TThe following article is an excerpt from my newsletter: Good coffee with Harry Bullmore. To receive my latest thoughts on fitness and wellness, enter your email address in the box above to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox.
This week, I’m here to tell you to do a little exercise. Most of you, anyway.
This may seem like strange advice from a fitness writer, but bear with me – there is method to the madness.
“Trying to throw the kitchen sink into practice often doesn’t work or produce the best results,” senior coach Paddy James told me recently. “To get results, whether it’s building muscle, getting stronger or getting fit, the most important thing is to find [an exercise plan] We can match that.”
A few hours of weekly workouts may not fit these criteria. If you have work pressure, a busy social life, or children to care for, an irregular exercise plan may prompt you to throw in the towel after a week or two.
While a more leisurely program of two or three significant sessions per week will allow for greater adherence and offer greater fitness benefits in the long run.
That’s the theme of this week’s show: Practicing to Live, Not Living to Practice.
As I wrote in this recent article: “Most of us are not Olympians – for us, fitness is not about being the best or purest in our approach.
“It’s simply about doing what we can, when we can, while balancing it with an enjoyable life. The goal? To gradually build a fitter and more flexible body in which we live.”
And for most people, it’s a much smaller commitment than you might think.
Paddy offers two 45-minute full-body strength training sessions per week. He prioritizes compound or multi-muscle exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows and presses for added efficiency, tries to work the major muscles (chest, back, shoulders, quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes) in each session, and aims to accumulate six to ten working sets of the muscle each week.
Each exercise should be performed with good technique, and each set should feel challenging, leading to a point where your movements involuntarily slow down as your muscles tire.
And here it is: what Paddy refers to as the “minimum effective dose” for building a stronger, fitter body. There is a four-movement exercise pattern showing this method in the attached feature.
If you can address this with a reasonable amount of daily movement—running, swimming, cycling, or something else you enjoy—you’ll have a much more comprehensive fitness plan. If you can add in an occasional Pilates class or something similar for some different movement (squatting, spinning, etc.) then you get an A+ from me.
On this topic, our second special episode features a range of motion routines from veteran physiotherapist Alex Morrell, who worked with many professional sports teams before setting up motion physiotherapy.
The goal is to ease and prevent back pain by creating mobility through the spine and moving the body as a strong, harmonious unit.
My goal with this newsletter and all my articles is to provide people with accessible, actionable and useful information. With low back pain affecting more than 80 per cent of people in the UK at some point in their lives, according to the NHS, it felt like a good topic to cover.
Muriel’s tips for dealing with back pain affect this short. He recommends regulating our stress levels through breathing work (breathing through the nose, five seconds in, five seconds out, for ten rounds), strengthening the surrounding muscles, and monitoring lifestyles that may contribute to our discomfort: poor sleep, stress, diet.
I especially enjoyed this insight: “People are looking at the importance of nutrition, hydration, sleep and any other lifestyle factor you can think of—they’re hitting everything,” says Morell.
“If you think about an athlete, trainers will try to optimize everything they do for better performance and recovery. Getting out of pain is a process of improving performance.”
And finally this week, I spoke to Professor Sarah Barry, Associate Professor at King’s College London and Chief Scientist at ZOE.
Being a little skinny, I recently lost some fat, but instead of changing my diet, I focused on changing the things I do regularly – for example having a piece of toast with my eggs instead of two. That way, without weighing food or doing precise counts, I’m pretty sure I’ve reduced my calorie intake quite a bit.
Professor Berry’s advice is helpful in achieving this. “On average we get 25 percent of our energy from snacks, so choosing healthy snacks can be a very simple way to improve our health,” she says.
“Our research has shown that swapping the typical British breakfast for almonds can reduce our risk of heart disease by 30 per cent,” he says.
“Almonds are an excellent source of fiber, unsaturated fats, vitamin E, magnesium and B vitamins, and these are very beneficial for your long-term health and well-being.
“We found that people who reported higher consumption of almonds reported lower rates of anxiety, and were less likely to report neurological diseases such as dementia or Parkinson’s disease.”
So, if you can replace your daily sweet treat with a few almonds, or simply subsidize a portion of it with nuts, the benefits are likely to add up over time.
Now, to our conclusion. The body is very adaptable, and if you make changes in your life, it will change accordingly. But the changes you need to make to see results are far less dramatic than many think.
For exercise, diet and beyond, find a health-promoting and (if possible) enjoyable routine that you can stick to long-term. Then learn from it over time and tailor it to fit your goals and lifestyle.
Get a good enough newsletter
to get Good coffee with Harry BullmoreSimply enter your email address in the box at the top of this page.
You can also visit our Newsletter Preference Center to sign up for email.
Once there, all you need to do is press the ‘+’ button and enter your email address to sign up.
#hourlong #workouts #killing #fitness #progress