Getting Ahead Nutritionally - Making Dieting Easier

When people come to AdMac Fitness and they want to lose weight, one of the most important aspects we address with them is their diet.

When it comes to weight loss, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that we have to watch the calorie intake. In order to lose weight, we have to create a calorie deficit. Regardless of the approach we take, this is a non-negotiable for weight loss.

There’s two ways we create a calorie deficit…

1. We consume fewer calories than our body needs

2. We burn additional calories through exercise

Fundamentally, most people understand this. It’s nothing new or groundbreaking in of itself. Here’s the thing though, although dieting may be simple, it isn’t easy. Knowing how to do it is one thing, having the skills, the motivation, the principles and the behaviours in place to manage it are another.

In this article we’re going to share a few little tips to help you stay on track nutritionally. They’ll make your dieting life so much easier, helping you to lose weight like so many of our AdMac Fitness success stories…

So here’s a few simple, practical tips to help you get ahead nutritionally, making dieting and weight loss easier for you to stick to…

Use counter top digital weighing scales for portion control

One of the most common reasons diet fail for people is because they don’t have a good grip over portion control. If you’re going to be counting calories, you have to take the guesswork out of it in order to be accurate. This one cheap, simple introduction into your food prep life is huge. It takes just a few seconds to accurately weigh your food, allowing you to add the calories into your tracker.

I like MyFitnessPal as a calorie tracker and these are the weighing scales I use…

They cost me £13.99 from Amazon and have been an absolute godsend when I’ve been tracking calories. They’re really simple to use, they’re accurate and they take a few seconds to give you the information you need. Without them, tracking calories is so much more difficult.

Stock up on food containers

Taking your own food to places is a way of being in control of what you’re eating. If you’re relying on the options of a canteen, or you don’t know if you are going to have access to good food, you need to be prepared. The best way for that is to meal-prep in advance and take a tuppaware container with you.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I take to places with me when I’m not sure what I’ll be able to eat when I’m out and about…

It means I know I’ll be able to eat something healthy, and I can control the amount of calories I’ll be consuming when I need to eat.

This approach keeps you consistent, stops you from relying on poor quality options and it means you’ll always have something to hand. If you have enough food containers, you can get ahead and prep a few meals for the week, so you save cooking time throughout days ahead.

Batch cook when possible

One of the best time hacks you can enjoy when it comes to food is batch cooking. This entails cooking a lot more than you need, then dividing it into equal portions of food to use at a later date. Not only does this make your life more convenient, it also allows you to do the calorie counting once, then you don’t need to keep doing it every time you have a meal!

Batch cooking saves so much time, which is important - when you’re in that ‘I can’t be bothered to cook, I’ll just get a takeaway’ mindset you can veer off track quite severely, so by having a healthy option already pre-cooked and all you need to do is heat it up, you can save yourself plenty of money and even more calories!

I tend to roast a lot of vegetables in one go and cook a lot of protein ahead of time. That way you can quickly cook your carbs and within a few minutes, you have a meal ready to go.

Invest in an air fryer

I know it feels as if everyone in the world is banging on about air fryers at the moment, but hear me out. They’re absolutely fantastic - they work quickly and efficiently. They save a bunch of calories and they’re really cheap to run.

This isn’t a case of style over substance at all - they can back up their claims. You can cook meat and vegetables with barely any additional fat, just seasoning. It makes them taste great, and you can cook a whole load of food in one go. Here’s a batch os chicken with salt and pepper seasoning I did. I can then mix this with vegetables, rice or noodles and I’ve got a dish cooked quickly, without any additional fat.

Keep all of the good stuff in your food, without adding much of there bad stuff!

Making dieting easier

There’s no point suggesting that dieting is easy. It’s really not, and no amount of pretending otherwise is going to change that.

However, with a few simple steps, a bit of help and a the discipline to follow these tips, you can make it easier. With the help of the expert personal trainers at AdMac Fitness, you can go the whole way, successfully losing weight in a safe and healthy manner. Our personal trainers in Bow, and our personal trainers in South Woodford are experts at helping guide clients through a weight loss journey.

We’ve successfully done it for years!

If you want help with your health, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

Easy to Store, Easy to Move Equipment For a Home Gym

The best place to do your strength and hypertrophy training is always the gym. If your gym is well set up, you’re likely to always have the biggest variety of training options, weights, bars, space etc there.

The thing is though, sometimes life gets in the way. Whilst we’d prefer to get in the gym, on occasion time or location might be against us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t train, we might just have to box clever. It’s a case of use what you can, when you can, as well as you can!

In this article I’m going to share with you a few relatively inexpensive home exercise equipment options. They won’t be expensive, they’re lightweight and easy to store.

This means if you’re stuck for time, or you’re going on a trip (business or pleasure), you can have access to a few different workout options. These items aren’t going to be big and cumbersome - they’re the kind of things you can easily store at home, or chuck in the boot of the car if you’re heading somewhere and will want to train.

What kind of equipment would I need?

Let’s make a few basic assumptions…

Let’s assume you don’t have the space or the budget for a complete home gym set up. Let’s assume you live in a normal sized house or apartment, and the equipment you buy has to be easy to hide when not in use. Let’s assume you can’t put heavy barbells on the floor, or that you don’t have 10 feet of overhead space for training.

Let’s assume the budget is reasonable - less than £200 for everything.

Using those parameters, here’s what I’d be buying for my home training options. The equipment here will allow you to transport your ‘gym’ in the car, hide it in a spare room (or cupboard) and still provide you with a good few training options…

Push Up Parallettes

These are fantastic because they’re well made, they’re versatile and allow for lots of progression. You can use them as a pair of push up handles, you can progress them to levers and even use them as mini hurdles for plyometric exercises. These are the reasons I’d select them over standard push up handles.

Suspension Trainer

When it comes to outright home gym versatility, the suspension trainer is the king of the hill. As long as you buy one with a door anchor, there’s almost no movement or body part that you can’t perform with one of these. They’re excellent and really worth the investment.

Pull Up Bar

One of the more difficult movements to perform at home is a vertical pull, so one of these pull up bars is an excellent addition to a home exercise set up. The pull up bar here is able to protract the door frame, it supports a lot of weight, is easy to put up and take down. Finally, it’s also nice and cheap!

Kettlebell

A kettlebell is a great addition to any exercise set up. You could argue a kettlebell is a whole gym in of itself as well. You can swing it, pull it, squat it, press it, clean it, lunge it etc. There’s not a great deal of movement that you can’t perform with a kettlebell. It has edged out a barbell in this list because of storage, and dumbbells because you can get away with a single one, plus you can do everything with a kettlebell that you could do with a dumbbell, plus more.

Ab Roller

One of the best abdominal exercises is an anti-extension roll out. Not only does this force the abdominals to work hard to prevent the body from collapsing, but it also trains the abdominal muscles eccentrically, which is different from most ab exercises.

Mobile home gym options - why those items made the list

If you can’t make the gym, then don’t try to replicate it at home - you won’t be able to. Instead, try to do things differently. You can max out bodyweight work with these items - the suspension trainer is a whole body workout in one.

The kettlebell adds an element of resistance, plus it gives a huge amount of workout versatility. When you’re done, just hide it in a cupboard or behind a stair! It’s easy enough to do.

The pull up bar and parallettes can be combined for an excellent all body workout. One of my go-to lockdown workouts was this…

• 3 air squats

• 2 pull ups

• 1 push up

I repeated this 100 times, meaning I did a 600 rep workout and covered my whole body. It was super tough, super effective and didn’t take up any room at all.

Don’t over-complicate your home exercise options. You’re not going to improve on the gym, so don’t try to. Instead, do things a little differently. Use the instability of the suspension trainer to challenge your abs. Go high rep with your exercises. Mix things into interesting circuits.

It’s a stop gap. Don’t spend crazy money, just get the basics and when you can, get into the gym to get your higher weight workout done!

If you want help with your health, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

Weight Loss Isn't Linear! Don't Expect it to be!

Given the time of writing, there’ll be a lot of people reading this who are either dieting, have recently dieted or about to start trying to lose weight.

If you’ve got some recent experience of weight loss, you may have noticed the fluctuations on the scales. Some weeks you might have lost a lot of weight. Other weeks you might have stayed the same. On some weeks you may have even gained weight, even though you’ve stuck to your calorie and activity targets.

If you don’t know what’s going on, this can destroy your confidence in the process, or make you as what’s the point of it all?

I’ve got some news for you…

THIS IS TOTALLY NORMAL. YOUR SCALE WEIGHT WILL FLUCTUATE DURING WEIGHT LOSS. IT’S NOT A LINEAR PROCESS - DON’T EXPECT IT TO BE!

Your body is an incredibly complex machine, and at any one moment there are millions of physiological processes occurring simultaneously. These processes produce waste products, sometimes they consume a lot of energy, water, etc.

All of these things can have an impact on your weight, irrespective of calorie consumption.

There was a research study performed in 2020 titled ‘Weekly, seasonal and holiday body weight fluctuation patterns among individuals engaged in a European multi-centre behavioural weight loss maintenance intervention’ by Turrichi et al.

They found that even during a calorie-controlled study (meaning there’s no calorie-driven reason for weight gain), the participant’s weight fluctuated by 0.35 - 1.35%. For perspective, that means if somebody weighed 210lbs (15 stone), their weight would sometimes fluctuate between just over half a pound, and 3lbs - this is in people who are calorie controlled.

Body weight fluctuations under ‘normal’ conditions are even more severe. We have a great study that examined this. A 2017 study called ‘Composition of two‐week change in body weight under unrestricted free‐living conditions’ was carried out by Bhutan et al.

