Author Archives: Chris

Meet Dan…

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Life has many good feelings. And one is when you help generate interest in others for something that you are passionate about.

Chris meets Dan at BodyPower 2014

Chris meets Dan at BodyPower 2014

This has just happened to me. I met a young guy at a trade show recently and somehow infected him with my enthusiasm both for fitness generally, and more specifically for standing on stage in a Fitness Modelling competition. I’ve been committed to a fitness-focussed life for six years now, and having collected a few championship wins on the way, I know how great a lifestyle this is.

The chap in question – Dan Wynes – was already keen on fitness. Indeed, before I met him he had developed an interest in the teachings, approaches and training strategies of fitness professional Rob Riches. Dan and I have that in common, as Rob was my original personal trainer and is a guy for whom I continue to have massive respect.

A 15-minute chat with me bolstered Dan’s enthusiasm levels. So much so that he decided at the end of our conversation to committing to step up his fitness activities substantially and progressing sufficiently over the next six months and that he would enter his first Fitness Model contest organised by Pure Elite in November. Dan asked me to help in whatever ways I can, and requested that I mentor him right up to the contest date.

Well, I’ve never been a mentor before, indeed I had to check in the dictionary exactly what was involved. However, the combination of me knowing just a bit about the subject, my keenness to pass this knowledge on, and Dan’s desire to learn and put this information into practice, seems to be the perfect recipe for mentoring success. So I accepted, and as a result I will be doing what I can to help him get into the best shape of his life so far. I say ‘so far’, because at age 21 he has many more ‘best shapes’ to come.

The term ‘journey’ is over-used on the fitness world, but I think it’s appropriate for Dan as he plans for the time up to his first contest. I am relishing being his guide for the trip – and I rather suspect that I will learn much from him too as we work together and he heads towards that appointment with the stage.

I am very honoured to be asked, and I will endeavour to repay the trust and confidence Dan has placed in me. I hope Dan finds me a good mentor – but if he slackens at all (which he won’t) he will find me morphing into a tor-mentor instead!

Dan will be blogging his own progress over those months, and I invite you to read and subscribe to his blog on www.DanWynesFitness.wordpress.com – and we’ll both let you know how we get on!

TV Times

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The TV documentary about me – called ‘Fat To Fit at Fifty’ – is now being shown by the Community Channel.  It tells my fitness transformation story and how I’m helping others down the same road.

There’s contributions from some of my Personal Training clients, magazine editors, and fitness professional Rob Riches – who is my own inspiration and the guy who introduced me to fitness in the first place.  There’s also views from top local PT Russell Lee, celebrity fitness photographer Simon Howard, and my workout buddy, fitness model Alex Hughes.

It is being shown at the following times on these channel numbers:

Monday 19 May – 11AM
Tuesday 20 May – 5AM

The Community Channel is on Sky 539, Virgin Media 233, Freeview 63 and Freeview-HD 109.

I hope you get the chance to watch!

A fast 12

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In my blogs, I try to pass on various tips that either increase fitness levels, reduce fatness levels or – ideally – a bit of both.  Sometimes these can be a bit complicated (especially when I find myself in the wonderful world of macronutrients ratios and timing), so this week I’ve taken a much more simple approach.

A key way to get the body burning more bodyfat as fuel is to give it no alternative – but without activating the State of Alert or Starvation response.  And the best and easiest way to do this is to maximise what is already the body’s longest fat-burning period, which is overnight, starting from a few hours after your last meal.

The easiest trick I know for this, is to have a 12 hour period every day (overnight) without eating.  So, if your last consumption of food or drink was at 9pm, don’t have anything else until 9am.  If you’re out late and eating or drinking until 11pm, then tomorrow’s breakfast is at 11am.   It’s that simple.

The body will use the fuel from the carbs in your last evening’s meal or drinks for the first part of overnight, then will turn to it’s built-in fuel reserve for the next few hours – until you ingest some food or drink again.  That built-in fuel reserve is your body fat.  So prolonging this second period significantly helps in making the body turn to its fat reserves for fuel.

Don’t be tempted to grow the fasting period to beyond 12 hours, as this can have the opposite effect – a long fast period can put the body into what is known as the State of Alert and elicits the Starvation response – with the body going all unwell on you and clinging on to bodyfat, as it thinks times have gone really tough and no food is coming for goodness-knows how long.   But 12 hours as a fast is fine, and to do it well, you should do this 12 hour gap every day.

