We’ve all heard how important it is to increase good hormones and control the balance of them day to day – let look at what balance looks like.

Hormones and you, lots of talk around balance and keeping hormones in check, what does this actually mean and why is it important to work to increase the good hormones?

Let’s start with what they are.

Hormones are chemicals created by our glands and realised into the blood stream to send messages and play different roles in our bodies many processes.

The processes we are looking at here are the mood regulators, the ones that help us feel positive feelings including happiness and pleasure.

So which are they?

Dopamine, this is our main feel good hormone, it’s an important part of the brain’s reward system. It’s associated with pleasurable sensations, along with learning, memory, and more.

Serotonin, this is a mood hormone and has lots of roles within that such as regulating appetite, learning, memory, sleep and can aid in digestion.

Now we got that all cleared up, how do we increase these good hormones?

For dopamine:

Diet can assist with this, increasing our protein intake, and reducing our saturated fat can help,
Prioritise sleep, ensure we are well rested,
Increasing time in natural light, especially sunlight,
Relaxation time, be that listening to music, walking, mediation,
And of course physical exercise, as per our previous newsletters, this doesn’t have to be high intensity.

Maximising our dopamine levels helps to maintain our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.

For serotonin:

Adjusting your diet, again with higher protein foods mixed with carbohydrates to help absorption,
Physical exercise, preferable outdoors,
Socialising with friends/family and our animal friends
Positive acts, volunteering, helping friends etc help elevate us.

Increasing our serotonin levels helps to regulate our circadian rhythm, regulate appetite and increase our ability to learn and memorise.

The cross over between dopamine and serotonin is great, many of the ways to increase both can start with simple steps that we can undertake with a little planning and without impacting our day too much.

Small changes to our daily routines can turn into big changes over the longer term, with each step increasing our good hormones, the next steps also become easier to envisage and act upon.

Would you like some assistance in planning in daily activities to help increase your good hormones? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

Got an event planned, or looking for one? What should we look for and how to build ourselves up ready to take it on.

So you’ve found an event you want to prepare for? – how do we find the best route to planning our success? By working backwards and understanding the strengths we will need to possess to achieve it!

Having had the opportunity to work with numerous individuals on a wide range of goals, one thing is clear building in a path way is critical to success.

That pathway has a number of stands, from recognising the areas we wish to build, incorporating appropriate counter activities and ensuring we have some flex baked in.

It’s all too common to look solely at the goal, back to using running as an example!

Signed up for a race, its X distance and we then start to run more and more to reach that distance, it’s a logical step and actual forms one of the strands.

Lets break it down a little further:

We need to:
run X miles
Increase leg and core strength to run X miles
recover our muscles from the runs
increase our pace
increase our O2 intake over the duration of the run.

No particular order there, just that these are additional areas for us to consider incorporating, want to add speed to our running, have an interval session programmed. Need to increase our O2 uptake, add in some hill reps.

The goal is to create the plan based on our needed outcomes, if we are looking to improve our time we need to add speed, and strength, likewise if we are just looking to complete the distance then we need to make sure we are recovered and our underlying O2 uptake and strength are ready to support us.

When considering these additional areas slow and steady wins the race, the goal is the sum of the parts but the parts can’t outweigh the goal.

Strengthening our legs shouldn’t be taken to the point where soreness effects our running, likewise continuously running hills and not increasing our distance will also hinder our goal.

Balance is key, I like to consider it as pizza, all areas are slices, ocd trigger warning, not all slices are the same size! They do, however, make an entire pizza and that is our goal – to eat one whole pizza, wait no, to achieve our goal, then have pizza.

In summery, find the key components of your goal, make time for the additional areas that would benefit from improvement, don’t add pineapple and slice size should be different.

Need help with planning your goal? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

Making use on the smaller slots in our day or incorporating them in to our daily living to little the little things add up over the days, weeks and months

How do we squeeze some extra movement in our day, after all little tweaks can add up to big changes over the days weeks and months!

Extra flight of stairs here, parking the car a little further away there, it all adds up and the impact can be huge. What can we do in the smaller time slots we have to help our progress?

Let’s start with the basics, all movement counts, yep all of it.

Hoovering – Yep
Washing the car – yep

We could go on, and on….

When we get someone in the gym for the first time our focus is always on starting movement off, it doesn’t need to be long, heavy or even tiring.

Instead we just look for muscles to be activated, our heart rate to go up and get a bit of a sweat on, this is different for everyone, much like adding movement into our day.

Tactics, game plans, and organising!

No running example this week, people examples.

Person A

Drives to work, has a desk based job and a 30 minute lunch break – think that a goos stock example.