They found that a within-week bodyweight fluctuation of 2.2–4.4 pounds was normal.

Why does our bodyweight fluctuate?

There are a lot of reasons why bodyweight fluctuates… Food intake, fluid intake, medicines, supplements, hormonal changes, temperature etc. There’s more than just one.

Assuming everything else is ‘normal’ - no medication, no obvious hormonal changes, no medication etc, it’s likely to be water intake. Water is responsible for a lot of bodyweight change - water retention or loss can see your bodyweight change by up to 10lbs in a week, depending on the severity of the condition.

Here’s a few elements that can positively or negatively effect water retention…

• Dehydration: When a person does not drink enough water, their body stores water to prevent dehydration. Drink until your urine is clear - that’s the best hydration advice.

• Sodium intake: Too much salt can lead to water retention and weight gain. You need salt for muscle contraction, but not too much. If you exercise and sweat a lot, you do need to replace lost salts.

• Glycogen storage: The body turns carbohydrates from food into glycogen molecules. The body stores excess glycogen in the muscles, liver, and fat cells. Low carb intake reduces the glycogen stores, which sees dramatic weight loss from water removal.

• Exercise: When you’ve exercised, you’ll have sweated out a lot of water (if you’ve trained especially hard). This will need replacing, so don’t be surprised if in the short term you gain a couple of pounds.

These 4 reasons can occur irrespective of the amount of calories you’ve consumed. So, if you’ve had a great week, hitting you protein target, your calorie target and your activity target, but have still gained weight, don’t worry about it! There could be other reasons.

Does the weight come off?

Absolutely!

What we’re interested in is the trend of weight loss, not the micro fluctuations.

Say for example you start the month weighing 200lbs, but you end the month weighing 190, we’re happy.

Whether that weight loss occurs at a steady rate, or you lose weight in week 1, gain in week 2, gain in week 3 but lose a lot in week 4 - it doesn’t matter. As long as the long term trend is downwards, the day-to-day isn’t important.

Just keep hitting your calorie targets and activity targets, then the rest will look after itself.

If you want help with your health, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

What are You Training for? How Personal Training helps you Achieve Your Fitness Goals

When many people first start training, they look at a magazine such as Men’s/Women’s Fitness for inspiration. They might look at instagram or YouTube, or perhaps they’ll ask a gym-going friend for advice. The problem with this approach is a simple one… There’s no guarantee that these approaches align with your goals!

All of the hard work in the world is great, but if it’s in the wrong direction it’s not going to help you. And that is the problem with taking the wrong advice, whether that’s from a magazine, an influencer, a TV show etc. All of your efforts should be taking you closer to a goal.

Imagine you have the goal of losing weight, but you’re following a program designed for powerlifters. You’ll get stronger, but you probably won’t shift an ounce on the scales!

It’s one of the (many) reasons that personal training is so effective. Your workouts and your wider actions are structured around your goals. You are guided by a professional trainer who doesn’t just listen to what you want to achieve, but actually designs a programme around helping you to achieve those goals.

At AdMac Fitness we have personal trainers in Bow, and personal trainers in South Woodford. Our team at experts in designing training programmes that help you to achieve your health and fitness goals. From the consultation to the program design, then into the implementation we’ve got your back.

Our personal training studio in Bow has been established for years, and our personal training team consists of a variety of experts with different approaches. This is important too, because not all people have the same goal. Individual targets need an individual approach.

Most people would like to lose weight, but there are also lots of people who want the opposite - they want to build muscle and gain strength. Some people want to be able to run faster and further. We can’t train these people the exact same way, when they have opposing goals.

The point is, experienced personal trainers treat each client as an individual. There are not going to share generic programmes designed for the masses with you. Sure, there might be similarities between exercises and movement patterns, but overall your personal trainer will make sure it’s suitable for you and your goals. It’s their job to help you reach your targets in the safest and most effective way.

The reason we have so many fantastic transformations and goal achievements is because we train people the way need to be trained. Check out the examples below. These two clients had completely different goals, so their training had to follow a different path - by not following a generic programme, they achieved great results…

AdMac Fitness offers Personal training in Bow and Personal training in South Woodford

Across our personal training studio in Bow, and our personal training studio in South Woodford we can offer completely different experiences.

In our Bow HQ, we can work with anyone from individuals to small groups. We have a fully equipped private personal training studio, with access to outside space if we need the extra room. Operating from the Bow PT studio, we have built a reputation for delivering expert personal training, changing thousands of lives over the years.

Our new personal training studio is in South Woodford. We wanted to offer something new to London personal training here, so went in a different direction. I’ll explain…

Many of our clients live a frantic life. Long working hours, rushing for tubes, constantly on the end of a phone, incredibly busy and almost no time to think, let alone do anything for themselves. (It might sound familiar to you reading this actually!)

To combat this, we wanted to create the antidote. A sanctuary where for an hour of your day, you focus on you, and you alone. The AdMac Fitness South Woodford personal training studio is designed to be your place away from the busyness of the outside world. Your phone won’t distract you, your emails won’t be pinging and you can create your own training environment - your own music, make as much noise as you like!

It’s just you and your personal trainer in there…

If you want to change your body, your health and your life, AdMac Fitness is the place to go…

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels.

These aren’t flippant claims - we mean what we say. In a world as competitive as personal training, if you’re not very good you get found out quickly. We’ve stood the test of time - we’ve been in business for years, we survived the pandemic and we are going from strength to strength (literally and figuratively), helping the people of east London get fitter with our personal training approach.

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

The 30 Minute Workout - What are the Options?

One of the biggest misconceptions in fitness is that a short workout isn’t effective. In fact, let’s go bigger than that. It’s that unless you aren’t getting an hour or more in the gym, it’s not going to do anything.

As personal trainers, we find that absolutely laughable!

Sure, a personal training session at AdMac Fitness is an hour, but that’s because we’re doing this professionally, and people have the luxury of time when they come to see us. By booking a personal training session, they’ve allowed themselves the time to do things optimally.

But life isn’t always like that. We’re busy, and sometimes you don’t get an hour to train. So with that in mind, we’re going to look at different 30 minute workout options. We’ll put together workouts that will maximise the effectiveness of you workout time.

We’ll cover different fitness goals as well, so no goal is left ignored…

When general fitness is the goal…

Here you’ve got to optimise for ticking several boxes - you need a strength element and a cardio element. They way to combine these is with a weights-based high intensity interval training approach. You can get creative with the approach…

30 Seconds Work, 30 Seconds Rest x 5

1. Kettlebell Swings

2. Push Ups

3. Bent Over Kettlebell Rows

4. Kettlebell Push Press

5. Kettlebell Front Squats

6. Swiss Ball Plank

These 6 exercises, each performed for 5 minutes will give you a whole body workout in bang on 30 minutes. The intensity will be high enough to get your heart pumping and give you a great strength training workout.

Here’s another workout, this time with a barbell…

Perform 10 reps of each exercise, then rest for 2 minutes and repeat. Do as many rounds as you can in 30 minutes…

1. Deadlifts

2. Power cleans

3. Front squats

4. Push press

5. Bent over rows

6. Lunges

This will hit every muscle in the body, you can time cap it at 30 minutes and it’ll get the heart pumping fast! You’ll enjoy a lot of calorie burn in a short period of time.

When strength is the goal…

Here you’ve got to go a bit more route 1 - think simplicity, think heavy, think whole body. That’s the approach I’d be taking. Give this a go…

5 minute cardio warm up, in a way that uses the whole body. Think rower, cross trainer, air bike etc.

1. 5 x 5 Squats

2. 5 x 5 Bench press

3. 5 x 5 Deadlift

Go hard, go heavy, just be careful.

If you’re less of a powerlifter and more of an all-rounder, I’d be looking at something like this…

1. 3 x 6 Incline dumbbell bench press

2. 3 x 6 Chest supported dumbbell rows

3. 3 x 6 Dumbbell shoulder press

4. 3 x 6 (per side) Bulgarian split squats

In these two workouts you’ve hit your whole body and still have time to get yourself back to work! Perfect way to get strong in a short period of time.

When cardio is the goal…

Here you’ve got a lot more freedom. You can hit a good half hour run - that’s easy enough. If you’re after something a little more creative, here’s a few approaches…

Talke a cardio machine of your choice. I like a whole body machine such as a rower or air bike ideally.

• 30 seconds gentle pace

• 20 seconds fast pace

• 10 seconds flat-out pace

Done in that exact order, for 30 minutes in a row. The short time goals means the 30 minutes flies by really quickly.

Another one I like goes like this…

Set the treadmill at a running pace you can cope with relatively easily. Something that raises your heart rate, but you could maintain for a long time if needed.

Every 30 seconds, put the incline up by 0.5%. It’ll take you 15 minutes to reach 15% incline (if you can make it that far). Once you’ve reached your maximum (whatever incline that may be), take it to 0% and start again.

Your 30 minute workout options - final thoughts

I’ve just given you 6 different workout ideas, covering general fitness, strength training and cardio training. All of them are a really simple set up, easy to execute and are brilliantly effective.

Next time you think you there’s no point in hitting the gym because you’ll only have 30 minutes, give one of them a go and see how you feel. I can promise you that you’ll be glad you trained when you feel the effects of them! Short workouts can be great, you’ve just got to do them right.

If you want help with your health, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

How do we Optimise Training for Muscle Growth?

When it comes to muscle growth there’s a lot of myths that do the rounds. From the type of workout routines to follow, the amount of weight you need to lift, the reps you to need to hit, the days of the week you train.

