I am sure at some point in your life someone has asked you (or you may have asked yourself!), “what is the point of all that training? Wouldn’t it be easier to sit at home and eat pizza?” Well, to answer the second part of that particular question, yes it would…however there are reasons that some of us do go training, eat healthy and so on. So why would a sane person choose to lift so much weight that the blood vessels in their eyeballs burst? Why would someone else go to the point of absolute exhaustion and…keep running?! Why does a fighter continue to go and get beaten up and ground down mentally and physically day after day?

I cannot answer all the above questions (and I am sure there are many more things people do that I would not consider fun training ideas), but I can speak for myself. Having done a wide variety of sports, I have a lot of different perspectives, but I will talk about the perspective of powerlifting (or, to be more general, ‘lifting heavy weights’) which is the thing I enjoy most and keep coming back to.

What I do in the gym is definitely not the norm, and does often get some strange looks – moreso when I was competing in powerlifting, which involved squeezing into tiny squat suits and bench shirts on a regular basis – but I would much rather lift a heavy weight a few times than anything else I could be doing in the gym. The thrill of being under a bar with a few hundred kilos on it and actually being able to lower it and come back up cannot be beaten. However, there are moments I question my sanity. Moments like today, when I finished a set of squats then promptly collapsed onto the floor as I was unable to stand and lay panting on the floor for a few minutes. In the aftermath, and with a stonking exertion headache coming on, I debated with another guy in the gym the point of doing that to yourself.

So without further ado, here is my list of assorted reasons why I train. Please feel free to reply with your own point of view, no matter what you do or how long you have been training, and perhaps this can provide some inspiration to others!

The main reason I train so hard is so that the rest of my life is easier. That may sound strange, so here goes…if I am strong, lifting anything in real life is no problem. If someone wants to move house, I can do things like this:

(by the way, that weighed about 75 kilos…)

If I work hard doing cardio, I don’t have the problem of getting out of breath walking down the street – I can even run for a bus without having a heart attack! If I want to sprint across a road and hop the fence on the other side, I don’t have to think about it, I just do it. Of course, carrying and passing weights to clients, spotting etc is easy also. Seeing the weight on the bar is satisfying in a way too!

I also train because there is the element of looking in the mirror and liking what I see. This has not been a focus for a long time, for years I was just interested in getting big and strong, but I do also like to look in the mirror and be able to actually see the results of my hard work. Seeing your abs gradually appear over the course of a few weeks is a very satisfying thing – as Alywn Cosgrove likes to say, “nothing tastes better than being lean feels!”

What are your reasons for training? What keeps you going through the hard workouts? I would love to hear from you! No doubt there are people who have just trained for the first time reading this, there are also professional athletes, and I am interested to hear all your stories so don’t be shy!

This needs to be done once in a while or that in-tray you can see at the top of the pic overflows…

Knowing when to come in out of the rain
Why the early bird gets the worm;
Life isn’t always fair; and Maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge). His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place by people who wanted to make a name for themselves.

Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition. Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or a band-aid to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault. Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 3 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I’m A Victim.

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

A correctly constructed training plan will have a main objective, which, depending on the goal, may have many smaller objectives along the way. Each step will acheive something – either reaching an immediate goal, or doing work to enable a goal to be reached down the line. Each session will be planned with a proper warm-up, with each exercise flowing to the next in a logical order, and so as to not interfere with any other sessions. Each exercise will be chosen or adapted to suit the individual…and so on.

If you are doing a workout because (and these are all real reasons I have heard in reply to ‘why are you doing that?’)

• You saw it on tv
• Your mate did it and got good results
• You heard it was hard
• You were bored and felt like doing something
• You were shown it during your gym induction
• You read it in a magazine
• Somebody said sprints were the best way to train
• Etc.

you will probably not be doing the best thing to acheive your goals! Some people have said in the past that exercise is a drug – the correct dose of the correct drug will acheive the best results, the wrong drug may do more harm than good – picking workouts randomly in this analogy would be the equivalent of taking 2 random pills out of your bathroom cabinet when you have a headache and hoping it goes away!

The solution to this problem, unfortunately, is not easy. In an ideal world PE lessons in school would cover the whys and hows of training sufficiently that people would be able to construct a well thought-out basic program, however this is not the case. Therefore, it may be worth learning some basics about training theory, or asking for guidance from someone who understands them. Here are some books that cover some useful areas (click the picture for details!):

Of course, I also offer one-to-one training, designing training programs, online training, seminars etc… if you are interested, drop me an email at alex@absolutegolduk.com and I will give you more info.

Tags: training, program, planning, why, exercise, progression

I’ve been eating crap, drinking way too much and not training anywhere near enough for normal life, let alone to counteract the effects of all the bad living.

So, how did I get to here and what am I going to do about it?

Well, I have always had a moderation problem…I either do something full on, or I don’t bother with it at all. I knew this and decided to give up drinking a while back as it was something I felt I was overdoing and would be better not to do at all. After a good few months of not drinking, I decided that having a glass of wine with dinner or a couple of beers at the end of the day was fine…then of course when going out I might as well have a few beers…next thing you know, I’m back to where I was before, drinking way too much and way too often.

At the same time I started a particularly hard training cycle, so convinced myself I needed extra calories to recover from the training. This may be true, but extra calories = good idea, extra calories mainly from pizza and eating pitta bread and cheese = bad idea. Coupled with this I was having some personal issues (which I will not go into as it would not be fair on other people) but the end result was that I was getting mentally down as well as eating and drinking wrongly.

Then the Christmas holidays came, and I had two weeks totally off work. Great, a time to rest! Maybe for some people, but it’s also a time where eating massive quantities of crap food and being drunk most of the time is overlooked and even encouraged. Let’s just say, I fit right in over this period. My personal issues went further downhill, as did my healthy lifestyle. I stopped training totally. I was lucky that despite all this abuse, my body just kept rolling on and I only put on about half a stone, and even got stronger during this time! However, I could see where the path I was on would take me, and it wasn’t a place I wanted to go.

The time soon came to go back to work, but I could not get back into the routine of health again. I knew I still had some issues in my head to sort out before I could concentrate on anything else. I felt like I just had to do my best and ride out the storm.

Recently, I have got on top of my issues, and have been able to really analyse the last few months and what I’ve been doing. I now feel I am ready to sort myself out and get back to the person I should be. Another effect of letting things slip in my head is that work, keeping the house tidy, making plans etc have all taken a back seat and I have basically sat watching things get worse and not felt the strength to control them. I am now ready. I have eaten healthy for the last few days, I decided (in somewhat of a masochistic way) to go and get absolutely hammered on Saturday in order to wake up Sunday and think “I am never drinking again”, and that is exactly what happened. I have a few things left to tidy up and organise, and then I will be back to a clear view of what I am doing. The only major impact on my body was a few pounds of fat and slightly elevated blood pressure, these will be rectified soon.

I am writing this in order to admit that yes, I have messed up, and I apologise to anyone who has found working with me/contacting me to be difficult recently, but I am now back on track and putting it out there. This, I hope, will strengthen my resolve to not let things slip back to where they have been.

Normal service will now be resumed!

Resources:
Here is the diet plan I will be following.
Here is the book I read to stop drinking originally, and will be re-reading!
Here is a book with great training plans for anyone inspired to join me in a fitness push.