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

Take a look at our great gym memberships!

Good Christmas? Nice dinner? Nice presents? Good, that’s how Christmas should be done of course, but now it’s time to tone that turkey-filled stomach and pulverise those extra pounds you’ve gained over the festive period.

A Christmas meal alone contains around 1,500 calories, three quarters of your recommended daily allowance.
With pigs in blankets around 100 calories per one, a glass of mulled wine 119 calories and champagne potentially even more than that, it’s easy to consume more calories than your brain can even think of over Christmas.

But it’s Christmas right? Not a problem? Not if you go about it the right way.

It will come as no surprise that January is the most popular month of the year for people to join the gym, with over 12% of new members joining in the opening month of the year compared to an average of 8.3% throughout the rest of the year according to the International Health, Racquet, and Sportsclub Association.

So here are some top tips when it comes to ensuring post-Christmas success in the gym.

1. Start early

Don’t wait too long before starting back at the gym. There are five whole days between Boxing Day and New Years Day alone, what’s wrong with them? Waiting too long to return to the gym may make those extra calories consumed over Christmas a lot more difficult and time consuming to lose. If you want to see progress from before Christmas, the earlier you get back to the gym the better.

2. Make a new year’s resolution

People do still do this don’t they? It may be a long lost tradition now days, but it could be key to your post-Christmas workout.

A simple yet challenging and realistic goal (let’s be honest you can’t lose four stone in a month) can not only make yourself more aesthetically pleasing after the festive period, but boost your morale and give you the motivation to hit the gym hard for the first few months of the year.

No point giving up a few weeks after you lose those Christmas calories is there?

3. Continue to eat right

Don’t cut certain things out of your diet to balance out the Christmas meals.

Cutting out carbs will lead to your body burning protein and lead to a loss of ability to build muscle in the months post Christmas. Cut back, don’t cut out.

With Christmas leading to constant snacks and a more irregular food intake, try and get back to a routine when it comes to food, eat regularly and space your meals accordingly, instead of just snacking on the odd mince pie or chocolate cake, your metabolism will appreciate it greatly.

4. Treat yourself

Why not treat yourself to some gym gear for Christmas? A new sports bra or some new shoes can do wonders for your motivation and nobody wants to buy some new kit and let it go to waste do they?

Maybe even treat yourself to some sessions from a personal trainer to kick-start your post-Christmas routine in style.

5. Don’t shy from cardio

Cardiovascular exercise is crucial to losing weight over Christmas as many of the festive foods can tag on those pounds with ease.

Cardio may be gruelling, but don’t shy away, go with a friend, listen to music, do whatever works for you to get you through the cardio you need to lose weight.

Mix it up, don’t get bored, your body will be more grateful for variety if cardio such as cycling, running and rowing opposed to weeks’ worth of the same cardiovascular exercise.

6. Start small and build up

For regular gym goers it may be easy for your muscles to regress and you may find when you start back you may not be able to lift the same weight as pre-Christmas.

Never fear, this is normal. However, don’t spend two hours per session thinking quantity is better than quality, it isn’t.

You will get more out of lifting lighter weights correctly than lifting the same weight for two reps for two hours, your body will soon get back to lifting the same weights you were before Christmas if you give it the time.

7. Don’t quit

The most vital of them all.
Don’t give up, you may not be able to run as far or lift as heavy as before, but you got there once and you will again. It’s only normal that Christmas has a slightly negative effect and after a year of hard work, you deserved the break!

But another year of hard work in the gym awaits and you will feel refreshed and grateful for the break once you’re hitting those high numbers once again come February, there will be a lot of people in exactly same boat as you post-Christmas.

Find a gym near you and get started!

Going to the gym can be a tough gig.

There is a lot involved in making the most of your gym experience, starting with the motivation just to go and that will-power to drag yourself to the gym and exercise when you’re tired or busy or simply not in a very good mood. From there, the commitment to eat well and to plan meals and workouts and the pressure to make time to go to the gym can all make working out on a regular basis difficult.

Yet, when you get past those slight nagging issues, it’s one of the most rewarding and aesthetically pleasing forms of exercise around and can even prove one of the cheapest if you find the right gym. Going to the gym is a lifestyle, of which we all need a break sometimes, right?

To compliment all your hard work at the gym throughout the year, going to the spa is key.

For instance, who knew that a simple massage can lead to the body removing waste products by improving the lymphatic system, aiding your intense weight-loss programme without even moving a muscle? It doesn’t just end there.

Contouring services and body polishing options at spas can regenerate skin cells and make all your hard work pay off with your skin too, something you can’t work on in a weights room!

