Me, Myself and I - Rebecca Conlin, PT @ RWF

When I took my first steps towards health and fitness I expected all kinds of encouragement from family, friends and relationships. After all, most of my family are overweight (as was I) and we were all constantly on and off fad diets. 

To begin with I had all sorts of support, but then I started to actually lose weight, tone up and enjoy my new lifestyle and it became obvious that I was changing my lifestyle permanently. The family dynamics were upset as I started to eat completely different meals to them. I trained instead of watching the T.V on DVD and take away nights. As for my 'friends', well, they became judgemental and made hurtful comments claiming that I looked ill, pasty and that I looked better with more weight on me. My then boyfriend became so insecure of my weight loss and new found confidence, that we eventually split. Collegues were the worst and instead of being happy for me, I was confronted with a hostile enviroment and negative snide comments shunning my hard work and disipline. I'm sure that any women reading this that have lost a significant amount of weight can relate similar comments.

Three house moves, one job, a new boyfriend and many friends later I have surrounded myself with people who have the same ethos as myself. Health and fitness being priority to us all. Instead of nights out in town drinking myself into what can only be described as a coma after bingeing on cheesy chips and kebabs, I do something better. I have often caught myself on Friday and Saturday nights emailing my collegue with articles, ideas and plans for PT clients, bootcamp classes and many other ideas we plan to launch in the future. That may sound dull to some, but I love it. I look forward to training both myself and others. My BIG nights out now often include participating or running a bootcamp. To relax I read and write articles about nutrition, exercise and general health. If I want to de-stress, me and my collegue sprint up hills to let off steam... ;-) (It really works)!

In retrospect, the hostility I recieved in my first years of making health and fitness my priority was a combination of resentment and jealousy. Some people don't like to see you do well in life because it highlights insecurities in their own. When people tell me that I look ill, I've lost too much weight and that they preferred me bigger what their really saying is, I wish I had your disipline, I wish I could lose some weight and I wish I was fitter. You're always going to get people in your life that try and turn positives into negatives and I am convinced that it is fear that you're going to suceed and leave them behind.

To conclude: if you are experiencing the same negative experience as I did, read between the lines. What people say and what they mean are two different things. All you need is security within yourself, you have to be happy with how you look and feel. Try not to take hurtful off-hand comments to heart because its just negative people making themselves feel better about their own insecurities. Definitely dont let others ruin your new lifestyle and experiences. Surround yourself with positive people :-)

Additional note from Derran:

I can identify with a lot of what Rebecca says. Whilst I've never been overweight, I used to be very skinny and unfit in my late teens/early twenties. When I first started training, I always got comments about 'living in the gym' or 'being obsessed with food'. Trouble is, these comments often came from people who would spend 10+ hours a week watching TV, and often would pass judgement on my food whilst digging into a Gregg's pasty. I doubt I've ever spent more than 5 hours in a week training, so the next time someone tells you you're gym obsessed, ask them to add up how many hours of soaps and reality TV they watch each week. It tends to shut people up!

It's a great point that these negative comments tend to come from people who aren't happy with themselves. I have never had stupid comments from other people that train, that understand what it is to work hard in the gym and to follow a reasonably decent diet, and to do that consistently for years. 

The most ridiculous comments - including the steroid ones - tend to come from people who would prefer to dismiss my hard work and put it down to chemical assistance, or my superior genetics, or the fact that I'm a PT and 'it's easy for me'. Let's dismiss those straight away - I haven't and would never touch steroids. It's not a moral objection, it's just that I have no interest in using things I know very little about. My genetics - well, I was about ten stone wet through at University, so I was never a big guy in the making. The fact I'm a PT? OK, I have more knowledge than most, but books don't lift the weights for you. In fact, I probably have LESS time to train than most 9-5 people - I often work 12-14hr days, and weekends don't really exist.

So, to echo Rebecca, try and ignore the daft comments and see them for what they are. Excuse making by people that can't or won't make the effort themselves, and want to transfer that angst onto you. Ignore - work harder - get stronger!

