YOGA ATHLETE

Monday, 19 May 2014

FIVE SIMPLE FAT LOSS TIPS

Monitor your calorie intake – If you are not in a calorie deficit, you will NOT lose weight!
Exercise regularly – 2 heavy lifting sessions a week and 3 cardio-orientated sessions a week
Fill your plate with veggies, (preferably dark green first, then as colourful as possible), lean meats (chicken, turkey, fish) and be very sparing with the carbohydrates, if any at all
Don't avoid healthy fats (avocado, coconut oil, olives) but don't overdo them either!
Stop with the junk food!!! You can't seriously think you can keep eating/drinking that crap and lose weight, can you?! No sweets, chocolates, cakes, fizzy drinks, alcohol, pizzas, burgers, fries, etc.

Start a food diary. Write down EVERYTHING you consume. Work out how many calories it is. Yes this means weighing everything and doing a bit of work. Suck it up buttercup; it's for your own good. If you don't work it out you'll never know, and you NEED to know how many calories you're consuming, so you can consume less. Less than “I don't know” is never going to work!

Regular exercise doesn't mean only when it's convenient, or only when nothing better crops up, or only if you're feeling perfect. Schedule it in and get it done. It's the accumulation of that effort that gives results. One good workout once in a while is just NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Aim to lift heavy twice a week – things like deadlifts, squats and military presses, and then aim to do some more cardio-orientated three times a week. That means lifting weights faster or some type of “jumping around” activity. Your workout sessions can be around 30 minutes each. That's only 2 and half hours of specific activity a week. If you say you haven't got time, quite frankly I'm just not going to believe you.

Eat more veggies!! Not only are they a great source of vitamins & minerals; but by piling them onto your plate you eating more nutritionally dense foods that are lower in caloric value. Start with dark green veggies like spinach and broccoli, and then just add as much colourful veg as you can. Protein is a MUST on your plate. Do not scrimp on protein. It is essential for growth & repair of muscle tissue. If you're not consuming enough protein your workouts will suffer greatly and you won't get the results you're wanting.

Fats are important! Some vitamins and minerals are fat soluble, so without fats you'll become V&M deficient. Fat also provides a great source of energy as opposed to the weight-gaining carbohydrates. Look to include healthy fats like avocados, coconut oil and olives. Avoid overconsumption though, as fats have a high caloric value.

How can you expect to lose fat if you continue to consume crap? If you're eating and drinking junk foods then don't come crying to me when you haven't lost the excess weight. We all KNOW that junk food and drink leads to excess weight gain. In fact, most people who just cut out the junk food, the takeaways, the fizzy drinks and the alcohol will experience a substantial amount of weight loss. Try it. It works.

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Personal coaching can help you achieve the results you desire, as well as giving you the necessary effective tools you need to keep striving forwards, to keep changing and progressing on your journey.

Challenge everything, especially yourself.

Alex Kay Grimmer

Contact me for Kettlebell classes and Personal Training in Southend-on-sea.
Please visit my website: ALEXKAY

Monday, 12 May 2014

Lose Weight Or Lift Weight?

Why you should worry less about the number on the scales, and more about the number on the bar

When your main goal is to reduce the number on the scales, you do a whole bunch of detrimental things. Firstly you probably go the usual route of eating less and exercising more. This will only work if you are grossly overweight. Eating less means less fuel, yet you increase your activity levels. Your body has no option now but to steal fuel from a valuable source – muscle. Reduced muscle and reduced fuel intake results in a lower metabolic rate, which means regardless of your increased activity, your body will slow down the rate at which it burns fuel. You will also rob your body of vital vitamins and minerals, which results in a less effective immune system, and higher susceptibility to infection, mood swings, poor sleeping patterns, bad skin and hair, etc. With the addition of increased activity, and your body having less ability to recover, you're likely to suffer from an increase aches and pains which take longer to dissipate. Your ability to perform well at exercise is dramatically reduced too. Think you can squat and deadlift heavy in the state described above? Think again. Your health is adversely affected, and your performance is adversely affected; but you've lost those annoying few pounds right? Well it has probably been a struggle to go through all of that to lose those few pounds – the sort of struggle that's not sustainable. Eventually you will crack. You will either get ill, or probably have a binge due to the cravings you've created. Then you will despair at the thought of the weeks of effort, poor health, running yourself into the ground to achieve the loss of those few pounds, only to find yourself worse off for it, and likely to have regained those pounds back again anyway. The long term effects of this strategy also mean that each time you do this, you further damage your endocrine system and overall health, which means it gets harder and harder to achieve the same thing each time. Long term; you're going backwards.

