Cycling In The City – Improving Posture for Optimal Performance

June 19, 2013 By

In the second of our articles on Cycling in The City Nell Mead, Clinical Rehab Director of our sister company Victory Health & Performance, looks at the effects of posture and mobility on cycling performance for office professionals. She also offers a couple of simple stretches and soft tissue exercises you can do to keep yourself fighting fit.

One of the biggest issues faced by cyclists and city workers alike is back pain. In fact almost 50% of patients we see at Victory Health & Performance initially present with low back pain as their primary symptom and quite honestly I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve explained to my physiotherapy patients that sitting down all day (long hours at work, and then more hours on the bike and at home) will eventually make them “chair-shaped”.

Being static for long periods in any position is bad for you – humans are designed to move, and if we don’t, our muscles, joints and spinal discs become sluggish and stiff – but being static for long periods in a flexed position, as you are in a chair, is even worse, because our muscles also gradually shorten, adapting to the limited demands we place on them.

This is particularly important if you are a sedentary worker who wants to cycle, because of the following equation, well-known in sports and discussed in Dave’s introductory article:

power = strength x speed

Both how much you push (strength) and how fast you push it (speed) are both affected by the range of motion around the joint. In other words, it’s one thing to train hard for strength, but if you don’t also work on your range of motion, or flexibility you won’t have the mechanical advantage on shortened muscles to produce optimal speed to power up those steep hills.

Flexibility is a quality that encompasses many factors, including joint range and stiffness, neuromuscular control, muscle length and muscle compliance (and all of these factors can also be broken down still further) – but let’s look at just a couple of those and relate them to back pain.

One of the biggest factors in becoming “chair-shaped” is the length and compliance of the hamstring muscles at the back of the thigh. Your hamstrings start at the base of your pelvis, so when these muscles are tight, your spine is pulled into a flexed position – a major cause of back pain.

The role of the hamstring muscle group is twofold: to extend your leg behind you and to bend your knee. When you have optimal hamstring length and compliance, you are able to sit comfortably on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you, and your low back upright and relaxed, without your pelvis wanting to sag backwards. If you can’t do that easily, it may be that you have short or non-compliant hamstrings, which will affect your chances of getting back pain and your chances of powering up hills on your bike.

To correct this, there are two areas you really need to stretch (for muscle length) and massage (to improve compliance, or “bounce”) – not just the back of your thigh, but also the outer part of your buttock (piriformis), as this surrounds the sciatic nerve which can affect hamstring flexibility.

Stretch to increase muscle length

Hold each stretch for 30-40 seconds, repeat three times on each leg, and try to repeat the sequence 3-4 times per day. To increase muscle length, stretch 6 days per week; to maintain it, 3 days per week is enough. Move smoothly into each stretch and try to relax into it, rather than bouncing.

Hamstrings (back of thigh):

cycling city personal training londonFor this stretch, make sure your raised foot points straight ahead of you (you can pull your toes up if you feel that increases the stretch) and that your hips are both pointing forward.

  • Place your left foot on a low support, keeping your left knee straight.
  • Bend forward slightly at the waist, and then carefully tilt your buttocks up and back, effectively pulling your hip away from your knee to create a c-shaped curve in your low back.

Piriformis (outer buttock)

The cycling stretches city of londondining table is quite a good place to stretch your buttock muscles; but any surface around hip-height will do.

  • Place your right lower leg up onto the table, keeping your knee in line with the centre of your chest. If your piriformis is tight, you may not be able to get your knee quite as low as the girl in the picture, but try to drop your knee as low as you can while staying as relaxed as possible.
  • Once you’re in position, try to bend forward at the waist, keeping your back straight and your head up, so that you don’t collapse over the leg.
Massage to improve muscle compliance

The best way to improve muscle compliance is through skilled sports massage, as a good therapist’s fingers (and thumbs and elbows!) will find and tease out tight and fibrous areas of tissue, helping the entire muscle to relax and become compliant. So for best results, we highly recommend the lovely Helen Murawska (pictured on the foam roller). However, if you don’t have the spare time or cash to devote to it, a reasonably good (if a bit more painful) alternative is to get on the foam roller or cricket ball and massage it yourself.

Hamstrings

This exercisecycling city london personal trainer massages the tight hamstring muscles to improve tissue compliance and iron out any trigger points.

  • Place the roller horizontally under your hamstrings, leaning your weight back onto your hands. Your feet and bottom should both be off the ground.
  • Lift your right leg into the air so that your weight rests only on your left thigh.
  • Using your arms to propel you, slowly roll back and forth so that the roller moves from your hip to your knee. If you find a particularly tight or tender spot, stop there and consciously relax your muscle until the tenderness releases. Continue for around a minute, then switch legs.

Piriformis

This exercise city of london personal training cyclingworks out knots in the tight piriformis muscle, helping also to improve flexibility around the sciatic nerve.

  • Sit on the roller, resting your weight back onto your hands so that both feet are off the ground, and place your right ankle over your left knee.
  • Rotate slightly to the right, so that your weight rests on your right buttock.
  • Using your arms to propel you, shift your weight around your right buttock until you find a particularly tight or tender spot. If it’s too tender, take more weight through your arms, or put your left foot down. If you’re not feeling it enough, reach forward with your left arm and pull your knee a bit further across your body.
  • Continue for around a minute, then switch legs.

If you don’t notice significant improvements in your flexibility (remember that sitting with legs out straight test?) or hamstring power within a couple of weeks, it’s possible that there could be more going on than just the muscles – for example, joint or disc stiffness, poor neuromuscular patterning, or mechanical imbalance – so it’s worth getting checked out by a good physiotherapist.

