Bullshit, Brawn and Business

So you started hitting the gym. You start going consistently. You start making progress and begin to see some changes. And then all of a sudden… They Stop! As frustrating as they are unfortunately plateaus in performance and rate of visual change are completely normal and happen to everyone at some point in time. Some people manage to break through the plateau however for others it becomes an unbreakable wall, which they ultimately succumb to. It would be easy for me to sit here and analyse why many people succumb when a plateau in performance hits but instead I am going to highlight the factors which helped me when I hit a performance plateau earlier this year. It was Mid-June, I was 11 months into my ‘bulking’ phase, which after a mini-cut (for 2 weeks) prior to a holiday in May I was quite happy with the way things had gone. I was clearly more muscular in appearance and stronger in terms of performance than when I had started the mass-bulking phase in the previous July....

How To Maximise Your Energy. Lacking motivation to workout or to stay on track with your diet? Don't worry we all do from time to time. Some of us deal with it better than others and battle through it, whilst others completely 'fall off the wagon'.  In this post I'm going to outline the most effective strategies that are most likely to help you get the most out of everyday. These are strategies that I use myself and although have no great amount of science behind them I firmly believe in from personal experience. Attack the day - Make a plan and stick to it! It starts by setting your alarm to the same time each day. I personally get up at 5:30am, drive straight to gym on a week day and get straight out on my roadbike at weekends. Get Shit Done - Instead of a 'To-Do' list have a 'Today' list. That gives you more accountability to actually get shit done rather than put it off and let it mount up. Chances are those tedious tasks won't take...

So the age old question remains; What form of cardio is best? Firstly, 'best' for what exactly? Well, if you're training to lose fat then I'd advise adding some form of cardiovascular exercise in 2-3 times a week to increase the size of your calorie deficit and help speed up your fat loss. So in this post I'm going to give reveal which form of cardio is the best for fat loss. I'm bulking do I still need to do cardio? It's not absolutely essential but I'd strongly advise that you keep at least one cardio session a week in your training schedule to keep you relatively well conditioned as stopping cardio all together will make it even more painful than it already is when you come to diet down and lose fat. What's 'best' HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) or LISS (Low Intensity Steady State)? THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE. DO WHAT YOU ENJOY. A benefit to HIIT is that it is often quicker and can be done pretty much anywhere, even in a ho...

After eating and drinking myself silly over the Christmas period I decided to go on a bit of a cut in the lead up to Easter in order to lose a bit of fat. When I say a 'bit of a cut' I mean I dropped my calories into a deficit of 200 under maintenance. This was the first time that I'd ever purposefully put myself into a calorie deficient for a prolonged period of time and upon reflection it taught me a few things, which I will outline for you below. 1. Meal Timings - Naively when I started out on the cut I thought I'd be able to eat like I had previously when bulking i.e. have a massive breakfast containing around 1200 calories, a decent lunch of around 700 calories, and then a 900 calorie evening meal. However, what I quickly found out when cutting was that eating this way and having the traditional three meals a day caused periods of extreme hunger and massive energy lags. After a number of weeks I realised that instead of having three meals a day at an average of...

I have been training for 3 years now and I have learnt an awful lot in that time and what I'm going to do in this article is outline the things that I've learnt along the way, often things that I wish I'd of learnt sooner and I may outline why I wish I wish I'd of learnt them sooner. 1. There are no shortcuts to results. You're not going to put in a week of training and wake up with your dream body. It takes months, often years of hard work, dedication and consistency in every aspect of your training. 2. Getting your diet right is the key to getting results. I could make a bet that 95% of people who train do not know exactly how many calories they are consuming each day, how to measure many calories they are consuming and what items are calorie rich and calorie efficient. 3. In order to burn fat you need to be in a calorie deficit (you need to burn more calories than you consume). 4. By the same measure in order to consistently increase muscle and body mass ...