By focusing on the number on the bar, you give yourself a performance related goal. This will directly be affected by ALL other factors. If you're concerned about increasing your deadlift or squat, you need to ensure that you are functioning optimally. So you need to ensure adequate and quality sleep. You need to ensure that you include active recovery to be prepared to lift heavy. You need to ensure you have fuelled your body correctly to have what is necessary to lift that weight. You need to ensure you don't over-train so that you are fresh for your lifting days. Now your body will function as it should. Your health will be optimal. Your sleeping pattern will be optimal. Your recovery will be optimal. Your mental focus and clarity will be optimal. Your mood will be positive. And guess what? Your body weight will be optimal too.

If you focus on a performance related goal, everything else must be optimally aligned to prepare for it. If you focus on bodyweight alone, you end up sacrificing everything else to achieve pointless goal. Think about it: If you say you want to lose a few pounds, what do you mean? A few pounds of what? Fat probably. A few pounds of fat from where exactly? Waistline probably. Why there specifically? So that you will look better probably. So when you break it down you want to LOOK better, not weigh less!

So stop focusing on losing weight! Start focusing on looking better, which will be a welcome result from focusing on better performance.

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Monday, 5 May 2014

Breakfast Options

My breakfast is nearly always the same – bacon and eggs cooked in coconut oil. This gives me a good amount of protein and healthy fats which not only provide excellent nutritional nourishment, but also keep me feeling full for most of the day. However, I have had requests for breakfast options that DON'T contain eggs; so here they are:

Breakfast Stir Fry

Chicken or turkey mince

Chopped onions & tomatoes

Mixed herbs

Tomato puree

Coconut oil

Avocado

Salt and pepper

Heat the coconut oil in a pan, add the onions and tomato, then the mince and fry for a few minutes. Add in the puree, herbs, salt & pepper and fry for a few more minutes until the meat is cooked. Slice your avocado on top and it's ready in less than 10 minutes :)

Avocado Breakfast Bowl

Chopped chicken breast(s)

Smoked paprika

Avocado

Chopped bacon

Sliced tomato

Coconut oil

Salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a pan and add the chicken. Fry it with the salt, pepper and paprika. Cook the bacon separately in another pan. Slice the avo in half and remove the pip. Scoop the flesh out and mash it in a bowl. Place the mashed flesh back into the avo shell. When the meat is cooked place it onto the mashed avocado and serve with the sliced tomato – again, all ready is about 10 minutes!

Enjoy :)

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Monday, 28 April 2014

I have had a request for suggestions on healthy lunches. We all probably struggle with what we should be eating because we have been conditioned to think it is cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and meat and potatoes for dinner. We it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, once you start exploring options, it is surprisingly easy, as well as healthier and actually tastier and more enjoyable!

Here's a tip: There is no set food for a particular meal. You can eat any food at any time. Food is fuel. It doesn't matter if it's 6am or 6pm. You will probably settle into particular foods for particular times, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can have steak, eggs, broccoli and sweet potato in the morning if it suits you! Break the mindset of set foods for set times. Dinners make great lunches too – time spent preparing for your health is not wasted :)

Cracking on; let's talk lunch.

Every lunch should contain protein, fat, and vegetables. The easiest options for protein are chicken, fish or eggs. I prefer to keep the 'heavier' red meats for evening meals, but they are fine too if you enjoy them :) Fats can come in the form of solids like avocados or olives (or even within fish such as salmon or mackerel) or oils like coconut, avocado or olive oils. Finally with veggies start with dark green (spinach, kale, broccoli) and then be as colourful as you can be!

Here are a couple of favourites, quick and easy lunch recipes.

Kale & Goats Cheese Salad:

a few large handfuls of kale

some of goats cheese

a sprinkle of pumpkin seeds

½ an avocado

2 red radishes thinly sliced

salt & pepper for taste

juice of ½ a lemon

a drizzle of olive oil

Put the kale, cheese, seeds, avo and radish into a bowl and mix! Season to taste, drizzle with the lemon juice & oil and enjoy :)

Clean & Lean lettuce Wrap

some large iceberg lettuce leaves

slices of roast turkey

sliced cucumber

hummus

paprika (a favourite of mine – try it on roasted and sliced sweet potato!)

Top a lettuce leave with a slice of turkey, cucumber, hummus and paprika. Wrap it up with another leaf and eat it like a sandwich – voilà!

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Tuesday, 4 March 2014

RECOVERY.

Two great things that everybody can, and should, be using to better aid recovery from their workouts; are magnesium oil and a foam roller.

Magnesium oil is a fantastic supplement with a list of benefits longer than a monkey's arm, but I will try and focus on the ones you will be interested in and benefit from!

