he too was obese.

Exercise has a massive positive effect on your health

Just a few benefits include

Improved longevity

Reduced risk of heart disease

Improved sleep

Improved regulation of blood sugar

Positive effect on mental health & stress

Helps fight age related mental decline

Reduce risk of some cancers

Reduced waistline & visceral fat

Improved bone density

Improved sexual health

Increased muscle mass

Improved coordination & balance

So with all the irrefutable evidence at to the importance of exercising you should hopefully be asking yourself how much is your health worth to you?

What sort of investment is better than one into your health?

Can you realistically afford a health episode which could potentially make you unable to work for a number of months?

Its your responsibility to take preemptive measures and start investing in your health.

Where does personal training fit into this?

When your time is limited you want to ensure that the time you invest is spent wisely.

Just 2-3 hours of focused training in the gym per week can be enough to reap most of the health benefits of exercise.

In addition to this I encourage incorporating small daily habits to up your overall level of movement in addition to this. These an be simple things such as waking more, using the stairs, having a stand up desk. Creating these habits as part of your lifestyle is a key component.

Joining a gym with a vague idea of exercising is a recipe for failure and frustration.

If you were to make a financial investment you would seek the help of a financial advisor. The same logic should apply to your health & fitness and you should seek expert advise from an experienced trainer on how to exercise effectively.

Your health is Your Greatest Investment.

Five Reasons Why You Should Strength Train

In order to invest time in something for me its important to understand the WHY behind it.

Here are 5 reasons strength training is a worthwhile investment-

1, Increased Bone Density

Osteoporosis is something that we all are susceptible to as we age. Your skeleton is the superstructure of your body and naturally over time the mass of your bones decreases. With this decrease comes an increase in the risk of fractures. This is even more acute in early post menopausal women.

Strength training sends signals to your body to increase bone density and help reverse this decline.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6279907/

2, Increased Muscle Mass

Another factor of ageing is progressively over time loosing muscle mass. Even without any training we naturally reach a peak in our mid to late 20’s. From then on it gradually deceases slightly every year and tends to hit a tipping point for most people in their mid to late 40’s (the dreaded middle age spread!) where the metabolism has slowed quite a bit. Consequently it becomes much easier to put on body fat. Increasing your muscle mass helps keep your energy demands higher even when resting and also provides a whole host of other positive knock on effects on your hormones, metabolism and even gene expression.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3117172/

3, Improved Coordination & Balance

Strength training is a practice of resisting gravity, be it through the use of barbells, dumbbells or even just your bodyweight. In order to perform these exercises you have to practice coordination & balance. This helps protect you against falls, especially in the elderly population. When factored in with increased bone density and muscle mass this is a triad of benefits that help make your body more resilient to injury.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3885846/

4, Improved Cardiovascular Health

Your heart is made of muscle and studies have shown that strength training can help improve you strength of your heart. This is applicable both to healthy adults and people who have already experienced heart attack or stroke. Strength training improves the balance in myocardial oxygen supply and demand and systolic blood pressure. Current research points to a combination of strength & cardiovascular training to be best to optimise heart health.

https://insights.ovid.com/crossref?an=00005768-201903000-00014

https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2010/10000/Changes_in_Arterial_Distensibility_and.38.aspx

5, Reduced Waist Line & Viceral Fat

Storing body fat around your waistline which involves also storing it as visceral fat around the organs is associated with numerous negative health consequences. A 12 year study on a cohort of 10,500 men showed that time spent resistance training is more effective at reducing body fat stored around the wasting when compared to same amount of time doing aerobic training. This will be due to a combination of improved energy demand at rest and positive effects on energy utilisation.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.20949

Five Tips To Build Muscle Naturally

In order to see results from your time spent in the gym your training has to be based on a foundation of solid training principles.

Here are 5 of those key principles-

1, YOU MUST GET STRONGER

In order to build muscles naturally (without steroids) you must focus primarily on progressively overloading your muscles. In a nutshell, get very strong on large compound exercises. Any high level natural bodybuilding competitor will be strong as hell relative to their bodyweight. In the hierarchy of what stimulates muscle growth the most, progressive tension overload trumps other forms of training for the natural trainee.

For the average person who is only going to make it to the gym 2-3 per week it makes sense to use your time efficiently and thus focus your training primarily on getting stronger. The aesthetic changes in body shape will follow this, although you’ll also need to create a calorie deficit if your goal is to simultaneously get leaner.

2, USE VOLUME INTELLIGENTLY

Volume in a training context is the number of exercises and sets that you use.

The amount of volume that your body can tolerate is governed by how you are recovering.

Things that will affect the amount of volume to use include-

• If you are just lifting weights.

• Are you doing other sports?

• Work extremely long hours.

• Have high levels stress.

• Have poor sleep.

• Age

• Cartain medical conditions.

There is definitely a sweet spot of volume that will generally work for most people and adding more to this will be a game of demising returns.

The role of a great coach is to be able to access how well their trainees are recovering and adjust their training programmes volume accordingly.

