FitSpring

Do you treat yourself with curiosity, care & compassion?

When coaching movement we teach core to extremity as an explanation for how most movements start at the centre and radiate out. Think throwing a ball.

That isn't how most of the fitness, health and wellbeing industry tends to work though. They are very much focused on reps and sets, broccoli and chicken. Rarely do you ever hear anyone talking about what shift has to happen at the core, to drive the change. And then what it takes to keep it going when things get busy, boring, scary or hard.

To spark change, you need to become dissatisfied with our status quo. The other side of the coin is wanting something for your future, your ambitions, hopes and dreams. Pain without ambition leads to frustration, feeling stuck and coping mechanisms. Ambition without discomfort will lead to low drive and leads to unrealised dreams and again frustration.

If you're not dissatisfied in some way with your current predicament or your have no ambition or hopes for the future your chances of being successful with any change effort are basically nil. You need both.

Action step:
Take a piece of paper and create a mind map of all the things you don't want. Write that in the middle. Run an imaginary film forward in your mind where you continue on your current trajectory. Consider as many areas of your life as you can. Include your career, family, health, relationships , social life, comfort, pain level, romantic ambitions, social life, confidence or quality of life etc. Think about the habits and behaviours that are not serving you or are going to lead to unhappy consequences or lead to you getting stuck.

Now pick something you want to change. If you're smart, you'll pick something that has a single cause but many downstream effects. For me, fixing my sleep was an example of that.
I now go to bed and get up the same time every night. No phone in the bedroom. In bed by 10pm every night. My alarm goes off at 7am.
Poor sleep and being tired were the start points for some unhealthy behaviours.

Result: Sleep improved, tired grumpiness reduced. Mornings I wake up refreshed, get more done. This led to getting my physical training becoming way more regular. This meant I missed fewer days. My diet improved without really trying too, because of fewer carb cravings. As a result my physical and mental health improved. I'm training more regularly. I am fitter and stronger, healthier and happier.

Photo by Jonathan Cosens Photography on Unsplash


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Memory giving you problems? Forgetting why you walked into a room?
Here’s what to do about it

Ever have a problem finding the right word? Can’t remember what you went into a room for? Struggle with people’s names more than you used to? All examples most of us in middle age will be all too familiar with. Neuro-degeneration or mild cognitive decline is part and parcel of getting older. It sucks and it is scary when your brain feels like it is giving up on you.

The good news is the a significant part of the solution is exercise. Good news because it is simple and effectively free.

Exercise has many benefits for your brain’s health. Follow the mantra “what’s good for your heart & body is good for your brain”. Regular physical activity will help with forming new neurons, primarily in the Hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial to learning, memory and cognitive flexibility. Exercise also helps alleviate feelings of despair and anxiety often associated with neuro decline. The long term protective benefits of exercise happen by lowering inflammation, reduced oxidative stress and the build up of amyloid plaques which are a feature of Alzheimers disease.

From a paper in Experimental Gerontology”

“Physical activity slows the progression of neurodegenerative illnesses..... Exercise can help you sleep better, which improves your cognitive performance. Exercise reduces chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, which helps to promote brain health and cognitive performance.” - Link to original source: https://buff.ly/3ACZ2Vm

Exercise helps release Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), long known as miracle grow for your brain. The link between exercise, BDNF release, neural development and improvements in learning have been long understood in kids. Now the benefits are being tested for and found in healthy adults staving off neuro-degeneration and adults experiencing decline by helping to reverse it.

**Action steps:**

Rather than planning to start a workout plan an Olympian would blanch at and then failing, hating yourself and ending up in a worse place than you are now. Start small.

A walk, a jog around the park, do 10 mins of yoga in your living room. Dig out your dumbbells from the garage and do some curls. Start, then build consistency, only once you have a solid habit, think about optimising for duration, intensity or whatever else.

If you already have a fitness practice, look at how you could increase the frequency. Grow 3 times a week into four or five. If you're smart you'll mix up what you do.

If you’re already training 5 times a week, look at how you could hit a more balanced scorecard of training.
A gold standard week might look like:
One long slow zone 2 effort
A medium duration high intensity session
One sprint session
A couple of strength sessions
A couple of stretch and balance sessions as recovery.

