We’re coming to that time of year once again where the lights and trees go up, out come the mince pies and out the window goes the exercise routine. Of course that can only be expected with a busy and celebratory festive period, but how can you avoid wasting your hard year of effort in the gym over Christmas?

Reports say that the average person consumes SEVEN THOUSAND calories on Christmas Day alone, ignoring the works Christmas party, Boxing Day and New Years Day, all well renowned occasions to pile on the pounds and neck back the drinks.

The first key to festive period fitness is making yourself available

The lead-up to Christmas is always a busy one, with extra work before the well-earned week off, a Christmas party and trips to the shops for presents, but ‘it’s Christmas time’ is not an excuse!

Ensure you make time for the gym, it may be a busy period but don’t discount the odd half an hour here or there can make, you can lose up to 600 calories cycling at 15 miles an hour for half an hour and they all add up when it comes to tucking into your turkey on Christmas Day.

If anything, go more often for less time and increase your intensity, which will lead you into greater chance of rapid weight loss before the fun begins.

The two weeks prior to the big day are key, as you prepare to take your diet to the cleaners over the festive period, cut out the fat, the snacks and the deserts and concentrate on a low fat diet that should balance itself out when it comes to munching on those pigs in blankets on Boxing Day.

Try avoiding alcohol and coke and try to drink lots of water, which will also help to balance out by the time the decorations come down in early January.

After all, water will suppress your appetite over the winter, as well as speed up your metabolism.

When it comes to your workout routine, cardiovascular exercise is key, but not the be all and end all of the Christmas period. Of course fat loss before Christmas Day is important, but don’t be too keen to put down the weights and head to the treadmill, as a loss of muscle mass will not aid your cause.

You can lose just as much calories through weights as you can on a bike or rowing machine, so make sure you stick to your weights programme. After all, turkey and steak are protein and will go hand in hand with muscle growth, potentially even hire a personal trainer to push yourself before you revel in your roast potatoes.

Enjoy Christmas by all means, but don’t let your year of work go to waste over the festive period, you may even be able to show off come Christmas Day after some pre-Christmas weight loss!

They’re illnesses can affect any one of us.

Depression, anxiety and stress are ever-growing issues in today’s society, as one in five people will experience symptoms of depression or anxiety.

Remarkably, you’re ten times more likely to suffer from depression now than you were in 1945 and it’s a similar spine-chilling story when it comes to stress, with 9.9 million working days lost to stress in 2014/15 and 440,000 reported cases of stress, anxiety and depression in the UK.

Women are more likely to suffer from ill mental health with females twice more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression and up to three times more likely to suffer anxiety, yet 14% of women quit the gym within their first year of membership compared to just 8% of men, coincidence? I think not.

The average age for the onset of ill mental health symptoms is between 25 and 29, the perfect age to join a gym, right?

That’s where exercise comes in.

One option to relieve stress and depression is to join a sports team, but the competitive nature of a league or pressure situations can often compress and magnify stress or mental illness symptoms, with individuals often scared to talk to team-mates about key issues in their lives, leading to isolation and bringing out worse symptoms and potentially more serious mental health issues.

The ultimate stress release for many people is joining a gym. After all, there is no better feeling them smashing out a 12-rep personal best, no matter what exercise you’re doing.

The gym can act as a release whether you exercise by yourself, with a friend, a partner or in a group, the flexibility and self-control of gym life can often make potential mental health patients feel in control once again.

A downfall of illnesses such as stress and depression can be through not feeling in control of your own life and therefore by being in control of your workout and exercising, it can be a platform to feel in control once again.

Working out on a consistent basis will not only prove a routine that makes you feel in control, but regular exercise will lead to a better physical appearance of course.

Having a poor body image can be a major contributor to mental health issues, with 47% of people claiming a decline in the quality of their diet was a factor in ill mental health symptoms in a study by the Huffington Post, highlighting how your diet goes hand in hand with your workout routine in ensuring sound mental health.

It’s not just mentally however, the gym does provide a scientific benefit which can relieve mental health issues, often caused by a lack of endorphins in the brain.

Endorphins are neurotransmitters that elevate your mood and by joining a gym and completing your first five-kilometre run or a 40kg bench press, the brain will release endorphins, fuelling a better mood for the rest of the day.

Being healthy is about being mentally, physically and socially active and going to the gym can improve all three of these with a simple yet effective workout routine, a very simple, yet very effective way of improving and maintaining sound mental health.

Metabolic training and cardiovascular training are completely different things, but we all see those people who only do the latter.