One factor that has unfortunately muddied the waters is the widespread use of anabolic steroids by people you see in Hollywood, Elite Sports and on Fitness Magazines. You simply can train harder if you are ‘supercharged’

Ultimately the volume you use harking back to the previous point has to create an environment that you can progressively improve on.

Warming up to do 2-4 sets of a exercise where you can perform a new personal record is far more productive and valuable than doing 10 sets of something with a submaximal weight “chasing a pump”.

Now don’t get me wrong, i’m not a Mike Mentzer Heavy Duty Method person who only recommends 1 set to failure, but volume does need to be used intelligently.

3, TRAIN ACCORDING TO YOUR AGE & ‘TRAINING AGE’

As discussed above your age will dictate how you train, if someone really looks after themselves they can potentially handle a surprising amount of volume. Exercise is a form of 'stress’ and the more ducks in a row that you have with your recovery the more you can probably do. The human body when looked after and fed well can become very resilient.

A beginner can progress in a pretty linear fashion for a long time as there is so much new stimulus.

The longer that you train you more you’ll need to adjust things to ensure continued progress, if it wasn’t like this anyone could build up to a 200kg bench press.

There are many variables that can be adjusted and then are the main ones-

• Exercise selection and order

• Sets & Reps

• Range of motion

• Tempo.

  This is again where an experienced coach is a valuable investment to help guide you on these adjustments.

4, SLEEP BETTER

Exercise provides the stimulus but when you rest is when the adaptions take place.

Sleep is a crucial part of this recovery process and there’s no side stepping this.

Better sleep will help you build muscle, reduce your body fat, reduce your incidence of many diseases, improve your resilience to everyday stress and reduce cravings & fluctuations in energy levels.

Ideally you want to aim for 7-8 hours of undisturbed sleep per night.

Check out my 15 Tips To Better Sleep article for more advice.

5, CREATE A SMALL CALORIC SURPLUS

In order to build muscle optimally you need to be in a slight calorific surplus. Now this isn’t permission to eat everything in the house, it only really requires a surplus of a few hundred calories per day.

It’s better to aim for a slow gain of muscle. For a natural trainee large, quick increases in body weight mean that you’ll also be adding plenty of body fat a the same time.

With this, it’s important to accept some gain of body fat as it’s very difficult to add purely lean tissue.

If you the gain you make is 60-75% lean tissue you are in a pretty good place. So say for example you add 6 kilo’s in a year and 3.6 to 4 kilo’s of it is muscle thats a really good rate of gain. The 2 to 2.4 kilo’s of body fat added can easily be taken off with a dieting phase.

I’d recommend to track your food intake so you can be more consistent with your daily intake. As your add muscle you will gradually have to add more calories in order to support this new bodyweight. This will also empower you with knowledge to be able to make easy adjustments to your eating when you reach a dieting phase.

All of the above will work much better when your sleep & stress management levels are optimised.

Three Common Exercise Myths Debunked

Today I cover three common exercise myths

1, Doing yoga or pilates will give me long, lean muscles

This statement is as nonsensical as saying that jumping off a cliff is going to make you sprout feathers.

1, Length

How long your muscles may look largely depends on your genetics.. Some people have muscles with long muscle bellies that insert all the way into the joint and others have short muscle bellies with a longer tendon. Added to this the length of your limbs goes a long way to governing if your muscles look ‘long’.

Now i’m a bit proponent of training exercises with a full range of motion in order to provide optimal stimulus however this isn’t going to magically make them look longer.

2, Lean

How lean your muscles look is dependant on how low your body fat is If you create a calorie deficit whilst doing any form of exercise over time you will start to look leaner. Yoga or Pilates do no contain some sort of magic formula to help this aside maybe help you to create a calorie deficit.

2, Doing more cardio is the best way to burn off your love handles

To put it simply, to ‘burn’ off your love handles you need you create a calorie deficit.This deficit must then be maintained for a sufficient time period in order to see changes.

Now this can certainly be done but adding extra activity however the amount of calories you burn through exercise is much less than most people think, in fact it’s a woefully inefficient approach.

For example; a Mars Bar contains 260 calories, which would take 2-3 minutes at most to eat. Burning 260 calories would take you around 25 minutes on a bike or elliptical trainer.

Now i’m not anti cardio and some i’m important for health benefits however the point I’m trying to make is that its much more efficient to create a calorie deficit through changes to your eating than it is by adding extra cardio for the goal of burning calories.

If you generally want to have a higher daily overall energy its better to incorporate little habits such as walking more, taking the stairs, using a stand up desk etc.

One method to make an impact on the number of calories you are intaking if you still want to snack is to make better choices and replace your usual foods with lower calorie alternatives.

A pumpkin spiced latte (308 calories) on the way to work every morning can be replaced with a black coffee or coffee with skimmed milk (10-20 calories with skimmed milk). The donut (200-400 calories on average) or muffin (395 calories) at the office every afternoon can be replaced with have a protein yogurt (140 calories).

The bottom line is you must align your eating behaviours to fit your goals, you must take ownership.

3, Strength training will make a woman ‘bulky’

Even in 2019 this is a commonly held perception that if a woman does strength training that they will suddenly wake up looking like a bodybuilder. There are two main reasons why this doesn’t happen-

1, Lower Testosterone Levels - Testosterone is responsible for much of the growth of muscle mass in the body.

