**This is a guest blog by Tommy Cole, author of The Smart Shred Diet**   I sat there as a young, impressionable, budding nutritionist, absorbing all the information I was being told by a nutrition guru I looked up to at the time. Information that I now know to be complete BS. He was telling me how sugar is the devil of nutrition, high GI carbs don’t have their place in the healthy diet, and that fruit–yes, fruit(!)–is fattening, simply because it contains sugar. This led me down a fruit-fearing, carb cutting, year-long phase of my life I like to refer to as m...

If you have read my other blogs on exercises for lower back-pain you will have already seen the importance of core stabilisation, or at-least the need to understand dynamic stability and correct alignment through movement. But what about spine mobility? Does that play a role too? You bet your aching arse it does! Here are the other blogs in that series: Part 1: The Core Part 2: Strength Part 3: The Hips The mid-spine is called the Thoracic, the bit that your rib cage is attached to and where many of your vital organs are kept. The range of motion available here is quite vast...

If you play sport or take part in some kind of sporting activity you probably do so because you enjoy being active, maybe your sport is your passion, your life purpose. But, in my experience, many recreational athletes don’t take their diet as seriously as they could. I have talked about this a lot on social media, but exercise needs fuel, for us humans that fuel is the Calories we get from food and beverages. If you take your sport or exercise performance even semi-seriously and you aren’t taking 24-hour energy balance (Calories in Calories out) into account you might be reducing your pe...

The kettlebell swing is an excellent exercise. It incorporates one of the fundamental movement patterns – the hip hinge – it helps develop explosive strength, core and spine stability and cardiovascular fitness. Because I love me some kettlebell action I thought I would break down the swing and some of its common variations. Technique and form are super important when exercising, especially when you add load to that exercises and even more if there is a dynamic explosive element to that loaded movement. Many people do the swing wrong and put themselves at risk of injury. Let’s lis...

**This is a brief look at some of the evidence and my own personal experiences with time restricted eating, you can see the research I read to help form my opinions at the bottom of this blog** There's a lot of claims about the benefits of intermittent fasting but are they all true? I love eating food and if the training wheels were off and no consequences could be had I would almost certainly eat continuously for about 15 hours per day (subtract 7 hours for sleep and one hour for swinging some kettlebells) so why would someone like me choose to skip breakfast? Well, first off I guess I ne...