 

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Improved posture can help generate more power for optimal cycling performance

“As someone lucky enough to enjoy the twin delights of an office job (lots of sitting down) and above average height (I’m sick of tall-person jokes), it’s no surprise that lower back problems were eventually going to come my way. And come my way they did, with the sudden onset of ‘acute locked back’ while doing nothing more demanding than standing up in my kitchen one day. I would strongly recommend any office worker getting into cycling to take their posture and mobility seriously as I could have saved myself one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the inconvenience of a recovery period lasting several months. However, it turns out that just a couple of minutes of exercises each night, alleviating the compressed discs at the base of my spine, are all that are required to prevent it from happening again. Thankfully, Nell at Victory Health & Performance managed to dedicate some careful attention to the offending back muscles in just 4 sessions and I now have a fighting chance of discarding the walking stick and completing a 300-mile charity cycle ride just three weeks from now. ”

Paul Simms

The final article in this series will look at strength and conditioning for City Cycling Professionals.


Major (Retd) Nell Mead is a former Army physiotherapist who now runs Victory Health & Performance, the sports injury centre in the city where the best get better. She specialises in back pain and sports injury assessment and treatment. For more information, go to www.victoryhealthandperformance.com or to book an appointment, call administrator Sarah Harvey on 07702 808 303.

Stretch pictures are used with permission from Tanya Bell-Jenje, www.bellrogersphysio.co.za

Foam roller pictures are modelled by sports therapist Helen Murawska MSc of Victory Health & Performance

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Cycling In The City – Introduction

June 17, 2013 By

The media somewhat disparagingly call them MAMILS (Middle Aged Men In Lycra) but the rise of cycling and triathlon as pastimes, replacing football and squash, is one of the big sporting commercial success stories of the last few years. Off the back of Olympic and Tour de France glory, British Cycling set a new record membership in 2012.

Whilst the sight of grown men shaving their legs (without really knowing why) and guzzling down energy drinks (without really knowing why) in the hope of emulating their professional idols creates a uniquely post-modern mid life crisis, as Weltschmerz anxiety reactions go it’s positively beneficial.

personal training city of london

Foundry:City client Chris who came 20th out of 225 riders in 445 mile London-Edinburgh Rat Race

As with almost all exercise cycling is good for you. Numerous studies specifically looking at the sport have suggested it has beneficial effects on body fat, cardiovascular health and diabetes, particularly for beginners.1 Cycling is also a low-impact sport. Unlike running, 70% of your body weight goes through the saddle and handlebars which makes it a particularly good choice for those new to, or coming back to, exercise, especially if they’re carrying a little bit of extra padding.

Finally cycling, alongside walking and running as a form of travel, is one of the easiest forms of exercise to incorporate into daily life.

However, in the interest of balance, it should be highlighted that there are concerns about the effect of sitting in the saddle for prolonged periods, with links at the elite level to a loss of sensation in the genitals and lowered sperm counts. There are also obvious dangers to hurtling around on an exposed two wheeled vehicle, particularly on busy London roads; however several studies have demonstrated the health benefits of cycling outweigh the associated risks.2 In fact most risks could be cut dramatically by changes to cycling policy and infrastructure, as seen in Holland in the 1970s which has also demonstrated a clear cost benefit to the economy of increased cycling.3 You can sign this petition here to ‘Get Britain Cycling‘.

Unsurprisingly we work with many clients at Foundry:City who cycle or compete in triathlons outside of work and who often do so as a popular way to raise funds for charity. Any fitness professional who ignores the meteoric rise of the competitive Mamil is turning away business from passionate people, hungry for knowledge and coaching, with the financial means to pay for it.

In this series of articles we will be profiling the following case studies of clients embarking on long distance cycle rides for charities and discussing their specific training and rehab requirements. In addition to training support, The Foundry is also making charitable donations to their chosen charities so we also hope to highlight these good causes.

  1. Mike and Paul are cycling 300 miles across Europe for Right To Play, a global organisation that uses the transformation power of sport and games to educate and empower children facing adversity. http://www.justgiving.com/Setters300miles http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/PaulSimms

  2. Tim is cycling from Paris to Geneva in September to support the Meningitis Trust after his son Alex contracted meningitis at the age of 10 months. http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TimBoag

For most Foundry clients we look at cycling as a base line fitness activity and as such there are many ways we can help prevent injuries and increase bike strength and power through postural correction, dietary approaches and resistance training.

Whilst the neuro-muscular stimulus of cycling itself will be enough for many beginners to see rapid improvements, beyond this stage, we find strength and power training, and the addition of lean muscle mass, are essential for optimal cycling performance. The management of body mass and body fat is the other critical component; carrying excess weight comes with a huge physical cost in work. The more weight, the more drag, the less speed.

Cycling requires the best possible power to weight ratio. It is often said a rider capable of winning the Tour de France requires the ability to deliver over 6 watts per kilo on the final climb of a mountain stage.4 There are clearly two ways to increase power-to-weight ratio. Either increase the power or reduce the weight.

In 2009, a study of club level cyclists, triathletes and mountain bikers gave participants either 2 extra sprint interval sessions a week, or a weight loss diet. At the end of the 10 weeks both groups improved peak and anaerobic power-to-weight ratios by about 10%, but neither method proved to be a superior approach.5 Most surprising of all is that participants who did both sprint interval training and weight loss did not improve their power-to-weight ratio at all, the problem being that losing a significant amount of weight through calorie restriction prevented them from gaining any power through interval training.

So which approach is better? In our experience, despite this research, the answer is both, but not at the same time and weight loss should certainly not be at the expense of inadequate protein intake! In the next article in this series we will expand on this and highlight and discuss the training and nutrition which we use to support our cycling clients.

personal trainer liverpool street

Paul demonstrating the strength, body composition and postural improvements which will have a direct transference to cycling performance.

