Yet another thing to blame your parents for!

I know it’s tough but for a moment do a John Lennon, and by ‘do a John Lennon’ I don’t mean sod off to India and study transcendental meditation, I mean imagine. Imagine a just and fair world where each of us are born equal with the exact same potential for achieving whatever we wanted to. In this just and fair world the only barrier to us achieving success would be the amount of hard work we were prepared to put in.

The trouble is we don’t live in a such a world. It would be great if we could all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger provided we trained hard enough but we can’t and there’s no point pretending we can. Some people are simply high responders to exercise, some are not.

It comes as no coincidence that myself and my two brothers barely need to train at all before appearing noticeably more muscular and athletic. And who do we have to thank for this? A large amount of gratitude must go to our parents. Old pictures of my dad show he had biceps that most bodybuilders would die for despite him never actually going to the gym, and to this very day many people still marvel at the strength my mum displays when helping us out with the odd DIY construction project.

My brothers and I were obviously very lucky to have inherited those strong genes from our parents, but some people are not so lucky…  

In one study which looked at muscle growth in people following the exact same resistance training programme, the high responders increased their muscle size by 50% with some of the low responders increasing their muscle size by a depressing 0%.

This type of response isn’t just limited to muscle growth. A study of 1000 people looking into the effects of training on stamina and endurance found that roughly the top 10% of the participants were super responders and made dramatic improvements, whereas the bottom 10% were low responders who made very little improvement at all (with the remaining 80% of people falling somewhere between the two extremes).

Not only does genetics play a large role in determining how much muscle you can build or how long and far you can run for, it also (amongst other things) plays a role in regulating how much fat you have, and where about on the body you store it.  

Now before you hold up the white flag and surrender on your plans of getting fitter because you think your parents dealt you a bad gene-hand, bear this in mind, genetics do not account for 100% of a person’s physique, there are a number of other factors involved which you can control and just because your body maybe genetically predisposed to store more body fat, it is not an excuse to deliberately let it do so. It just means you have to work harder than other people to overcome that problem, yet at the same time remain realistic about the limitations that our bodies impose.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

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    matt@mlrpt.co.uk                 www.mlrpt.co.uk                          07939316401 www.twitter.com/mlrpt      www.facebook.com/mlrpt        www.twitter.com/mlrpt

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Perfection is poison to your diet success

Google the term ‘diet’ and ‘weight loss’ and page after page after page appears extolling the virtues of diet after diet, most of which are downright ridiculous (as are the credentials of most of their proponents for that matter). Anyway, regardless of which diet you follow, in my experience one of the major reasons why they fail is because people expect perfection. That is, when they are on a diet, they are ON a diet and they will not deviate from that righteous path. To do so would be regarded as abject failure.

Now this approach is great when everything is rosy and you feel super motivated but what happens when you’ve had a bad day and your mood is lower than a snakes’ belly? And your cravings for that chocolate digestive are higher than Pete Doherty on a Saturday night? Simple, you reach for that chocolate-topped biccy and munch through it with gusto, and do you stop at just the one? Of course not, just like Taylor Swift and her celebrity boyfriends, you go for another and then another and then another. By this point you’re so upset and despondent with yourself that you are now officially OFF of your diet and you end up eating the whole blimmin’ pack of biscuits.

The following morning you wake up with more regrets than a vertigo sufferer who’s just go a job on the waltzer, and because you’re now no longer ON a diet you spend the day eating rubbish. A day turns into a week and a week soon becomes a month. Before you know it, you’re back at square one with regards to weight loss and that’s if you’re lucky. Often, if you’ve followed a fad diet you’re worse off than you were to start with because you’ve ended up losing a lot of muscle mass when trying to shift the fat.

If you adopt this attitude, that anything less than absolute perfection is a failure, unfortunately, just like Danny DeVito entering a high jump competition, you’re pretty much doomed from the start. The trouble with dieting, as with most things, is that life gets in the way.

So what is the antidote to this perfection poison?

It is something called the 80/20 principle, which basically states that if you follow your diet for 80% of the time, the other 20% doesn’t really matter too much, not unless you make it an issue of course. So don’t strive to be perfect all of the time, just most of the time. Think of dieting as learning to ride a bike – you have to expect to fall off now and again!

Another way is not demonising certain foods or food groups. For example, if biscuits weren’t regarded as sinful, perhaps they wouldn’t be the catalyst for binge eating the whole pack. But that’s not to say that biscuits are ‘good for you’, of course an apple would be a better option, but then again eating shed loads of them would have their down sides! Perhaps renowned songstress Cheryl (formerly Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, formerly Cheryl Cole, formerly Cheryl Tweedy) summed it up perfectly in her hit song ‘Fight for this Love’ when she sang ‘Too much of anything can make you sick’. As my old nan would say ‘a little bit of everything does you good’.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

TO BOOK YOUR FREE PERSONAL TRAINING SESSION, OR TO BOOK A PLACE AT MY BOOT CAMP CLASS, PLEASE DON’T HESITATE TO GET IN TOUCH.

    matt@mlrpt.co.uk                 www.mlrpt.co.uk                          07939316401 www.twitter.com/mlrpt      www.facebook.com/mlrpt        www.twitter.com/mlrpt

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