The reality is, there’s not a one-size-fits all answer.

You can build muscle a whole load of different ways, using different exercises, different weights and different workouts. One thing remains important though - the amount of training you do. If you train too little, you’re absolutely not going to build any muscle at all.

If you train too much, you’re likely to overtrain and not be able to recover in time. That will also impact your muscle growth.

In today’s article we’re going to look at how to optimise training order to grow muscle. We’ll look at the research and try to establish an optimal approach to training for muscle growth. Any recommendations we make are going to be evidence-based and not opinion-based.

Maximising hypertrophy - what we know

When it comes to maximising hypertrophy (muscle growth), there’s a few things we know for sure. For a start, we know that we need to create a mechanical tension and metabolic stress.

In English, this means we have to get the muscles to work hard - this is mechanical tension element. When the muscles have worked sufficiently hard enough, it creates a metabolic stress. This is the chemical response by the muscles to dwindling energy levels. It sets into motion the physiological processes we need to build muscle.

Put simply - to create metabolic stress, you need to work hard by creating mechanical tension (lifting weights). Metabolic stress then forces the muscles to grow and adapt to these challenges, making them bigger and stronger.

The longer this process goes on for, the bigger the effects. That’s why you can’t just do a couple of workouts and turn into the hulk.

We also know that the mass of the weights lifted aren’t as important for muscle hypertrophy as first thought. It was once believed that in order to grow muscle we needed to lift weights that fatigued us in the 8-12 rep mark. Whilst research suggests that might be optimal for muscle growth, it’s not the only way.

Grgic performed a meta analysis on 2020 titled ‘The Effects of Low-Load Vs. High-Load Resistance Training on Muscle Fiber Hypertrophy’.

He concluded…

‘In this meta-analysis, there were no significant differences between low-load and high-load resistance training on hypertrophy of type I or type II muscle fibers.’

How much training do we need to do for muscle growth?

When this topic was studied by Schoenfeld et al in 2016, they concluded that there was a definite relationship between volume and muscle growth. Their research suggested…

‘Outcomes for weekly sets as a continuous variable showed a significant effect of volume on changes in muscle size. Each additional set was associated with an increase in effect size of 0.023 corresponding to an increase in the percentage gain by 0.37%.’

This means that you always benefit from more sets. Volume appears to trump weight, exercises, joint angles etc when it comes to hypertrophy. As long is the volume is appropriate to the load lifted (lighter weights need longer sets etc), it’s the most important variable of the muscle building game.

The caveat here though is that you’ve got to be able to recover from them. If you’re not recovered, you’re not able to give your all in the session.

If we go back to the rules we established at the start of the article - that mechanical tension and metabolic stress need to be present to build muscle - our ability to create mechanical tension and metabolic stress is severely impacted when we’re fatigued.

Optimising training for muscle growth… Our Suggestions

Based on the lessons we’ve learned from the research, here’s a few points on how we can optimise training for muscle growth…

Always prioritise volume

The research is clear - when it comes to building muscle, volume matters more than weight. You can build muscle with any level of weight, as long as you are hitting the correct amount of volume. If you were shooting for muscle building, I’d be hitting 5 sets of 8-12 per body part in a workout.

All-body workouts

Following on from the last point, if you’re trying to build serious muscle, you can’t rely on hitting. body part once per week. Forget a body-part split, especially if you’re a beginner. Instead, hit whole-body workouts, or an upper-lower split.

Get plenty of protein

The metabolic stress puts the physiological processes of muscle building in place, but they need the raw materials to build muscle. If you don’t have enough protein in your diet, it’s going to be very difficult to add muscle. Hit at least 1g of protein per pound of body weight.

If you need help building muscle, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

Social Support and Fitness Goal Achievement - Why it Works

There’s an old quote that’s attributed to Jim Rohn that says ‘“You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

The subtext here is that we take our behaviours from the people around us. We bend our habits to the company we keep, essentially. We can even dig a little deeper on this when it comes to health and fitness, because the evidence is all around us.

Think of fitness and weight loss groups and you’ll see what I mean…

Weight Watchers and slimming world are communities, and they help people to lose weight not because of their dietary advice - you can find that anywhere. In fact, you can find better advice.

No. They work because of the community. It’s a group setting, and there’s an element of public ‘shame’ if you don’t achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself. You’re being publicly weighed every week, so it’s an external motivator that keeps you sticking to the diet.

Whether you agree with the concept or not, the evidence shows it works…

A study by Borek et al published in 2018 looked at ‘Group-Based Diet and Physical Activity Weight-Loss Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials’.

They concluded that… Diet and physical activity interventions delivered in groups are effective in promoting clinically meaningful weight loss at 12 months.

This is interesting because there’s a commonly-held belief that diets don’t work for the long term. However, a 12 month success story is impressive, especially in a world where a lot of people give up on their goals after a couple of weeks (or less) in most cases.

What does this have to do with me?

If you want to lose weight, improve your fitness, get healthier etc, you have to engage in a community where those behaviours are not only present, but they’re expected of you.

If you don’t have access to a community of like-minded people, you have to create it yourself. The quickest and most effective way to create that weight loss or fitness improvement community is to work with a personal trainer. Not only do you share the core elements of what makes group and community projects work (being weighed in front of someone, expected behaviours, an approach to follow), you also have it personalised to your needs and capabilities.

A personal trainer works with you to create a training program that will align with your goals.

If you don’t stick to the expected behaviours, there’s no hiding from the lack of results you’ll get. Your personal trainer will be assessing the results and the outcomes every few weeks, so you’ll be given constant feedback.

There’s also support, and that’s invaluable.

There’s an assumption that personal training is all stick and no carrot, so to speak. That your personal trainer will approach your weight loss by criticising wrong moves etc. That’s absolutely not there case.

Yes, your personal trainer has to hold you to account - that’s their job. But they’re also there to (in part at least) be a cheerleader. To encourage and motivate you to do things you didn’t think you could. To push yourself further and harder than you otherwise would yourself.

That’s the AdMac Fitness approach, and it’s part of the reason we have so many fantastic transformations across our personal training studios in Bow and South Woodford…

Personal Training in Bow and South Woodford

The AdMac Fitness personal trainers are experts in weight loss and fitness improvement. Across our years in business, we’ve worked with every kind of personal training client. From those who are terrified and need all the help we can give, to those who know what to do, they just need a kick up the backside to make it happen!

We can offer a private personal training studio in which to train as well.

Our Bow personal training studio is our longest-running personal training base. Here we offer personal training and group exercise to help you get in the best shape of your life. It’s not open to the public, only personal training clients of AdMac Fitness. It means you’ll never have to wait around for equipment!

If privacy is your thing, our personal training studio is South Woodford is perfect for you. It’s a single-person studio, so it’ll only be you and your personal trainer in there. You can create the personal training environment you want - control over your music, be as loud as you want to etc! It’s PURE privacy!

If you want help with your health, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

Cold Exposure - What's the Score?

Recently you may have seen people getting into freezing cold water and posting it all over social media. You may have also seen Wim Hof on the BBC last year, getting a bunch of celebrities to endure cold showers, jump into icy lakes and swim under the water.

So what’s it all about? What’s going on?!

It’s the latest health and wellness craze. Over the years we’ve been through a bunch of them in the fitness industry. A few years ago it was the Atkins diet, then we had juicing. Next up it was Stoicism and now we’ve moved onto cold water exposure.

Like all kinds of things in fitness, there’s a bit of research that comes out, then a handful of influential people start to do it. The idea will spread, more people will start to do it, then the originals start to sell products on the back of it. It’s a rinse and repeat model that makes a handful of people a lot of money.

So is that what’s going on here? Let’s take a look…

Cold exposure and health - a quick history

The idea of using cold for therapeutic benefit is nothing new at all. We’ve been using cold on injuries for literally decades. The idea behind this cold use is to reduce inflammation in acute injuries. That’s why we see ice packs, freeze sprays etc in the physio bag.

We’re also aware of cold exposure following intense bouts of exercise. Images of athletes jumping into an ice bath after competition to speed up recovery are nothing new…

Interestingly, despite this being a common post-exercise practice, there’s surprisingly little rock-solid research to back up its use. It’s not to say it doesn’t do anything, it’s just that there’s probably more effective, more convenient and less uncomfortable ways to speed your recovery!

So if the research isn’t there for a post-exercise cold immersion, why do people still do it? What are the claimed benefits of cold exposure?

Why are people jumping in cold water?

The main benefits appear to centre around wellness. Here’s a snapshot of some of the overarching claims as to the efficacy of the practice…

There’s a psychological argument - that overcoming adversity has psychological benefits. It can help people to overcome fears, to face difficult situations, to push themselves physically and mentally, which has other benefits. Anecdotally, it appears to be a solid link. Lots of people self-report feeling psychologically better thanks to cold exposure.

The research here is limited, but interestingly it does show promise. A study involving cold showers shows that it can help people with depressive symptoms, but the researchers do say that the sample size was small, and the topic needs more investigation. It’s certainly showing promise though.

Fat loss is a benefit… This is an interesting one. Essentially humans have several types of fat. The most common one we know is ‘white fat’ - the stored energy that we associate with being overweight. There’s also a type of fat known as ‘brown fat’.

Brown fat burns chemical energy to create heat and help maintain body temperature. Researchers have previously shown that, in response to cold, white fat cells in both animals and humans take on characteristics of brown fat cells. This means cold exposure can actually help us to burn more fat, and the research appears to support this - as long as the cold exposure is long term and consistent. You can’t just do a single ice bath and then turn your body into a fat-burning furnace!