There is a study that compared three groups of men: one group who trained, one group who trained while supplementing with exogenous testosterone and one group who supplemented exogenous testosterone but didn’t train. At the end of the study the group who took the exogenous testosterone but DIDN’T train gained MORE muscle mass than the group that trained without supplemental testosterone!

Women typically have on average 20 times less testosterone than men (Female range is 6 - 86 ng/dl, Male 270 - 1100 ng/dl) meaning that the potential for growing muscle mass is significantly reduced.

Testosterone is the reason why you saw the East German female olympic team in the 70’s & 80’s take a turn to look decidedly more masculine and suddenly break multiple world records.

2, Less Muscle fibres with potential for large growth - Woman have more slower type-I and -IIA fibres in females compared with males that parallels the lower contractile velocity in females compared with male.

A caveat to this is women who are at the very top level of athletics & sports. This really isn’t a good demography to compare yourself to. These women by nature of selection to excel in their sports are probably gifted with higher than average testosterone levels & number of fast twitch muscle fibres and thus their bodies do have more growth potential. A good book further on this subject is The Sports Gene.

For the average woman this is not something to worry about. Now it’s not to say that you won’t gain any muscle mass, and in order to achieve a ‘defined’ look you definitely have to add some muscle to give your body ‘shape’.

When commencing strength training initially your scale weight may actually increase, however trust the process and keep going. Provided you are creating a calorie deficit your levels of body fat will over time reduce. Muscle is denser and thus takes up less space than fat so even if you ended up the same weight if you had more muscle and less fat you’d be smaller in your clothes. It’s about what you are composed of, not what you weigh.

If you liked this article get in touch and i’ll be happy to post some further articles debunking common fitness myths.

Eating For Fat Loss Does Not Have To Be Boring

A common misconception about eating when your goal is fat loss is that the food needs to only consist of bland chicken breast or fish with steamed vegetables. Who’s seen the fish & a rice cake video? (click this for funnies)

The only thing limiting how tasty your food it is you choosing not to add any flavours to it.

If you are in the habit of smothering your food with full fat mayonnaise, drizzling it with butter, oil or some other high calorie dressing then its definitely something you’ll need to track as calories but that’s not to say you can’t use them. Simple herbs & spices add such negligible calories its not worth tracking.

Flavour your food with herbs & spices

Herbs & Spices not only add great flavour to you food but there is research to suggest they provide some health benefits.

If you are completely clueless in the kitchen and i’d recommend investing a cookbook or use some online recipes to get some ideas. Many modern cookbooks will provide the macro’s for the recipes but this can also be done by entering the recipe into the application.

Being relatively experienced preparing quick healthy dishes what I do is choose a regional theme that encompasses a variety of herbs & spices. Some simple combinations I use are -

Indian: Cumin, Coriander, Garam Masala, Turmeric, Chilli powder, Garlic, Ginger, Tamirand

Mexican: Coriander/Cilantro, Thyme,Parsley ,Tomato puree,Cumin,Chilli

Thai: Thai 5 or 7 spice, Lemongrass, Fresh Lime or Lemon, Garlic, Ginger, Fresh chilli

Chinese: Chinese 5 spice, Garlic, Ginger, Cloves, Soy sauce, Cinnamon

Italian: Basil, Oregano, Garlic, Tomato Puree, Black Pepper, Sea Salt

French: Garlic, Black Pepper, Herbs de Provence, Sea Salt, Paprika

Supermarkets and ethnic food stores have a wide variety of readily mixed spice combinations for you to choose from.

3 options to avoid overcooking your meat

No it doesn’t have to be bland grilled dry chicken breasts and white fish! Here are some ideas to make your sources of protein taste better.

George Foreman Grill- This is much better than using a regular grill to cook you meat and will leave it a lot juicer.

Stir Fry- Cut the meat finely then quick stir fry it, This will help avoid the meat getting overcooked and drying out.

Slow Cooker - Stick a load of slow cuts of meat in the slow cooker in the morning before work, then set the timer for it to be ready for when you come home. Most have an option to go to a ‘warm mode once its cooked to avoid overcooking your dish. This is by far the lowest labour intensive method relative to the number of portions you can prepare.

Stir fry your veg instead of steaming

Steamed vegetable to be honest can be quite boring flavour wise and its something I rarely do.

I prefer cutting a medley of different vegetables and making a stir fry which is you combine with a protein source such a meat or fish gives you an easy one pot recipe with less washing up afterwards. Cook the meat or fish first and take out and place to the side in a bowl. Next stir fry the veg in the juices and any additional flavourings you are using then fold the meat or fish back in a the end. This helps avoid overcooking it.

Invest in a large wok and you’ll be able to make 3-4 portions at a time which can see you through to lunchtime and possibly dinner the next day.