People who work out a lot put their body under stress. This is in addition to the normal, every day stress we all have, which is a great deal sometimes just on it's own.

Magnesium oil is in fact a super-saturated water solution that you apply directly onto your skin which you absorb more effectively than if you took an oral supplement. If you have low levels of magnesium in your body, you may experience a tingling sensation when applying it, but as you build your levels up you won't feel the tingling any more.

Here comes the science bit..
Magnesium helps to optimise DHEA levels (which acts a backup to testosterone), pregnenolone, insulin, seratonin and growth hormone, amongst others. These hormones are the ones that keep us young, help us to sleep better, be more active, have healthy sex drives, burn fat more effectively and build muscle tissue.

The more we stress our bodies with exercise (and just 'normal' stress like finacial worries, family issues, poor sleeping patterns, etc) the lower our magnesium levels, which has a cascading effect on the adrenal function of our bodies, which in turn makes us feel sluggish, look and feel tired all the time, loss of sex drive, thinner hair and poor complexion... the list goes on.

The good news is that you can change all that just by applying magnesium oil twice a day to your skin after a shower. In fact, if you have a particular area that is tight or painful from exercise, you can apply it directly to those muscles, as magnesium oil also acts as a muscle relaxant. If you have no particular areas of discomfort, applying it to the abdomen or just the larger muscular areas will be best.

Benefits you should notice within a week or two are generally a better sleeping pattern, better recovery from exercise with less muscle soreness, and an elevated mood.

The second thing you can and should be doing to better aid your recovery is foam rolling. A foam roller is a foam cylinder that is available in varying sizes, densities and designs, but largely all do the same thing. My preference is THE GRID (Google it).

Basically you position yourself onto the roller, and 'roll' back and forth. Think of this as ironing out the wrinkles in your muscles - it's the next best thing to a massage. When your muscles are tight and sore, you have adhesions or maybe even scar tissue, and the rolling helps to release the adhesions (knots) and break down scar tissue build-up. This helps to reestablish proper movement patterns which will allow you to function better not only after a workout, but generally in life too as sometimes we go about with poor posture, or other lifestyle factors that inhibit our muscles and movement patterns.

So there you have it! Very simple yet extremely effective tools to aid recovery and just generally improve our lives and longevity. The key thing to remember is these things should be used ALL THE TIME. Apply the oil twice a day EVERY DAY. Foam roll every day, or at least EVERY OTHER DAY. It is the cummulative effect that will make the difference.

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Monday, 13 January 2014

Do you want to save £5 to £10?

Personal training is expensive. It is a luxury. But you really want results, and you know that if you try to do it on your own it just won't happen. So you've decided to invest in yourself instead of a new designer handbag, or the latest game console. How do you select a PT? They're all the same right? So you look at price. That's a reasonable thing to do, the economy sucks and we all need to be careful. You look around, and find surprisingly, a great number of personal trainers. Prices vary. But hey look! You've found one that is cheaper than the rest - £5 or £10 a session cheaper! What a bargain. Think of the money you're saving over those other trainer's clients. Easy decision, and you're on your way to a new you with your new PT.

Your new trainer works you HARD. They even have a whistle (How you hate that whistle...). You ache – for days. Every session you're sweating buckets, and getting to the point where you might need a bucket. You're drenched, dizzy, a little bit green around the gills, you have more than one part of you 'twinging' as you try to 'push through the pain'. But inside you're beaming because you KNOW that all this hard work will pay off and you will be amazing. The first few weeks are great, painful as they might be, because the pounds are finally coming off! This PT must REALLY know their stuff! AND you saved money with this PT!

Then after a few weeks; no more weight loss. Your body aches more than ever, but your PT just yells at you to go harder and faster, “More! More! More!” Eventually, you have no option but to slack off. You feel tired ALL the time, yet you still don't sleep well. The aches and pains just don't go away, and that stabbing pain every time you try a certain exercise is really starting to get to you. Your eyes look like a panda and your skin like a crocodile. Well congratulations. You have wrecked your endocrine system. Don't know what that is? Well neither does your cheap PT probably, which is why he destroyed yours. He also never advised you on correct lifting form, so your horrendous technique is now so ingrained it'll take a decent PT months to fix. But you did lose 5-10lbs in weight, and you did save 5-10 pounds in cash per session. It was worth it right?

When selecting a PT, do NOT select them purely based on price or even popularity (Paris Hilton is popular; remember?). Select your PT based on knowledge and skill. Those two, and ONLY those two things are what will get you from where you are to where you want to be, and safely.