We need to park the car, can we park it further away? This might be the other side of the carpark, a different carpark or a street further over from the office. This is going to add a few more steps top the count. Made up maths incoming!

Other side of car park +/- 100 steps (500 p/w)
Different car park +/- 300 steps (1500 p/w)
Different street +/- 500 steps (2500 p/w)

These might be per trip or per day, either way they can easily add extra to our daily and weekly totals.

This can also be added in when working from home, a nice stroll just before work – kind of like we are walking to the office!

Person B

Works from home, desk based with a semi-flexible day.

Whilst we could include the morning ‘walk to work’ it might not be a straight forward, instead could we do a few trips up and down the stairs?

After all we need a break, even just going top and down 1 per hour will add to our steps and flights climbed (if you record that, cheeky follow up to our fitness tracker write-up!)

Going back a little while, I had a client who was based in a fast paced war environment, they were pedal to the metal whilst at their desk, however the company had a strict 1 hour away for lunch policy (forward thinking, ensuring staff had to have a break), we started doing 1 minute of stair climbing at the start of lunch and 1 minute at the end – after a few months this became 7 minutes at each end!

As always, one size doesn’t fit all, we could break this up into multiple 1 minute chunks through out the day or hourly, how about using the hours of the work day.

7 hours left – 7 stair reps
6 hours left – 6 stair reps
5 hours left – 5 stair reps

And so on, nice little reward for the final hour.

Remember it doesn’t need to be fast, of course as we progress it can become a little faster, further, longer etc.

Few more examples to help get the ball rolling:

Walking whilst on phone calls
Walking meetings with co-workers
Park further away at the shops and carry shopping back to the car
Add stretching breaks while at your desk (or move away to perform them)
Walk on the spot during adverts
Add some squats whilst getting things out of low cupboards

There are lots of ways to include more movement into our days, need some help adding a few little bits into your day? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

Should we? – we’ve looked at mixing them, how about splitting them up, is it needed?

Should we separate cardio and strength? What benefits does it have and when is it best for our performance?

We covered the benefits of mixing of cardio and resistance, let’s flip the coin and take a look at why it might be advantageous to separate them.

When we looked at how to combine cardio and strength it really came down to it depending on our overall goals, separating them works in a similar way, shocker I know!

Let’s look at how we can gain from separating them, how it can be advantageous for certain goals and some ways of programming it in.

Why separate them? – it allow us to focus specifically on them individually, we can of course do both and we’ve covered that, however when we are programming them specifically it can be advantageous.

Let’s use running as an example, should we be training for a longer distance event having a dedicated session for cardio would be appropriate.

Like wise, long walks for cardiovascular health would be another example, doing this later in the day away from a strength session would make sense.

This would help too keep session time to a minimum and make it specific to the overall goals:

Training for a half marathon?

We would have a number of dedicated run days, we can then intersperse strength workouts on our rest days to supplement our running activities, this could also include longer stretch sessions after the strength work or having targeted strength sessions.

When considering the use of cardio as a healthily lifestyle a similar profile can be adopted, with the advantage of being able to do these on the same day.

We could for example, strength train in the morning, followed by a walk in the afternoon. This would allow recover time and for the pace to be set by how we are feeling for that particular session, feeling energised we could pick the pace up or go a little further, likewise if we are shorter on time we could do a quicker walk or not go quite as far.

Either way the separation allows us to focus on the activity with a sole purpose on full energy and not as a multipart activity.

Now to add a bit of science, in the examples we have mentioned cardio after strength, currently studies show that for the most part strength before cardio is preferable.

There are exceptions the most notable is when we are training for a racing event, such as a running race, in this example strength should come after so we have full use of our energy stores for the main goal.

It’s also worth noting that if we can (training resistance) this is slightly better suited to a non-run day, rather than two workouts in a single day, where possible.

All in all, separating can assist in reaching your goals, where time allows, as always the main goal is to maintain movement.

Need help with programming for your goals? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

Weight, weights, distances, time – what metrics matter and how should we record them?

Wanting to track your progress? – how is best, what helps to identify areas of improvement and most importantly how long should we measure for and how should we interpret the results?

Progress isn’t Linear!

We are going to have some ups, some downs and some times things are going to stay steady – its part of the process.

When we measure is all to easy to fall into the trap that everything should be getting faster, longer or in the case of weight continuously move in a positive direction.

Measuring can provide good insight, help us stay on track and most importantly allow us to celebrate milestones along the way.

Starting with weight, after all it’s one of the biggest challenges and on the face of it would seem like it should be linear….