Here are a few vegetable combination ideas incorporating a variety of colours. To this you can add any herb’s & spices to your tastes-

Onion, Broccoli, Red Sweet pepper

Green Beans, Carrots, Chestnut mushrooms

Asparagus, Beetroot, Kale

Cauliflower, Spinach, Tomatoes

Spring Onions, Pak Choy, Shitake Mushroom

Chuck it all in one pot (Hotpot)

Certain cultures especially in Asia have been doing this for centuries. In a nutshell you put everything into one pot and let it cook. The only thing you need to get right is the timing of adding the ingredients. 

I don’t use any special pot for this, just one appreciate for the number of servings I am making. If you are a former poor student with honours you may have even learned the trick of using a rice cooker for this function!?

Get a pot, fill to half way with boiling water and add either a stock cube or fresh stock. This is your base. There are many ways to flavour your base. I personally prepare stock and then store it frozen in ice cube trays for easy future use.

You then put the meat/fish which if cut finely should only take around 3-5 minutes to cook. Next the noodles for another 3-5 mins and finally vegetables for a further 3-5 mins. Putting the vegetables in last helps avoid over cooking them and decreasing their nutritional value. Add herbs & spices to taste. 

This by far is the least labour intensive option and you’ll have very little to wash up afterwards. Again you can use a large pot to make multiple portions. 

Wrap Up

How you view eating goes a long way to govern whether you’ll be successful at sticking to. If you view eating healthy as a chore you will fail.

Invest in nourishing your body properly and you’ll be surprised how much more energetic you will feel.

Improve Your Form, Improve Your Results

Swinging weights, or/and using partial range of motion are two common sights I see in the gym.

If your form regualarly breaking down then you are not optimising your results as training with a full range of motion has been shown to deliver superior results..

Here are 4 strategies to help improve your form-

1. Select A Weight That You Can Use Good Form With

One of the most common things I see in the gym is people trying to use too much weight on an exercise. Guys are most often guilty of this.

Gaining strength is a slow process, if you try to increase the weight too quickly your form will definitely go out the window. You’ll use a partial range, growth potential will be reduced and from my experience your likelihood of injury will increase.

Win small battles a rep at a time over a long time period. This is what compounds to great levels of strength.

Keep your ego in check and your strength training focused on it being your own battle. No one around you is impressed how much weight you may be swinging around sloppily and its possible you may end up on an episode of Gym Fuckery.

On this theme rather than trying to increase the weight too quickly-

2. Work within a repetition bracket before increasing the weight

Jumping up to the next dumbbell or adding extra weight to the bar can often be too steep a progression.

Say for example you are able to perform 3 sets of 10 with a 10KG dumbbell. The next dumbbell is most likely 12.5KG’s. That’s a massive 25% increase! You are definitely initially not be able to perform the same amount of reps with this new weight and trying to do so will force you to loosen up your form.

Whats better is to work within a ‘rep bracket’.

You don’t increase the weight until you have reach the high end of the rep bracket. The weight then increases and you’ll work from the low end of the rep bracket, again slowly chipping away at adding reps until again you are at the top of the rep bracket.

Example-

Dumbbell Row, 4 sets of 6-8 reps (24-32 total reps), 180 seconds rest

Week 1, 15KG x 8, 15KG x 7, 15KG x 7, 15KG x 6 = 28 reps total

Week 2, 15KG x 8, 15KG x 8, 15KG x 8, 15kg x 8 = 32 reps total

Week 3, 17.5KG x 6, 17.5KG x 6, 17.5KG x 6, 17.5KG x 6 = 24 reps total

Week 4 17.5KG x 8, 17.5KG x 7 17.5KG x 6, 17.5KG x 6 = 27 reps total

Week 5 17.5KG x 8, 17.5KG x 8 17.5KG x 8, 17.5KG x 7 = 31 reps total

For some exercises, especially isolation exercises where the increments for increases in strength are smaller you may have to broaden the rep bracket further to say 8-15 reps.

3. Slow down the tempo

Sometimes in order to truly master a movement you’ll need to perform the movement more slowly to get a feel and find the right groove for the exercise. Add pauses to parts of the rep where you are struggling the most with control. For example if you are getting to the bottom of the squat then collapsing forward use less weight, and add a 2-3 second pause at the bottom. This will allow you to get a feel for how to keep tension in this position and build isometric strength.

A good learning tempo I use with my clients is 3121. That’s 3 seconds on the way down, 1 pause a the bottom, 2 seconds on the way up and 1 second pause at the top.

Once once you have mastered the movement you can then return to a more common tempo of say 3010 and work on steady strength progression from here.

4. Keep a couple of reps in the tank

Another common scenario is form breaking down when training to failure.

For long term progress avoiding training to failure too often is a smarter approach especially on multi joint exercises. Instead work on a steady rep bracket progression as described above keeping a rep or two in the tank.

On the last set you could work to push it a bit closer to failure with your form still being good, but go by how you feel on the day and use this sparingly.

Wrap Up

Improving your form will go a long way to not only improving your results as a muscle worked through a full range of motion is a better worked muscle but it will also decrease your risk of injury from sloppy form.

Three Tips To Optimise Fat Loss

In this article I share three simple tweaks to optimise your dieting-

1, Add protein to breakfast

After 15 years of analysing food diaries the most common trend I see is inadequate protein intake at breakfast. This can easily be remedied by either adding a protein shake or a high protein yogurt alongside whatever you normally have at breakfast. Egg’s can also be used but note that the fat content of egg yolks does bump up the calories quickly however provided you take this into account isn’t a problem at all.

