Imagine standing at the base of a majestic mountain, the trail winding up into the clouds, or picturing yourself kayaking through serene waters as the sun sets. These aren’t just daydreams – they’re powerful motivators waiting to transform your fitness journey.
In adventure sports, balance plays a crucial yet often overlooked role. Whether it’s hiking up a mountain or catching a wave, the ability to correctly balance the body is absolutely crucial to our performance and is often something most people ignore in their training, mainly as they have no idea how to improve it.
Stand-up paddleboarding is not just a sport; it’s a pathway to a healthier, more balanced life. For those in their mid-life, SUP offers a unique opportunity to rejuvenate both body and mind, to explore new horizons, and to rediscover a sense of adventure and tranquility.
11.5 lbs down now. Just had cholesterol results go from overall 8.2 to 4.3 and bad cholesterol from 3.4 to 2.6.Best its been in 30 years.
After 3 weeks: LDL drastically down from close to 200 to 50 – we will reduce the Statins to one pill every other day
Your microbiome has a HUGE ability to drive health or disease within the body, so taking probiotics seems like the logical choice, but they have a dark side…
“Finish your workout…load up with protein and carbs.” An age old message we have been told since we first started doing exercise and if you’re exercising to build muscle and want to recover quickly in-between sessions it’s absolutely spot on. If you’re working out to lose weight…not so much. In my last post I talked about the fact that while high intensity cardio releases a lot of fatty acids into the blood stream it doesn’t necessarily burn them. To sum it up here, let’s say you go to a HIIT class. That class drives your body to release a ton of fatty acids into the bloodstream but whilst you are exercising at a high intensity your body will always prefer glucose as a fuel source as it’s simply easier to use and the lactic acid released through such intense exercise INHIBITS the burring of fat as a fuel. So the fatty acids just sit there in the blood for such a time as your body can actually convert them to energy to burn. Now if you finish that workout and go and eat something, following the advice we talked about earlier, you have just given your body an injection of glucose…and remember the body ALWAYS favours glucose as a fuel source over fat. So all that fat in the blood will simply be returned to the fat cells as the body burns the food you have just eaten. Meaning the net effect of your cardio session in terms of weight loss is a BIG zero. If instead you finished the HIIT session and then waited to eat (for around 45 mins to an hour) the body is starved of glucose for this time and so is FORCED to use the fatty acids now readily available in the bloodstream. What’s more as the lactic acid in the blood has been cleared it’s much easier for the body to actually burn these fatty acids as fuel. Meaning that your cardio session, or at least the hour following your cardio session, has a huge impact on fat burning. Sam. 😎🤙 Interested in how you can lose 6kgs in 4 weeks and then keep it off without ever going hungry, counting calories or spending hours in the gym? Check out our Fuel for an Active Life program.
We’ve all seen them, or even been them. The people who come to the gym day after day. They’re carrying a bit of weight but they have this determined look on their face. They sign up to the hardest classes and smash them, they jump on the treadmill and sweat their asses off for what seems like hours, then they jump in the sauna. After 2 months of this they get on the scales waiting to be amazed, only to find they have lost… …nothing, nada, zip, zilch …in fact they’ve put a few kilos on.Totally dispirited they drag themselves off the scales and decide they were born with faulty genes and simply give up. And to be fair, who can blame them…that sounds awful. But what is really going on? Today I want to talk about the #1 mistake I see most people making when it comes to working out when their specific focus is weight loss. Working too hard. And it’s truly tragic as some of the most determined, driven people I know are being sabotaged by their own desire to lose weight. What we all MUST understand is TOO MUCH exertion results in metabolic byproducts, which sabotage fat loss. Let me explain. The graph in the image looks complicated, trust me it’s not. Let’s break it down. The blue line is fat oxidation, or in normal speak, fat burning. The amount of fat that you’re actually burning off from the bloodstream by converting it into fuel. The green line represents fat uncoupling. That’s basically when the fat cells themselves give out fatty acids, drop it into the bloodstream and make those fatty acids available for the body as fuel. The red line is blood lactate. That’s how much lactate you have in your blood and as we can see lactic acid increases as we exercise harder and harder. So let’s go back to fat oxidation, the blue line. Notice how this line peaks at about 40% exercise intensity (exercise intensity is given by the x axis of the graph). Now for most people, that equates to a heart rate of around 100 BPM. Now, to give you a clue, if I stood up now and started walking around at half decent pace, my heart will probably go about a hundred. So that’s optimal fat burning exertion because after the 40% point fat burning actually decreases. If you look up at the 80, 85% mark which equates roughly to the person doing the HIIT class or slogging their guts out on the treadmill. They passed the point of optimal fat burning almost the minute they started working out. So where has this idea that we burn more fat as we exercise at higher intensity come from? Well, it’s because for so long we’ve been looking at the wrong marker. We’ve been looking at the green line, this lipolysis/fat uncoupling line and remember that’s how much fatty acid the fat cells are depositing in the bloodstream. Hang on a minute, that sounds good…? Well yes, BUT… If it’s not being burned, as soon as you finish exercising, it…
For a lot of us the goal is simply more muscle. Here I break down why that’s not always a great idea.