In order to lose weight we need to be in a calorie deficit, we spoken before about how to create a deficit, using a smaller one to allow ourselves to still perform well and give room for further changes as they are needed.

Measuring weight, this can be tough and depends on your personality. Depending on how we respond is important, do we like to use a measurement as a driver? If so, then weighing monthly might be the answer, it’ll even out any speed bumps and also mean that you’ll know to get the needle moving in the right way the month has to be good.

So what are the others?

Weekly – similar principal to monthly with a little less waiting, this does mean we should expect smaller changes!

Daily – mixed bag here, and I’ll take the hate… for those with an analytical mind and those needing to understand how their body undulates this can work. This is not the common route as weight can be effected by so many variables.

What does it look like?

Daily 186 – 185 – 185 – 186 – 184 – 185 – 184 – 184 – 185 – 184…..
Weekly 186 184….
Monthly 186 …. 179

Daily gives the detail, weekly shows the progress without too much waiting, monthly can help keep your head in the game if we also keep the measurement in our mind.

We could of course weigh ins at other intervals, these are just a few examples to help us paint a picture.

Time and distance, used for many sporting endeavours, again we have looked into how the 10% rule plays out, how seeking continued time or distance can only happen for so long (or far).

Logging distance and (or) time provides great metrics as we progress, much like weight these can be effected by a number of other factors, such as hydration levels, tiredness, fuel and many others. We should look to the averages over the months rather than the day to day stats.

We can also add in extra notes here, perceived effort, when we log the time/distance put an effort score in (1-10, 10 being the most difficult) be honest if it was difficult note it.

Another is heart rate, if we are keeping to the same time or distance, was our average heart rate lower?

With all of the measuring we can sometimes lose clarity over the very basics:

You are exercising and that is goal one!

Somedays everything is golden, these are great days indeed, others may not be and those days, the ones where we still do it for me count many times more….

In order to measure data, we first have to have it and that involves just getting it done!

So do something, be proud of yourself for doing it – then see what the averages say in 2/4/6 months time!

Need help reading the data? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

How does planning out our intake help with consistency and what does it look like?

Planning food can be either a saving grace or a worst nightmare, can you add flexibility into planning intake? Does everything need to meticulously planned or can we flex up and down to suit?

Let’s start off with the obvious, make choices at the point of hunger usually leads to less than desirable choices.

So do we need to plan perfectly? – No

Do we need some guide rails? – Most probably

Over the years there have been lot’s of systems/diets created or adapted which have claimed to be the ultimate way of sustaining or losing weight. The main outcome of all is calorie control, whether that be from food source control, food selection or food timing.

Clearly food choice is a large part of this, having options is equally as important.

I like to think of it as a boulder, when moving a boulder you need to keep it moving, little movements make it easier to keep it going, stopping makes it much harder to start again!

So what does this have to do with planning intake?

It’s all about the small pushes, having some go to snacks prepared makes us more likely to keep the boulder rolling, it makes us consider the choice of food.

Having meals ready means we are saving time, those days that seem to get away from us? – what’s better than having something ready to eat in a few minutes rather than pressing deliveroo (other food delivery services are available!) on our phones.

Easy ways to start?

Cook two things at once, easy to pop something timed in the oven whilst preparing something else on the hob.

Make a larger portion and save some, cook multiple vegetables and split them down, slice a few extra carrots to have as a snack

Buy an extra piece of fruit to leave on your desk

We don’t have to cook every meal for everyday, just make sure we have good options available, like cooking from fresh everyday? – awesome, let’s prep it ready (as much as we can) the day before or in the morning so when we get back it becomes the default option.

Small steps in the right direction makes everything move forward, and keeps the boulder moving.

Need some more help with planning? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

What should our goals look like? – follow the crowd or look at the outcomes we want in ourselves and set goals around them?

Having relevant goals would seem like a no brainer, sometimes though, we find ourselves pondering what they should be. How do we find goals that are relevant and scaled for ourselves?

Think of a grey animal – elephant?

Think of how to make a positive impact for next week – slightly more taxing on the brain?

When exploring fitness, it can be the same, just it has many more levels to it.

I want to tone up, ok does that mean look like we did 10 years ago or add muscle to look athletic or something else?

I want to be able to run

I want to be able to lift weights

I want to be flexible

On the face of it, these are goals, our objective is to expand these and make the goal a relevant one and specific one at that.

I want to be able to run:

Distance, speed, activity type, duration and how long do we have to reach this are all of the questions that ideally we cover off.

Not having answers to these is absolutely fine! – we can fill in the gaps as we need to, or as we learn more about ourselves.