The goal here is to get between 25-50 grams depending on your daily protein goal from a high quality source (meat, fish or dairy).

These is noting wrong with using protein powder here to boost up a regular yogurt or Kefir or use one of the many high protein yogurt brands available today.

If you are not averse to savoury in the morning kind of person there’s nothing to stop you eating some meat, fish or eggs (or a combination of) at breakfast.

2, Eat more vegetables & fruit

The amount of scientific studies to support the health benefits of consuming more vegetables & fruit are numerous. Vegetables & fruit are important sources of vitamins, minerals & fibre. 

In addition to health benefits FIBRE is certainly a strong ally when on a diet at it helps fight hunger by keeping you feeling fuller for longer- Aim for 25-35 grams of fibre per day. It’s also been shown to be good for your gut bacteria. I’ll get deeper into this topic in a future article.

I recommend to eat 2-3 pieces of fruit per day and 4-6 servings of vegetables per day. For you busy types select vegetables during the day that don’t require any cooking such as salad leaves, tomatoes, peppers and carrots. To prepare a lot of veg in one go i recommend doing large stir-fries or even making soups.

Here’s a food dairy example below from the trainee. You can see they incorporate some form of vegetable or fruit to each meal whilst hitting close to their targets-

Targets

2310 KCAL

150 g Protein

214 g Carbohydrate

95 g Fat

Now you can see the macro numbers are not exactly matching the targets but they are pretty damn close. In context to total calories, adequate protein and high fibre this is a good day.

3, Buffer your calories for meals out

Eating out doesn’t mean ruining your diet. You can probably expect food in restaurants to contain a bit more calories with the way chefs liberally use fat in their cooking.

A smart way to prepare for this is to create a buffer with your calories by eating lighter earlier in the day.

Base your food intake mainly on sources of protein and vegetables. This will give you more allowance for extra calories in your meal out in the evening. However this doesn’t mean you then go and fill your boots. Enjoy the food but don’t be a hoover! We want to avoid a binge-diet mentality.

This technique can be further expanded if you know in advance you’ll eating out either once or twice over a weekend. You can set your total calories a little lower on the weekdays to give you leeway to eat out at the weekend without ruining the calorie deficit you’ve created during the week.

Example – 2310 KCAL daily intake x 7 days = 16,170 KCAL weekly

Monday to Friday = 2,000 KCAL daily = 10,000 KCAL. This give you 6,170 kcal or 3,085 KCAL per day on Saturday & Sunday. 

Now 3,085 KCAL might sound like a lot but if you are having 2-3 course meals 2 twice over the weekend plus liquid calories in the form or alcoholic beverages the calories will add up quickly! 

Don’t be a hoover and view this meal as a ‘cheat’ where you can go buck wild for the sake of it.

You aren’t “cheating anyone”, the calories still matter.

As mentioned before tracking your food intake teaches you its nutrient value which over time should allow you to make better choices that align with your goals. Empower yourself with this knowledge.

Exercise Is Not About Suffering

A certain mentality of suffering is promoted in many gyms these days. Both personal trainers, motivational speakers and certain types of group training environments there is a ‘hardcore’ attitude if you aren’t suffering lots when training or dieting then you aren’t doing it right.

This unfortunately puts off many average people from even trying to start exercising. They see it a a mountain not even worth attempting to scale.

Yes you have to work hard, achieving anything worthwhile in life takes hard work but its its not about machoism for the sake of it and it needs to be scaled appropriately according to the level you are at.

Below I discuss a better approach-

1, Training

Feeling like sh*t afterwards isn’t a measure of a good gym session.

It’s common these days to be bombarded by certain types of gyms and magazines promoting the attitude that working harder when exercising is always better. That you should always be crawling out of the gym after every workout in a sweaty puddle of destruction with nothing left in the tank.

This in my opinion is an idiotic and dangerous attitude.

Not only is approaching exercise like this is a sure fire way to quickly grow a hatred for it but I believe your chance of injury is also a lot higher.

This is especially applicable for beginners who’s fitness levels will be at a low baseline and haven’t yet built a better body awareness.

Sure you definitely need to train hard but you do not need to push every set to failure nor want to throw up after every workout, in fact I strongly discourage this as you’ll quickly plateau.

Steady Progression is the key

Your training needs to be focused on the key principles of getting stronger on primarily compound exercises whilst using good form. When combined with patience and persistence these are the ingredients for progress.

Now there are certainly limitations on how strong you can get otherwise everyone would be working up to a 300KG bench press. In order to truly maximise your strength you will at some point have to specialise your training (powerlifting as an example) but for the average person who goes to the gym this isn’t applicable and they are in most cases far away from their potential.


Like most things in life lifting weights will not always have a linear progression. There will be up’s & down’s and It’s natural to reach plateaus from time to time. This will require you to back off the weight you are using before ramping it back up again. The more advanced a lifter you become, the smaller the progress will be. What’s going on in your life; life stressors, quality of sleep and nutritional intake will also have an impact on your progress.