If you’re thinking that personal training is not for you, or it’s too expensive, then do also consider how much money is wasted on gym memberships that don’t get used, and how a few sessions with a real professional could help you assess exactly what training and diet works for you personally – you’ll essentially be far healthier for life.

References

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The Five Pillars of Good Health

March 22, 2013 By
When we talk about ‘fitness’ or ‘health’ definitions are often blurred. Inwardly the fitness industry tends to focus heavily on body composition, size, and strength, while outwardly our health service and medical industry have real concerns over obesity, diabetes, and the rapidly increasing elderly population.

There is still a major disparity between the two camps, though in reality the two are closely linked. The fitness industry by its nature seems to attract those who are younger and have less interest in the long-term health aspects of exercise and fitness. Through the rise in media surrounding how we look, rather than how we feel, it has become far more trendy to post pictures of six-pack transformations and large muscular physiques than case studies of improved health, daily function, or disease reduction.

Nevertheless, the two need not be mutually exclusive, although it is questionable that we should sacrifice the latter in search of the former. If our clients are truly in search of ‘feeling’ better, we need to take a wider look at their health and know that if they can get those aspects in line, they will not only feel they look better, but also feel better about how they look.

1) Emotional Health:personal trainer liverpool street

The increase in depression, eating disorders, stress-related illness, and dependence on medication is frightening. Our ability to change our habits and improve our health is built on a foundation of being able to emotionally cope with change, and the realisation of the need to do so. Obesity lives at one end of the eating spectrum, while obsessive eating behaviours and eating disorders occupy the other. Both are unhealthy but are all too easily formed. For many who feel a lack of control in other aspects of their life, eating habits can quickly become the anchor to which they attach a need for control. Of course, eating is not the only vice chosen. Alcohol, drugs, smoking, gambling, violence, and promiscuity all form conduits by which people try to find some escape from their unhappiness. For those wanting to make changes to their life, addressing emotional health is the place to begin. Recognising this and then taking steps to improve it is a necessary start to living a life free of unhealthy emotional attachments and destructive habits.

Tip: Many factors affect our emotional health and the reality is that we will all have to deal with difficult and unpleasant situations in our life. Adopting healthy habits and hobbies that bring us pleasure, be that owning a pet or taking up a sport, improve our ability to deal with these situations and minimise their impact on our overall health. Find something you’ve always wanted to try or experience and go do it. Searching out new and exciting experiences is always rewarding. Support this with a diet high in unprocessed foods and vegetables, healthy sleep patterns, and minimising substance/stimulant use that tend to have a depressive effect.

2) Joint Health:personal trainer shoreditch

While working out is often associated with building bigger muscles and improving muscular strength, it is far less trendy or sexy to talk about joint health. However, when our joints start to break down or are injured, the effects are debilitating. This is why we place such a large focus on flexibility when working with our personal training clients. While the benefits of resistance training are plentiful and well-established, it does carry the potential to increase wear and tear on the joints of the body. Of course, this may not manifest itself to some way down the training journey but, when it does, it will be much harder than muscle damage to recover from. Our joint structures turn over far slower than our muscles and once damaged will be hard to repair. Couple this with the effects of age, poor nutrition, and a sedentary lifestyle and the importance of attention to joint health is obvious.

Tip: Bodybuilder Reg Park (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s idol) recognised many decades ago that there was value in taking lay-offs from heavy resistance training loads. While this may be a bitter pill to swallow for those competing in strength sports, it shouldn’t be so hard to swallow for those for whom long-term health is a consideration. Breaks from high volumes of resistance training, coupled with a healthy respect for flexibility and nutrition should provide a recipe that makes weight training a lifelong pursuit. Similarly, so many people ignore the signs of poor joint health and continue to load joints through a fear of ‘letting go’ of their strength training schedule. Stretch tight areas, improve range of movement, and allow rest and recovery when joints start to tell you that they need a break. Activities like yoga, pilates, and tai chi can be a fantastic balance for heavy resistance training.

3) Digestive Health:

The digestive system is a powerful window into our health. Modern research is identifying the role of the various elements of gut health and are even starting to show links between digestive flora and obesity, plus we all know the effects that stress, anxiety, or excitement can have on our stomachs. Our digestion can also suffer when confronted with foods that provide a greater challenge than it was originally designed for. Diets high in wheat, gluten, refined/processed foods, all increase the burden on the gut to effectively break down and absorb nutrients, which can affect everything from our mental health (95% of our serotonin is found in the gut) to simply cramping our social life when suffering from bloating and stomach ache. It isn’t just our diet either that can cause digestive problems. Prescription medication often has detrimental impacts on gut health, ranging from the damage caused by NSAIDS to our stomach lining to the effect of antibiotic use on digestive flora.

Tip: If you suffer from poor gut health, an elimination diet can be a useful way to determine what causes you problems. Taking out key troublemakers such as high wheat foods can often have an immediate impact on improving digestion. Often including foods like pears, nectarines, and prunes can help smooth digestive transit along with a good intake of water. Try to avoid using over the counter medication where possible, in particular known gut irritants like Ibuprofen.

4) Metabolic Health: personal training shoreditch

With so many of our clients attending regular health screenings and operating in high stress environments it would be foolhardy to be ignorant of metabolic markers of health. From aerobic capacity through to blood lipid levels, these tests can provide insights into the possible risk of long-term health problems. It is a shame that these medicals give little attention to measures of inflammation and blood triglycerides, which to me would seem more pertinent as the paradigm surrounding heart disease risk gradually starts to shift. Aside from that debate, blood pressure, waist circumference, and resting blood glucose provide an excellent insight into our clients health and we have consistently seen these drop markedly in our clients with a bit of attention to diet, a reduction in alcohol intake (note total abstinence not required), and the addition of some cardiovascular exercise, which our clients enjoy both the physical and psychological benefits of despite its vilification in recent times by countless fitness experts and personal trainers.

