It’s been a few months since the last update of news and research in the pregnancy world. In my personal life I’ve had a new niece and a new nephew arrive in the last few months so I thought it was time I heralded their arrival with a few posts I’ve seen about pregnancy. It’s [...]
A while ago I used to joke that I did too many blog-watches about Vitamin D. Well, since then the topic of “sleep” has taken over from that. There’ve been some more excellent posts about sleep and, crucial as sleep is to good athletic performance and health, I’ve set them out below as a glossary [...]
Tags:Recovery·Rest·Sleep·weight loss
I get stressed far too easily and I’ve found that my stress levels correlate with poor performance in the gym as well as mental fog and all the usual things that I expect from high stress days. It’s worth noting though that I don’t often suffer from poor sleep when stressed, I just wake up [...]
Tags:Diet·Insomnia·Motivation·Muscle gain·Recovery·Rest·Stress·Training·weight loss·Women
I have the good fortune to live in a village between two large towns. While I am conscious of the light pollution of these towns when walking after dark on the hills outside the village, we aren’t close enough to notice a significant “glow” at night. Our bedroom is on the back of the house [...]
Tags:Mental health·Muscle gain·office·Recovery·Sleep·weight loss
This is a controversial subject. Obviously there is the “women should do light weights with high reps and shouldn’t lift heavy” camp and I definitely disagree with them. However, there are some more subtle differences that may affect how you structure your training (eg. biomechanics, ability to recover etc). A few months ago I had [...]
Tags:Female·Glutes·Pull up·Recovery·Training·Women·Work capacity
Yesterday we looked at why the thoracic spine should have some mobility and what problems may occur if it loses that mobility. Today I’m going to briefly look at an example of how poor thoracic mobility can specifically have an adverse impact on powerlifting and then I’m going to work through some common stretches designed [...]
Tags:Injury·Mobility·Powerlifting·Recovery·Self-massage·Thoracic·Training
A couple of weeks ago, I was reminded that I had promised myself I would really start to address my thoracic spine mobility. The key word in that sentence is “reminded”. While on holiday we had identified that my lack of thoracic spine mobility was a key problem for me and that I was unlikely [...]
In case I hadn’t mentioned it enough, I was on “holiday” last week. The reason for the inverted commas is that I was walking over half of the UK’s coast-to-coast. This is a 192 mile (307km) walk from St Bees on the west cost to Robin Hoods Bay on the east coast, crossing several of [...]
Yesterday, I wrote about my new adventure into the world of barefoot shoes and the different options available to people. Having finally decided to get Vibram FiveFingers for both Chris and me, and having spent a significant amount of time online finding out exactly how to do that in the UK, I’ve decided that [...]
Last weekend I cracked. On the Saturday I finally admitted a temporary defeat and decided to completely re-write the training program from scratch. I had two main reasons: work-related things at the moment mean that it would be handy to have a bodyweight equipment-free workout that will be effective and which I can bring out [...]