We all see the person who spends an hour on the treadmill and the bike burning away the calories and dripping with sweat, but who wants to spend all their time doing that when you can combine two types of exercise with better results? That’s where metabolic training comes in.

Metabolic training is completing structural and compound exercises with little rest in between exercises in an effort to maximise calorie burn and increase metabolic rate during and after the workout according to BuiltLean founder and CEO Marc Perry.

For those still in the dark, structural exercises involve isolating one muscle group such as using a leg press to train the quadriceps, whereas compound exercises use multiple muscles and could include a squat which puts pressure on your hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes and lower back.
In contrast, cardiovascular training is exercise that increases the demand of oxygen to the muscles for a long period of time.

Metabolic training differs from cardiovascular training in a series of ways

Firstly, they focus on different aspects of your body as cardiovascular training focuses solely on weight loss, opposed to metabolic training which is aimed at a combination of calorie building and muscle building.

Metabolic training also tends to be a lot more intense, triggering weight loss much more rapidly as well as increasing weight loss when the body is at rest by using things such as high intensity interval training opposed to a simple run on the treadmill, where you combine a series of cardiovascular exercises in a short period of time to increase intensity.

Metabolic training also focuses on large muscle groups. Some examples of metabolic exercises include chest press, bench press and shoulder press (structural) or squats, deadlifts and lunges (compound).

The benefits of metabolic training have no end. One of which can be to improve your aerobic capacity, not just your cardiovascular endurance like cardio training. Cardiovascular training may make you be able to train for longer, but metabolic training will allow you to train for longer and harder without feeling the effects, leading to improved stroke volume, VO2 max and even a reduced resting heart rate.

Metabolic training not only leads to a heavier calorie burn at the gym but away from it too

You can lose 500 calories in a half-hour metabolic workout at the gym, but you can also increases your metabolic rate up to 25% over the next two days, leading to rapid weight loss compared to cardio training. After all, there’s no point burning all that fat via cardio training if you don’t tone it, whilst metabolic training also leads to using more of the gym facilities and something we all want when we buy our gym memberships is value for money, isn’t it?

After all this time away from your usual fitness routine it may now be crossing your mind that you are going to have to get back into it now that September is suddenly upon us. It seems a daunting prospect, but if you follow these simple tips it will make your life a whole lot easier when you’re trying to motivate yourself to get back into your usual fitness and work/school routine.

1. Assess the damage – start by weighing yourself to see how bad it actually is; it may not be as bad as you think. This can give you a good idea of what you’re trying to achieve.

2. Get rid of guilt – we often feel very guilty after holidays that we’ve let ourselves relax and not stick to our fitness routines, but think of it in a positive way, it is important that your body has time to relax and forget about the stress of work or school. Instead of feeling guilty, use it to give yourself a fresh start and a new set of goals.

3. Plan – create a plan and goals that are achievable and specific so that you know exactly what you’re going to do. Find a time that you are going to do it and stick to that time. Then maybe even set a reward for when you’ve completed for example 1 month of your new fitness routine, like buying some new gym kit.

4. Workout music – create a playlist that will get you motivated and keep you going.

5. Try something new – it can be hard to get back into things because you’re bored of them. Try a new class or type of exercise that will get you motivated and make you want to do it. Taking a new class can be fun, interesting and challenging and it gives you the chance to meet new people.

6. Challenge a friend – find a friend in a similar situation and challenge them for a certain period of time. Doing this you will motivate each other and the competition element will make you want to exercise even more.

7. Do it for yourself not for anyone else – remember how good it makes you feel when you’ve done some exercise and you are in shape. Make the time and place easiest for you so that it doesn’t just get forgotten.

8. Get inspiration – read a weight loss story or find a role model to inspire you to keep going, but don’t let it put you down about yourself, you can do it too.

9. Start ASAP – its best to start as soon as you can and get it back into you routine, if you make it a habit then you are more likely to stick to your plan and get the results that you want.

10. Go easy – at first it will probably feel more difficult than you remember, cut it down to start with and then build back up to what you used to be able to do. Otherwise you could injure yourself or put yourself off completely.

As well as exercise it is also important to eat a healthy diet if you want to get back into your healthy lifestyle, here are some tips:

1. Eat on schedule – eat breakfast within an hour of waking up and eat again every 3-5 hours. Evenly spaced out meals will maximize your metabolism, regulate your blood sugar and insulin levels and level out your appetite. Don’t just cut back on food – eating too little forces your body into conservation mode and you burn fewer calories so you’re more likely to hang onto body fat.