Bodyweight Training Basics

Not everyone wants - or indeed needs - to get into a gym to achieve their goals. You already possess a home gym - your body. Using the most basic bits of home furniture as an aid, just look at some examples of what you can do:

Lower body - squats, lunges, burpees, calf raises, tuck jumps, mountain climbers

Upper body - press-ups (of which there are tens of different variations), tricep dips, bicep curls, one arm rows

Core - v-sit ups, crunches, leg raises, bicycle crunches, planks...abdominal work has endless possibilities.

Throw in just £50 worth of additional equipment (like a kettlebell and a chin-up bar) and you can add literally hundreds of additional exercises into your home workout repertoire.

How does it all fit together?

When planning your home workout, think about what you want to achieve. If you want to get 'fitter', then we need to do a lot of circuit style work, high reps, and keep you moving quickly between exercises. We need to get you out of breath, and keep you there.

Improving 'Fitness'

Squats x 20 reps

Lunges x 10 reps on each leg

Mountain climbers x 50 reps

Rest 60 seconds, and repeat. Try to complete 3 times. Then:

Press-ups x 20 (from the knee if necessary)

Dips (using a chair) x 10

Crunches x 20

Plank position for as many seconds as possible

Rest 60 seconds, and repeat...again, 3 times.

That should get you out of breath, and if you're new to exercise, be a very challenging workout. If you find it too easy, add another 10 reps onto every exercises, and cut down the rest time. If it is still too easy, add more circuits. Do it 4, 5 or 6 times - the beauty of training at home is that you can keep going as long as you want. Aim to train every other day at first, and don't be afraid of some aches - that's the feeling of your body waking up!

Keep an eye out for the next blog in this series, where we'll take a look at how to incorporate some very cheap additional equipment into your home workouts. It'll not only make your training even more effective, but it'll add some variety to keep you on your toes.

RWF group exercise classes - 'Boot Camps'

It was brought to my attention recently that the term 'Boot Camp' has put off a few people from having a go at attending these sessions that we run. So, I thought I'd put a blog together to explain what the sessions are like, and to try and dispel a few misconceptions.

First of all, let me tell what ISN'T going to happen:

1. No-one will make you feel weak, or inadequate, if you can't do everything.

Every person at these classes (the trainers included!) has been where you are now - perhaps nervous, unsure about exercise, out of shape, out of practice etc. Everyone starts somewhere. RWF have a zero tolerance policy towards any kind of belittling behaviour. The atmosphere we encourage is a supportive one (with an element of informal competition between those people that like competing)

2. No-one is going to stand and shout at you, Sergeant Major-style.

Shouting at someone and pushing them simply makes people feel that they aren't good enough, and embarrasses everyone involved. If you want/need to be shouted at, then these sessions aren't for you. There are plenty of bootcamps run by over-zealous Army wannabees who will charge you to be shouted at for an hour. We won't. You'll be pushed, and encouraged, but it's constructive - not to satisfy your trainer's ego.

3. You won't be made to continue if you can't keep up.

You'll work at your pace. Sure, we'll encourage you to keep up. We'll let you know if we think you could do better, but we'll never push you beyond your capabilities. Saying that, you'll probably find you are capable of a lot more than you think you are.

4. You won't be doing Army-style training

We aren't going to make you run for 30 minutes. We won't make you crawl in the mud under cargo nets, or make you wear Army camouflage for an 'authentic' experience. You won't have to climb up and over 10ft high obstacles.

So, what will you learn to do?

You'll get good at being able to manipulate your own bodyweight to use as a training tool. You'll learn, and get good at, basic bodyweight moves. These are fundamental things that many adults lose - the ability to squat, to press up their own bodyweight, to jump, to sprint, to lunge. We make no apologies for not having a Bosu-ball to balance on for an hour, or for not having a Vibroplate to hone you into shape. We concentrate on the tough things that actually make a difference.

You'll learn how to add resistance. Using gymnastic rings, kettlebells, TRX, medicine balls, power bags - basically, anything that makes a standard exercise more difficult. But, you'll do it when you're ready, and when you're capable. All we ask is that you try. There's no shame in not being able to do something, but there is in not even attempting it.

Ultimately, you'll learn that even if you currently think you're fit, or even if you know you aren't, that your current capabilities are nowhere near your potential. Frankly, you'll be amazed at what you can do within a couple of months.

