About Health and HIT

A father of three and a health and fitness enthusiast with a passion for bodybuilding. This blog is an ongoing documentation of key points or thoughts that I feel I can openly express on here or share for others to see. One thing that has become very obvious to me is that the more I learn the less I realise I know. Keep striving for more...

10/05/2021 – Post Lockdown plans

What a crazy depressing year it has been for the majority!

Looking forward and pre planning my short and long term goals, I’m going to break down a few ways to show how I can make sure I keep myself motivated and progressing. I haven’t focused on just one goal, I’ve set up several. These will ultimately come together and make it feel more rewarding as I go along. I think it’s important to see progress and that’s why I plan on making small steps through several different ways.

Heres some of my goals;

1/ Beat my previous best of 11 days alcohol free. (Due to lockdown. Currently on 9 days. 11 will be easy now the gyms are open. Once I hit 11, everyday I can then count an extra day and use this as positive progress. I drank through boredom in the evening, nothing excessive)

2/ Clean my diet up. (This has been easy as I’ve simply prepped my meals. No alcohol means I don’t feel rough the next day and I can eat what I need to eat)

3/ Get my strength back. (Starting off with lower weights will allow me to progress. This will help my mental approach to monitoring my progression)

4/ Build my cardio up. (This will come with being more active and cycling to and from the gym)

5/ Drop my body fat. (This will happen as a by product of the above being on track)

6/ Improve my body composition. Take pictures and measurements every 2 weeks (this will go with the above)

7/ Spend more time on my social media or blog. (Surrounding myself with what I love doing)

Those are a few key things I think about and are consciously aware of. I use many other methods to make sure I can progress in at least 1 way. I don’t want to fail and I don’t want to feel disheartened. I’ve spent many years figuring out ways to keep focused and these are some of them. I will compose a more indepth post when I get the time, but for now, this is a start.

Keep motivated and keep pushing forward. Health, fitness and wellbeing is essential and after this intense lockdown, we can get back on track and look after the most important thing we own, ourselves.

Keep pushing…!

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01/09/2020 – It’s been a while

Right where are we… SEPTEMBER! This year has gone fast despite all the unfortunate circumstances the world has been up against. It’s certainly been challenging for everyone in many different forms. I personally haven’t known anyone that has had the virus and for that I am thankful.

After a few months of not knowing what was going to happen and being locked down with the kids in the house, I naturally stopped being quite so active and fell in a bit of a slump. I still trained the best I could and religiously woke up and done a half hour walk on the treadmill. After a month or so I managed to pull my back whilst out on my bike and that set me back with weight training. Then I sprained my wrist and then my back again! I put this down to not using my body enough and so it started to get little niggles from sitting around too much. We are still in uncertain times, although we have to try and push forward where it is safe to do so.

I’m fortunate enough to have some good people around me and we have a tidy little gym we can use. I’ve been back training in the gym for around 2 weeks. I’m taking it nice and steady to ensure all my smaller muscles are ready for some heavier weights. I’ll give it another 2 weeks to allow my body to naturally get some strength back and then it’s on to what I enjoy doing, HIT!

I feel that the biggest area I need to work on are my legs. I don’t think physically I have lost too much strength, although mentally I feel I have been set back quite a bit. Again, given the circumstances and being fortunate enough to have pulled though it without falling into a depressive slump, is something I am again grateful for.

I hope to be working along side some great passionate people in the near future and from there I can continue to share my passion by helping others progress mentally and physically.

My personal goals at the moment are to lose around 7lb of fat and get my fitness/strength levels back up. From there I will continue to steadily lower my body fat and feel much more happy within myself. During lock down my diet has been good enough. My huge downfall was the sun, boredom and beer. Alcohol is the devil at times like this as it’s a short term fix. but long term it destroys you from inside out. I do enjoy a drink, I am just very aware of what it does to my body, it’s poison. I would say the vast majority of my weight gain is from beer alone. Although that wouldn’t be fair to assume this, as exercise has taken a back step too.