2. Drink more water – supports optimal metabolism and some research shows that it can curb your appetite. Aim for 2-2.5 liters a day (about 8 to 10 cups)

3. Don’t cut out carbs just cut back – cutting them out completely can cause your body to burn protein for fuel instead of using it to support and maintain your calories burning muscles

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It’s that all so familiar situation, you’re sitting in the weights room, glaring over between sets and someone is attempting to perform a simple free weights exercise, terribly.

Maintaining the correct form throughout a free weights exercise is arguably the most important part of an exercise programme if you are to be successful in achieving your goals at the gym, and there are a number of consequences of not using the correct form.

The most harrowing of which being the obvious risk of injury.

Implementing the correct form will allow your muscles to safely contract and relax against the resistance of the weights throughout your workout and specific exercises and without the correct form, the joints that the body uses to complete the exercise will be under unnecessary pressure, creating a much greater risk of injury.

Incorrect form may not give you discomfort or pain on the day or day after your session, but can be a long term issue that will do serious damage, and you may not notice until it’s too late.

Take a leg press for example, if your hips, knees and ankles are not in the correct alignment, you could put excessive pressure on either of them, creating damage to the ligaments or tendons in the knee or ankle, making the ability and freedom to exercise a lot less frequent and comfortable, or just altogether reduce your range of movement.

With a leg extension, the hips should be at the same level as your knees on most occasions (unless you’re using a tilted leg extension), whilst your shoulders should be above your hips, which is known as hip-knee and shoulder-hip alignment. Without it, weight could be shifted to the lower back and will put your back at risk of unnecessary pressure.

Not using the correct form can also lead to training the wrong muscle. Form is not only there for your safety, but for your overall improvement to your strength and physique.

A smith machine chest press can be easily turned into a smith machine tricep press simply by holding the bar with your hands too close together, so make sure that you have the weights, your grips, and your body positioning in the right place in order to ensure you’re putting the right amount of pressure on the right muscle group.

Last but far from least, poor form will waste your time and money and it goes without saying time spent at the gym is invaluable, as is the membership fees!

So don’t waste your time or money on performing incorrect exercises, make sure your exerts are spent giving yourself the best chance of improving your strength and physique.

So how can you measure if your form is correct?

There are some very simple ways, every weights room has a mirror, doesn’t it? Well there’s your starting point, look in the mirror as you’re performing your exercises if you can, if it doesn’t look like you’re doing the exercise properly, you’re probably not!

Don’t use weights too heavy for you, it’s more important to use a lower weight and perform the exercise correctly than show off in front of your mates, cause they’ll be showing off in the changing rooms when their muscles are double the size of yours.

Correct form involves maintaining continuous body tension throughout your exercises, that’s how you control the weights you’re using, but make sure you don’t lock your joints, that will spell trouble.

A lack of body tension will make it difficult to control your weights or push yourself, or perform the perfect exercise.
Proper form is the ability to do the exercise at the correct pace, make sure you focus on the negative element of the exercise just as much as the positive side of it, take a dumbbell bench press for example, lowering the weights back to shoulder level after the initial movement is just as important as pushing them away from you.

If they come down too quickly, you’re not in control of the weights and therefore not using the correct form. Make sure you exercise through the full range of movement. The range of movement, or motion, is the distance between extension and flexed position.
The wider range of movement you use the higher percentage of the muscles you will be using throughout the exercise and therefore a higher chance of muscular hypertrophy. The narrower range of muscle motion you deploy, the quicker your reps will be, which as discussed already, will not aid your cause.

Remember, form is crucial, do not ignore it.

It’ll be no surprise to any regular gym-goer that the most popular month for joining the gym is in January. Making someone feel welcome at the gym is a key part of keeping someone there. It’s easy to get frustrated at how many new people descend on the weights room at the turn of the year, but everyone went to the gym for the first time once.
According to Realbuzz, 12% of gym members sign up in the month of January as part of a new year’s resolution, a gift, or a general change of attitude after the festive season. However, up to 80% of those members quit within five months.
The question this presents is… why? Is it something as simple as a new year’s resolution not lasting? It’s also key to explore how to stay motivated past the first 31 days of the calendar.