Tip: Metabolic markers of health can often be considerably improved with simple and easily sustained changes to diet, lifestyle, and exercise habits. Reducing alcohol on several days of the week, lowering sugar and starch intake, taking some exercise over the weekend, and managing stress all combine to have a powerful effect on improving health.

5) Dental Health: 

The last part of this little post is to look at dental health and the emerging data linking heart disease and dental health. I won’t get into all the hubbub surrounding fillings and heavy metal poisoning etc; it’s way beyond the scope of this post and I’m way under qualified to comment on it. However, one thing is for sure and that’s that we only get one set of adult teeth so we had better look after them. Many habits that affect our health negatively can also impact on our dental health causing tooth decay, gum disease, discolouration, acid erosion, and bad breath. All equally bad news, but a very quick and easy way to get a window into someone’s overall health is to look inside their mouth. Stress, anxiety, and stimulants can cause teeth grinding (the official name is Bruxism) which also accelerates the wear and tear on our mouth. In a 2010 study, those participants with the worst oral hygiene routine were 70% more likely to develop heart disease compared to those who cleaned their teeth twice a day. Whether it is causative or simply correlation remains in debate, in a similar way to how we should be viewing cholesterol in reality. However, gum disease (gingivitis) is an inflammatory condition and modern health research is showing us that for many years inflammation has been the elephant in the room when it comes to heart disease.

Tip: Brush your teeth twice daily, preferably with a electric toothbrush and careful attention to teeth, tongue, and gums. Get teeth professionally cleaned by a hygienist twice a year, and avoid habits that damage teeth, such as smoking and fizzy drinks.

So, there you have it. Five pillars of health that when combined give an insight into our overall fitness outside of the now more mainstream measures of BMI, Body Composition, or muscularity. What’s more is that very few of these require much effort to monitor or measure, with the exception of some aspects of our metabolic health that can be easily tested with home kits or via private medicals. Address, and in turn improve in, all the above areas and it is highly likely that you’ll see an accompanying improvement in how you look, feel, move, and function as our body remodels itself to the demands placed on it.

Often health improvement is less of a consideration or motivation for many taking up exercise, but for those clients we see at our City of London studios it will often be a high priority as they notice their decreased ability to cope with the stresses of the modern workplace and lifestyle surrounding it. As with much of our work, simple changes can have profound effects. Tackling the ‘big rocks’ within our clients lives, and strengthening them through intelligently applied resistance and cardiovascular training provides a platform for them to continue to enjoy their work, families, and leisure time.

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Health Dreams vs Reality 2: Training Recommendations for City Guys and Girls

March 5, 2013 By
Health Seminar

Graeme at our latest successful corporate health and fitness seminar

In the first part of this little blog series Graeme Marsh, one of the few personal trainers who has spent over a decade working with desk bound workers in the City of London, talked about a few general recommendations for health and nutrition when working with the general population.  It seemed only natural to expand this into the actual training aspect; what we do in the gym with our clients and why:

First up, to avoid attracting the barbed quills of keyboard-based trainers out there, we should qualify a few things about our typical clients. They are usually over 30, or more commonly over 40 and have more interest in their general health than they do achieving ‘X’ % body fat or ‘Y’ Kg Bench Press. Most of our clients, but not all, do very little ‘training’ on their own, but often enjoy recreational activity. These girls and guys are also really smart, and can smell the kind of bullshit the fitness industry likes to peddle from a mile off, so we keep it simple, direct, and straightforward. Our clients are the definition of the time poor professional, so the training and the advice we give is designed to work with their lives, not against it.

As with the previous post, I haven’t bothered to find references to back everything up. So-called ‘bro-science’ is very out of vogue these days and if you aren’t referencing ten papers per statement you now risk being ostracised for being ‘non-scientific’. I’m all for sports science, I even got an MSc in it  7 years ago, but as usual the pendulum has swung the other way and we are forgetting that training people in the real world is a long way from studying university students in a lab. I spent a lot of time when I was younger writing from a position where my academics outweighed my experience, but with over a decade in the city training clients now I feel confident that a combination of the two is a good place to come from. Besides, you won’t find many studies on how to train a 45 year old banker, so you’ll just have to trust me on some of this. However, that said, I’m reasonably confident most of these conclusions are borne out in what evidence there is.