Circulatory benefits… There is some evidence that the contrast element of cold exposure and the subsequent return to normal body temperature helps with circulation. There’s lots of anecdotal research as well that supports this.

There are lots of people on social media reporting that cold exposure has helped to improve their circulation and in some cases, cure them of persistent Reynaud’s syndrome. Whether or not that can be applied to the masses is another matter, but it may be the case in future as more studies are done.

A warning…

If yo decide to give cold exposure a go, do so knowing there are risks you need to mitigate. Build top your tolerance over time. Don’t do anything stupid like jumping into icy lakes. Start with cold showers for 20 seconds and build up.

If you decide to carry on, buy an ice bath to use outside. A cheaper and just as effective way is to buy an extra wheelie bin from the council, fill it with cold water and use that!

Just be safe. Health first, pushing limits comes second.

Cold exposure - should you?!

Here’s what we know so far… there are lots of potential benefits to regular cold exposure. The research is in its infancy, but there is definite promise.

Whether or not all of the claims made by enthusiasts are going to prove true is a different matter.

That being said, there’s a lot of benefit in challenging yourself, expanding your capacity and your capabilities. If you’re doing it because you want to develop your mental toughness, or prove what you’re capable of, go for it.

If you are struggling with your mental health, there’s a solid case for using cold exposure. It appears to be excellent for this purpose.

If you are doing it for fat loss, for muscle recovery or for blood circulation, there are more effective and less uncomfortable ways of boosting those! The effects are there, but they’re not as powerful as other approaches we already have available to us!

If you want help with your health, AdMac Fitness is the place to go!

We help people using tried and tested fitness approaches. Our expert team of personal trainers, based in both Bow and South Woodford can help you get a grip of your health and fitness. With our guidance you can see your health and fitness reach new levels!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

The Busy Gym Workout Ideas

At this time of year gyms can explode in terms of how busy they are. If you train in a public or commercial gym, an influx of members signing up means queuing time for equipment can be a big problem. Today though, I’ve got some tips to help you…

To get around the busy gym problem you can switch up your training time, maybe hitting the gym when it’s less busy. That’s not always possible though.

Instead, the way I prefer to approach the issue is by switching up my exercise selection.

Your immediate reaction might be one of dismay…

NO! I’VE GOT A TRAINING PROGRAMME AND I’M GOING TO STICK TO IT! EVEN IF A WORKOUT TAKES ME TWO HOURS, I’M NOT CHANGING ANYTHING ON IT!

If that’s you, let me explain my thinking. It might even teach you a thing or two about training in general…

How a personal trainer looks at training

One of the differences between how a professional trainer and a general gym goer looks at workout design is how they view exercise selection.

A general gym goer will think ‘I’m going to do barbell bench press for my chest’, whereas a professional trainer will think ‘I need to include an upper body horizontal push’.

Why’s that different?

It’s different because the personal trainer is looking at movements, not exercises. That means they’re married to the effect, not the vehicle. It means that you can be flexible and dynamic with your approach. If you think there’s a better way of achieving the result you can follow it - you’re not tied to the exercise.

But what does this have to do with a busy gym?

Movements not exercises - benefits in a busy gym

If you are focussed on the movement itself rather than exercise, you can be flexible in your training. If you normally do you bench press with a barbell, but they’re all being used you can grab dumbbells, or do weighted push ups.

If your go-to leg exercise is a barbell squat, try a Bulgarian split squat. You’ll possibly even find it’s a more challenging upgrade on the barbell squats you’ve been doing!

If you deadlift with a standard barbell and they’re all being used, why not experiment with the trap bar? It’s a new way to challenge your vertical pull, can be adjusted to switch up muscle recruitment and is more likely to be free for quick use.

By viewing a workout from a movement, not exercise perspective you can by-pass the equipment that is being used and think on the fly. You’ll still get a great workout in, you’ll give your body a new challenge and you won’t get caught up in the traffic of the gym.

Equipment choices in a busy gym…

If you know your way around a gym, you can pick out the items of kit that are less likely to be used. Here’s a list of the more common bits of equipment you’re less likely to have to wait for…

#1 Dumbbells

As a general rule, people will tend to bias barbells over dumbbells, despite the fact that for many exercises, dumbbells are better. There’s also a unique versatility with dumbbells that lend themselves well to plenty of exercises.

You’ll usually be able to get your hands on the dumbbells, so you can use these for almost any exercise… presses, rows, squats, lunges, curls, deadlifts etc.

#2 Kettlebells

I’m a massive kettlebell fan - because of both their versatility and their uniqueness. They don’t have have to be swung, cleaned or pressed either. You can use them in replace of dumbbells or barbells as well.

When you start to look outside of the box with kettlebells, you open up a huge range of training options.

#3 Suspension trainers

The suspension trainers in a gym are often left alone because many people either don’t know how to use them, or they don’t think they’re a very good exercise option. To those of us in the know, a suspension trainer is an outstanding item of kit.

You can put together a full body workout on a suspension trainer, so you won’t need to use anything else in order to get a session in. Great for a busy gym workout!

#4 Pull up and dip bars

Great for the old school body weight work. Simple but very effective, pull ups, dips, chin ups and push ups are all a great upper body combo.

For a fantastic upper body pull and push workout, all you need are pull up bars and dip bars. These are often found in the same place, so you can perform multiple sets of upper body pushes and pulls. This was one of my lockdown go-to works, and the results were excellent.

Busy Gym Workout Ideas

The thought of training in January may fill you with dread, but by making clever equipment selections, you can avoid most of the problems of queues.

Alternatively, you could join the AdMac Fitness client list and make queuing for equipment a thing of the past!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

How to Save Your New Years Resolutions

As we enter the second week of January, a lot of people would have seen their health and fitness based new years resolutions fall by the wayside.

You may even be reading this thinking… ‘yup, mine too!’

Well the good news is that all is not lost. At the time of writing, we’re less than 2.5% of the way through the year, so you’ve got plenty of time to get things back on track! We’ve barely even started thing yet, so listen up… you haven’t failed!

Why do resolutions go wrong?

There’s plenty of reasons why new years resolutions go wrong - not all of them are because we’re lazy, or failures, or whatever other negative adjective you want to use to describe yourself. The reality is a lot of them are simply ill-informed.

In our experience, fitness based new years resolutions fail for one of these reasons…

They’re too ambitious

If you’ve never been a regular exerciser, and you’e never been one to cook much at home, changing this is a big step.

To go from no exercise and barely cooking at home to ‘I’m going to the gym 5 days per week and I’m going to eat only healthy food every day, and give up drinking’ is a HUGE leap. It’s too big a change in too short a period of time. In order to make a resolution easier to stick to, dial things back a little bit.

The point is you’re trying to creat lasting behaviour change, not a short-term fix that you’re going to fail at.

Think smaller, but think ambitiously. Here’s an example of how to change that resolution into something more likely…

• I’m going to get to the gym twice per per week

• I’m going to walk 10k steps at least twice per week

• I’m going to take a healthy lunch to work 4 days per week

See how this is different?

Two gym sessions per week is doable for most people. There’s only a couple of days per week when you’ve got to bend your plans, or make arrangements to get there.

The walking is easy for anyone. You don’t have a cost barrier, you don’t need any equipment, you can use it as a commute to work etc. Unless there’s particularly exceptional circumstances, managing to walk 10k steps twice per week is VERY doable.

Taking a healthy lunch to work doesn’t take much in the way of prep time - it’s lunch for one person, not a whole family. It’ll also likely save you money.

Once you’ve got this nailed, you might add in an extra gym session per week. An extra walk etc. Start with something you can achieve though.

There’s no plan

There’s a saying you might of heard… ‘a goal without a plan is a dream’.

This is never more true than with a new years resolution. If you don’t think about what that looks like in reality, and make a plan for it to happen, you’re going to fail.

Say you’ve made a resolution to go to 4 group exercises classes per week, but you’ve only got 1 set of gym clothes… you’ve either got to get VERY efficient with your laundry, or buy more gym clothes.

Otherwise, after the first class you’ll end up thinking… ‘I can’t got to the class tomorrow, because I’ve got no clean gym clothes’.

When you’ve set a resolution, you have to set a plan to make it happen. You have to look at your weekly schedule, think about what you can do to make sure you hit your goals. If it means planning ahead with clothing, with social plans, work plans etc, do so. Just make sure you’re allowing time to complete your resolutions.

You’ve got no guidance

Behaviour change isn’t easy - it’s far from it in fact. It’s even harder when you go it alone.

There’s a couple of main reasons why guidance can help you to achieve your new years resolutions…

#1 You’ve got a support network

By hiring a personal trainer, you’ve got someone to help support you through the process. They’ll help to guide you through the minefield that is a new set of lifestyle factors and behaviours. You’ll have someone you can talk to for advice, for opinions or for another set of eyes. Someone with experience and insight on the topic.

#2 You’ve got accountability

This one is a huge point. Being accountable to someone is massive when it comes to goal accomplishment. If you’re not accountable to another person, your chances of failing your resolution are so much higher.

By hiring a personal trainer, your goal turns into a shared goal. You ease the burden of responsibility on yourself, and you have a sounding board. Someone to steer you away from bad practice, and towards good habits. Someone who can help keep you accountable is a huge asset when it comes to goals.

Rescuing the situation

Now we know why new years resolutions go wrong, let’s look at ways we can prevent this, and get them back on track You’ve still got 97.5% of the year to course-correct!