So, don't be afraid to come along and have a go. It's a good, supportive atmosphere. You will work hard, but it'll be within your own limits, not the limits of the person next to you. All we ask is that you push yourself to improve, week on week.

For more details on timings and prices, go to the website here

Weight loss fundamentals...

Losing weight is the easiest thing in the world. There, I’ve said it. Now, before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t have a clue about how hard it is to lose weight, hear me out…

Everyone knows, deep down, what foods they should and shouldn’t be eating. Everyone knows that eating five or six portions of vegetables and fruit each day, and eating things like chicken and fish regularly, is important. But how many people actually do it?

Everyone also knows, deep down, that chocolate, crisps, sugary cereals, fizzy drinks etc are bad for you…but again, how many people successfully cut them out when trying to lose weight?

Even if you are one of the few people that gets the above stuff right, are you sure you aren’t sabotaging your efforts by eating things you think are good for you, but aren’t? Are you avoiding foods you really should be eating, because you are still listening to out-dated science and old wive’s tales? Chances are that if you are having ‘healthy’ cereals for breakfast, and ‘healthy’ low-fat yoghurts, and ‘healthy’ ready meals, whilst avoiding eating eggs (they’re high in fat, surely?), never cooking in olive oil and ignoring anything that looks remotely like a carb, you are doing yourself no favours.

Ultimately, losing weight – and let’s be honest, it’s FAT we want to lose, not necessarily ‘weight’ – is about creating a deficit. You want to burn off more calories than you consume. If you don’t know how many calories your body needs each day, how can you know how many calories you should be eating each day? There’s your starting point. Once you know how many calories you need, you can adjust your intake to make sure you are eating about 500 calories a day under that level. There’s nothing mysterious about it – if you eat at least 3,500 calories a week less than your body needs, you WILL lose weight.

Whilst it may seem a bit confusing sometimes, you need to bear in mind that the diet industry is absolutely massive. It’s said to be worth more than one billion pounds a year in the UK alone. Diet plans, slimming clubs etc, don’t really want you to lose weight and keep it off. If you lose weight, you stop attending, you stop buying branded shakes and books, and the money stops rolling in. Don’t think for a moment that the diet industry is there to help you. It is in their interests to make diet and nutrition as complicated as possible. It doesn’t have to be that way.

That leaves exercise. Diet will take you so far – in fact, it’s probably more important to address your diet than it is to get yourself exercising. Saying that, diet alone won’t improve your fitness, stamina or body composition. To look healthy and sleek, some form of training is needed. Ideally, this is two or three times a week doing something structured that allows you to easily measure your progress. Whether you do this alone or with a PT is up to you, but you will be far happier with your new body if you exercise as well as ‘diet’.

At Real World Fitness, I work with a significant number of overweight clients. I know what the barriers are, and I know how hard it is to start changing the way you look. I don’t expect clients to overhaul their entire lifestyle in a week, and become superfit overnight. Each client has their own life to lead, and every approach will be slightly different, but you can be certain that whatever your target, you’ll get a level of help and support that is way above and beyond what you’d expect from a PT.

On average, clients who address their diet as instructed, and who train with me at least twice a week, tend to lose between 8-10lbs in the first 4-5 weeks (based on averaging out the weight loss of 20 different individuals). I have longer term clients who have lost as much as 5st in nine months. You can do it too – it just takes hard work and a bit of guidance. The actual science of losing weight is easy!

Sports Performance and Injury Prevention

It seems obvious, but your sporting performance is linked directly to your general conditioning, your diet and your ability to perform functions that are key to your sport.So why do so many amateur AND professional sports people fail to address any or all of these in their training? A lot of team sports - football and rugby in particular - are very high risk in terms of causing injuries. Now, if you can do something to minimise that risk and extend your playing career, or remove niggles that prevent you performing at your best, that's going to make you enjoy your sport that much more.

I've trained a lot of rugby and football players who felt they needed to improve their conditioning and strength to ensure they could last a match, or to push through into a first team. Kettlebell work in particular translates well into rugby - there's a lot of single arm and single leg work, which matches up well with a lot of the in-game movements your body will make.

I've trained cricketers who need to improve their bowling speed, and their batting average. Most people don't realise how much the back and core is involved in sport, and once this strength and flexibility is improved, it's no surprise that the performance at the sport also improves.