  • Most people do way more than they need to (particularly when starting out) and often way more than they should do when it comes to work sets. This is a double edged sword, not only does it seriously hinder recovery, it is inefficient, tiring, and usually done at the expense of other less-trendy fitness qualities (such as flexibility or endurance)
  • There is too much focus on how much weight is lifted and not enough on how it is done. Unless you’re competing in a strength-based event, the actual number on the weights is merely a tool to measure progression. Effective muscle recruitment demands an attention to technique often missing in the average gym member.
  • Much like nutrition, exercise is a lifelong habit, therefore long-term compliance to, and confidence in, your methods is of importance.
  • It’s really fine to stretch people first. Really, it is. They aren’t about to leap up and try for a 1RM snatch or 30m sprint so if people have restricted range of movement in the hips and shoulders don’t expose their joints to risk by loading poor movements. I’ve been doing it for ages without seeing any negative effects, to the contrary I’ve seen good improvements in clients movements and self-reported feelings of improvement and progress through making flexibility a focus in those that need it. Combined with an appropriate warm up this way seems more effective at building better movements. Once these movements are well established, less work is needed to maintain them.
  • The Tabata protocol is misunderstood, overused, and under delivers. If they aren’t on a wattbike hitting 170% of Vo2 max, then it isn’t ‘Tabata’ -Swings and Planks don’t cut it. Conventional interval training, adjusted to target the desired energy system, is though far more time efficient than steady state training both for fitness and body composition. This doesn’t mean that we should discourage people from doing any exercise that they actually enjoy and feel the benefits from. A bit of lower intensity CV work or recreational sport should be encouraged and most people are more likely to do this anyway.
  • I prioritise high intensity weight training with female clients, but I do so because it is the thing they are least likely to do on their own due to the atmosphere in most weight rooms around the city.
  • The fitter and stronger the client, the better the tolerance of both intensity and volume (and greater the need for adequate recovery when working at higher levels). You’d think this common sense but you still see people with a 4 week training history being pushed to max rep deadlifts……that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen
  •  Train their arms directly. I know, I know, chins train the arms – if you can do them for sets with good form. Most people can’t – so, if you want to get stronger and better looking guns start close grip pressing and barbell curling. How curls ever got relegated in favour of ‘functional’ training I’ll never know.
  •  Speed of movement is a really effective training variable when followed, but some people just don’t have the attention span. Slow and Fast works for them. Pick your battles.
  • Timing rest periods is a fundamental of any competent trainer or trainee. If you aren’t timing your rest periods then you may as well use random weights and reps for every set too.
  • Single Leg and Single Arm stuff can be great, but it doubles workout time and therefore reduces workout efficiency by 50%. I tend to use it sparingly and generally when people are starting out. So-called ‘unstable surface’ training is pointless and ineffective.
  • Making someone ‘really sore’ should not be used as a reference for the quality of the training session (same goes for making someone throw up).
  •  The Good Morning has to be one of the most underrated exercises out there for people who spend ages at desks and on planes.
  • Unless competing in a strength contest, your primary goal with resistance training is to recruit muscle effectively. Too often the movement and the load are given priority over the muscles used to achieve it. This is training for injury not injury prevention.
  •  It’s better to use exercises with short learning curves. You can often achieve the same results but with less time spent mastering technique than using more complex movements.
  • Sure, full squats and deadlifts are great, but new clients have a whole training life ahead of them so don’t feel like they have to be doing those movements from week 1, especially as most people who’ve spent 20 years at a desk will lack the muscle recruitment and movement patterns to perform them in a way that doesn’t make my teeth hurt when watching. Set an effective foundation from the start so when they start with the big movements they can experience success long-term.
  • Continually working to failure week-in, week-out is probably the fastest way to stall someone’s training. Time spent mastering reps at a level close to but below technical failure (or as Ian King coined the term, their ‘Technical Limit’) builds confidence and volume at higher loads. Cluster training is brilliant for this as is Progressive Wave Loading.
  •  Periodisation in it’s purest form is great for Olympians but a sledgehammer to crack a walnut for average city folks. Life itself provides a ton of natural variation. Have a basic idea of what qualities you want to focus on but be prepared to moderate/increase/reduce dependent on nutrition/rest/stress/mood.
  • As far as periodisation goes, we will sometimes focus on one quality more than another, but rarely at the total expense of another. Generalised training outcomes (lose weight, tone up etc) don’t require overly specific means.
  • Measures of health tend to mean more to us than measures of ‘gym fitness’ ie: body fat %, strength in certain lifts, or overall muscular size.
  • When people say their ‘core is weak’ they really mean ‘my back is weak and my glutes need to start working for me’. I barely do any ‘abdominal’ work with people, but we do a ton of back strengthening, particularly before we start squatting or deadlifting heavy. See earlier point on the Good Morning.
  • Most guys aren’t as obsessed about ‘getting big’ as the fitness industry itself is.
  • If someone struggles to even get to sessions on time due to work and life commitments, don’t bother trying to get them taking supplements – it’s a waste of your time and their money.
  • Yoga movements make brilliant warm ups, they’ve now become known as ‘dynamic warm ups’ in an American rebrand.
  • Every now and then mix it up and reverse ‘conventional’ exercise order, it creates a stimulus for adaptation and prevents imbalances in training developing.
  • High volume workouts tend to leave people too wiped out to go back to their desk, let alone come back and train two days later. Use volume sparingly as it will create a ‘recovery hole’ quicker than other programme variables. Doing large amounts of sets in one line of movement also requires balance with others and this can be difficult to achieve on 2-3 x week schedules. It doesn’t mean I never use it, but right place, right time is key.
  • City workers tend to work late, sleep late and poorly, drink regularly, and have high stress loads, but by some sort of Darwinian career choice they seem to thrive on this far better than most. Experiment to find the right balance of volume and intensity for each client. Women tend to tolerate greater volumes but this may be because they generally tend to spend less time training near their max. Performance can ebb and flow, tweak routines accordingly, sacrifice volume before anything else (both in terms of resistance training and interval/energy system work).
  • You don’t get to work in a highly paid city job where you can hire an expensive personal trainer twice a week without knowing a thing or two about determination, dedication, and motivation. But, they may not find exercising as fun or interesting as a PT does. It is the trainers job to bridge the gap and find a way to keep the client well-informed, accountable and motivated. Results are a good place to start, as is accurate empathy, honesty, and integrity. The ‘best’ way may not always be what the textbooks, training courses, or even people like me on the internet tell you it is. Find your own path.

Most of this is common sense but quite a bit of it seems to go in the opposite direction to what is currently popular within the fitness industry and media, so that’s about it before this turns into more of an essay than a blog post. . As the Philosopher John Locke said “I will not deny, but possibly it might be reduced to a narrower Compass than it is; and that some Parts of it might be contracted: The way it has been writ in, by Catches, and many long Intervals of Interruption, being apt to cause some Repetitions. But to confess the Truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy to make it shorter.”

