Give it a rest!

No, I'm afraid I'm not telling you all to quit your exercise regime.  Quite the opposite, in fact!  But I am telling you all to get some rest.  Both in the form of "rest days" (days where you don't exercise at an intense level) and in the form of good quality sleep.

Sleep plays a MASSIVE role in our overall health, and especially when it comes to losing weight.  This fact is well known amongst fitness professionals.  Everywhere I turn at the moment (websites I read, other trainers, fitness magazines I subscribe to) there's reference to the importance of sleep with regard to weight loss.  But sleep is often overlooked by your average exerciser, so I thought I'd put together a quick summary to explain why rest is just as important as exercise and diet.

Below are some of the reasons you should try to get more sleep each night.  Inadequate sleep:

• can lead to insulin resistance and contribute to increased risk of diabetes
• can increase blood pressure
• can increase the risk of heart disease 
• means low energy the next day so you're more likely to skip your workout or, at best, have a half-arsed attempt at a workout! 
• drives down leptin* levels, which makes you crave sugary foods.
• drives up ghrelin*levels, which makes you more hungry.
• reduces levels of growth hormone*, responsible for muscle growth and cell renewal.
• increases cortisol* levels which increases hunger
• messes with the body's ability to metabolise carbohydrates and causes high levels of glucose in the blood, which leads to higher insulin and - as a result - more storage of unwanted body-fat!

You'll see that there's a lot of talk about hormones*.  Below is a little more information on each of these hormones:

Leptin -  A hormone produced during sleep.  Regulates appetite, telling your brain when you're full.  So the less you sleep, the less leptin you produce, and the more you eat as your body essentially doesn't know when to stop eating.  

Ghrelin - The "hunger hormone" which stimulates the brain to increase appetite.  High levels of ghrelin also mean you're less likely to feel satisfied after eating.  More sleep = lower ghrelin = reduced appetite.

Cortisol -The stress hormone.  One of its major functions is to metabolise macronutrients (fat, protein, carbohydrate).   Studies have shown that sleep deprivation causes an increase in stress to the body, hence high cortisol levels which actually slows the metabolism.  To make matters worse, high stress levels have been shown to increase fat deposits around your middle = muffin top!

Growth Hormone - A protein that helps regulate the body's proportions of fat and muscle.  When we don't sleep enough, we don't produce enough growth hormone, which means our muscles don't get a chance to recover from a workout.  So you could be putting in all the effort at the gym, but ruining those efforts and not getting the results simply because you haven't allowed your body enough rest.  Growth hormone will increase muscle mass - and we all know that muscle is far more calorie-hungry than fat.  By this I mean that the more lean tissue you have (i.e. muscles) the higher your base metabolic rate will be and the easier you'll be able to lose weight and keep that weight down.

What's more, it's not just an old wives tale that going to bed earlier is better for you.  Surely it's the quality of sleep and the total number of hours slept, rather than when you sleep, right?  Well, actually - wrong!  Our bodies are designed to rest when the sun goes down and work & play when the sun comes up (sometimes referred to as biorhythm, circadian rhythm or simply body-clock).  Call it what you like, but we've all heard Bejamin Franklin's saying  "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise".   It seems he had a point!  Before there was electricity, mother nature intended for us to go to sleep shortly after sunset.  As such our bodies have evolved to get the most benefit from sleeping between the hours of 10pm-6am.  Our body carries out most of it's detoxification and cell regeneration between 9pm - 1am.  For more informaton on this you can go to the link below:

http://foreverhealthyandyoung.com/index.php?post=212


So there you have it.  Bad sleeping habits = bad hormones = bad weight problems.  Simple as that.  Even if you don't need to lose weight, getting adequate sleep will dramatically improve how your body functions, and set you on the path to optimal health.  Now, turn off your computer and go get some shut eye :-)

Obesity in women - an even bigger problem than we first thought?!

Earlier today I posted a link on my Facebook page to a very interesting article that I came across in "The Biologist".  The article looks into the issue of denying obese women access to fertility treatment on the NHS.  You can read it here in full (http://www.lovefittraining.com/IVF_article.pdf), but below are the salient points:

- Increasing numbers of couples require IVF, but funding for fertility treatment is increasingly being restricted.
- Obese women are more susceptible to fertility problems, and problems during pregnancy.
- Some PCTs use extra criteria to determine which couples should be prioritised, most controversially the BMI <30 limit, because women with a BMI >30 are less likely to be successful with their IVF treatment.
- However the time it might take for a women to lose enough weight to significantly reduce her BMI could actually reduce her chance of conceiving, due to the fact that fertility decreases with age.
- Perhaps most importantly the government should be concentrating on the importance of getting to a healthy weight before trying to get pregnant at all.