So there are many strategies to drive progress. Four key ways are:

1. increasing the weight you are lifting

2. performing more reps

3. adding more sets

4. reducing the rest period between sets.

I find its best to choose one of two of these methods per training cycle. Keep it simple.

Rep's & Weight Progression Example-

Flat Bench Press- 4 sets of 6-8 reps, 180 seconds rest

Week 1- 80KG x 8, 80KG x 8, 80KG x 7, 80KG x 6 = 29 reps total @ 80KG = 2,320KG total lifted

Week 2- 80KG x 8, 80KG x 8, 80KG x 8, 80kg x 7 = 31 reps total @ 80KG = 2,480KG total lifted

Week 3- 82.5KG x 7, 82.5KG x 7, 82.5KG x 6, 82.5KG x 6 = 26 reps total @ 82.5KG = 2,145KG total lifted

Week 4- 82.5KG x 8, 82.5KG x 8 82.5KG x 7, 82.5KG x 6 = 29 reps total @ 82.5KG = 2392.5KG total lifted

Squeeze out those small victories a rep and set at a time!

If you really want to get strong you have to look at this as a ‘long game’ and anyone who has increased their strength and transformed their body dramatically will have invested a number of years into the process.

2, Dieting

In a nutshell I feel that dieting shouldn’t be a sprint.

How many times have you already possibly tried crash dieting to then put the weight back on soon after possibly with a bit extra?

Yes creating a large calorie deficit for short periods of time certainly can work for a quick assault on your body fat but for most people this ends up being a yo-yo cycle.

During an aggressive diet you’ll likely be pretty miserable as you’ll be very hungry and possibly in a bad mood.

Whatever your time period is, one of the key important factors is maintaining muscle mass whilst dieting.

When in a calorie deficit you should ensure your protein intake is adequate. This for dieters is generally much higher than the RDA and for most people I set it at 2-3 grams per kilogram of bodyweight. The additional benefit of high protein is it helps with the feeling of satiety.

Adding strength training to this mix will further help you fight breaking down muscle and also help you to ‘shape’ your body that will look better at a lower body fat level.

You should aim at no more than 0.5KG weight loss per week and you should aim to do this over the course of at least 12 weeks ideally. If say you have more than 6 kilo’s to loose then you should aim to make this a longer time period to take this into account.

Again just like weight lifting dieting isn’t always a linear progression however you have to trust the process you are following reminding yourself whats most important.

Bodyweight will fluctuate lots depending on you hydration status, sodium intake, bowel content, hormonal cycle (for both men & women) and how much you have slept.

Track your weight without getting obsessed about it and look at the trend over the weeks and the month rather than from day to day. It’s much more likely to look something like this-

Wrap Up

Extremes whether they are with exercise or dieting are rarely sustainable.

Crafting a lifestyle that has good balance of exercise and sensible eating must incorporate patience and persistence.

In addition to this your fitness regime should complement your other interests in life, it should not be the sole focus.

In the pursuit of looking good make sure you aren’t missing out on health and living life!

Three Principles Of Fat Loss

In this article I cover three fundamental principles for creating fat loss- 

1, Regulate Total Calories

In order to loose fat you have to create a calorie deficit. 

So how many calories do you need in order to lose weight? 

I’ve experimented with numerous different formula’s but over time I’ve found the best one is simple your bodyweight in pounds (kilos x 2.2) generally multiplied by either 12-14 as your starting point to establish a baseline. 

Now this is always going to be a best guess and factors such as your individual metabolism and activity levels will have an impact on what multiplier you use. Some people might have to even go down to 10 in order to get them into a deficit if their activity levels are low. 

Select a number and see how things progress. Adjust the number up or down as appropriate to align with you loosing body fat at the right speed. Generally I recommend trainees to aim to lose at most 0.5kg per week. Your total calories over time will also gradually need to be adjusted down as the diet progresses in order to continue to support fat loss. 

Example – Bodyweight 75 KG x 2.2 = 165 lbs x 14 = 2,310 KCAL

This part is absolutely critical, If you have no idea accurately how much you are eating its akin to shooting a shotgun into a dark room and hoping you hit something.

Tracking macros & calories indefinitely isn’t essential for fat loss or maintaining a healthy weight.

However a time period of tracking your food is a useful tool to educate yourself on the nutritional composition of different foods so that you are then able to make better decisions when not tracking. 

Practice this skill, learn to eye ball portions of food and initially measure it to see how accurate you can get. Make it a game. 

Your mindset and how your approach this is important. Remind yourself this is a good thing you are doing for yourself, you will be building a lifelong skill that can help promote better health for the rest of your life.

2, Adequate Protein Intake

You have your calories, now you calculate total protein. This needs to be high enough to support essential body needs and for recovery from training. Protein requirement is increased during a diet and in the absence of adequate dietary intake your body will break down more muscle tissue.

For periods of dieting I like to set it at 2 grams of protein per kilo of bodyweight. For advanced athletes who are already low in body fat it may have to be increased even further as the diet progresses. 