If you had one or two really hard efforts in that week and the others were more gentle, that would suit most working adults.

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Stay Flexible, Live Longer

There's a lot of proof that strength training and improving your aerobic capacity (how well your heart and lungs work) can help you live longer. Now, a new study suggests that being flexible can also lower your risk of dying from any cause.

In a Brazilian study, researchers looked at data from 3,139 people aged 46-65 (66% were men). They found that people with better flexibility had a lower chance of dying.

For women with low flexibility scores, the risk of dying was 4.78 times higher compared to those with high flexibility scores. For men, the risk was 1.87 times higher if they had lower flexibility scores.

There are many ways to improve your flexibility. Start small by adding a 2-minute stretch to your daily routine. If you have more time, try a 5-minute yoga routine on YouTube. If you can, join a yoga class, or try Yoga with Adriene on YouTube if you’re on a budget.

For the best results, aim to stretch each major muscle group for about 90 seconds, six days a week. This adds up to around 9-12 minutes of stretching per day.

Weekly training plan for a long, healthy life:
Two strength training sessions
One long, slow workout (Zone 2)
A high-intensity threshold session (Zone 4)
A sprint session.
You can also add a couple of stretching classes as active recovery.

Photo by Scott Broome on Unsplash

Source: https://buff.ly/4e3wL93

Sleep tracking about to become a whole lot more accurate, cheaper & easier.

Sleep is vital to a long and healthy life and lack of or broken sleep is a predictor of future health problems like heart disease and dementia. As with all things, knowledge can be power if used correctly. Knowing how well you are sleeping gives you data to do something about the problem early.

World class sleep tracking know as polysomnography (PSG) traditionally needs a cap with dozens of leads attached, a sleep lab in a university and a trained tech. The strange location, intrusive leads and high cost make this cumbersome, less accurate than it should be and the cost is exclusionary.

Now researchers have found similar accurate results to old school polysomnography (PSG) using a single lead electrocardiogram (ECG). This is great news because it is a powerful, non-invasive tool for monitoring the nervous system activity during sleep. Even better news is the research is Open Source, meaning if you could code, you could build your own heart rate based sleep analyser. You can bet that smart wearables using this tech will be coming out in no time.

The ECG based approach using neural network technology and achieves "gold standard levels of agreement with PSG using only ECG data". These results were considerably more accurate than commercial non EEG sleep tracking approaches (E.g. your smart watch). Most non PSG options fail to classify some sleep stages.

The sleep stages are:
Wake, rapid eye movement (REM), Non-REM stages 1-3. Each stage is associated with a particular physiological process such as memory.

Photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

Original article: https://buff.ly/3yBLV6r

50 y/o & 5 half hour sessions in a week...

I was talking to a 50 year old working mum who said she knew she needed to do something to avoid he slide into disability and decrepitude that her parents were experiencing. She also wants to be a good role model for her kids. The problem was she didn’t know what to do with that time for the largest fitness effect. TBH, she didn’t know what she was trying to achieve, let alone how to get there. This isn't a criticism of her, why should she have any fitness, training, nutrition coaching knowledge?

Start with why:
There are two things to consider. The length and quality of your life.

Chances are you’ll die from a heart problem, cardiovascular issue, cancer, a lung issue or dementia. However, the quality of your life will probably be influenced by less lethal things, such as your bone density, muscle mass, aerobic capacity and mobility.

QoL is also strongly effected by social factors such as the number of friends you see regularly, your extended familial support network and your mental health. There is a clear need for a nutritional and lifestyle component in the plan as well as training and social stimulus, but nutrition is outside the scope of our 5 x 30 minute workouts. It is something I as a coach would weave into the conversation and aim for small but steady changes

We’re looking for activities and habits we can build that will positively impact all of those measures of quality of life while at the same time reducing the likelihood and severity of symptoms of those diseases, pushing back the onset as far as possible to give you the longest, healthiest, happiest disease free life.