You can read the first instalment of this series here: http://www.foundryfit.co.uk/blog/healthdreamsvsreality/

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Health in the City: Dreams vs Reality

February 27, 2013 By
Graeme at our latest successful corporate health and fitness seminar

Graeme at our latest successful corporate health and fitness seminar

I recently went back to the city law firm where I gave my first ever talk here on nutrition and training, almost ten years ago and while the faces are different the questions tend to remain the same.

The public now seem more confused than ever, and it isn’t just them – the over-sciencing of nutrition by those seeking to become gatekeepers of information on this topic is making the waters more muddied instead of less. Meanwhile, the obesity bandwagon marches on, with British women on target to be fatter than American men by 2030.

As with most things Occams Razor can be applied to 99% of nutritional and weight loss cases. Very rarely is their problem down to some kind of spurious ‘imbalance’ or a deficiency in some sort of magical amino acid. In fact, all too often it is their psychology that we need to consider ahead of their physiology in all but the more extreme clinical cases involving specific and diagnosed pathology.

Looking at the folks I’ve worked with here in the City for over a decade now I’ve come to a few fairly solid conclusions. These have been borne out by practical experience rather than studying the books, although I’m reasonably confident that current research into the psychology of behaviour change will back most, if not all of them up.

So, in no particular order here are a few thoughts…..
  1. Compliance is everything. Consider this first. The likelihood of someone’s ability to change their behaviour to your recommendations is directly related to their perceived ability to do it. If it all sounds too much like hard work then it isn’t likely to happen at all. Personality type is rarely ever considered, but for example, entrepreneurial and very creative people struggle with organised routines requiring high levels of self control, whereas a highly organised lawyer or trader may seek that exact approach.
  2. Where and how people eat is as important as what and why. The first two tell you a lot about the reasons behind the latter two. Changing diet is about changing habits, eating in front of the TV and social eating are two environments prone to overindulgence, irrespective of actual hunger. Look at where and how people eat first.
  3. Sleep and recovery drive the ability to train and eat well. Without good sleep both our food and training suffer. It builds reliance on sugar and stimulants, reduces work capacity, impairs how we feel and function, and generally makes us feel crap. It is the first and easiest way to break people down by depriving them of sleep. If sleep is poor then fix it first and if prone to long days travelling then build in strategies to help deal with it.
  4. Temptation is the hardest thing to avoid and all too often clients are faced with the temptation to drink and eat when if left to their own devices they probably wouldn’t. Try to build in some solid plans of action for when these scenarios come up “If we go for drinks I”ll keep to non-alcoholic till I’ve eaten” or “I’lll ask for a vegetable option instead of chips or pasta”. Keep away from the unhealthy choices, if there is cake in the office, keep it in the kitchen rather than next to your desk where you are more likely to succumb to a piece (and if you are breaking a diet, you’ll probably go right off the rails and have several).
  5. ‘Dieting’ requires almost constant conscious thought and willpower to maintain, only those with the highest motivation and strictest level of self control are likely to stick to them. Those who fail tend to gain back more weight than they started with. Instead look at simple habits that over the course of a longer period of time (think in terms of months and years rather than weeks) that can be more beneficial. For example, trying to just give up bread consumption can often be achieved and often can bring great results. Once ‘not eating’ something becomes a habit it is much easier to maintain.
  6. Use simple and easy methods of tracking weight and body. No need for complex measurement systems, regularly measure weight and waistline and you won’t go far wrong. Unless you are preparing for a competition – and even then, how you look will be more important than any numbers on a chart. For my clients in the city I am more interested in their blood lipids, resting heart rate, and blood pressure as a guide to their health.
  7. Seek out habits that bring happiness. Dieting is miserable, just ask any pre-comp figure athlete or bodybuilder. Instead look for habits that make you happy and your capacity for improving your food and lifestyle will raise too. Dancing, walking the dog, playing sport, or simply taking a stroll with a friend – they may not burn the same calories as an hour of interval training but they bring many other far more wider ranging benefits (and are a lot more fun too!).
  8. Give yourself a break, you don’t have to eat cake every day but you’re far more likely to stick to your habits if you know that in a couple of days you are out with friends and able to relax and enjoy a piece of cake with them then. This has been proven time and again to be a more effective strategy than total abstinence. It is naive of any trainer working with the population that I do to think that they will live saintly in your absence. They will more likely just hide this information from you, especially if it is received with condescension and a telling-off. Work with what you have got, find solutions WITH the clients that they feel confident and happy to try and over the longer-term you’ll see a progressive improvement in health, fitness, and happiness.

We’ve been working with these approaches for years now at The Foundry, and while we may not specialise in putting people on stage in their swimwear, we do know how to ensure that our clients go to their medicals and achieve results that would look good for people half their age. As with anything, there are universal truths about training and nutrition, but how you communicate these will often need to be measured and delivered differently.

There is no one right-way, though there are many wrong ways. As a trainer, I look for every little win and I am sure to do my best to highlight it and focus on it with the intention of creating a habit. I am also realistic about the lifestyles my clients lead and believe that the first stage to achieving better health is an honest appraisal of current health and a desire to want to improve that, without that well-intended advice is too often wasted.

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A healthy outlook is for life, not just for Christmas

January 2, 2013 By

With New Year resolutions around the corner Foundry Director Dave Thomas looks at the preoccupation with constantly improving our physical shape and discusses whether this can be detrimental.  We also share a wonderful client success story 

The Rise of the Body Composition Expert

Phyical Obsession

At what point does physical obsession contradict health goals?

The current fixation in the personal training industry is with ‘body composition’ and it’s not hard to see why. Our quick fix culture wants immediate results, we are bombarded with carbon copy physiques in the media and as trainers we know before and after pictures are the shop window to our business. We are also an industry populated with bodybuilders and fitness models. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either of these groups as it takes unbelievable commitment and work to compete in these activities, however it also takes an obsessive preoccupation with the physical aesthetic. Very few clients will ever have the potential or opportunity to show this level of commitment.