Spa days relax muscles in order for the muscles to reset and be better prepared for that assault on the cables, as well as ensuring healthier joints by relaxing tendons to release pressure built up through vigorous exercise.

A spa day or break can take your mind off all your stressors, your issues and even the pain from yesterday’s workout and refocus the mind, ensuring you’re ready and raring to get back into the gym and smash out those personal bests you’ve been working on for months on end.

Just by sitting in a sauna or getting a massage, you can improve your body no end just by spending the day at a spa with a friend or partner, and increase your mood with the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that will improve your mood, your social ability memory and sleep function, important isn’t it?

Impact Experiences offers spa days and breaks for incredible value all over the country, for yourself or as a gift to a friend who needs a well earned break.

Don’t knock it before you try…

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.

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.

60% of adults in the UK are overweight or obese. The UK is the ‘fat man’ of Europe, there is more obese people in England than anywhere else on the continent. Scary fact, right? Slightly behind that unnerving figure are our Irish neighbours, followed by Spain, Portugal and Germany rounding off the top five.

So it’s safe to say there’s probably a large amount of people who caught a glimpse of themselves int the mirror and decided that it was time to go on a diet. There are hundreds of diets available for weight loss, whether it be simply buying and cooking better food and taking more time over it, joining a weight-loss club or tougher, stricter diets such as the Atkins diet, the Blood Type diet or the Caveman diet.

It’s all well and good dieting, but without going to the gym or regular exercise, all your time and effort in the kitchen can go completely to waste. A study in the US found reducing your calorie intake by 30% without exercising will likely lead to no weight loss at all, as the body deploys its natural compensatory mechanism, reducing physical activity in response to the reduction in calories.

Joining a sports team or club is also a popular option. Sports teams may offer more social benefits as well as a more active lifestyle, but a couple of pints here and there after a football or cricket match all add up. By joining a gym, you can target certain areas of your body and give yourself a more rounded workout as opposed to pure cardio during a football game or going for a run every now and again. There’s no point dieting and attempting to lose weight if you don’t then tone your muscles, which an 80 minute rugby game once a week or the odd hockey training session certainly won’t do.

The best, most effective and quickest way to lose weight and look better is to exercise and eat well. They go hand in hand; you wouldn’t go to the gym but maintain bad eating habits, so why improve your eating habits but not increase your frequency of exercise? Food and exercise complement each other providing you do it right, so as well as dropping the donuts and finding the fruit, make sure that a solid and regular gym workout is also part of your weight loss programme.

From 1987 to 2003, there was a meteoric rise in older people going to the gym. The jump was measured at 343% more people aged 55 or over joining the gym. That number is still rising as people look to keep fit as they get older. After all, it does become a much tougher proposition and something all the more harder to keep on top of as we start to age. Yet still, 44% of adults over the age of 70 years enjoy a 20-minute walk less than once a year, or never.

So why is it more important for older people to go to the gym?

A whole range of reasons are medical. Men who burn 2,000 calories a week have a life expectancy two-and-a-half years longer than a bloke who doesn’t. Without exercise, aches and pains you’ve never experiences will be sure to creep in as your muscles and joints become less active. The gym will keep these moving and also keep them stronger. Exercising regularly will slow down the decline in function your body goes through as you get older.

Older people who exercise are less likely to be at risk of illnesses such as type two diabetes, depression, dementia and some forms of cancers. That’s if you aim for 150 minutes of exercise per week. As you get older your metabolism also slows down, which means chemical reactions happen slower in the body and in addition to that, the lower your muscle mass the slower your metabolism is likely to be. Therefore, it becomes much easier to put on weight as you get older and getting in the gym and eating the right things as a result won’t only make you lose or maintain your weight, but speed up your metabolism.

Exercising is also a great way to socialise. With the leap in number of elder gym goers over the years, you’re bound to meet someone a similar age as you with the same motivation for going to the gym, adding to your social life and you may even become gym partners to push each other that step further to become more active in later life.

Older people should aim for a slightly cardio-based workout to maintain and lose weight, but don’t underestimate the value of strength exercises. A study on 90-year-old women in a nursing home found that a 12-week strength training programme took the equivalent of 20 years off their thigh muscle age, leading to improved mobility. Strength workouts can keep the brain more active and also allow you to do more during the day. Older people who don’t exercise regularly may find walking into town or standing at the bus stop a lot more difficult than those who find themselves on a treadmill frequently.

There are hundreds of gyms around aimed at older people, some of which even offer classes aimed at older people and their needs, make sure you make use of these and they’re also another great chance to socialise with a large group who all have the same aim, to stay fit.