To make this more effective, try to have some exercise in the morning before the end of the 12 hours.  Ideally light to moderate cardio – nothing too strenuous that puts you out of breath.  I find 40 minutes on a cross trainer at level 12 or 30 minutes slow jogging does the trick for me.

And if you want another tip, have some black coffee before that exercise session – this opens up the fat cells and encourages the release of fat to the bloodstream for use as fuel. By the way, black coffee is allowed in the 12-hour non-eat period as it has no calories.  Black tea and water are the same, allowed as they have no calories.  So the idea is not really avoiding meal or food in that time, it’s keeping clear of anything with calories.

Of course, what you eat and drink in the other 12 hours of each day is very important too – but outside the scope of this week’s blog.  Talking about that would get me started on macronutrients ratios again, and I’m giving that subject a miss today. So for a simple rule, that really helps in reducing fatness levels, get into that everyday 12 hour fast, quick!

The top question

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Chris at Zone Gym 04I’ve heard many times that it’s impossible to add muscle and burn fat at the same time.  But is this correct?

While I agree this is true for any one instant of time (the body can’t do both at exactly the same micro-second), I don’t think its true over a realistic period – such as a month.  In the past month, I’ve been able to add a little muscle and lose fat through my nutritional and training strategies, heading up to my World Championship bid a couple of weeks ago.  Its a combination of nutrition and exercise, so here are my top 10  recommendations to achieve that magic combo – the key things I did in the two months leading up to the contest:

On the nutrition side:

1. Low calories than most but high protein within it (target 40% of calories from protein)
2. Minimal sugar and other fast carbs
3. Lots of green veg to go with the protein sources of meat, fish and eggs plus some whey shakes to up the protein
4. Low saturated fats
5. As much natural food as possible – avoid processed

On the exercise front:

1. Cardio every morning pre-breakfast but post-black coffee or fat-burner
2. Vary the cardio to be either low-moderate resistance on some days, high/low intensity intervals on the other
3. Spend ten minutes on abs straight after the cardio
4. Daily afternoon resistance training, ideally five days per week, on a bodypart-split basis – ensuring the same bodypart isn’t trained on consecutive days
5. Ensure there’s two days off per week from resistance training – you can do the cardio and abs on those days of course

If you want to go the extra mile, you may want to think about supplementation – I used BCAA’s, Creatine and a morning fat-burner (Ripped) from True Performance Nutrition, the company for whom I am an Ambassador.  That level of detail may not be for everyone, but this next point is – remember that consistency is important; you won’t be able to stick to all of those 10 points every day – but the more days you do, the better and more likely you are to succeed.

Does it work?  I’ve measured the results on myself measured through reducing body-fat percentage measured by my scales, and increasing weights numbers in the gym.  To me, getting results on both of these over two month counts as doing both at the same time, so yes – I’d say it can be done!

Have a great, fat-losing, muscle-building weekend!

A double World Championship – and another retirement!

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MPW1402I came first in both the Muscle Model and Fitness Model categories, both for the over 50 age group of course!  It was an amazing experience, a draining day with some heavy preparation involved on both training and nutrition fronts over the previous 6 weeks, but well worth it when the results were announced at 10pm.

I’ve decided to ‘retire at the top’ and don’t plan on competing again – I have to say that ‘never’ is a big word, but I can’t see me changing my mind at this point.  I’ve had a great few years on stage, made some great friends doing it, and have accumulated a few British Championship and runner-up World trophies.  But now I have the double World Championship – with the biggest trophies ever! – I am happy to move on from posing competitions.

I’ll still be involved in fitness – in more and bigger ways than before, in fact – but the trophy cabinet is now full.  Many thanks to Angie Weston , Audrey Kaipio and Matt Marsh, plus everyone else I’ve met both backstage and onstage at Miami Pro, all of whom I hope to meet again in the gym someday!

Lower Slower

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My blog this week looks at something I see taking place every day in the gym (yes, I do go every day at the moment). It’s a bad habit which people slip into, and I hope I can correct a few with these sentences.

It’s to do with the speed of performing any exercise. This really relates to any resistance exercise, whether it’s with dumbbells, barbell, cable machine, fixed-path machine, Smith machine or anything I’ve forgotten. Oh yes, body weight too.