Example – 75 kg x 2 = 150 grams of protein daily

Protein has 4 kcal per gram so 150 grams of protein is 600 kcal

Your total calorie and protein intake in my experience are by far the two most important numbers to concentrate on. 

3, Carbohydrates & Fats

So with 2,310 KCAL minus 600 KCAL for the protein the remaining 1,710 KCAL can be divided evenly between fats & carbs.

Carbohydrate 855 kcal / 4 calories = 213.75 (214) grams

Fat 855 kcal / 9 calories = 95 grams

Totals

2310 KCAL

150 g Protein

214 g Carbohydrate

95 g Fat

From there it’s entirely up to you on personal preference how your split this up during the day. In general I guide my trainees to divide this up over 3-4 daily meals. Some people like an even spread of nutrients over each meal, others like to eat a bit lighter in earlier meals to create more ‘allowance’ to have a larger meal in the evening which they maybe are sharing with loved ones.

Example 1 - Even spread over 4 meals 

578 KCAL

38 g Protein

53 g Carbohydrate

23 g Fat

Example 2 - 4 meals but with a larger evening allowance

Meals 1-3

472 KCAL

38 g Protein

35 g Carbohydrate

20 g Fat

Meal 4 

895 KCAL

45 g Protein

100 g Carbohydrate

35 g Fat

My only preference here to help optimise protein synthesis over the whole day is to ensure you get 3-4 servings of 25-50 grams of a high quality protein source.

From personal exerience 4 is the best so that each meal is not too large and you get the body protein synthesis.

The distribution of the other nutrients is much less important in the grand scheme of things. 

Wrap up

Nutrition is literally a magic bullet in regards to regulating your body composition.

Certainly the more active you are overall your overall daily calorie requirements are which will allow you to “get away with more” but overall its very very hard to out train a poor diet.

Now there are certainly additional strategies to help further optimise your diet which I will cover in future articles, however without first creating the strong foundation these are somewhat redundant.

Fat Loss Explained

In this article I address some key principles to focus on when your goal is fat loss-

1, You must create a calorie deficit

In order lose body fat you must create a deficit to your energy intake.

This can be achieved through changes to your eating or increases in your activity levels. I find changes to your eating the most efficient as it’s a lot easier to consume calories than it is to burn them. 

As a diet progresses and you lose fat you will have to gradually keep reducing the amount of calories you consume in order to continue to lose fat.

A lighter body expends less energy to move around in everyday activities and so your body as part of its survival mechanisms will attempt to balance this out by reducing your metabolic rate.

This is temporary and after a period of dieting this will gradually return to normal, you are not creating any long term damage. 

Keep these adjustments downwards small, no more than 5-10% at any given time.

You want to lose fat on as many calories as possible as this helps to maintain you energy levels for exercise and everyday life and combat levels of hunger.

You want to avoid you getting too ‘hangry’ as this is going to make you and probably others around you feel miserable and more likely to lead you to falling off of the wagon and binging. 

2, Strength training

You lose fat by creating a calorie deficit. Now in order to get your body to loose body fat rather than lean body mass (muscle) you have to give it a reason to retain that lean body mass. Strength training provides this stimulus and will help you ultimately achieve that ‘toned’ look once your body fat is low enough.

Creating a deficit to lose fat without this concurrent strength training means that a greater proportion of the weight you lose will come from lean body mass and whilst you will certainly over time still lose fat you’ll also lose lean body mass which will likely leave you with a less than aesthetically pleasing ‘skinny fat’ look.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to go all in and start training like a bodybuilder, far from it. This is a common misperception that puts many people off of lifting weights. Bodybuilding is a very specialised pursuit and it takes years of consistent focused training to achieve that ‘look’.

For the average person weight lifting in addition to preserving lean mass when dieting will make your body firmer and you’ll look & feel better naked.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28507015/

3, Keep your overall daily activity levels high (NEAT)

Creating a calorie deficit is in nutshell subjecting your body to a small famine and body has some very clever in-built survival mechanisms to try to fight this.

One tactic it uses it to subconsciously encourage you to reduce what’s called your NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis). NEAT can account for quite a number of calories burned during a day on top of your BMR (Basel Metabolic Rate, the amount of calories you burn just to survive doing nothing).

Say you create a calorie deficit through food of 250 calories but at the same time subconsciously you start walking less, taking the elevator, lying down more etc. you’ll find that you can start to quickly make inroads on that calorie deficit and mint end up unconsciously sabotaging your results.

One easy way to counteract your levels of NEAT dropping is to monitor your daily step count. Say your average is 5,000 then aim to keep that constant throughout the ‘diet’, You may actually find upping this to 7,500 or even 10,000 steps per day as your bodyweight reduces will continue to help you lose body fat. A lighter body burns less calorie in every day activities.

• Get off a stop early or walk to work

• Use the stairs

• Get a stand up desk

• Manually clean things rather than using ‘labour saving’ devices.

• Plan a long walk at the weekend

• Find activities outside of the gym that get you active - Martial arts, dancing, climbing, swimming etc.

4, Optimise your Sleep Quality & Duration

Tigger knew the secrets to staying lean

A study highlighted to me in the book ‘Why We Sleep’ by Matthew Walker showed the amount of sleep you have directly impacts what weight is lost when on a diet. 