Going to the gym isn’t cheap. A gym membership at a low-budget gym may cost around £15-20 per month, but a health club or fitness centre with added amenities such as spa and pool can be considerably more expensive. People often don’t pay attention to the costs when setting a fairly vague goal to ‘get fit’. Tunnel vision drives us to want to lose some weight, but there is a lot more that goes into joining a gym than just stepping on a treadmill.
The pounds may fly off in the initial weeks after joining the gym if someone’s body is not used to regular exercise. At some point, it’s natural to hit a wall as your body gets used to your new routine. If caught out, this can drag people down a whole new avenue of their fitness journey. This can include buying new equipment including resistance bands, barbell pads and foam rollers, being lured by a personal trainer or buying supplements such as protein powders. None of these come cheap when added into the cost of your gym membership over the course of the year.
What’s the solution? Only spend what you can afford! Your gym membership is not only for 31 days, especially if you sign a contract. Don’t buy into one that you cannot afford to keep. Spend some time conducting extensive research into the equipment a gym or club has to offer, go to multiple inductions to see which environment you feel most comfortable in and then leave some budget on top of that to ensure you can afford any of the add-ons you feel necessary such as classes, equipment or personal training.

Time constraints can lead to a slippery slope. One missed session leads to two, and sooner or later someone who was as excited as a kid on Christmas eve to get on a treadmill a month earlier may not have been to the gym in a couple of weeks. Progress lost.
What’s the solution? Planning and being realistic. The more realistic you set your sights at the start of your fitness journey, the easier it will be to grow your fitness regime. It’s hard to go from not exercising much to being a body builder who spends five days a week in the gym. What is realistic is two or three light sessions a week to start. If your routine allows for more sessions then great, of course you can go to the gym more often! Plan your sessions in advance so you can make the most of the time you have in the gym. It’s better to have two fantastic workouts than five rubbish ones. Don’t get too disheartened if life gets in the way of the gym every now and again, it’s natural.

It’s far too easy for a gym newbie to set unrealistic goals. Everyone signs up to their new gym with a picture in their head of what they want to look like. We start our fitness journeys to get to a point we feel comfortable, with our bodies. Aiming for the dream body within a fortnight is not quite how it works.

What’s the solution? A fitness journey is a marathon… not a sprint. Setting achievable goals will not only keep you motivated and prevent you from panicking every time you look in the mirror, but will also keep you in the gym for longer than just January. Speak to the staff in your club or gym regarding goal-setting. Most staff and trainers are happy to give free, helpful advice on what you should look to achieve in a time period you feel comfortable, tailored exactly to what you want to achieve. If your aim is to lose a couple of stone, make sure not only do you have your main goal but plan what you want to do once you reach that goal. It’s a fantastic feeling to hit a target so work out what it is you want to do once that goal is achieved and how you’re going to reach your next milestone.

Going to the gym offers so much more than weight loss or muscle growth. Fitness offers a stress release, health benefits such as reduced blood pressure and cholesterol and a fantastic way to socialise with fellow members or friends. These are benefits that last 12 months, not one. Your goals will not come to you by stopping attending the gym. As they say… better late than never!

Whether it’s a bit of Christmas timber lingering on or the results of a successful winter bulk, it’s not unusual for us to be carrying a little bit of extra weight going into the summer months, but your diet is the perfect way to start your summer weight loss.

It may be something as simple as letting go of the takeaways, the pizzas and the chocolate bars of course, but for some it’s much more complicated than that.

For those who took on a winter bulk for some winter warmth, they could be looking at a full blown cut in calories. Firstly, work out how much weight you plan to lose and a time scale. It may be that you’re going on holiday or you’re starting a summer sport such as cricket or tennis, so make sure you leave yourself enough time to achieve your desired weight and therefore you won’t need to go without.

You must be mentally tough to make a cut. Going from say 3,000 calories to early 2000s won’t be easy for your body to cope with. Ensure you don’t make a sudden drop and gradually drop your calories, by say 150 or 200 per fortnight, so your body has more than enough time to adjust.

Any cut programme should last at least six weeks, but if you’re cutting 10 pounds or less you should aim for a cut of around 2-3 months, with 20 pounds or more 4-5 months in duration.

In summer foods like watermelon, green beans and cucumber will be readily available so try and encompass these into your diet accordingly, whilst chicken will probably be your best friend over the summer months. Fish is the next low-fat alternative and some porks can also be very low fat, whilst still providing the protein you need to train.

Cardio will also become much more of a factor in your routine opposed to the winter months so make sure you’re still getting in carbs, but you’ll still cut a percentage of those out too. The major cut of course is clearly fat, you’ll only lose weight if you’re burning more calories than you’re consuming, so make sure you track your calorie intake closely day by day to achieve a successful summer weight loss programme.

The cornerstone of any day is our meals and the times we eat. Those who go to the gym regularly often base their day around their meals and spend hours a week planning and preparing meals for the coming days. However, it could come as more than a surprise how these mealtimes arrived at their everyday names we give them today such as breakfast, lunch, dinner or tea.