Let’s dissect this a little, and imagine that we can run but are not sure of how far or fast we can run at the moment. We will also rule out running around for fun (with peers/children etc) I cannot note just how good a goal this is though – just a little difficult to surmise in this context.

So would we like to enter a race or just compete against ourselves?

We want to compete against ourselves – cool

What’s the overall distance goal – 5K to start, this is a wise starting distance….

How are we going to measure ourselves – speed over the distance – sub 35 minutes

When would we like to complete it by – 4 months, good time frame

So in 4 months time I would like to be able to run a 5K on my route within 35 minutes.

If we were to be starting out, the ‘within timeframe’ can just be dropped, once we have completed it we can then re-visit and choose a time (if we wanted to stay at 5k) and reframe the goal. Likewise we could choose to use that time and predict (plenty of online calculators for running) a 10k time, as an example.

Goals will always evolve and we need to be flexible with other things happening in our lives, don’t be afraid to change the goal posts if needed, the goal only disappears if we stop working towards it!

Lifting weight, one of the simplest yet complicated goals….

Lifting more is something that always brings lot’s of opinions (even just lifting weights in general!),

5 reps at 100kg = 500kg

10 reps at 50kg = 500kg

Same overall weight, very different methodologies and outcomes.

Do we want to be able to continuously apply force through a muscle group or have one complete effort?

When we search for an outcome as our goal, it becomes a little easier to break it down and apply some logical steps.

Need help with setting goals? Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

Can we accomplish a sufficient workout in a shorter time frame?

Sometimes we really don’t have a spare hour (or more) to train, so what can we do in less? Is 20 minutes enough to workout, can we sufficiently work a muscle group (or more in that time), we can, if we are smart about order and rest.

There are lots of technical words thrown around for workouts and variations – let’s start with some of those.

Superset – 2 exercises performed back to back

Giant Set – 3 or more exercises performed back to back

Pretty straight forward, and what they say on the tin, why mention them? – they can be used to create time effective workouts, they serve a number of other purposes, but let’s stay on track.

Squats/Stiff legs
Biceps/Triceps
Chest/Back

These form the somewhat typical thoughts as the muscles are opposing, and they are completely valid.

We can also look to mix the muscle groups to allow different parts of the body to be worked out and increase the intensity for this muscle groups.

Hamstrings/Shoulders
Quads/Back
Abs/arms

Variation on a theme, perhaps, tactical advantage absolutely.

Giant sets can work in exactly the same way, just with an extra exercise or two added in.

Quick example time:

Squats, incline presses (superset) add a row movement to make it a giant set.

Kettlebell deadlifts, Shoulder press (superset) add an ab movement to make it a giant set

Within the above you could make the row and ab movement a super set also.

Moving back to the short workout theme, lets talk about how workouts look helicopter style

Time | Volume | Intensity

The longer we go, the more volume we complete so intensity must be reduced.

Higher intensity with long rest periods (time) means less volume

And the one we are looking for High volume and intensity means less time – bingo

So by using some superset or giant set movements, we can do more volume (the exercises are back to back) and keep the intensity up (working different body parts) for a shorter amount of time.

By undertaking a smaller number of sets of each super or giant set we can keep the overall weight up, or increase the intensity via holding or slowing the movement.

We can use the example above,

20 Squats (bodyweight, KB, DB, bar)
12 Incline presses (Plate, KB, DB or bar)
10 Row movement (Plate, KB, DB or bar)

60 seconds rest and repeat

15 Kettlebell deadlifts (or bar, trap bar, DB)
10 Shoulder press (per arm) (Plate, bar, KB, DB)
45-60 seconds Abs – loads to pick from!!

60 seconds rest and repeat

You could even do a set of the first followed by the second, then back to the start for another round, got more time, add a few extra rounds in.

This is a basic example, it does show that we can string exercises together to build a quick functional workout in a limit amount of time.

It’s good to have these as go to’s when we may be a little light on the time side.

Need a hand with optimising your workouts? Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

What’s the difference and how do we know which one works best for us?

Which is really better? Sometimes turning the looking glass around can help – which is best suited to my goal and my needs. Both offer valid outputs, and can be mixed to help overall performance.

From a pure science view, high intensity works the fast twitch muscles and steady state works the slow twitch.

Ironically this can be considered a simplification, but its science though?

It is, with a few exceptions we typically want to increase (or at least maintain) distance and do it faster.

Think park run, 10k’s, half marathons all the way up to ultra’s.

Even if we keep the distance the same, we still need to cover that distance whilst increasing speed. So our endurance must maintain with the speed increase.

So how do we turn the looking glass around?