Follow these tips to make it happen…

Be realistic

Look at your life, and then think about what plans you’d need to put in place to make your resolutions happen. Do you need to find a gym closer to home or work? Do you need to carve out a time to get there? If you work in the afternoons and evenings, clear time in your morning etc.

Outsource your motivation

If you struggle to motivate yourself to train, outsource it. Hire a personal trainer. Join a class. Join a sports club. Train with a friend. Just do anything you can to help spark and maintain a level of motivation to keep going with it.

Make life easier

If you’ve made a promise to eat healthy food, but you lack the time/skills to prepare it, make life easier for yourself. Maybe use a food prep company. Buy healthy ready meals. Make soups or smoothies instead. Throw a salad together. All of these make life easier.

Look to alternative forms of calorie burn

If you don’t always have time to for the gym, look instead at your other training options. Maybe walk or cycle to work. Take your calls on a walking break. Suggest walking meetings if it’s a possibility. Walk with friends. Don’t just assume all calorie burning needs to be done at the gym!

Ask AdMac Fitness for help!

With personal training studios in South Woodford and Bow, let the best personal trainers in East London help you to save those new years resolutions!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD.

3 Tips To Improve Your Training

Here at AdMac Fitness we’re in the business of improving lives through personal training. Our team of personal trainers use their expertise to design and deliver the most effective workouts to help people achieve their heath and fitness goals.

Whilst we can uphold our end of the bargain, what can you as the personal training client do to ensure the success of your workouts?

In this article we’re going to share three tips that we believe can help you improve your training sessions…

Sleep well ahead of the session!

Our first tip starts the night before your training session… get yourself to bed early and have a decent night’s sleep. There’s no pre-workout in the world that can match the impact of a great night’s sleep.

When you sleep well you do so much more than arrive mentally fresh for your workout session. You give yourself the best possible chance of great performance. In 2017, Dr Adam Watson performed a review into ‘Sleep and Athletic Performance’. He concluded through his review that…

‘Improvements in sleep duration and quality appear to improve reaction time, accuracy, and endurance performance’

These findings support later research by Knowles et al, who noted in their 2018 study titled
’Inadequate sleep and muscle strength: Implications for resistance training‘ that...

‘Inadequate sleep impairs maximal muscle strength in compound movements’

The science therefore is really clear - a lack of sleep impairs your exercise performance across a wide range of measures. You can’t get around this with a couple of coffees or a pre workout. Ahead of a workout, make sure you get some great quality sleep, so you can show up to the gym physically and mentally ready to train as well as possible.

Be present in your session!

In an age of constant distraction, the ability to clear your mind of work, stress etc is a superpower. The gym is a perfect place to practice being present - you’ve got a constant task at hand (next rep), and you’ve got a focus (making sure your form is correct).

By concentrating on your form in the gym, you’re going to exercise more effectively. When you’re exercising more effectively, you’ll improve your fitness. Improved fitness means better results. It’s the domino effect, and it all starts from being more present in the gym.

One of the best ways to stay present in your session is to leave your phone in your bag. By not bringing your phone into the workout, you’re not distracted by the alerts. You’re not tempted to check social media, or answer a phone call that could easily wait.

Keeping your mind focussed on the task at hand will do your fitness the world of good. It’ll also give you that fixed time away from your phone and the distractions it brings with it.

Eat well beforehand. Be fuelled and hydrated.

This links into our first tip about sleep. Your preparation for the session extends to your nutrition as well. By making sure you’re fuelled and hydrated, you’re ready to give the session your maximum.

There has been a lot of debate over the years about what you should or shouldn’t eat before training. The reality, as with most things in fitness, is that it depends on what you’re going to do. How your body responds to certain foods. How long you have before your exercise bout.

All of these points mean the ability to just say ‘eat this or that’ are wrong. We do have research that gives us a decent framework of what you should be eating…

In research on pre-exercise nutrition strategies from 2020, Rothschild et al concluded that…

‘Performance is improved following pre-exercise carbohydrate ingestion for longer but not shorter duration exercise’

These findings are supported by later work from Henselmans et al in 2022. They researched the effects on carb intake on strength and resistance training performance. Their conclusions were that…

‘our findings indicate conventional high-carbohydrate intake recommendations of 4–10 g/kg/day may be excessive for the performance of strength trainees, such as bodybuilders, powerlifters and Olympic weightlifters. Based on the inconclusive evidence and potential for benefits but not harm, strength trainees are advised to consume at least 15 g carbohydrates and 0.3 g/kg protein within 3 hours of their training sessions.’

This suggests that for resistance training, you don’t need to arrive on a full stomach of carbs! There’s a suggestion that post exercise is more important, where protein ingestion helps to build muscle and repair tissues.

A small meal before training will be OK, with the bulk of the protein coming after training.

Hydration is easier - drink until your urine is clear. That’s a rule of thumb that seems to work for performance in most people!

Let the AdMac Fitness Personal Trainers help you reach peak health!

With personal training studios in South Woodford and Bow, let the best personal trainers in East London help you to look after yourself…

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

No, Christmas HASN'T Ruined Your Progress - You CAN Get Back on Track!

If there’s one thing any personal trainer knows about the Christmas period, it’s that clients will likely indulge in a lot of food and drink. There’s nothing wrong with that at all - life is to be lived, and if you can’t enjoy some great food and drink at Christmas, when can you?!

A good personal trainer would have given you tools for how to tweak your diet to allow for extra calories anyway.

So, that’s the first point we wanted to make over… forgive yourself! You’ve not committed a crime - you had a few extra calories! It’s no big deal!

In this article we’re going to look at the Christmas period, what is can mean for diets, how we can indulge as much as we like and then get back on track. It allows you to have a great time, relax on the food front and then enjoy a return to normality!

You’ll be left with a simple plan to get back to where you started…

Why people freak out about Christmas ruining their weight loss…

The problem comes in the days after Christmas, where when people have enjoyed their mince pies and all of that great food they spiral into a bit of a mess. They think that because they’ve eaten their body weight in Turkey for a couple of days, all of their progress is ruined.

Let us give you some good news… it isn’t!

Any amount of food you eat for a couple of days over Christmas is likely to have a minor impact on your progress. Even if you jump on the scales after a couple of days and can see you’ve gained 5 lbs… it’s mostly just water.

Where it becomes an issue is when the 2-3 days around Christmas becomes a 7-10 day binge fest of booze and food. Your body will cope just fine with the short period of time. The extended period of over-eating is more of a problem. Not just because of the calories, but because of the difficulty of breaking out of those behaviour patterns.

Resetting after Christmas - your 5 step plan…

The size of the reset will be dependent on how big the interruption was! The longer you’re indulging, and the harder you hit the food and booze, the bigger the changes you need to make!

Here’s how you do it. Whether you do these steps over a couple of days or a week, it doesn’t really matter - just get them underway!

Step 1 - MOVE!

If you’re anything like me, eating and drinking is accompanied by a lot of sitting! This is a double-whammy. Not only are you consuming extra calories, you’re doing nothing to burn them.

It’s time for a pattern interrupt. In an ideal world, you’ll get to the gym and get a good sweat on. Chances are though, that’s not going to be top of your list of priorities! Instead then, get outside for a walk. You don’t need to walk up mountains, just get a few miles in. Shoot for 10k steps minimum.

It’s easier to move than it is to stop the eating I find, so start with the easy win.

Step 2 - Fast!

We’re fans of fasting here at AdMac Fitness, for various reasons - not just weight loss. In this case, fasting is really helpful. It doesn’t just stop you from eating, it gives your body and digestive system a break.

If you’ve been eating more than usual for a few days, you’ve given your body a lot of work to do. Help it out by giving it a break. Not only does it help the digestive system recover, it also allows your body to enjoy a hormonal reset. Digestive hormones return to normal levels, hunger hormones reset (after a little battle!) and your overall calorie consumption is down.

A fast of 18-24 hours is a great way to help you get used to not eating all the time too!

Step 3 - Drink more water

A lot of the food you would have eaten over the last few days will have been dehydrating, so you’re probably not going to be fully hydrated. Start by hitting 2-3 litres of water per day. It’ll help you stay full, it’ll rehydrate you and it’ll help keep you away from more booze!

Depending on where you read, your body is 60-70% water, so give it a helping hand by consuming enough of the good stuff!

Step 4 - Remove temptation

It’s really hard to avoid temptation if it’s around, so take steps to help yourself out. Your willpower WILL FAIL. I promise you.

Remove the temptation to keep eating all of the unhealthy food in the world by removing it. Give it away, throw it away, ask someone to hide it… do whatever you need to in order to get it out of your world! You’ll be glad you did.

It’s really hard to choose the vegetables when the chocolate cake is an option!

Step 5 - Get back to normal

After a few days, it’s time to get back to normal - whatever your version of that is. If you track calories, if you train daily to offset the food, if you fast, or all of the above, just get back on track.

The sooner you do it, the easier it is. That’s obvious, but it’s important to mention.

Your first intense workout in the gym might feel tougher than usual. Your first run might be slow and you might be out of breath. Your first bike ride might feel like you’re riding through treacle. That’s OK - you’ll get back to normal quickly. Just keep plugging away. Get back on the dietary horse too - make those great choices and get your consistency back.

Christmas and the Guilt…

We have a habit of feeling guilty when we indulge ourselves, but we shouldn’t. Yes, it might temporarily knock your goals out slightly, but that’s fine. It’s all recoverable.

