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Showing posts from March, 2017

Fairytales from the gym: The copycat program

Story time. Once upon a time fitness nutrition was all about carb loading. Endurance athletes were king and they needed a lot of carbs to fuel their long, punishing training regimes. People who wanted to be fit, but weren't professional athletes followed their lead and ate loads of carbs. But they weren't running for 8 hours a day, I was too young for the fitness world then but I imagine they were doing something like this for an hour a couple of times a week. So funnily enough, fuelling your body like an endurance athlete, when you aren't an endurance athlete isn't a great plan. What happens is you take on too many calories which your body helpfully stores as fat. Also people started interpreting "carbohydrates" as highly processed starches and sugars, rather than wholegrains and vegetables. So then people started saying that carbs were terrible and we should perhaps cut them out completely because they made people fat. So then people st

Functional... and mighty

The other day I was at the gym where I work, and one of my co workers made an interesting comment about my hands. It was something like "oh wow, you have great hands, can I see them?" Which is probably a bit odd to most people, but we are like that. The thing is, I've never really thought I had great hands. I have massive hands. When I was about 18 my boyfriend at the time told me he found it intimidating that my hands were bigger than his. I have long fingers, but also pretty solid palms. I also have massive feet, I'm a UK 7, but I'm not generally very big, I'm just under 5'4". I have always been self conscious about my "massive flappy hands and feet". So it was a bit of a revelation to have someone make positive comments about my hands when the best anyone had previously managed was "you'd make a good pianist" (and they are right, I can play Shumann and that dude cut his finger webs to achieve his span). My co worker

Fairytales from the gym: The Squat Queen

OK, so back to Fairytales, I want to look at another gym trope. It's very easy, as we've already seen, to fall into habits based around your favourite exercises and the goals that mean the most to you, while losing sight of the importance of a balanced routine for good health and alignment. So without further ado, let's introduce our next character: The Squat Queen. Is squat your favourite exercise? Do you regularly take pictures of your bum for instagram ? (no shame guys, we've all been there) Do you own more leggings and yoga pants than you have space for? (Yeah, me too) And shirts with slogans about squatting ? Are you all about "dat ass"? Then, you might be heading in a SQ direction. Love squats, because they love you too. OK, so squat is an amazing exercise. It works some really good muscles, burns through a good few calories with that compound work. Plus you can do about a million variations: Narrow ones, wide ones, front squ