By understanding what suits our goal, what do we need to complete our goal.

Running a long distance? – focus on endurance first, to complete we must first finish.

Running for a PR – focus on speed, we already cover the distance how do we create additional power to shorten the time taken.

Let’s get down into it, increasing distance, We’ve previous cover how the 10% rule can lead to some exceptional large numbers! gradually increasing our distance in small incremental steps will allow our pace to (largely) remain the same, the critical part here is small and incremental, if we have larger jumps we will have to sacrifice pace for distance, our bodies like time to adapt to change.

When is steady state good?

Keeping fit and healthy – we don’t always need to increase distance or speed, used as part of a workout, steady state offers a great way of getting our steps in (or revolutions for our two wheeled friends) helping keep our help healthly.

Distance building, when we are starting out or building up, steady state allows us to gently introduce distance loads to our bodies. I always like to add in here that everyone can benefit from this! – marathon (26.2) to Ultra (26.2+) same rules apply.

Different disciplines, steady state allows us to experience other modes, this could be rowing, swimming, cycle etc, this is because we aren’t going hammer down.

Feel the need for speed?

Crushing PR’s – if we are already covering the distance, adding speed is the next step, intervals and hills work well to increase speed over the course.

Improve oxygen consumption , increases your muscles ability to use oxygen, the more efficient they the better power delivery we can expect.

We can also mix the two to a certain extent, again we have to look at what is the primary focus, take working to a 10km run. We would want to get the km’s under our belt, we could also add some speed work in to help keep the pace up. It also offers a variation to our training from a distance point of view.

Typically we would like to mix a bit of both in, whether that’s weekly or bi-weekly.

Want to explore the best options for you? Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.

“mile 1 – 7:56” do metrics help push us forwards?

Sometimes the chime helps on other days we say “kindly be quite little built in speaker” understanding how to integrate them into our workouts and measuring over a sensible time frame are key to remaining friends with them.

We’ve covered a number of area’s with fitness trackers, such as how accurate are they etc. Let’s look at what they can help (or hinder us with.

Steps, 10k a day, awesome devices for this, many can be set to remind us to get a few steps in, whether that be hourly, after the last bout of them or at regular user defined intervals.

There can be the annoyance of the beep or vibrate when sat in a meeting, the car or at some point that we can’t immediately drop everything and jump up in to a step frenzy.

Overall, being nudged to get some steps in and get moving is a good thing, providing we have the reminders set to our liking and that we can allow the times we can’t get to it to pass until we can. If we can’t then perhaps turning these off would allow a little more freedom to explore and measure ourselves throughout the day.

Stairs/Flights climbed, another nice reminder to use the stairs at work or to get a little bit of extra movement in if we are working from home, same pro’s and cons as the step count.

For both of the above providing we can balance the reminders with our daily flow I personally think they are a good thing, after all a little nudge can help to get some extra done.

Exercise reminders, having a daily target for exercise can make sense, it can offer a handy breakdown, for example undertaking a 15 minute walk everyday. Often the more you hit those goals the more the device wants you to do. Unfortunately progress just ins’t that linear, neither is our available time to exercise!

The other side to this when we workout say 3 times a week, completion of the goals aren’t as easy on the ‘off’ or rest days, Sure we could go for a walk or do some active recovery but this doesn’t always fit and can again lead to the upward creep of the daily goal.

Sounds like I’m being negative, I actually really like wearables, I have one and its homed in to my activity schedule, the key is to understand how they are going to drive behaviour and help with healthly habit forming, rather than detract from the awesome progress of getting ourselves moving.

Last one, then I’ll leave you in peace….

The announcements, there are many:

You are x hours away from your stand goal
Last mile 7:34
Move ring closed

And any others we care to remember, they can be great, highlight our progress and spur us on to finish the days goals. A quick observation on mile/km timers, the are matter of fact, if the previous mile was slightly downhill, and the next is slightly up hill our split times will vary!

Now to balance this out, I am a massive fan of heart rate zone training, and they do this brilliantly, because this is the topography is irrelevant to the read out it’s giving, naturally our heart will be higher when we go up hill, however the device isn’t worried about up or down purely where your heart rate is at.

I always use the example of Dave Scott conditioning himself to 155bpm and dropping almost three minutes off his average min/mile time. In his book he states he had to walk up hills on his training runs to stay in zone.

How do we finish this up?

Do they help or hinder, on balance they are an impressive tool, can offer may metrics to choose from and allow us to build good habits – provided we take the time to understand what goals we want to achieve and how to use the device to match this.

Not sure what you should (or shouldn’t) be measuring? – Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.