Whatever your sport, supplementary training is essential to get the most out of it. Even if your sport if just a hobby, additional training will help you get more out it - after all, professional sportspeople don't simply practice their sport, they also train around it to improve.

Injury Prevention and Rehab

Most sporting injuries are simply accidents - things that can't be avoided. However, it IS possible to insure yourself against minor, and sometimes major, injuries by strengthening areas that are more likely to be damaged.

For example, strengthening hamstrings and calf muscles helps to stabilise the knee joint, and means the knee is less likely to suffer ACL strains, or even tears. Even if you do injure the knee, having strong supporting musculature means the rehab and recovery period will be very much shorter.

The vast majority of injuries in team ball sports, are to the knees and ankles. Yet many people simply do not do any leg training at all, and assume that simply playing the sport is enough - it really isn't. Directly working on areas that are exposed to the most risk, minimises that risk of injury. It sounds simple, but is so often ignored.

Similarly, I get many, many clients who come to me with 'bad backs'. People generally assume that they have some kind of defect, that their back is a problem area and needs to be protected. Most of the time, it's quite the reverse - their back and abdominal area is simply weak, and the spine is being forced to do all the work that the muscles should be doing. It's no coincidence that the VAST majority of back problems simply disappear after a few weeks of training the lower back, and the core. If you've suffered with back pain for years, but never done any training, try it - you could be pain free in weeks.

I have direct experience of rehabbing knees, shoulders, backs and ankles - so whatever your injury, the chances are I can help you get over it in a safe and progressive manner.

If you would like more information on training to improve your sport performance, or working to prevent or rehab injuries, feel free to contact us.

The typical personal training client...

...doesn't exist :)

As myths and misconceptions go, the idea that all personal training clients are bored housewives with nothing better to do with their time and money is up there with Special K being good for you, and endless treadmill running being the best way to lose fat. In short, it's a load of rubbish.

I hear it a lot though, from friends, family and random people I meet. I even hear it from clients who DON'T fit that mould, and think that they are the exception. The truth is, my client base is massively varied. I had no idea when I started out how varied it would be. The problem I have is:  if I've heard this misconception being carelessly thrown around so often, how many other people hear it too? Does it put people off personal training?

I have had clients from the age of 17 right up to 72. The youngest client I currently have is 20, the oldest 64, and every age in between. If I had to state a typical age range, I'd say something like 25 - 45.

My client's careers range from unemployed, to student, to housewife/husband, secretaries, managers, directors, self-employed people in a whole range of industries and semi-pro sports-people. I've trained gym instructors, and owners of huge companies. I've trained people that work part time, and people that work 70+ hours a week.

So, to be honest, I don't look for any particular 'type' of client. I have a few pre-requisites though:

1. Be prepared to work hard (within YOUR capabilities)
2. Show up on time and with the attitude to get cracking. Hangovers get zero sympathy.
3. Do at least 75% of what I tell you to do in between sessions
4. Be upfront and honest about your nutrition and you activity levels

Don't be put off getting a PT because you think it's something rich people do, or something for people other than you. Personal training isn't about status or stereotypes, it's about making you the best version of yourself that you can be, and getting you to your goals quicker than you trying to figure it all out on your own. But, please, do be prepared to work hard!

The Gym Divide - Rebecca Conlin, PT @ RWF

I have used many gyms throughout my life, training with men and women. I have trained for sport, for fat loss, for strength and for fun.  It has been apparent to me that in every gym I have used there has always been a male/female divide. Typically males and females have different goals, as in my experience women strive to be as slim as possible and men as big and ripped as possible. Chasing the ideal, cartoon like physique!

So as I wander through the cardio area of my gym, crossing the divide into the weight room, I always get a few glares from both males and females alike. Then I start my chin-ups, dips, rows, bench press etc. I use heavy weights and I work to failure. Often I get approving nods, especially from the man with bigger biceps than my thigh! Sometimes though, I don’t get the right support from my male counterparts, who feel that they are qualified to advise me on what (as a female) I should be doing, simply because they are male.