As a pre- and post-natal exercise specialist this article certainly caught my attention.  But more than anything, I picked up on the sad fact that more and more women are obese.  Whilst I could have a private chuckle and say that it's good for business(!), the truth is that this is a very serious matter.  Modern day living is literally "feeding" this epidemic.  I mean, come on, we live in times when there are adverts on the television showing families supposedly bonding and getting fit together playing a computer game!  Whatever happened to good old fashioned taking a walk together?  Or football in the park?  When I was a kid we used to climb trees and run around, and my Dad took us swimming every weekend.  I know that many people reading this won't fall into the category of couch potato, but the number of people who do is shocking.

What's even more shocking is the fact that this lfestyle of inactivity and over-eating is not restricted to the developed world.  Having recently spent 3 weeks in Thailand and Cambodia I can honestly say that I was horrified at the number of fat Thais I saw.  I'm not sure that I'm allowed to say "fat Thais", but I've said it because it's the truth, and I was genuinely surprised to see overweight people in that part of the world.  To give this a bit of perspective, my observations were really only in Bangkok.  In the more remote areas that I visited, the locals were slim, active and had a more humble diet.  Funnily enough I didn't see a single overweight person living in the rural hill villages!  And at the Temples of Angkor there were Khmer (Cambodian) Grannies who'd put many British teenagers to shame, clambering up steep ruins in the 45 degree heat with little effort!  In Bangkok, however, it's notably more westernised.  In fact, Bangkok is a relatively wealthy city with a thriving financial district and a large number of enormous shopping malls.  This was the real culture shock for me:  Huge malls with i-max cinemas, Ferrari dealerships on the 5th floor (no joke!) and then an absolutely massive food court in the basement.  Sure, there were all the types of noodle restaurants as expected but what I wasn't prepared for was the presence of bakeries, ice-cream parlours, and the usual fast-food suspects (yep, good old Maccy D's and Starbucks everywhere)!

Perhaps this was slight naivety on my part - I've travelled a fair bit in my time and saw Pizza Hut in Peru in 2003, so why be surprised by Ben & Jerry's in Bangkok in 2011?  Well, it's not the presence of the foods, so much as the effects they appear to have had.  Whilst in Bangkok I met up with a friend who lives there.  She spent some time in Thailand 7 years ago and is now living there again, having returned at Christmas time.  She said that she was gob-smacked by the change in body shape of the locals.  Apparently when she was there before, you simply didn't see overweight Thais (although obesity was already prevalent back home), but now there are "muffin tops" aplenty! 

The point I'm making is that Thailand is not alone.  Obesity is a very real epidemic and is evidently spreading way beyond the West.  So if Thailand can experience such a shift in less than a decade, it's no wonder we're seeing such drastic measures as depriving obese women fertility treatment here in the UK!

Some food for thought, no?  Excuse the pun.

Working with the best of them

Evening all.  As promised, here's a follow up to yesterday's catch-up post.  I mentioned that I'd been involved with a few other local (and not so local) businesses of late, so I thought I'd share some details and spread the love.

So, firstly and most recently (just yesterday morning, in fact) I went along to Parkers Piece bright and early to join in with a Cambridge Bootcamps session.  Believe me, I never thought I'd be doing burpees as a warm up @ 6.30am!  Outfit Ladies only Bootcamps are run by Charlie Wall, who I met with last week.  She and I both work specifically with women, run our own fitness companies and - bizarrely - originally come from the same town (Colchester for anyone interested)!  So it seemed fitting that at some point we'd get together and talk shop!  I loved the workout Charlie had devised for us all, and it was great to see so many women pushing themselves, burning bodyfat and having fun.  All before getting ready for work!  Currently they operate at four different locations throughout Cambridge and each camp holds 3 sessions per week.  I'm very excited about any involvement I might have with Cambridge Bootcamps in the future.

Then  of course there's the fabulous Sweaty Betty.  In 2010 I was one of the Sweaty Betty Ambassadors, and I've continued to have a lot of involvement with the Cambridge store this year.  The ambassador role involved everything from promoting their brand (pretty easy to do!)  to rather more "exotic" aspects:  Last May they sent me up to Perth to lead the post-race stretches at the Scone Palace Ribbon Walk, and I spent time at Sweaty Betty headquearters with the accessories designers in December, offering consumer advice on a variety of products.  Back in Cambridge, the lovely Kimberley Cole has been managing the store since Christmas time and, although I'm no longer an official ambassador, Kim has been great at supporting me and my business.  I hosted a Lovefit Client evening in the store back in March, and most recently Kim has offered a 15% discount for all my Buggy Bootcamp Mums from 27 Jun - 03 July.  Go and treat yourselves ladies :-)

Which leads me on to my next mention of the evening - Buggy Bootcamp.  For those of you not already in the know, Buggy Bootcamp is a fitness program for Mums with their babies, and was originally started back in 2009 by Nicola Ostler in Waterbeach.  I've been running Buggy Bootcamp in Cambridge since January and the classes have proved to be very popular.  We're all heading out for a Bootcamp social on 28th June which will be a great opportunity to have a "night off"(!) and get to know each other even better.  Can't wait!