In a study, 2 group of people were put on a calorie deficit. One group in addition to this had restricted sleep.

Both groups on average lost a similar amount of weight.

However, for the participants who got only 5 1/2 hours sleep the amount of fat mass relative to lean body mass was significantly reduced- 1.3 pounds of fat and 5.3 pounds of fat-free mass compared to the group who got 8 1/2 hours sleep- 3.1 pounds of fat and 3.3 pounds of fat-free body mass.

In addition to this the sleep restricted group had increased levels of hunger as their Ghrelin levels (‘hunger hormone’) increased.

This very starkly illustrates the importance of getting good sleep. This should be an areas in addition to neutron that you should invest time in.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101004211637.htm

Here’s an article I wrote on improving your sleep - 15 Tips to Better Sleep

5, Set realistic goals and be patient

You don’t get out of or into shape overnight

Fat loss in order to make it sustainable and create a healthy relationship & lifestyle shouldn’t be a sprint.

Yes certainly you can have brief periods of dieting with a large calorie deficit but these should only be used for short periods of time and are unsustainable. From my experience of helping hundreds of clients, a slower more consistent timeframe for fat loss wins the day.

Adherence is ultimately the key. It’s all well & good creating a deficit for 5 days of the week but then at the weekend if you fill your boots on high calorific food and especially liquid calories (alcohol, with an added effect of reducing sleep quality) it’s very possible to sabotage the very deficit that you’ve created over the week. 

A useful strategy is to set your calories slightly lower during the week to allow for more of a ‘buffer’ of calories at the weekend which will enable you to be social when eating out or cooking with your friends & family without ruining your deficit. This doesn’t mean you give yourself permission to eat in a gluttonous fashion.

How To Have A Good Workout- 4 Tips

Going to the gym is an time investment in improving your body, make sure you get the best return from your investment. Here are 4 simple tips on optimising your gym sessions-

1, Progressive Overload

If you want to change how your body looks you have to give it a reason to. Adaptions to training are simply a response by your body to being exposed to a ‘stress’ and then adjusting structurally (muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones), neurologically and chemically (energy systems) to better be able to handle this stress the next time.

Over time it’s essential to gradually push forwards to get stronger. If you are lifting the same weights that you did 3 years ago you’ll likely look the same.

On this theme it’s also important to stick to a particular set of exercises for some time in order to give yourself time to improve. Changing your programme too frequently doesn’t allow this to happen.

Generally I’d recommend to stick to a particular programme for at least 6-8 weeks. For more advanced lifters with several years of lifting experience sticking to the same exercises but adjusting the sets, reps & tempo after 2- 4 weeks can be sometimes be a strategy to promote continued progress. 

2, Good form, good form Dammit!

What good is a gym programme if you find yourself injured several times a year? Progress takes time and injuries can set you back weeks and even months. Unfortunately we loose gains we make in the gym faser than we create them.

Exercises have been created in mind to work a muscle through a full range of motion in order to maximise the adaptive response. For the majority of people using a full range of motion is your best strategy for safe & effective training. 

Using a partial range of motion can be useful for certain specific situations such as in Powerlifting & Strongman or if your sport has a particular demand to be strong in a narrow range of motion. Specialisation training to help get through sticking points.

However for most of the gym population its doing nothing more than stoking your ego and possibly increasing your risk of injury.

An additional benefit to using a full range of motion is the exercise is in itself a ‘loaded stretch’ so over time using a full range of motion can help to ‘unstick’ some areas that might otherwise feel tight. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23629583/

3, Emphasise Compound Movements First

Exercises such as the Squats, Deadlifts, Lunges, Chin/Pull-Up’s, Dips, Presses and Rows should be your bread & butter movements you spend the most time on when exercising. These types of exercises active the maximal amount of muscles.

Focusing your energy progressing from shoulder pressing overhead 30KG’s to 50KG’s is going to do much more for your shoulder development then performing 3 sets each of a front raises, side raises and rear deltoid raises with a 4kg’s weight. 

Similarly improving on being able to perform 3 Chin-up’s & Dips to being able to do 9 is going to do way more for your arm development than performing 8 different exercises for your biceps and triceps.

No don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with adding some supplementary direct arm, shoulder or glute work but only after doing the basics compound lifts first.

4, Set A Time Limit

Following on the previous recommendation you should set a time limit to the amount of time you spend on any given training session.

45-60 minutes maximum per session 3-4 x per week is optimal for most people. Whilst gym sessions can be longer some some spots specific purposes, I.E. when training some involving a lot technique like olympic lifting or requiring longer rest periods for maximum strength training & powerlifting this isn’t appropriate for most people.

I recommend to set strict rest intervals between your exercises and use either something like an old digital Casio watch or a dedicated timer so that you avoid the temptation of getting distracted by your phone. I am of the belief that Tinder has done much to ruin peoples gains over the years!

Get in, primarily focus on progressing on the big compound movements first and then leave. It’s a spiral diminishing returns to spend any more time than this.

Ultimately the gym should be a tool to help enhance your experience of life outside of the gym and should not be the sole focus of your spare time.