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...

**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...

Endurance athletes tend not to do much in the way of strength training, preferring instead to do more of what they enjoy doing the most. That’s fair enough but there are some very specific and relevant adaptations to concurrent strength training for endurance athletes that really ought not to be ignored. Runners, for example might do a bit of core training or maybe some yoga and then, for power they might do some sprint intervals, Fartleks or hill sprints, something like that. Cyclists like doing power intervals on the turbo or a Wattbike and feel that is all the ‘strength work’ they need...

This blog is the concluding part to a three part series on exercise for back pain. The links to the other two blogs are at the end of this text. Lower back-pain can be a pain in the arse (hips, neck, spine, etc). But what happens when your back flares up and feels stiff, sore and immobile? You stretch it, right? Guess what? You probably shouldn't be stretching your back. Why? Allow me to explain. Joint by Joint The joint by joint principle was popularised by Mike Boyle, it's not necessarily an evidence-based approach, in that it doesn't really take much research to confirm that the body a...

Everyone knows that exercise is good for them, but despite that too few people do much of it with any real consistency. Beyond walking to the fridge and back or angrily hammering the keypad on their mobile phone while taking part in some kind of pointless argument on social media. But the health benefits of exercise are incredible, to the point that it really ought to be a prescribed by doctors as a first line of defence against almost all forms of chronic illness. But, the thing is the fitness industry doesn’t seem interested in selling exercise to you for health and longevity. It tells y...