I always encourage my clients to question everything. Feel free to ask me WHY I am getting you to do certain exercises. Ask me what the benefits are; how exactly is this going to get you to your goals? In fact, I pre-empt this. I always educate my clients, both class and private. I encourage you to learn, I encourage you to look to the right people to learn from. Most of my long term clients would make better coaches than 90% of the personal trainers out there. Why? Because I have educated them on everything, and taught them to think for themselves. Correct form, and how to fix mistakes, which exercises support others and why... etc.

I am always interested in helping people to learn. I am not just about beasting you into the ground. That part is easy. That time will come, but generally later when you have enough knowledge, experience, technique and strength to handle it so that it progresses you and doesn't just destroy you.

I may not be the cheapest. I am not the most expensive either. But I guarantee results if you follow what I say. I train, compete, get coached by and coach (yes, that too) some of the top coaches and lifters in the world. Every month I am in London at least once training alongside the countries top coaches. I attend seminars and workshops throughout the year hosted by the world's best coaches and lifters. I also coach and lecture at events, and I am recognised within the industry as someone who has a huge amount to contribute.

I am looking to take on a small number of new clients this year because from next year (and later on this year) my availability for PT will be less as I increase the seminars, lectures and writing I do within the industry. So if you're looking to make a change within yourself, now is the time. Start investing in yourself because this body has got to last you. Take the plunge and see what you are actually capable of, and in the process future-proof yourself against old age filled with illness and poor posture.

I will always do my best to make my services available, but what I offer has value, and as such it has a cost. In the long term it is money well spent. Would you rather lose 5-10lbs in 2-3 months with a cheap trainer, but then not only gain the weight back but have gained postural problems and a wrecked endocrine system to boot? One of my female clients recently performed a double bodyweight deadlift, and another should be there in a matter of weeks now too. These long term clients have progressed steadily, but have CONTINUED to do so, and will keep progressing. Which group do you want to be in?

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Monday, 6 January 2014

Benefits of PT in a group session

People come to me for personal training to get fitter, to get stronger, to be able to move better. Well I want to be able to give the people coming to my classes those benefits. I do not want to run classes where people just go through the motions, using the same old weights they always did, never changing and never progressing. I love my classes and I really want to give everyone the most benefits that they can get. So in 2014, I am going to push the envelope, and push YOU to achieve far more than you thought you could. If you are really wanting to change, and see what you are capable of, join me for 2 classes a week and watch your strength DOUBLE in 6 months! Want to know how?

For at least the first 6 months I am going to focus on 3 specific things during the group sessions -

1 – your ability to get up and down effectively

2 – the amount of power, and focus, you can generate

3 – pure, raw, strength

This means...

Turkish Get Ups. Yes people struggle with these, but that is the number one reason to do more of them, and to get better at doing them. Everything starts with movement patterning. If you have poor movement, you have no base for building anything. Adding strength to dysfunction is a recipe for disaster. Start moving better and you will see how everything else becomes easier.
Swings. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to swing light kettlebell. A strong core, good posture, unparalleled grip strength, true fitness and the ability to generate a good amount of athletic power are all benefits of a strong swing. Aim to be swinging one third of your bodyweight during the classes.
Overhead Pressing. Once again, people gravitate towards the same, safe, light weights when performing overhead presses. The only way you are going to get stronger is by using a heavier weight. You need to push outside the comfort zone, suck it up, and use something heavier. This is actually easier than you think. By push pressing the weight, you get used to having something heavier in your hand and above your head. Keep push pressing until you can press it, then grab something heavier and start push pressing that.

Consider your training frequency too. How many group sessions do you attend each week? Once a week is great, but twice a week is infinitely better. Why wait a full 7 days before doing it again? What are you doing during those 7 days – sitting on your bum watching TV? Ask yourself, is there a real reason why you can't attend 2 sessions a week.

To encourage you to train more regularly, if you attend 2 classes each week without a break, after 9 classes you will get your tenth class absolutely FREE!

The classes are part of my gym schedule so long as enough people are attending them. Please encourage people you know to join you, so that you and others can continue to enjoy them and benefit from them. Here is my class incentive scheme for 2014:

You bring a friend and their first class is FREE!

When they attend their 2^nd class, you pay only £5!

With your help, I can offer even more scheduled kettlebell classes, which will give you more opportunity and availability to attend them. Please encourage your friends and family to join you and support what is going to be an exciting year for physical change!

I don't know about you, but I am really excited to break through barriers and comfort zones this year, mine AND yours! It is exciting to know how that in only 6 months I am going to be praising people for what they have managed to achieve! All you have to do is show up, and work hard for approximately 40 minutes twice a week. Are you game?

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