The important thing is that you leave a little room in your life to have some fun, enjoy yourself and eat that great food! You can always be stricter on yourself after Christmas, but whilst the fun is to be had, make sure you have it! The AdMac Fitness personal trainers will be there to help you get back on track afterwards!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Benefits of a 24 Hour fast

Here at AdMac Fitness we believe in coaching the individual, not the method. But what does that mean?

Essentially we believe that there’s no one right way to train or to eat. People aren’t robots, and different clients will want to approach their health and fitness in different ways. It’s our job as personal trainers to help our clients achieve their health and fitness goals in a way that suits them.

We have a range of tools and approaches we can use to help our clients. We’re not married to one way of eating or one way of training. We’ll use an approach that we believe will work most effectively for our clients. In some cases, that will be calorie counting. In others that might be fasting. For some people it could be a mixture of the two.

We do what works.

This flexibility allows us to work with a lot of people in different ways, and it enables us to build up a data set on the benefits. At this time of year, one of the more powerful reset tools we can use is a 24 hour fast. In this article, we’ll explain why we like the use of a 24 hour fast as a reset.

Why using a 24 hour fast could help you

One of the key aspects of health is effective digestion. When we overwhelm our system with excess - be that food, booze, chemicals or all of the above, we immediately stress our digestive system.

Taking a period of time away from food can help to reduce the ill effects from the excess. By not adding more food for your digestive system to deal with, you allow the ‘clearing’ of the damage you’ve done. There is evidence that taking a short term fasts has benefits regarding hormone levels, reduction in stress biomarkers and the return to normal levels for blood substrates such as insulin and glucose.

Anecdotally, there’s a lot of support for water only fasts of up to 24 hours. This is an accessible amount of fasting time for most, because it’s short enough to be manageable, but long enough to be significant from a health point of view.

There’s also an evidence-based assessment that water only fasts are safe enough to use for the longer term (2 days and longer), so a day long fast is absolutely fine for the vast majority of people.

Dietary re-set

Another benefit of a 24 hour fast is that it can help serve as a dietary reset. If you’ve over-indulged on food, then taking that 24 hours away from food will help to rebalance your diet. It’s a case of simple maths…

If you’re usually consuming 2500 calories and your body burns a similar amount, you have a net balance of zero - all you’ve done is replaced what you’ve burned.

If you don’t consume any calories, your body will still burn the 2500, forcing it to rely on stored energy. It means you’ll have created a 2500 calorie deficit. You’d have done some seriously impressive eating to go 2500 calories over your target, so in one day you’re likely to have corrected a bad day the day before.

This simple dietary reset can help you get back on track after a heavy day, preventing your weight loss journey from being derailed.

When to use fasting, if you’re not using it often

Fasting is a legitimate way to lose weight, but if you want to do it properly then you have to be strategic with it. Fast for a given period of time, or on particular days.

That’s not what we’re doing here though.

In this case, we’re using it as a one-off magic bullet, so to speak. It’s damage repair after a heavy night. If you’re already following a calorie controlled diet, or you’re keeping an eye on your macros then you likely won’t need to throw in a fast… unless of course you’ve blown your calorie targets right out of the water with a massive overindulgence!

Real life happens. We understand that, so we want to give you tools to fix the damage afterwards. If you’ve hit the food or booze hard, a 24 hour water fast will help get you back on track. It’ll give your body a break, allow it to deal with the additional food and booze, then get you back to feeling good!

Let the AdMac Fitness Personal Trainers help you stay healthy!

With personal training studios in South Woodford and Bow, let the best personal trainers in East London help you to look after yourself this winter…

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Personal Training Client Transformation - Perspectives from the Client Side!

At AdMac Fitness we pride ourselves on the success of our personal training clients. Our team of expert personal trainers help people to transform their lives and their health every day.

What we thought would be a nice change is to hear what the experience is like from the client side. What is it like to be trained by the AdMac Fitness team? What has the person learned and how have they changed through the process?

In this article we’re going to hear from Mike, an AdMac Fitness client in our Bow studio. He has been trained by Gian, and together they’ll share their experiences of the process and how they’ve achieved these results…

Mike wanted to add lean mass - gaining muscle without gaining much body fat. You can see how much bigger he looks on the right, with a bigger chest and thicker arms…

What made you choose AdMac Fitness?

I started with Ad Mac fitness because I was looking for professional support with my fitness goals. The team is local to where I live and they had excellent reviews.

I decided to give them a try and right from induction I was impressed with the questions asked and the way they listened.

I’ve a spine condition affecting my bone structure and it can limit some exercises for me. It was clear they could help me with fitness goals and help to resolve issues that caused me pain and discomfort. In the years since, I’ve now also increased the range of my mobility and I can do much more than when I started.

Did you have previous experience in training?

I was training before I started at AdMac but my knowledge was based pretty much on what I’d read and learned online or snippets of feedback I’d received from class instructors in gyms I’d gone to. This was useful but enthusiasm is no substitute for professional knowledge and focus.

What were your goals at the start of your fitness journey?

I’d always wanted to gain weight and muscle mass. I’ve worked with Giancarlo in particular but also Adam too and they were brilliant at helping me reach that ambition.

More importantly though, they also provided an education - in my case on strength and mobility so my goals have become more advanced and specific as time has gone on.

What have you learned?

Stacks! And plenty I wouldn’t have thought about before I started. I’ve learned more about training, form and technique in a way that only comes from one-to-one tuition from a trained professional.

Consistency is also king! Gian works with me during sessions and I take what I’ve learned into my own training through the week. We have a big focus on checking on my overarching goals to make sure I’m on track.

Sometimes I have a brilliant week, other times it’s less good but it’s never a catastrophe - the most important thing is to dust yourself down, support yourself and get back to it.

How has your health (physical and mental) changed since you started?

My mental and physical health has transformed since I started. I enjoy having greater strength, control and mobility and I no longer suffer from back pain caused by my spinal condition.

While we can’t change the bone structure, we’ve done a lot of work on muscular support and it’s worked. The part of my body I probably disliked the most has become something I’m most proud of, because of the work put in to make a change.

Training is also a real outlet mentally and I enjoy time in the gym, using my brain and body in a different way to the usual day to day.

What habits do you have now that you didn’t at the start?

I train more intelligently and I use my time in the gym much more effectively. That gives me more time for mobility and soft tissue work which has improved my flexibility and my training sessions.

I’m also more conscious about the food I eat. While I’ve always eaten well I’m now thinking more about the impact my diet has on my body and the planet, which has led to cutting out a lot of meat and dairy.

What would you say to anyone on the fence about working with AdMac Fitness?

Jump off the fence and get to the studio! The team are kind, warm and dedicated to their clients. It’s a great atmosphere in the studio where people of all ages and abilities are welcomed and supported. And as we tackle one goal, another is set. You never know where you might end up!

A little from Gian…

Mike is one of the most hard-working and committed clients I have ever trained.

Mike came to me with the goal of wanting to put on some lean mass which he has achieved far and beyond. But his focus wasn’t just that. He was interested in being strong, functional and mobile - a supple leopard!

Mike’s posture has improved over the past two years of training as we dived into some of his habitual movement patterns and overall biomechanics to try and even out any imbalances and weakness he had. He is consistent with the guidance I give to him and he takes care of his body in and out of the gym.

Another important note, he knows when to have fun, giving his body the balance we need.

Not everyone wants to lose weight, and what Gian has explained here is how Mike came to him asking for help gaining muscle, without gaining too much fat. He also wanted to maintain his flexibility and mobility, so the sessions would be designed towards these goals.

This is the difference between training and personal training. At AdMac Fitness the sessions are delivered around the goals of the client, not about what we as personal trainers believe the client needs.

Gian points out that the work they do hasn’t just helped Mike build muscle - it has also improved his posture. This will reduce the chance of injury in future, so offers protective benefits as well. Biomechanics refers to the human movement element - Mike will now move better and exercise with more effective technique following the inclusion of specialist exercises and approaches to his fitness.

The lessons he has learned will keep him in great shape for good (as long as he applies them!)

Could you be the next AdMac Fitness Personal Training success story?

What Mike has achieved is replicated time and again by the excellent AdMac Fitness team. We have scores of success stories, just like Mike. We believe in straight up, evidence-based fitness and nutrition advice that changes lives.

No fads, no fashions, just effective work.

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Winter Supplementation - A Handy Guide

Winter has us in its grasp now… temperatures all around the UK are regularly going below zero, it’s dark in the afternoons and the mornings don’t lighten up until 8 or so!

Winter colds are abound, and the time where we burn the candle at both ends is approaching fast. Less light exposure, more drinking, late nights, parties, fewer healthy food choices, possible stress rises and reduced exercise.

I’m not putting this out there as a sign of impending doom - it’s just an explanation as to why we’re more vulnerable in the winter.

It can also serve as a warning as to what we need to do to protect ourselves better. Health is about balance - so the further we go one way, the more we have to go the other in order to maintain health. If we’re sleeping less drinking more, and eating more unhealthy foods then we have to help ourselves rebalance that.

It means supplementing our diet well. It means when we get a chance, exercising effectively. If we’re sleeping less at night, schedule in naps or ‘recovery sleeps’, where we can have a longer sleep to recover.

In this article we’re going to discuss winter supplementation and lifestyle factors to help you stay healthy across the Christmas period, and the rest of the winter…

Winter Supplementation - Getting it Right

To stay healthy throughout the winter, it’s less about supplement quantity and more about quality. We have three major obstacles to deal with…

1. Lack of sunlight - reduced vitamin D levels

2. Prevalence of winter bugs - immune system pressures

3. Sleep issues through booze - general health decline

What we need to do then is supplement to address these points. We can’t rely on supplements alone to cure all of our ills and prevent anything going wrong with us, but they help. There are also lifestyle factors I’ll address later on in the article to help you too.

