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....

It doesn’t take a lot of scrolling through my instagram feed ( @joe_guy ) to see that in recent years my bodyweight and body fat has taken some pretty major swings. In December 2015 my bodyweight was 82kg, which then dropped to 69kg in July 2016, which then ballooned to 93kg in November 2016, before leveling out again to 85kg today. To some people that may look like the classic stereotypical bodybuilding cycles of bulking and cutting, bulking and cutting, but others may sense that there’s a deeper issue there, which there was. After breaking my ribs in October 2015 I was unable to train for 3 months and although my diet was still relatively tight the lack of training meant aesthetically my physique went backwards. Upon returning to full training I decided that I was going to ‘prove’ to all those who said that I’d let myself go a little just how good a physique I had. After 4 months things were going well, I was looking ripped and training well but I wasn’t ‘cover model rip...

The 5:2, Keto, Slimming World, Weight Watchers; they all WORK! But why do they work?   The reasoning behind it is simple, it's because they make you subconsciously watch what you are eating. I have tried pretty much every single diet out there and I've lost weight on them all.  A diet that sticks in my mind and is at the forefront of current UK media is Keto. When I went on a Ketogenic I GOT SHREDDED! But the reason behind me getting super shredded on Keto wasn't because it's some kind of superior super diet. It was because I started to check the nutrients of every food I ate before I put it in my mouth. Chocolate; can't have that, it's got carbs in. Pasta; can't have that, carbs. Milk; can't have that, carbs again. You get the gist! Weight Watchers, another diet I got shredded on. Why? Because I was checking how many points a food was before I ate it!  However, as I've become more educated and knowledgeable I've learnt that I ca...

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...

Last July I started a new job... Exciting I know! However, before I started I was aware that the job involved very long hours, 10 hours a day sometimes more. This meant that I had to fit my gym time into one of two slots, either before work or afterwork. After a little bit of thought I decided to go for the before work option as gyms are quieter in the mornings than the evenings, I would miss the morning rush hour if I found a gym by my workplace and I wouldn't be tempted to find an excuse throughout the course of the day not to hit my session afterwork. I managed to find a gym which was literally a two minute walk from work that coincidentally also had 24/7 opening hours! My first week at work came and went in a flash but it was absolutely creasing me. Not because the job was hard but because I was waking up at 4:45am getting my bag and breakfast ready for the day, then I was grabbing lunch on the go, which is never the healthiest, and then I was coming home and watching TV un...

Being as we've had a little bit of a heatwave in the UK this weekend many peoples attention has been turned to the upcoming summer and the holidays that come with it. The thought of the summer often strikes fear into people as they don't feel summer ready in terms of their bodies, and the fact of the matter is, there is no such thing as the perfect body and therefore you can't expect to turn into a Greek God/Goddess overnight, you have to work with what you have and look how to make marginal, sustainable improvements over a period of time. However, this post isn't about getting in shape, its about maintaining what you have over the summer, in a period often littered with booze fuelled BBQ's and calorie busting candle-lit dinners overlooking the ocean. For those of you that don't know I spent the summer of 2015 living in Crete, Greece and before I went I was in fairly good shape, relatively shredded and naturally I wanted to maintain that shape for as long as p...

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...

So this week is a landmark week, well sort of. This week is the first in my 6 weeks to shredded programme and the first week of incorporating Huel in my diet. For anyone that isn't aware of what Huel is a nutritionally complete powdered food ​that contains all the proteins, carbs, and fats you need plus at least 100% of the European Union's "Daily Recommended Amounts" of all 26 essential vitamins and minerals​. So you know you won’t be deficient in any essential nutrients. Now, I'm already well aware that by this point in the article many of you will be sceptical about powdered food, probably because you're thinking along the army rations line. Huel is not a ration, it is however, a convenience tool. My reason for bringing Huel into my diet is because it is nutritionally perfect, which will aid me on a calorie restricted diet and can be prepared in a matter of seconds, which makes it perfect when I am in a rush or on the go. Huel is also hugely cost effectiv...

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 ...

Every diet, when implemented properly has some kind of restrictions, whether thats a restriction of certain foods or the amount of calories you can consume. With restriction come cravings, cravings for the things you can't have. Its human nature to want the things you can't have, but when it comes to diet most of us it seems just can't help ourselves. We're now moving into February and its been a month since you promised yourself that you would eat healthily but the reality of it is a Chinese take away has never sounded so tempting. The problem that I find with the majority of diets today is that they 'ban' certain things and it causes the big red button syndrome amongst people. What I mean by the big red button syndrome is that if somebody tells you don't press the button, the only thing you want to do is press that button. So when somebody tells you that you cannot eat chocolate, the only thing you want is chocolate. What a lot of dieticians and fitn...