It’s the principle of ‘lower slower’, a term I came up with to describe that the lowering phase should be executed more slowly than the lifting phase. Every resistance exercise has a lifting phase – technically called the concentric phase – and this is when you are pushing the weight up – such as standing up in a squat, pressing the bar in a bench press, sitting upwards in a floor crunch or curling the dumbbell towards you in bicep curl. This phase can be seen as moving the weight in the opposite direction that gravity wants to move it, and isn’t the bit I’m talking about, so I’ll move on.

The other phase is the gravity resisting phase, what happens as the weight lowers. I see many people struggle on the lifting phase, then let gravity take the weight downwards again, without any work for the muscle in that second stage. In fact, this phase – if timed correctly – is more beneficial for strength and muscle building than the lifting phase. And the correct timing I’m referring to is for it to be slower than the lifting phase – at least twice as long per rep.

The lowering phase is called the eccentric phase, technically, which is a term I hate as it sounds like it’s for weirdos only. I’ve also seen it referred to as the ‘anti-grav’ phase, which is nicely Star Trek I guess, but does get a few raised eyebrows. And not just from Mr Spock. So I tend to stick with the term ‘lowering phase’ – easily identifiable as the opposite of the lifting phase.

In some exercises, the lowering phase needs to be thought about, as it may be slightly counterintuitive. For example, the lowering phase of a lat pull down is as the bar goes up – it’s the weight stack that is lowering at that time. Similarly, on a tricep push down on a cable machine – the weight stack lowers as the hands go upwards, and it’s this lowering of the weights that makes that the lowering phase.

By lowering quickly, and letting gravity do all or most of the the work for you, you are missing out on most of the benefit from performing the rep in the first place, as I said before. But worse may be to come – how does a rapid lowering phase usually end? Maybe with a slam into the ground or bang on the weight stack of a machine, or perhaps a sudden jolt on your body’s anatomy as you halt the rapid movement pretty violently. The first offers no benefit to the body, the second is potentially seriously injurious.

The number one offending exercise is probably the deadlift. I’ve seen some people really struggle to lift the bar to back-straIght position, then just drop the thing. Apart from the effect that has on the other gym users (and the structure of the building), they are missing out on so much of the benefit they are aiming for. Much better to use less weight, lift as before, then lower slower to within a nanoprobe’s distance of the floor, then commence the next rep.

So, for the next few times you are undertaking a resistance exercise, think of the lowering phase, and how you can do that more slowly. Lower slower, my friends. Have a great weekend, live long, and prosper.

Getting the approach right

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For this week’s blog, I thought I’d share an email I received earlier this week from a chap called Kevin and my response.  It’s about medical suitability for exercise, and some overall guidelines on nutrition and activity for someone of 50+.  It’s really about getting the approach right in this fitness-up, fatness-down personal project.

I’m blogging this as I hope my comments will be appropriate for a wider audience, perhaps including your good self…

Any questions or comments welcome, as always, on Chris@FitnessOverFifty.co.uk

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Kevin wrote:

Hi – I’m 52 and l used to smoke heavily but quit 6 years ago. After that l put weight on (4 stone) which was due to a combination of beer, junk food and not doing anything to burn off calories. My job is not physical either. I am now dieting and eating a healthier diet of meat fish veg and salad. I have lost a stone in the past month but l want to lose more and get fit. This is not a fad/new years resolution but a serious attempt to change my lifestyle. The main worry is am l eating enough and will exercising now at my age be dangerous, do l need to take medical advice?

Regards

Kevin

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My response:

Hi Kevin

Many thanks for getting in touch.

If you’ve any doubts about your suitability for exercise, you would always be wise to seek medical advice.  Any personal trainer – such as me – would ask you to sign an industry-standard medical declaration in advance, and that declaration asks you to self-assess your suitability, and asks you to seek your doctor if you’ve any doubt.  In addition, any decent personal trainer will discuss your response to this questionnaire, even if it is perfect (actually, especially it is perfect) to ensure that the trainer is happy with the responses given.  There will once again be the advice given that even though the form indicates nothing of alarm, medical clearance should be sought if there is any concern or doubt.

However, if your underlying health is good, you have no medical conditions, and your blood pressure is in the normal range, then it’s likely that you’ll be fit for exercise.  But start slowly and build up – you aren’t in your twenties any more, and the body doesn’t take as well to adaption to and reaction to stresses at your (and my age) than it does for those half our years and less.  Take any ache seriously and take a day off exercising where it hurts.  I’m a big believer in listening to your body, a skill we all have but sometimes don’t use   But, just to confirm, once again, see the doctor if you’ve any doubts.