Vitamin D

This is arguably the most important supplement you’ll take all winter. Throughout the summer months we generally enjoy benefits of the sunshine (as long as you’re out in it), which naturally take care of our vitamin D requirements. In the winter though, things change.

We see less of the sun. We’re less exposed to the sun. Finally, the sun isn’t as powerful, so even if you get some exposure to it, you won’t enjoy the benefits as much. What this means is we need to take a vitamin D supplement to help us.

I could talk all day on the benefits of vitamin D, but I’ll summarise them with this list. Here’s the benefits you’ll experience from having healthy vitamin D levels…

• Reduced cancer risk

• Lower obesity and diabetes risk

• Improved brain function

• Stronger bones

• Improved mood

There are plenty more, but this is a blog post, not an essay! You can read more about the benefits of Vitamin D here.

Multivitamins and minerals to support immune function

In an ideal world, we’d meet all of our vitamin and mineral needs from whole food sources. The reality is however, we just don’t manage it. That can be for a number of reasons, including lack of food seasonality - we simply might not get food at its best in the winter. We don’t always make good food choices either. That’s not a good thing, but it’s the reality of life.

We can accept this, and make a point of addressing the issue. We know that vitamins and minerals play a key role in immune function (as well as general health), and we know that we’re unlikely to meet our needs with diet alone. Add to this the increased demands as we’re exposed to the winter and Christmas period stresses, and it becomes clear we need help.

A good quality multivitamin will help to plus gaps that our diet can’t fill. A daily multivitamin will provide both vitamin and mineral support, and whilst it might not be perfect, it’ll be a good second.

Sleep help

We know that sleep is the bedrock of recovery - there’s no element of health that isn’t improved with good quality sleep. Promoting quality sleep isn’t easy though - it depends on a lot of lifestyle factors such as caffeine and alcohol consumption being limited, reduced exposure to screens, reducing stress levels etc.

Assuming all of these issues are being address, one of the more surprising supplements that have been linked with improving sleep are amino acids. This is particularly true when paired with vitamin D (which you should already be taking!)

For a long time amino acids were a staple of the bodybuilding world. They were seen as a muscle building supplement only, but a lot of research has been done about the impact protein has on other aspects of health and this appears to be one of them

Improve sleep and you’ll improve a lot of other health markers, so make amino acids a go-to on your night time supplement lists.

Lifestyle factors to consider

The reality is that all of the supplements in the world won’t undo the damage that long-term poor choices make. They’ll help to improve matters, certainly. If you think though that surviving on 5 hours of sleep every night, eating a crappy diet, drinking every night and never exercising won’t matter if you’re taking your supplements, you’d be wrong.

Very wrong!

Here’s a few tips to help stay healthy…

Exercise when you can. It doesn't have to be a brutal, lung-burning workout (especially if you’re under-slept), but do what you can. Lift weights, do a bit of cardio. Stay active - it’s really important to move your body. It’s great for body and brain.

If you’re drinking alcohol, don’t drink caffeine too. One of those substances impacts sleep… adding them together is a recipe for sleep disaster.

On that point…

There’s a concept known as ‘sleep banking’ that you can use. It’s where you sleep for longer in the lead up to a time when you’re likely to be sleep deprived. So for example if you know that you have a party on Saturday night, you can allow for the reduced sleep by getting a couple of good nights in on the nights beforehand.

Research shows it’s an effective aid for short term sleep deprivation (but don’t rely on it as a long term strategy - it’s very much a short term thing!)

When you get the chance, eat well. Chances are any food you eat at a party isn’t going to be great for you, so when you get the chance, stack up on the good stuff. Start your day with plenty of protein. Get your fruit and vegetables in when you can. Smoothies and soups are great for this.

Drink plenty of water. As Paul Chek says… the solution to pollution is dilution. It’s hard to argue with that!

Let the AdMac Fitness Personal Trainers help you stay healthy!

With personal training studios in South Woodford and Bow, let the best personal trainers in East London help you to look after yourself this winter…

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Buy 5 Personal Training Sessions, Get 1 Free at AdMac Fitness this January!

Christmas is the season of giving, and at AdMac Fitness we’re on board…

We’ve got a fantastic personal training offer available. Throughout January, if you buy 5 personal training sessions, you get 1 free. It’s a great discount, with each personal training session worth £55 - £65 depending on the personal trainer you use.

It’s the perfect opportunity to kick your fitness journey off properly.

Maybe you’ve been terrified of exercise for years? Well a personal trainer can help guide you through the process. You’ll be in safe hands with the AdMac Fitness team. Our personal trainers have worked with hundreds of clients over the years, helping people to go from complete beginners to seasoned fitness fanatics!

If the thought of exercise in public terrifies you, don’t worry. At our AdMac Fitness personal training studios you’ll be working out in a private environment. Our facilities aren’t a public gym - they’re private personal training studios.

At the AdMac Fitness personal training studio in South Woodford, it’s the epitome of private training - it’s a one to one studio, so you’ll have only your personal trainer for company! It means you can create the perfect environment for your training - pick your own music etc! No need to feel any kind of self-consciousness!

Even if you’ve been exercising for years, engaging the services of a personal trainer can help to give you a new focus to your training. It’ll help you get out of a training rut, give you new ideas, new goals and provide you with opportunities to work on weaknesses.

A personal trainer is so much more than just a rep counter. The quality of personal trainers we have at AdMac Fitness will help you to see your training differently. You’ll be challenged and changed in different ways, giving your fitness journey a new direction.

We all get stuck into training ruts, where we repeat the same few exercises because we like them. In reality, these don’t serve us as effectively when we do them all the time.

A personal trainer can redesign your training plans and workout routines, all in line with your goals. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, so maybe there are fantastic exercises that you’re missing out on because you haven’t added them to your plans.

That’s the kind of insight a personal trainer gives you.

Perhaps there’s sticking points you’ve reached, and you don’t know how to get past them. By talking to one of the AdMac Fitness personal trainers, we can help you to overcome these stopping points.

Existing AdMac Fitness Personal Training Clients - We Haven’t Forgotten About You!

We realise that existing personal training clients need to be looked after as well, so we’ve got you covered!

If you refer a new client to AdMac Fitness, you too will enjoy a free personal training session for each new client you send our way. You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

The Power of Accountability - Why Personal Training Works So Effectively

Arguably the most important element of achieving your health and fitness goals is consistency. The frequency with which you train over a consistent period of time will have a bigger impact on your results than almost anything else.

Anyone can train really hard once or twice, but the ones who make a real lasting change in their health and fitness are the ones who stay consistent over the long haul. The one-off people just don’t see the changes they like.

There is a quote that has been attributed to Aristotle, the Ancient Greek philosopher and scientist…

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

You could lift this word for word and say the same about fitness. We are what we repeatedly do. Fitness, then, is not an act but a habit. It’s not the one great workout that changes your body, it’s the dozens of them, strung together over a long period of time. It’s a consistent set of actions accomplished without a break, and with high intensity.

Personal training is a huge part of the accountability that a lot of people need in order to stay consistent for the long haul.

Personal training and accountability - how it helps to change lives

There are a lot of reasons why somebody would hire a personal trainer, but I’d argue the most important one is accountability. If you see the difficulty many people have sticking to a regular training routine, their personal training sessions, (whether once weekly or several times per week) are the bedrock from which they build their fitness and accountability.

Personal training is the motivation you rely on when you can’t motivate yourself. The accountability of working with your personal trainer, ensuring you have a good training session even on the days when you don’t feel like it is powerful.

Habits are built on momentum, and the momentum you get when you’ve had a great session that week is really powerful. It pushes you on to adopt healthful behaviours for the rest of the week.

This isn’t just opinion either - in a study from 2019, a group of university students had their dietary choices monitored to see how a training programme would influence their food choices.

The dietary choices were monitored to see how many calories, and what kinds of foods they were consuming pre and post exercise intervention. The training program lasted for 15 weeks and there were several observations noted, especially around the type, duration and intensity of the exercise program followed. The study concluded…

‘The 15-week exercise training appeared to motivate young adults to pursue healthier dietary preferences and to regulate their food intake.’

Think about that for a second… regular exercise triggered them to make lasting changes outside the duration of their workouts. It inspired other healthy behaviours and choices away from the gym. This suggests that the personal training isn’t just effective during the session - it helps afterwards too!

Support equals success

Having a personal trainer also means there’s another person invested in your success. This is very powerful and can be another motivator that keeps you accountable. You wouldn’t be letting yourself down, you’d also be letting your personal trainers down too.

Research conducted in 2020 assessed something called ‘Supportive Accountability Measure’ (SAM), which assessed whether or not having social support helped with adherence to healthy behaviours when trying to reverse obesity.

The results showed that the ‘SAM has strong reliability and validity across two separate studies’.

By having other people invested in your goals, it would appear that you help yourself stay on track with achieving them. It’s part of the reason personal training works so well. These are the ‘soft’ elements of personal training that we don’t always think about, but are arguably more important than the dietary advice or the exercise programming.

Where to start with personal training

If you really want to change your health, the best place to start is with an experienced personal trainer who understands your goals and how to get you there. At AdMac Fitness we have a team of professional personal trainers, who operate out of our private fitness studios.

We have a diverse team of trainers, all with experience in different elements of fitness. No matter what your goals, one of the AdMac Fitness team can help you get there.

