It may come as some surprise to you that I have long suffered with lower back pain. It has taken me years to get to the bottom of it and although I still experience occasional flare ups I now have a good strategy for dealing with it and getting back to normality as quickly as possible. Without boring you too much with lots of technical anatomy information let me just explain this. The joints in the body alternate between mobile and stable in an ideal world. The lower back, or lumbar, has a tremendous range of motion compared with other parts of the spine. 40-60˚of flexion 20-30˚ of exte...

I love kettlebell training, I find them convenient, versatile and progressively challenging. There is a technical element to many of the lifts that just isn’t present with more traditional forms of resistance training. As much as I love a good barbell deadlift, there’s just something more organic about one of the more complex kettlebell movements like, say, the Turkish getup. There are so many joints and muscles being used, it requires control, balance, concentration and coordination, it’s not a million miles away from yoga in many respects but with the added benefit of having to control a ...

Being evidence-based is important, it means that you can be confident that the advice you give is based on facts, not opinions or, worse still, feelings. For example, any fitness or nutrition ‘expert’ who claims that weight loss occurs only when you control for insulin secretion is wrong. I can say that with 100% confidence because there is enough compelling evidence that shows that simply is not the case and that insulin-obesity hypothesis has NEVER been proven by science (1, 2, 3). Of course, the evidence doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story, but it can certainly show us when somethin...

If, like a lot of my clients, you are an active person and you partake in sports that involve running then the chances are you have experienced a Hamstring injury of some kind at some point. It might be a spasm, a minor strain or a grade 3 tear. Hamstring injuries are pretty devastating for running sports so what can you do to reduce your risk of experiencing one? This blog will set out to look at some of the evidence available regarding stretching and foam rolling and asks whether they are effective. Then we take a look at some of the evidence on strength training and finally, give an evid...

We hear all the time about the importance of exercise in a healthy lifestyle. But there are so many different exercises and so many training styles how do you know what the best exercises are? This will be informed by a number of factors; your health history, your activity levels, your weight, your personal interests, your sport, your age, etc. Here I intend to give you a convincing argument for three exercises (and variations) that EVERYONE should include in their healthy lifestyle regardless of goal. But before I give you the exercises, let me establish some context.