Right, so 5 x half hour sessions in a week…

The amount of time and amount of kit you have when you start is not necessarily a long term limiting factor. Getting started is the hardest step. Once you are in the habit of getting up and doing something, getting hold of extra kit or making a bit more time for a long workout once a week are probably doable.

What would a week look like:

2 x strength sessions, we can start with bodyweight exercises.
1 x long slow workout (loaded fast walk or a jog)
1 x sprint session, zone 5 as hard as you can go
1 x medium effort, medium duration tempo workout

Day 1: Strength 1
Day 2: Sprint session
Day 3: Medium effort tempo cardio
Day 4: Strength 2
Day 5: Long loaded walk

Sprints:
The sprint session doesn’t care whether you do 10 seconds hard and 30 recovery or 30 on, 30 off or 4 minutes as hard as you can go, 4 mins recovery. There is no magical protocol.
Warm up, work as hard as you can, recover. Do it again 2-10 times. As with everything, build up volume and intensity. The sprints should leave you gasping and hating your life choices.

Medium effort tempo cardio
This means go as hard as you can for somewhere between 10-30 minutes. Run, row, bike, ruck, whatever. Pick a route, keep the time the same and try and beat your distance each week.

Long slow cardio:
Slow, but not super slow, out of breath, but not dying. Add 10 minutes each week until you’re getting an hour and a half of solid Z2 cardio. If you can’t manage that, do what you can.

Strength:
What do the strength sessions include? We want to cover all the big, commonly used movement patterns, but try and avoid doing very similar movements on the same day.

These movement patterns are:
Squat - getting up out of a seat
Hinge - picking something up from the floor
Push - both vertically and horizontally, vertically as if you were putting a suitcase on top of a cupboard and horizontally as if you were doing a push up.
Pull - vertically, pull ups and chin ups. Horizontally, bent over row of some type
Split - lunges, step ups/ downs, split squats
Rotation: movements that mimic throwing a rugby ball or a hook punch
Anti-rotation, the ability to stop yourself from being rotated by either outside forces or your own movement
Crawling & floor work: copy a young child, crawl, roll, get up, get down

Now we’ve decided on the movement patterns we’re going to use, we need to pick a specific exercise to start with.

Ideally we’ll have a scaled version so we can start nice and easy and progressively make it harder applying the principle of overload. This could mean more reps, but often means adding a bit more weight than you did last time. The most common reason I’ve seen for people not progressing is lack of overload. We tend to avoid overload because it is hard work and gets scary.

Hopefully as you can see, there is a lot to consider, and we haven’t touched on nutrition or lifestyle yet.

Coaching makes this all so much more manageable. Get in touch if you need help.

Photo by Peter Conlan on Unsplash

Ketogenic diet may harm gut bacteria and raise cholesterol levels

Low sugar diet good. - Keto diet long term bad. - Moderate sugar diet - meh.

"Despite reducing fat mass, the ketogenic diet increased the levels of unfavourable fats in the blood of our participants, which, if sustained over years, could have long-term health implications such as increased risk of heart disease and stroke " - Lead researcher Dr. Aaron Hengist

Published in Cell Reports Medicine, the research from the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Metabolism involved 53 healthy adults for up to 12 weeks. Participants followed either a moderate sugar diet (control), a low-sugar diet (less than 5% of calories from sugar), or a ketogenic (keto) low-carbohydrate diet (less than 8% of calories from carbohydrates).

Reduced Favourable Gut Bacteria: The keto diet altered gut microbiome composition, notably decreasing Bifidobacteria, beneficial bacteria often found in probiotics. This bacteria has wide ranging benefits: producing b vitamins, inhibiting pathogens and harmful bacteria and lowering cholesterol. Sugar restriction did not significantly impact the gut microbiome composition.

Glucose Tolerance: The keto diet reduced glucose tolerance, meaning the adults' bodies became less efficient at handling carbohydrates.

Both Diets Resulted In Fat Loss: Keto Diet resulted in an average of 2.9 kg fat mass loss per person, whilst the sugar restricted diet followed with an average 2.1 kg fat mass loss per person at 12 weeks.