Our private personal training studios are located in Bow, E3 and South Woodford, E18. Thanks to our set up, we’re not in a public gym, so the places are never crowded and you won’t have to wait for your equipment. You’ll be able to exercise in a purpose-built personal training space to give you the very best session available.

Our South Woodford personal training studio is completely private, so you’ll have an entire facility to yourself, allowing you and your personal trainer to focus the entire session on you and your goal achievement.

At AdMac Fitness we’re not about fads, fashions and short term fixes. We want you to succeed properly over the long term, so with our help and advice you can get your fitness back on track! If you’d like us to help you, contact us on 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

AdMac Fitness: Arch 457 Robeson St, London E3 4JA

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Muscle is Medicine - Strength Training Can Save Your Life!

The benefits of exercise have been known for decades, but the obsession with using exercise as a weight loss tool has made us forget about (arguably) the most important exercise benefit of all… It builds muscle mass.

I’m not even joking. Muscle mass isn’t for looking good - it’s literally an organ. It’s a living tissue and enables us to deal with a wide range of conditions. More muscle mass makes us more insulin sensitive, which helps to prevent us from developing type 2 diabetes. It helps us to maintain strength, balance and mobility in later life. It also keeps us alive for longer.

The fitness world is full of exaggerated claims, but the muscle being medicine isn’t one. It’s based in fact.

Muscle is medicine - the evidence base

In a 2018 study examining ‘the association of predicted lean body mass, fat mass, and body mass index (BMI) with all cause and cause specific mortality in men’, over 38,000 men aged between 40 and 75 were assessed for 21.4 years. There were 12 356 deaths during the 21 years. The results showed a couple of particularly interesting results…

• Excessive (over 21kg) fat mass increased the risk of death. This isn’t a surprise - the link between obesity and mortality is long established.

• A lack of lean muscle mass was a large risk factor for all cause mortality.

This is huge… whilst it doesn’t exactly give the green light for a lot of fat gain, it does teach us that we could be prioritising muscle gain (and maintenance) over constantly striving to be leaner. Especially as we age. Of course if you’re obese then weight loss should be a priority, but for people who are slightly overweight, muscle mass is more protective for health and longevity than getting leaner would be.

Muscle mass and cancer survivability

Another study compares the survival rates against cancer with different levels of muscle mass…

A Chinese study from 2022 compared the survival rates of patients with gastric (stomach) cancer. In the study, the participants were split into groups, some of the patients had low levels of skeletal muscle mass and the others had normal levels of muscle mass.

The conclusions were that low levels of skeletal muscle mass predicts a poor prognosis for patients with advanced gastric cancer, and this is not associated with postoperative complications.

Debunking the muscle mass myths…

One of the concerns a lot of people (women in particular) have is that they’ll start lifting weights, then immediately inflate. They think they’ll pile on muscle mass and look like the Incredible Hulk.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Women don’t have enough of the necessary anabolic hormones such as testosterone. They can increase muscle mass, but it takes a very long time and requires a lot of eating to gain anywhere near the amount of muscle they’d need to look ‘bulky’! The reality of what happens is the muscle they do have becomes stronger, more conditioned and healthier.

A woman could gain 5-10 lbs of lean body weight and look significantly smaller. Gaining muscle doesn't mean gaining size - it’s important to remember this.

It’s easier for men to gain muscle, but it’s still not easy. It takes a huge amount of effort, but it’s one of the most important things you can do for your health. You’ll age better, you’ll metabolise food better and you’ll improve your general wellbeing.

Struggling with where to start? Speak to the AdMac Fitness team…

The muscle maze can be a confusing one to navigate on your own, so take the guesswork out of the process by working with one of our AdMac Fitness personal trainers. They’re experts in helping people from all walks of life add muscle and dramatically change their health and fitness.

We have a long list of client success stories, so get in touch and we can make you our next success story!

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Winter is Coming... Time for Personal Training?

It’s winter… you know the drill. The nights get longer, the temperatures drop, motivation to train takes a huge dip…

Then the festive season hits!

Parties, more booze, more food, less time for exercise (which when added to dwindling motivation makes for a one-way ticket to weight gain!), compromised sleep, winter colds doing the rounds.

When you factor everything in, it’s no surprise that so many of us gain weight over the winter. It’s a pretty big challenge to stay on the straight and narrow food and exercise-wise, when so much conspires against us! When you’re at home after a tough day at work, do you really want to get up and go out to the gym, or head out for a run?

Probably not.

When the alarm goes off early and it’s dark outside, do you really want to get up and go out for that morning run or ride? Again, probably not! And that’s fine - we’re not designed to seek discomfort!

That’s where personal training can help

Personal training is a powerful tool at this time of year. It can help you navigate the winter by keeping your training intensity up. Apart from the better, more focused training you’d experience under the guidance of a professional personal trainer, it’d also give you a reason to train.

When you’ve booked an appointment, you’ve outsourced your motivation to someone. You won’t want to let your personal trainer down, so even when you’re not really feeling it, you’ll turn up, work hard and your health, fitness and general wellbeing will benefit as a result. Even winter won’t get in the way of a workout with a personal trainer, because you’ll generally be training indoors (it’s not lockdown any more!)

The motivation to train goes up several notches when you know it won’t be done outside in the cold, wet and dark. You won’t be suffering the elements, instead you’ll be in a private personal training studio, where the lights are on, there’s music playing, you’ve got great company and there’ll be an instant feeling of pride when you’re heading home, glad you got that workout in!

Alongside the additional motivation, it’s the extra quality of training that you get when you’re being coached…

The reps are better quality, the rest periods are managed, the exercise variety is increased and the intensity is higher. You’ll get more benefit from the session, translating into better results… just at a time of year when you would otherwise be taking your foot off the pedal.

Finish the year off with a bang!

If you’re concerned that you’re in danger of losing track of your fitness, it’s time to get in touch with the AdMac Fitness team…

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD

Do You Always Need to Follow a Training Program?

How important is it to follow a training program to achieve your health and fitness goals? Is it vital, or can you go off piste completely? Is there a room for an in-between?

In this article we’re going to look at training programs, who needs to follow them and where there’s room to be a bit more creative with your training. We’ll look at the what’s, the why’s and when’s. This will give you a little more of an idea about how rigid your training needs to be.

Why do we follow training programs at all?

The first question we need to address is why need to follow training programs at all?

The answer lies in the principles of fitness. There are 6 main principles of fitness, and they govern how the body adapts to training. The are the guidance by which any training program will need to follow in order to be successful.

The 6 principles of fitness…

Here’s each of the principles in more detail…

Overload: In order to make progress, tissues need to overloaded. Muscle and connective tissues become stronger and more able to cope with load when then lift heavier weights. Cardiovascular capacity is enhanced when it is pushed beyond its normal limits etc.

Reversibility: This is what happens when we stop training. If a lifter stops strength training, the muscle and strength gains reverse. If a runner stops running, they lose fitness. The same happens if the intensity of training drops - there’s a reduction in capability.

Progression: This is linked to overload, but it has to be managed safely. If the speed of progression is too fast, there’s an injury risk. Progression and overload must be present to improve fitness and capability, but at a sensible rate.

Individualisation: The principle of individualisation exists to ensure that a training program is designed with the individual needs of the person in mind. Rather than just following a generic training program, to really maximise personal fitness it has to be a program for the individual.

Periodisation: This is linked to progression, because it’s the pre-determined rate of change throughout a training program. It can consist of a mixture of changing intensities, program direction and overall volume and load.

Specificity: A successful program has to be specific to the needs of the client. If they want to improve their 5km time, focussing all of their training time on building muscle is wrong. Training should always be specific to the goal.

Why principles determine programs

A program will always be written to achieve a pre-determined goal. This is fundamentally the difference between ‘exercising’ and ‘training’. When you exercise, you are doing something non-specific to get or keep fit. When you train, you are looking to improve a particular outcome measure.

By not following a program, you can’t be sure that you’re training in accordance with the principles of fitness. You don’t know if you’re overloading, you don’t know if you’re progressing and there’s no chance of general exercise being periodised. Exercise will get you fit, keep you healthy and the rest, but training by following a well-designed program will help you achieve a specific goal.

If you have a target to aim for, you need to be following a program. Whether that’s a physique goal or a sporting goal, you need to be aiming for something.

But what about weight loss? Do I need to follow a program then?

This is where it gets interesting, because it’s a slightly grey area…

You need to follow a program of sorts - a calorie target. Outside of that, you need to be exercising to help you burn more calories, but it isn’t necessary that you follow a particular training plan in order to lose weight. Any form of exercise will help with that goal.

Of course there are workouts that will make the process quicker, but beyond that your weight loss is going to be determined by keeping a negative energy balance (burning more calories than you consume). That’s why people manage to lose weight just by turning up at a variety of fitness classes, or by hitting the gym regularly without a real plan in place.

As long as they hit their calories, everything else will be OK.

If you have a goal, but don’t know how to achieve it…

Then you can speak to one of the expert personal trainers at AdMac Fitness. We operate out of two sites - one of our personal training studio’s is in Bow, and the other personal training in South Woodford.

We have a whole team of personal trainers who program exercise for a living, helping people just like you to achieve their health and fitness goals! Whether that’s weight loss, building muscle, being a better runner or just feeling a little healthier, our personal trainers can help you.

For more information on who we are, what we do and how we can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, contact us on… 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our locations are…

AdMac Fitness Bow: 153-159 Bow Rd, London E3 2SE

AdMac Fitness South Woodford: Unit 4 Marlborough Business Centre, 96 George Lane, South Woodford, London, E18 1AD