Do sit ups make your lower back pain worse but you’ve been told to strengthen your core? Modern life revolves around sitting for longer and can make our core weaker, give us poor posture and put unnecessary strain on the spine stressing our lower back. A strong core helps maintain good...
While your body weight on the scales can sometimes be an indication of overall health, in many cases it's misleading, inaccurate and demoralising. Most scales are inaccurate or difficult to interpret accurately, even expensive ones. Moreover, if we lose body fat and gain muscle at the same...
Have you ever compared yourself to someone else while exercising in the gym, felt intimidated and totally out of your depth? You’re not alone. It’s common and totally normal to want to fit in. In fact, it’s a very instinctual human response we probably evolved to help us seek common purpose....
Most people, if not all, will experience an episode of anxiety and/or depression in their lifetime, which may be short lived or long term. I’ve had bouts of anxiety throughout my life with varying degrees of severity. There’s been times I’ve had low level anxiety and others with a full-blown panic...
Are you over 40 and feel like every day movements are getting harder? Perhaps getting up off the floor is more difficult, or you look at a flight of stairs and think ‘Nope, I’m taking the escalator?’ You’re not alone, this process happens to all of us and it's not all bad news. As we age,...
Several years ago, I decided ‘I’m going to start running to lose weight’. Most evenings I’d part run/part walk the 6km path around the river, I couldn’t yet run the entire 6kms. I continued this habit for several months, eagerly anticipating transformation. Did I lose weight? No. I was fitter and...
When stressed our natural instinct is to overthink strategy and make solutions to our problems more complicated than necessary. When clients aren’t getting the results they want they tend to leap to the ‘do more workouts’ conclusion. In my experience as a Coach, I often find the solution is the...
Have you been seduced by Abdominal Workouts that promise visible rock-hard ab’s? Ironically they are the most inefficient way to achieve that goal. One of the first things you learn when becoming a coach is that you can’t spot reduce. No amount of sit ups will get rid of unwanted belly fat. Sure,...
Many people, myself included, have been caught up in a calorie counting fad in hope of achieving weight loss. In my early 20s I kept a detailed daily record of my calories in/out. It wasn’t long before my obsession became a problem. I’d heard 1,200 calorie diets were good but at 176cm tall (above...
What is Plyometrics? Plyometric exercises are dynamic or explosive in nature and take advantage of the stretch shortening cycle (SSC) which is the storage of elastic energy and challenges your fast twitch fibres. Basically it’s any type of explosive movement which usually propels you off the...