With this beautiful sunny weather we’ve been having for the past few days, I’ve been training clients and doing my own training outdoors. With most people paying out for gym memberships now, it’s easy to spend all your time cooped up inside the gym rather than getting out there in the fresh air. I’ve noticed that my clients actually seem to be more alive and alert when training outside and plus you have so much more room to move about than in the restricted space of a gym. 

The good thing about training outdoors is that you don’t need any equipment [...]

Everyone knows that exercise is good for us and that we should all be doing it regularly but many people are unaware of just how many health benefits there are. Here are some to keep you motivated with your exercise:

- Higher levels of regular activity are associated with lower mortality rates for both younger and older adults.

- Regular physical activity decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease, particularly coronary heart disease.

- Both the National Cancer Institute and Cancer Research UK strongly advocate exercise to help reduce the risk of all types of cancer. Colon cancer has been found to be reduced [...]

Everyone exercises differently – whilst some of us enjoy the sociability that a group class or run with a friend brings, others could think of nothing worse and would rather pop in their earphones and head to the gym alone. Whilst I love going to group boxing and HIIT classes, I have always tended to do my resistance training sessions and runs by myself as I find that I’m able to focus better and become less distracted. More recently however I have started training with friends and have found there are many benefits.

Firstly I think it makes a big difference [...]

Recently a few of my clients have signed up to do half marathons and marathons and we’ve been discussing ways to initially get them going with training. 

For many people the mere thought of subjecting their mind, soul and body to an endurance run is enough to make them feel exhausted – and to be frank, who can blame them? For most of us, a full time career and 24 hour family commitments make the sofa and TV remote look far more appealing than getting out to train for such an event. Running a full marathon or half marathon is an [...]

I’ve recently been doing a lot more interval running training in my own workouts to prepare for my triathlon in the summer and have seen massive improvements in my speed and endurance so thought this should be something I write about this week.

Interval training is all about mixing up short high bursts of speed with slower recovery phases which means that it works both your anaerobic and aerobic systems. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these systems, here’s a quick biology lesson: During the high intensity parts of the run the anaerobic system is used and uses the [...]

Many women think that lifting heavy weights will turn them into some kind of bulky bodybuilder. This is hardly surprising when the media suggests that women should be doing gentle, ladylike exercise and using weird and wonderful exercise gadgets to tone and sculpt their bodies. This means that a lot of women tend to believe that they should stick to bodyweight exercises or very light weights to avoid bulking out.

People hugely underestimate just how hard it is to build muscle. Men have about 16 times more testosterone than women and even those who train ridiculously hard at the gym five [...]

It’s a common misconception that fats (especially saturated ones) are the cause of the sudden rise in heart disease and obesity. Consequently people began eating less saturated fat but the number of cases of heart disease and obesity continued to rise – how can it be then that eating fat causes people to develop heart disease and become obese?

Research has now shown that there is no correlation between saturated fat and heart disease and is instead indicating that sugar is the problem. We should be eating good fats like avocados, nuts, seeds and meat in order to keep our immune [...]