At The Foundry we are sportspeople first and foremost. As such we often find our core values differ to others in the industry. Take a quick look at our testimonials and you’ll see international sports people, Olympic gold medallists, world champions and leading fitness professionals and coaches. You won’t see many celebrities or models. A cursory glance at social media will tell you this is an industry which spends half its time criticising other trainers’ physiques, whose members have topless profile pictures on their business profiles and which, worst of all, actively belittles the very people it’s supposed to help, all in the name of ego. If we treat our potential clients like this is it any wonder society is so dismissive of anyone who doesn’t confirm to a physical ideal? We then top this off as a collective by creating completely unrealistic expectations through the use of performance enhancing drugs and photo-shopped pictures.

The Foundry Philosophy

As I have said before, “Size is not a component of fitness”. Our job is not to judge our clients’ goals but it is also not a trainer’s job to project their/society’s physical ideals upon clients. We can help people change their shape to feel better about themselves, benefit their health, play with their children, improve their sporting performance and (I say this with no hyperbole) extend their life. But we should also recognise that being slightly overweight or unable to put on significant muscle mass is not prohibitive to these goals. In fact several studies have demonstrated that carrying some padding as we age is correlated with longer life and better health. I know I would much rather my clients were fitter and fatter than thin and unfit.

Take a look at our transformation pages and you’ll see we have many clients who have achieved quick and dramatic results. We don’t populate our website with these pictures (we have 100s we haven’t published yet) because they do not always explain the context. They are a strong visual sales tool which inevitably elicits an emotive response, however it’s not always realistic or ethical to recommend that this is what every client should aspire to.  (We’ve often had to refer people to our affiliate psychologists before commencing training as it would be unethical to ignore the underlying reasons for wanting to change their body shape.) This is why we try to include such transformations as blog posts or with a write up explaining our clients’ motivations, whether just wanting to look good on the beach or training for a wedding, a photo shoot, an approaching sports event, rehabbing an injury or suffering from a serious illness. Our role as a coach very rarely finishes once these photos have been published.

Which is the perfect link to showcase the 2012 Foundry transformation of which I am most proud. I was very cautious about not exploiting this story to shout about our company but I felt it was a very powerful example with which to make a much wider point.

A Remarkable Story

Personal Training LondonMeet John. 4 years ago he was a young sporty individual with whom I had played rugby for many years. John was such a good athlete that in 2009 he ran the infamous 150 mile Marathon de Sables through the Sahara desert. In doing so John raised several thousand pounds for charity but also nearly became one of its victims. After completing the race he suddenly fell very sick with Guillain–Barré syndrome. This is a rare disorder in which a person’s own immune system damages their nerve cells. John ended up paralysed in ICU.

The first thing to highlight is the amazing treatment he received from the often maligned medical profession, in particular at The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. I visited John and despite being his usual chipper self it was clearly a traumatic and difficult experience. He eventually made steady progress and with the support of his neurological physiotherapist and his family and friends he moved first to using a wheelchair, then crutches and finally ankle supports.

This is where we come in. I was very impressed with the tremendous progress he had made but at this point John was feeling a little down about hitting a plateau. He has permanent nerve damage in his lower legs which means he cannot dorsiflex his feet (lift them towards his shins). This means he is unlikely to ever be able to participate in many of the sports he used to.  It would have been very easy to give up and settle at this stage but after lunch one day we made a plan to take his training to the next level…from rehabilitation to performance.

John initially started working with the brilliant team downstairs at The Foundry: Victory Health & Performance.  Here he had regular sessions with rehab director Nell Mead and the sports therapy team who are absolutely essential to our clients’ success and are amongst the most principled therapists I know.

It’s always interesting deciding who clients should train with, however I realised Fiona Pocock, our resident England rugby international, not only had the patient personality for the job but also the requisite personal experience after rehabilitating herself from a career threatening 20 month injury.

Like many clients John also wanted to drop some weight, particularly as he’d been in great shape before his illness. Initially however there was the job of relearning individual muscle contractions so we all agreed body shape would not be a main goal. When I saw John’s first workout with Fiona in May, the primary work sets were gentle one leg knee bends using a squat rack for support.  From there to now has been nothing short of astonishing.

With careful guidance and reassurance from Fee and Nell, John has not only made remarkable performance gains but also dropped several kilos of body fat. This incredible story conveniently saw him deadlifting over 50kg for reps in November, just before I decided to write this article. 3 years ago he was paralysed. I have been humbled by the hard work Fiona and Nell put in with John, the brilliant medical team who helped him initially and also his excellent commitment to continually refusing to accept his circumstances.

So how does this fit in with your New Year resolutions?

If you want to look like a fitness model in 12 weeks we can help you, as can the majority of excellent personal trainers out there, because despite what the industry tries to convince you with hormonal based supplement plans, renaming age-old workouts and pseudo-science aplenty, the truth is that the key to getting the kind of impressive transformations which training websites have is mostly down to choosing the right client: one who is prepared to follow some form of strict nutritional intervention and a challenging training regime and who can manage this commitment around their current lifestyle and circumstances. Not everyone can do this at every point of their lives and this is a reality which should be embraced.

However if you also want to achieve something truly remarkable, be it patiently spending a year gaining the flexibility to squat, (another article coming soon) running up the stairs without being out of breath, or deadlifting 50kg 6 months after you couldn’t bend your knees, and still drop a few lbs then please give us a call.

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HIIT me baby one more time

September 26, 2012 By

There probably isn’t a personal training company or studio in London that hasn’t already written about interval training and cardiovascular training for fat loss. That drum has already been soundly beaten, although there is all too often a bit too much spurious information out there disguised as science that is distorting exercise prescription.