The type I’m talking about can be divided into 2 groups; the skinny little boys who come into the gym complaining that our dumbbells ONLY go up to 30kg… if you were using 30kg right (full range of motion helps!) you would, at a minimum, have bigger arms than Bambi’s legs! The second group are the old school weight lifters who feel the need to carry my empty barbell to my next station when they have just seen me deadlift 1.5 times my body weight! Full of good intentioned advice, very helpful but unable to change their own out-dated training methods into newer more efficient methods.

Now let’s discuss the 'female' area of the gym, the cardio room. I hear the whispers and I see the stares as you train for hours upon hours on the treadmill… *yawn*. I know you think that I’m going to ruin my body and become the female incredible hulk! NEWS FLASH! It’s impossible!  Firstly, as women, we do not naturally produce enough of the hormone responsible for muscle growth, testosterone. Secondly, skinny is no longer beautiful! Strong and sleek is the new skinny, and to achieve that athletic, long lean defined look you have to lift weights. 

So what can we learn from each other?

I use to train with a pretty serious weight lifter. We will call him Bob. Bob use to lift weights daily, had put on a serious amount of lean muscle in a relatively small amount of time and even considered competing as a figure athlete. On Sunday nights I played football with Bob for a male football team and as much as Bob ‘looked’ in incredible shape, I ran rings round him. Through his bulk he lacked cardiovascular fitness, speed and agility. Bob lacked overall fitness and after considering going into the armed forces had to consciously spend time like any beginner building his cardiovascular fitness up. Bob did, however, teach me the importance of excellent weight lifting technique, the importance of core strength and the key to permanently increasing my metabolism enabling me to efficiently lose body fat. Lifting weights is the key to sculpting your body and achieving your ideal physique. 

For advice on how to achieve overall fitness whilst also sculpting your body into its ideal shape, don't hesitate to contact the personal trainers at Real World Fitness. 

5 Reasons to be wary of online advice...

We all do it these days - we have a problem, we often turn to the internet. Most of the time, someone else has had the same problem. Not only that, but they've written about it, and written about the solution to it. Most of the time, that's great. Loads of problems have basic solutions that are maybe just a step beyond common sense.

But what happens on the more complicated stuff? How about that rumbling you hear under the car bonnet? A quick Google brings up hundreds of solutions, with each person being certain that their answer is the answer.

Fitness, training and nutrition advice online is no different. There are a wealth of amazing sources of information out there, from people who really know what they're talking about. They've been there, done it, often countless times. But, unfortunately, you also have a lot of armchair experts. They've read every book, seen every study, argued every point - but never actually set food in a gym. Never trained anyone. Never been responsible for making someone stick to a nutrition plan. Often, they've barely ever trained themselves.

Here's a few warning signs to look out for if you're buying advice on the internet:

1. Websites, or forum posts, full of typos and spelling mistakes. Seriously, it's not that hard to spellcheck. If someone is that casual with the presentation of information they want you to follow, it's likely they don't know enough or care enough to get the information right either.

2. Advice offered with no bio/photos of the person offering it. This is an industry dominated by vanity and aesthetics. If the person offering advice isn't willing to show themselves, or at least detail their achievements, it's likely they don't practice what they preach (and yes, RWF bios and photos are on the main website).

3. People who are far too insistent that their way is the ONLY way. It's rubbish - almost every fitness, strength, fat loss or sports goal has more than one method that can be used to get success. If someone is adamant that their way is the only way, they're probably either (a) ignorant of the variety of training and nutrition methods available or (b) trying to sell you something. Or maybe both :)

4. I touched on it earlier. The internet has allowed everyone to become an unaccountable expert. I can recall a number of situations where the self-appointed 'guru' on a forum has turned out to be a 17yr old with no training experience, or an overweight guy who has rarely trained in their life. If the information seems to be written too rigidly, or in text-book speak, it's probably because it's copied and pasted from somewhere else.

5. People who claim that a certain method 'worked for them, so it'll work for you'. Not necessarily true. Granted, we aren't all as unique as we'd like to think we are, but to imagine that the routine that Big Dave in the gym uses is somehow the exact same routine that you, with no experience of training, should do is absurd. Realise that what YOU need to do, may not be what experienced people currently do. People giving advice often forget where they started, and are too quick to get new trainees to move away from the basics. If you're being encouraged to do something complicated, back away. Training, especially at first, is not complicated.