Ask yourself what your 4 week goal is. Write it down in stages. As an example for a 4lb weight drop over 4 weeks, break it down into smaller, achievable goals. If you were climbing a mountain and you look at the top, you would have to find a way off getting there and that will be in small stages and even little set backs. Ultimately you will reach the top and that’s where you aim to be. 

 

  • Week 1 – drop 1lb
  • Week 2 – drop 1lb
  • Week 3 – drop 1lb
  • Week 4 – drop 1lb

I hope to update my blog more over the coming weeks as I’ve been neglecting it and I shouldn’t as it’s my diary and a way of self reflecting.

Keep thriving, follow your desire and seemingly impossible things can be achieved!

12/11/2019 – The Original Mass Monster Premier

Generation Iron and Dorian Yates collaborate on an epic movie based on the life of DY. This movie goes back to the beginning and shares an intimate journey through parts of his life, told by family, friends and the man himself. I personally found it very informative and entertaining as a fan. I have it here on DVD and I am looking forward to watching it again over the next week.

To order the DVD or to buy online head to here… If you are just interested and wouldn’t mind seeing what it’s all about, then wait a while as we all have our fingers crossed for a Netflix release at some point. Fans wont hesitate to buy it though…

17/11/2019 – DY Master Trainer Certification

The majority of people that I have the privilege to meet in life know me through fitness or know my passion for the health, fitness and the bodybuilding world. I would make an educated guess of 95% of the people that know me, will know that Dorian Yates has been a huge inspiration to me in terms of his mental strength and laser like focus with the profession he desired to pursue.

I have followed Dorian and his High Intensity Training for the majority of my journey and I’ve trained with him and his son Lewis many times in the past. The thing with training high intensity is that we all think we are training as hard as we can and most likely we are training as hard as we think we can, but the lack of form and intensity is missing in all departments. For example, when I see people training biceps, they go to failure on the first exercise and then the 3rd exercise and then the 7th exercise and 21st set and yet they never execute the repetition correctly. By the 3rd set you should be at total muscular failure and all parts to the repetition should be performed strict and to total negative failure.

As the journey continues and an opportunity opens up which allows me to pursue my long awaited DY certification, I made arrangements, booked up and headed to Marbella for a week of intense training, studying and relaxing. I didn’t realise until a few weeks out that my good friend Gups was also coming along to pursue his DY HIT certification and that turned out perfect as we could share a hotel and discuss everything together as we went along. Needless to say there was no partying. It was literally a perfect bodybuilding experience, but with the whole week surrounding business with the certification. The week basically went, train, eat, rest, study, repeat. Perfect!

After the week of training and studying, me and Gups passed the course and Dorian certified us as DY HIT Master Trainers. Just saying that make me feel excited and fortunate enough to be able to have my mind set on one goal for many years and to battle through some very dark times in my personal life and to keep pushing forward to successfully obtain my prestigious certification. I’ve put just about everything I have into this one goal and now I have finally conquered a lengthy goal. It’s Now time to pass my experiences onto others, the correct way. The amount of adjustments to perform an exercise correctly is extremely in-depth without even talking about the different machines and weight.

I’m assuming people know who Dorian Yates is, but if you don’t then give it a google and you will get a good understanding of what he brought to the bodybuilding world and how he changed the game as it was known. Short 45 minute intense workouts 4 days a week was all he needed to train, but the intensity was extreme and so was the rest of variables that go with it. https://generationiron.com/dorian-yates-movie-promo/

I am very pleased to be one of the 35 DY HIT Master Trainers worldwide and I look forward to teaching people the most effective and intense way to train correctly. Keep as eye out for things coming up which you can get involved with and thank you to those that have supported me from the start… I can count them all on one hand or maybe even one finger…

– What your heart desires and your mind requires, your life will acquire.