In this blog post Foundry Director Graeme Marsh looks at a recent study on interval training for fat loss in men and gives us his views on the topic.

So, it’s over to Graeme…

—–

Here is an interesting little study from the Dean of research into High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), Stephen Boutcher and his colleagues from the University of New South Wales. Boutcher has produced some fairly convincing evidence over recent years that has shown the overall superiority of HIIT over the more conventional methods of ‘cardio for fat loss’ and its led to a vilification of steady state exercise within the industry. His latest paper, published in the Journal of Obesity this summer is unsurprisingly no different.

The training protocol was a repeat of that used in previous studies consisting of 8 seconds of sprinting on a cycle with 12 seconds recovery. Repeated for 60 intervals. This was done 3 times a week over a period of 12 weeks, so a fairly achievable schedule for most people. This study used a group of exclusively male subjects, but a previous study by the same author using females had found similar results over a 15 week period. These studies have focused on the exercise aspect of fat loss more than nutrition with no actual nutritional intervention used, although one of the proposed benefits of HIIT over conventional steady state work seems to be a reduction in post-exercise appetite, an effect I would certainly support anecdotally.
Now, we could look at this a bit more in depth, but I know it is mid-week and you are probably thinking “Get to the point already” so here is a summary of the key points:
  • Over 12 weeks subjects lost a total of 2kg of fat training 3 x week for 20 minutes per session (not including a 5 minute warm up and cool down). 8 second sprints were performed at 80-90% of maximum heart rate with a 12 second recovery bout in between.
  • Reductions in body fat came from both fat under the skin and that around organs, showing a positive impact on cardiovascular disease risk factors. There was also a significant reduction in waist circumference.
  • There was an increase in fat free mass over the course of the study and improvements in aerobic fitness alongside the reductions in fat mass.
  •  These results were achieved without any changes to dietary habits.
Overall the numbers involved were still relatively small for a 12 week commitment to changing body composition so it would be interesting to see these protocols combined with a nutritional intervention also to see if the effect can be enhanced. While the exact reasons behind the effectiveness of HIIT as a method are still unclear it would seem that the intensity of the exercise is key, stimulating the release of hormones that stimulate fat loss and also helping to retain fat free mass. Shorter, more intense exercise like this also seems to have a suppressive effect on appetite rather than the stimulating effect so often seen with longer bouts. It would be particularly interesting to see the individual results in this study, similar to those reported recently by Blundell and colleagues in Leeds, who have demonstrated that exercise responses can be highly varied from person to person.
So, what do these studies mean in practice when moving from lab results to the ‘real world’?
Here is where we stand on HIIT training methods and the much maligned steady-state cardio that still remains popular today.
  • Interval training is psychologically tougher. It requires a high level of motivation, despite the shorter duration, the intensity must be high for it to be effective.
  • The leaner you are, the less effective this method seems to be for losing fat. This to me suggests that lean people may well already be adapted to this style of training. However, it’s benefits for stimulating muscle mass retention during dieting should not be ignored.
  • Long duration cardio such as jogging or cycling for 40-60 minutes offers poor return for fat loss and may also stimulate appetite (although this seems to vary a lot between individuals). It is best used either for those who require it for specific endurance sports or used as recovery and/or recreation.
  • Instead of simply ‘burning calories’ HIIT seems to work more through stimulating hormonal changes in the body that favour increased fat oxidation.
  • Overall HIIT offers a more efficient solution to improving body composition, CV risk factors, and aerobic fitness than conventional steady state methods.
Anecdotally, we have found that adherence to these protocols outside of supervised training sessions is probably the biggest limitation to the use of HIIT. As with the many resistance training protocols championed on the internet for their fat loss benefits, these are only effective when performed at an intensity level high enough to stimulate change.
As an aside, steady-state exercise is often criticised for inducing high levels of stress hormones but this needs to be better qualified as it would seem that increased catecholamine release is one of the reasons behind the effectiveness of HIIT. Boutcher states in this paper that “it is feasible that the significant levels of catecholamines generated during acute HIIE [27] could elevate postexercise fat oxidation. The significant catecholamine response to HIIE is in contrast to moderate, steady-state aerobic exercise that results in small increases in epinephrine and norepinephrine [28]. Also the high levels of catecholamines produced by HIIE may underlie its ability to reduce visceral fat, as catecholamines have been shown to drive lipolysis and are mainly responsible for fat release from visceral fat stores “
It would be my opinion that if reducing stress hormone release in a client is a primary concern (in such cases that exercise tolerance is negatively affected by an inability to react to physical stressors) that neither HIIT or long duration CV exercise would be appropriate.
Instead a focus on relaxation and restoration methods combined with recreational activity, such as walking, cycling, swimming, etc would seem more apt. While it is true that duration of exercise can influence stress hormone release (certainly I wouldn’t advise marathon running as an activity unless planning to run a marathon) it is also true that intensity of exercise will have a pronounced effect. Individual factors such as age, emotional state, lifestyle stresses, sleep habits, and nutritional status, will all have an impact on this. This detail is often left out of the many criticisms circulated on methods of CV training.
As with any training or indeed nutritional approach, it is simply a case of selecting the right tool for the right job. HIIT has rightly gained popularity for its effectiveness in reducing fat mass over relatively short-term studies. However, there is no reason why modes of exercise such as walking and cycling should be actively discouraged, as has become popular for many to do. Well motivated subjects or those performing supervised sessions may well get good results with HIIT, while poorly conditioned and more ‘reluctant’ exercisers may find the levels of intensity a demotivating factor. Any exercise or nutritional intervention is only effective if compliance is high so individualisation of programming should be the key determinant in selecting what method to use.
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