FITNESS LESSONS FROM A STAG DO!

Recently I was invited to friend’s stag do – a weekend away in Bournemouth, owing to the soon to be groom being such an erudite, debonair young man, he had many, many friends clambering to be part of the festivities (either that or they just fancied a weekend away on the lash).

Either way this led to a bit of dilemma for the best man for he was a stressed control freak and wanted to plan everything down to the most minor detail. This became glaringly apparent when making travel arrangements - he wanted to hire a coach so that everyone could travel together.

However, this was never going to happen, some were of course happy to travel by coach but some wanted to go by train and others wanted to drive.

This caused the best man to worry like an Olympic sprinter with the drug testers at the door, for he wanted everyone to arrive at our destination all together at the same time.

Fast-forward to the actual stag do itself and oddly enough despite the best man’s endless worrying and attempted interfering with everyone else’s travel plans, every single person arrived at our destination at more or less at the same time (give or take half an hour) whatever mode of transport they took.

The obligatory strip bar (it is a stag do after all)
Later that evening as the rest of the stag-do were enjoying the adult art provided by the extremely friendly ladies in the strip bar, I of course opted to wait outside (I had to put that in just in case my wife reads this) it dawned on me that I could draw parallels with the best man’s travel saga and people trying to reach their fitness goals, in that there are multiple paths to the same destination.

Just as some of the lads in the stag party preferred taking the train rather than the coach, some people prefer high intensity interval training (HIIT) to low intensity, long distance training.

Likewise, just as some of the gentleman chose to travel by car rather than coach, some people enjoy doing one set of as many repetitions as possible when weight training as opposed to doing multiple sets.

Anyway the examples are endless and I think you get my drift.

Tabata Training

There are numerous studies out there which back up one form of training over another and the vogue method of training at the moment seems to be Tabata which is great if you enjoy working really, really hard, however if you don’t and you prefer perhaps a more sedate form of exercise this is obviously not for you as you are not likely to do it and therefore not reap any of its benefits.

I of course have my preferred methods of training which work for me, the trick is to find which method works for you.

Sir Steve Redgrave

Perhaps Sir Steve Redgrave (British Olympic rowing legend) puts is best with his take on training. When discussing the huge success he enjoyed using different training regimes employed for each of his Olympic gold medals (which included HIIT, low intensity high mileage training, training with weights, not training with weights) he said “It probably doesn’t matter a great deal about how we train, we just need to do a lot of it and with plenty of variety”.

For help finding your perfect training programme and to book a free trial session, or of course just to find out what the hell Tabata actually is (don’t worry, once you know the whole truth about it you won’t be that impressed), please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

     matt@mlrpt.co.uk                               www.mlrpt.co.uk                              07939316401

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