Metabolism: Researchers also noticed that the keto diet caused significant changes in lipid metabolism and muscle energy use, shifting the body's fuel preference from glucose to fats.

Physical Activity Levels: Both sugar restriction and keto diets achieved fat loss without changing physical activity levels.

As ever with peer reviewed studies, you need to take the results with a pinch of salt until they have been replicated by other reputable teams.

University of Bath. "Ketogenic Diet may reduce friendly gut bacteria and raise cholesterol levels." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 August 2024. .

Photo by Agto Nugroho on Unsplash

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Food labeling & peer influence improves shopping/ diet quality:

Adding behavioural nudges and financial incentives improves diet quality by a significant amount. This backs up what coaches have been saying forever, that you need clarity about what to do or you just won't do anything. You need to know why it is important and the benefits so you can judge the effort vs reward and make a smart choice. It turns out that adding a little competition, a small financial reward and maybe a fear of being judged about your shopping choices also drives healthy behaviour.

Supermarkets could and should build into their online shopping systems peer comparison and health scores without much difficulty given all the nutritional information must be available. If they were smart, they could also incentivise healthy choices by providing a low cost reward (coupons maybe) that you would lose if your basket was above a threshold for 'unhealthy'.

Researchers from Duke-NUS' Health Services and Systems Research Programme conducted a randomised trial. There were three groups, no front of packaging food labels, front of package food labels and food labels + peer influence and a chance not to lose a $5 healthy shopping bonus.

"shoppers were exposed to the front-of-pack labels and peer influence, there was a large improvement in the healthiness of the shopping basket. There was an additional improvement in the "yours-to-lose" cash reward arm, but the biggest bang came from the peer influence."

" When the researchers allowed participants to see the front-of-pack labels and how their shopping basket compared to that of their peers, there was a 14 per cent improvement in the diet quality of the shopping basket" - Science Daily

Professor Eric Finkelstein, from Duke-NUS Health Services and Systems Research Programme, said: "We've seen peer influence be effective at reducing energy consumption. With this study, we've demonstrated that it can also motivate consumers to select more nutritional items. This is a simple and costless way to fight chronic diseases. I hope our findings encourage supermarkets to introduce these interventions into their online shopping environment."

Photo by Caju Gomes on Unsplash

Change is hard. Here's a 5 step plan

Improving anything in your life takes effort. Our brains absolutely hate spending effort when we could just not.

Which of these sounds more appealing? Get up an hour early and go for a run or stay in bed and snuggle? Cook a healthy meal at home or get a takeaway delivered? Spend an hour studying after work or doom scroll YT? Exactly.

There are two psychological prerequisites for action. You have to answer two questions and believe the answers.

1. Can I do it
2. Is it worth it?
If you answer no to either of those, your chances of getting anything done are zero

Author and Jia Jiang has a great [article](https://buff.ly/3LVkJCz) (https://buff.ly/3LVkJCz). In it, he talks about the advertising gold mine that is vague but impressive sounding calls to action. There are plenty of examples, but Nike’s “Just do it”, is the most famous. If you pause for a moment and ask“just do what exactly?" You'll come up empty and then do nothing because the first step isn’t clear. Nothing that is apart from going out and buying some new Nikes. End result, dopamine delivered, credit card punished and you're no closer to your goal.

This speaks to the first question. Can I do it. if the ask is vague in any way, the answer will be no.

So what to do?

What we need for any change effort to be successful is a single thing to work on and practice. That thing must be clearly defined, super-simple and small enough not to cause overwhelm.

Or as Jia Jiang says.
“The real secret in long-term success is neither an inspirational slogan like “just do it”, nor a step-by-step plan. It's taking consistent actions, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month. Every day, your new action needs to build on the momentum from your past actions, and you flow faster and faster towards your goal.” - [**JIA JIANG**](https://buff.ly/4dyNtN4)

More like cleaning your teeth every day than something that is one and done.

So commit to making 20 sales calls a day, or doing your abs first thing every morning, or blocking in half an hour for strength training a few times a week. But be consistent and avoid wasting time planning too much. We tend to increase the scope of what we do as soon as the current step becomes too easy to challenge us.