There are probably a million and one other things to look out for. These five are the ones that routinely come up over and over again, and do a lot of damage to new trainers.

Advice is great, but it's up to you to weed out the helpful bits and discard the rest. Remember the 'Wear Sunscreen' song from a few years back?

"Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth"

Fitness for Fat Loss - Rebecca Conlin, PT @ RWF

A subject I am very passionate about! You don’t have to spend long arduous hours on the bike or treadmill! It has been proven in recent research that a combination of high intensity interval training (HITT) and a specific weight training programme yields the greatest results for losing body fat and weight. By working at a higher intensity for shorter periods you will not only burn more calories you'll also benefit from the ‘afterburn effect’, a boost to your metabolism meaning you burn calories at a faster rate for the rest of the day, even after you've finished your work out.

Why stop there? An effective weight training programme aiming to gain lean muscle will permanently increase your resting metabolism. More muscle means you burn more calories whilst doing…NOTHING! 

For all the ladies worried about bulking up, STOP! It is almost physically impossible for you to bulk up because women don’t produce enough of the hormone responsible for muscle growth, testosterone. Putting muscle on for ladies will only achieve that long, lean and athletic look most women strive for.

Finally, diet and nutrition are of vital importance and half the battle. Fad diets aside, now is the time to change to a permanent, new healthier lifestyle that is sustainable over long periods. Real World Fitness personal trainers are experts in diet and nutrition and would be happy to advise you on the perfect nutrition specific to your body’s needs.

Failure is only a fact when you give up. Everyone gets knocked down, the question is: Will you get back up?

What's hiding in your kitchen? - by Derran Langston, Owner and PT @ RWF

I think I've probably lost track of the amount of times a client has told me they eat a certain food, and I've told them it's full of sugar/trans-fats/additives and they've replied with 'really? I didn't know!'.

It's a bit of a sad indictment of society that we simply believe what the packaging WANTS us to believe, and what the adverts WANT us to believe, rather than taking five seconds to double check the claims.

Low fat? Less than 5% fat? Lower fat than the standard brand? All are simple tricks to make you think a food is good for you. 99 times out of 100, low-fat foods are awful. They've taken out the fat (and fat doesn't make you fat, but we'll get on to that some other time) and replaced it with sugar. Why? Because fat tastes good. Remove it, and you've got to replace it with something else. Most of the time, sugar. Check the nutrition labels on low fat foods. You're looking for the 'carbohydrates, of which sugars' bit. Bear in mind a teaspoon of sugar weighs about 5g, and that low-fat yoghurt or bowl of Special K suddenly looks a bit ropey doesn't it? In a 50g serving of Special K, you've got nearly two heaped teaspoons of sugar. Branflakes (the healthy option, right?) are even worse.

The answer is simple. Don't believe what you are told. Read the labels for yourself. Anything ending in '-ose' is a sugar. Smart manufacturers will bank on people not knowing that, and instead of sugar will write 'dextrose', or 'glucose', or 'fructose'. It's all still sugar.

Have a rummage through your cupboards now. That innocent looking Dolmio pasta sauce, the Muller Lites, the SunPat peanut butter. How about your WeightWatchers low fat cereal bars? None of them will have sugar in, surely?

You'll be surprised what is hiding in your kitchen, cleverly disguised as something 'healthy'. Take a stand, take responsibility, and change your buying habits. People are often amazed at the huge changes they can make just by being more aware of what they are eating.

Do you self-sabotage? by Derran Langston, PT and Owner @ RWF

Ok - this post isn't going to win any awards for revolutionary thinking. You're not suddenly going to have a light-bulb moment when you realise this is the one thing nobody ever told you. The problem is, as with many things in life, that you already know it. You just don't actually do anything about it.

There's a business model based around learning which details four stages of 'competence'. One of the four stages is 'unconscious competence'. Basically speaking, you're so damn good at something, you don't even have to think about it. You just do it, and do it well. The flip side to that is 'conscious competence'. You're still damn good at it, but you have to try. It doesn't come naturally.

Either one of those stages is a great place to be. Naturally talented or gifted athletes have the former; the rest of us that achieve anything halfway decent have the latter.