As our bliss and peaceful sleep is abruptly halted by our rude alarm clocks, the sleep is still lingering in the corner of our eyes and our pyjamas are still well and truly on, we trudge down the stairs for breakfast. Breakfast is, literally, what it says on the tin.

Break-fast. The fast being the last few (but never enough, of course) hours happily asleep. Fast, coincidentally, is what the meal is designed to be. A quick meal to break the hours without food, hence why our most important meal of the day is typically a juicy ripe apple or a crunchy light cereal bar, or even a slice of toast drowned in baked beans or topped with a scrambled egg or two. Unfortunately, about 18 percent of males and 13 percent of females between the ages of 35 and 54 decide not to opt for a fry up or a bacon sarnie in the morning, according to a 2011 study by the market research company NPD group.

Moving onto what I like to call lunch, or some dinner, this derives from a time when life was much different. From Roman times to the Middle Ages, people used to get up and go to work a lot earlier and had often been grafting hard at work for six hours come midday. In the Middle Ages, deprived of watches or electricity, lunch was taken on the basis of daylight.

As man-made light became a more modern concept, lunch or dinner became a later meal and the word lunch started to become more common for the earlier meal, taken from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘nuncheon’, which meant a quick snack between meals that you can hold in your hands, often bread and cheese, the start of the sandwich.

Sandwiches take their name from the Earl of Sandwich, who used to have sandwiches as a late-night snack. However, this started to become more and more common on the lunchtime menu as workers needed something quick to eat around noon and lunch became even more prominent during the 19th century and the industrial revolution, when Britain became the first country to offer industrialised food in the form of pies to workers.

Dinner or supper, even tea to those potentially in the northern regions of the country, derives from Roman times. This was the only meal they ate all day with breakfast frowned upon. The rich and famous ate a luxurious, ravishing meal around noon, to show off if you will. As artificial light pushed this meal back, it became a meal for when the working day was over and people ate at home after a long day. As white goods became a popular purchase in the 1950s, the traditional family dinner was born as the housewife would cook ready for the husband, who’d been at work all day.

The word dinner comes from the derogatory Latin word ‘disjējūnāre’ meaning ‘to break one’s fast’ and was at first used to describe breakfast, but can be used at any time of the day to break any type of fast so is a broader word for a meal, hence the argument whether dinner is eaten as lunch or supper. Supper refers to food eaten later in the day and originates from the old French word ‘souper’ meaning ‘evening meal’, commonly used by more upper or middle class families. In contrast, ‘tea’ is traditionally eaten at around half past six and is a working class phrase.

For me, today is everybody’s favourite day of the week… rest day. However, not everybody treats rest day correctly, or does the right things to compliment a hard week of workouts in the gym.

Firstly, it is important know why rest days are important. Of course most of us cannot make it to the gym seven days a week for various reasons, but lots of people make the effort to go as often as they can. Rest days considerably lower your risk of overtraining, defined as: ‘exceeding the body’s recovery capacity, indicated by excessive fatigue both physically and mentally and resulting in impaired performance.’

Overtraining is often known as staleness and can severely impede performance and your rate of improvement, as well as put you at risk of injury. A lack of rest days can also lead to burnout, physical or mental exhaustion cause by long-term stress, or in case of the gym, exercise without a break.

Rest day should be carried out at least once a week, if not twice, but this doesn’t mean you should pig out on any food you can find and sit in front of the TV on the sofa refusing to move all day.

1. Keep mobile
   As much as sitting around on the sofa is the easiest thing to do on a rest day, it’s a rest, not a day off. Keep mobile and include some dynamic stretching. This will improve your flexibility to do acute exercises and increasing mobility will put you at a lower risk of injury for quick, snapping movements during exercise.
2. Do some cardio or a leisure activity
   Not heavy cardio, of course, but a light jog or some interval training will keep you up and about without putting stresses and strains on your body. Alternatively, go and play a game of football or go on a bike ride with your family or a swim, something active but also enjoyable, you might not even realise you’re exercising!
3. Continue to eat well
   Rest day should include extra protein for muscle growth and repair. You can also drop your carbs as you don’t need as much energy as you would for a day at the gym. Excess protein may lead to excess fat, but that’s not a problem, neither is a little chocolate bar or pack of sweets. Who’s going to know?!
4. Add extra nutrients
   Apart from your macronutrients, excess fruit and vegetables can reduce inflammation around the muscles and speed up recovery, reducing soreness. Try out some new recipes on rest day too, it is meant to be a one off after all, have fun!