Think about it, if you were doing 30 second planks every morning and that became easy, what would you do? Up it to 45 seconds or 60 seconds? Exactly. Didn’t need to waste time on a 3 month master plan in Excel.

Action steps:
What are you doing now that would make your life better if you stopped or were doing less of it?
What are you not doing that would improve your life if you started or doing more of it?

Pick one. Only one. Yes, I know you want to change 10 things at once, but that is the recipe for not achieving anything.

Accountability:
How are you going to create accountability? Calendar, coach, partner or friend?

5 step plan:

1. Align for direction by thinking about starting with the end in mind.
2. Pick the smallest first step you can do.
3. Think through what would have to be true to get that first step done? What do you need: Time, energy, equipment, gym membership, shopping, hours of sleep etc. If you’re adding something in, what are you going to cut out? How are you going to make sure you have the energy to start?
4. Now go sort out the logistics so they don’t become a barrier to action.
5. Finally build in accountability. This could be a coach, this could be a calendar on the wall you put a big X in every time you do the thing. If you’re smart, it’d be both.

The fabric of your life is made up of thousands of tiny moments, decisions and actions. Some will make long term differences to the quality and length of your life. Small changes add up.

For me.
When things have been hit and miss, I lacked accountability.
When I couldn’t get started at all, the first step was too large. Or it was too vague. Or it was too scary. Or the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

30 day Challenge:
Can you build yourself a one month challenge? 30 days of not missing once?

I had great success weening myself off beer and pizza back in 2006 by setting myself a series of 30 day challenges. I’d be super strict on my diet for 30 days. That was long enough to embed some new eating and buying habits, but short enough that I could see the end in sight. At the end of the 30 days strict, I’d definitely slip back a bit, but I’d still be eating better than I was at the start. So win.
As I progressed, I got more disciplined with my eating and lost 25Kg in 6 months, most of which I've kept off 18 years later.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

If you have things you want to change, but are stuck. Get in touch.
FitSpring coaching: https://buff.ly/4fshikt

Change, it is hard.

The hard bit of any change effort is not the what or even the why, it is the how. More importantly what conditions need to exist for your change spark to grow into as roaring flame?

Think about it, you can get an infinite amount of nutritional, sleep, s*x, training and every other kind of advice pretty much at zero cost over the internet. So why aren't we all healthy and happy, living our best lives? Yes, some of the advice is utter crap designed to separate you from your hard earned cash, but assuming you're not an idiot you can probably filter the obvious cons out, so why are you still stuck?

I read a wonderful article by Adam Mastroianni of https://buff.ly/4aFESHl, where he talks about getting out of the bog. One of the key take home points was that change takes effort. You don't have an infinite amount of energy and you can't just create more, you don't have infinite time and you can't create more. So if you're planning a change effort, what conditions need to exist to allow you the time, head space, energy and resources to make it work before you land back in the bog.

In other words, what needs to change to allow you to change.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Stay the course:

"Accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus.
No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road.
Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end”. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Coach Somner⠀

Photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash

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What should your weekly training template look like for if you're after longevity, vitality and health?

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Last week we put out a beginner program of 8, 6, 4 reps.
Here's what to do when that isn't stretching you any more.

Build up the volume like this to avoid too much soreness:
Week 1: 3 x 5
Week 2: 5 x 3
Week 3: 5 x 5
Every 6th week do a 5, 3, 2 day where you try and go heavy on the 2

h/t to Dan John for this workout format

Day 1:
A vertical press (DB/ BB shoulder press, Landmine press etc.)
A vertical pull (pull up) if you can do more than 5, do 4 sets of 5 weighted, the 5th set max reps
A split pattern like a box step down
A squat (goblet squat if you like, progress to front squat)

Day 2:
Horizontal press (some sort of bench press)
Horizontal pull (Pendlay row, Bent over row etc.)
A hinge movement (KB swing or DL)
Split pattern like a Rear Foot Elevated Split Squat

For added karma points, add in a loaded carry each session. Farmer's walk, waiter's carry, sandbag carry, slam ball carry or suitcase walk are all good options

Photo by Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash

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