So where do the vast majority of people slot in to this model? I warn you, it's not pleasant reading and I suspect many people reading this will wince as they recognise themselves...

We've got to the unconscious incompetence level. This sums up a lot of people - you're well-intentioned, maybe you've gone out and bought all the new gym kit, joined a spanking new health club and signed up to a 10k for a couple of months time. But you're just not getting anywhere, because you don't have the first clue how to train properly. You're doing stuff, but not the right stuff. You're being incompetent, but you don't realise it. That's ok though - you are one of the curable people. There's hope for you - you just need guidance from a decent PT (such as us at www.realworldfitness.co.uk perhaps?).

The people that are really going to struggle are the last bunch. Please tell me you've already recognised yourself in one of the last three categories. Because if not, this is going to sting a little...you're consciously incompetent. Yep - you're doing all the wrong stuff., and you KNOW you're doing it. But guess what? You don't care enough to do anything about it. Ever heard the definition of insanity? It's doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. If this is you, if you've been plodding away at the same things to reach your goals...and never quite getting there...then I suspect you already know what you're doing wrong. You're deliberately being incompetent.

If anything in that last paragraph strikes a chord with you, change today, not tomorrow. Be any of the other three types of people, because all of them will eventually get results, and get to where they want to be. Stay consciously incompetent, however, and you'll always be chasing a goal that gets further away from you...

The Yo-Yo Dieter - by Rebecca Conlin, PT @ RWF

Looking at what I have achieved now it’s hard to believe that only a few years ago I was overweight, unfit and extremely shy. In fact growing up in a family who put health and fitness last I was uneducated on what being healthy meant.

It was a visit to the doctors aged 13 which led to me being in the career I love today. Walking into the surgery with a knee injury, the doctor examined me and then to my horror weighed me…13 stone! I weighed the same in stone as the years I had been alive. The diagnosis was childhood obesity; my growing bones were being put under too much stress making my knee joints painful.

Firstly, I want to put an end to the excuses. You are not overweight because you have the fat gene. You are not overweight because you have big bones. You are overweight because you eat too much and/or you don’t move enough. I know this because if anyone should be using these excuses, it is me. All my family are overweight, I myself was overweight, I was ‘big boned’ and it was ‘genetic’… it made me feel a little better, but I was lying to myself. 

Immediately disgusted that I weighed so much I cut out all junk, did not eat after 6pm and if my weight loss wasn’t going as planned I wouldn’t eat at all. This is where my yoyo dieting and disordered eating began. I lost and I gained, I went up and I went down, I had good days and I had bad days. The amount of diets I have tried and ultimately failed, I would need more fingers and toes to count on.  The heaviest I have weighed is 15 stone.

So why do people yoyo? How many times have you heard, or said, 'I did lose weight but I put it all on again'? First of all the word ‘diet’ has a certain stigma to it.  The word ‘diet’ automatically makes people defensive.  Diets typically give you a set of strict rules to what you are or are not allowed to eat, and if you deviate from the plan you have jeopardised it all. What happens when you follow the diet word for word, you step on the scales and… nothing, zero weight loss, despite all your efforts? Reducing the amount of food you have eat so much so that you can’t possibly reduce it anymore?

What if I told you to lose weight you needed to eat more?

Almost 15 years later I am a stable size 10 weighing 10 and a half stone. I eat more often, I have a constant supply of energy AND I’m happy and confident.

Why?

1.      Eating smaller meals more often is believed to keep your metabolism running at the optimum level. After 3 hours your body detects that you haven’t eaten for a while and responds by slowing the metabolism to make your energy last longer. Eating every 3 hours can help prevent this.

2.      The main bulk of my diet comes from unprocessed foods, lean meat and fish, fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, herbs and spices, nuts and most importantly lots of water. Keeping your diet as close to nature as possible, the way we were built to eat.

3.      My diet fuels my workouts making me perform at my best in every session. In addition to diet, combining high intensity interval training with a specific weight training programme will allow you to sculpt your body into your ideal physique.

My advice is to ditch the excuses, ignore fad diets, break the chain passed down from parent to child and get educated to what healthy actually means. I have given some basic guidelines based on personal experience and my work with clients but by no means is this a comprehensive guide.