Finally, and I promise to be brief, I'm hoping to go and train with Dax Moy in Januray.  I referrenced Dax - one of the Uk's leading personal trainers -  when I blogged yesterday.  I was lucky enough to catch him on Facebook after that and now I'm all fired up to attend his Kinetic Chain Assessment Course early next year.  I just have to rearrange a snowboarding trip which is likely to clash!  Goodnight.

A long overdue apology!

Wow - what a busy few of months:  Amazing 3 week trip to Thailand and Cambodia (April), launch of weekly Bootcamp class (May), and collaborations with some fabulous fitness professionals (June).

But none of that is an excuse for my lack of Blogging, especially as there's so much to share with everyone.  I'll be posting an entry for each of the above over the next few days, but in the meantime I should explain what's prompted me to get typing again after such a gap (my last post was, embarassingly, 2 April)!  The short answer is, quite simply, that I want to improve myself as a fitness coach.  The long answer requires a little more explanation and a big thank you to an elite trainer...

I guess self-improvement is something we all want, right?  Who wouldn't want to be "better"?  But what do we actually ever do about improving ourselves and reaching our goals?  The plain fact is that we rarely do anything.  We think about it, we maybe share our wildest dreams with our nearest and dearest, but beyond that, we just end up getting side-tracked.  I'm as guilty as the next person with this!  I say "if only..." and "I'd love to do..." and "wouldn't it be great if..." but rarely do I get round to following things up.  Like most people my excuse has always been time.  "I don't have time to write my Blog this week", "I don't have time to read that article", "I don't have time to complete my own workout today".  That's because daily life gets in the way.  For everybody.  Not just me, not just you - we all have 24 hours in a day!  We all have to work, eat, cook, shop, clean, do admin, keep fit and maintain a social life.  Most importantly we need to get out of that rut.  We have to change our habits and make the time to do what's important to us and that means prioritising!

This might all sound a little deep for a Wednesday afternoon, so you could be wondering what's prompted this?  Well it's a mix of a few things (about which I'll be blogging in the next few days) but culminating in a post I read last night by one of the UK's leading personal trainers, Dax Moy.  Dax's article was all about setting goals.  Not just wishy-washy wouldn't-that-be-lovely stuff, but clearly defined goals and determining what it is we'd actually like to achieve.  He alluded to the "perfect day" goal.  That isn't to say the best day you could ever imagine for a special occasion, rather the way you'd like to live your life on a daily basis in your ideal world.  The article highlighted the fact that we (the fitness professional) often lose sight of our own goals because we're so focused on trying to help our clients achieve theirs, and that we need to reassess our own goals in order to be truly excellent trainers and coaches.

Anyway, before I start to plagiarise what Dax Moy had to say (!), the point is that it got me thinking about my own career in the fitness industry.  I suppose my first goal and biggest achievement was actually setting up my business in the first place.  After 5 long years working for an Investment Bank in London I was desperate to find a route out, and I wanted to exploit that opportunity to do something completely different and to find a career that I genuinely loved.  A lot of people had their doubts as to whether I'd even manage to leave the clutches of the corporate world, and those who had faith were still a little dubious about my timing (i.e. trying to set up a persoanl training business just after we'd officially hit a recession)!  I was given a lot of advice about going to work in a gym first just to get some experience and to have a ready-made client base, but I was determined to make the most of my escape from the city, and wanted nothing more than to be my own boss and do it independently.

Luckily for me, it has all worked out and my business grew pretty quickly.  For the past 18 months I have been handling a very large client base and have seen some amazing results with the people I work with, and I am incredibly busy.  But that's just it!  I am incredibly busy, work very long unsociable hours, don't exactly rake it in, and often don't have time to do all those little extras that I'd like to do from a professional point of view.  I certainly haven't blogged enough, I still haven't tapped into online products and I'm only just reconnecting with other fitness professionals in the area (more on that to follow).

All this is a very long way of saying that I am now at a stage in my career where I really want to take my fitness business to the next level.  That's not to say I want to open a chain of gyms or take over the world - and actually I'm keeping my goals close to my heart for now - but needless to say the first step is to get blogging more.  Try to keep connected with everybody, share my experiences and hopefully receive valuable feedback through that process.

I promise to write a couple more posts over the next few days to elaborate on various points of interest from the past 3 months.  Good to be sharing that with everyone :-)