It sounds like you have adopted a much healthier diet, which is great, and the foods you mention are indeed the right way to go.  My nutrition advice, in one sentence, is to cut the calories overall, and within that, cut the sugar, other ‘fast’ carbs and saturated fats the most, and fill in some of those calories eliminated by upping the protein.  Beyond that sentence, maybe add some extra protein in the shape of a protein shake.  Meat or fish, both with loads of green veg and/or salad is a winning combination for dinner.

On the exercise front, combining your new diet with moderate cardio exercise is good for losing fat.  And the ideal time to do cardio is first thing in the morning, pre-breakfast, therefore continuing the body’s overnight fat-burning period.  If you do this, some black coffee or a fat burner (I can recommend one) would be ideal to take beforehand, but don’t have anything with calories (such as milk or sugar) prior to the cardio, and of course keep hydrated. Come back to a good breakfast with protein as well as carbs after.

Make sure you are doing some resistance training too (weights or weight-simulating machines) to add back some of the muscle that you will probably lose with the diet and as part of the cardio.  This is best later on in the day, and try to do this at least two or three days per week. If you only do this once or twice per week, do exercises that cover the main muscle groups only across the whole body (chest, back, quads, hamstrings), ideally with compound (multi-joint movement) exercises.  If you can do three or more sessions a week, then something more complex on a body-split basis is appropriate, and you can probably add in dedicated biceps, triceps, shoulders and calf work as well as abs training to those bigger muscle groups, and add some isolation training to the compound moves.

There’s a lot more on all these aspects on my web site – which I encourage you to look at.

Finally, if you’d like something more personally tailored to your needs, I offer a one-to-one Skype consultancy session that may help, or we could meet in Central London for an hour, or longer if you want have a Personal Training or in-gym Fitness Consultancy session.

I hope this is of help to you, please let me know how you get on or if I can help further.

Chris

I want to tell you a story…

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Well, its not any story, its actually my story.

I’ve created a article for a Los Angeles-based web site called MyFitTribe, as they were keen to tell the world about an obscure 57 year old Englishman that they know.

Depending on how well you know me, and how many of those nearly three-score years  I’ve spent in your company, you may already know some of the info in the article.  Whether its all new or not, I hope its of interest.

My thanks, of course, to MyFItTribe for asking me to do this.

Enjoy the article, any questions or comments as always, please, to Chris@FitnessOverFifty.co.uk

I’ll be back with more blogging next Friday (probably…).  And, as usual, have a healthy and fit sunny weekend!

Chris

Its the final countdown…

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My blogs usually take the form of advice or suggestions, based on something I’ve discovered, or answering a question, or another form which I believe is of general interest.  It’s not usually about me, but this one is an exception, its all about me – but I still hope its of interest to others.
The reason for this self-centredness is that its just four weeks to go until my World Championships Fitness Model appearance on stage at the Miami Pro.  As a result, training and nutrition are both stepped a notch from this week.  I came 2nd in my age group in the same World Championship contest last year, and – guess what – I’d like to do one better in 2014!
So here are the key things I’m changing to my fitness routine.  And if you’re looking to step up your performance for a big event too, then maybe this could be of value to you.
Firstly, on exercise.  yes, morning aerobic system exercise every day, if possible.
And afternoon/evening resistance training is now ideally 7 days a week from now on, rather than the 5 days up to this point.  Cycling around Arms, Back, Chest, Delts and Elevators, then back to Arms again.  Elevators?  My word for ‘Legs’ in my alphabet-obsessed brain.
When is a weights rest day, I hear you say?  None are actually scheduled as such: but the upper body gets a rest when I do Elevators!  And the legs get a rest when I do an A-D bodypart.
On the nutrition side, trying to keep the sugars and fast carbs to twice a day – after training and at breakfast.  Overall calories are down, but within that, protein and unsaturated fats are up – can’t go wrong with grilled meat from the table-top grill and green veg!  I’ve not swung totally pro-saturated fats like many have in the fitness field – I still think they make you fat, so I keep off them (as I do sugar) but not to the extent it harms the protein input.
I knew you’d ask about beer and wine – well red wine is good for a couple of glasses a week, and I won’t be restricting that.  Beer is tough, I’ll cut it down some, but an exception is always made if it is of truly superb quality or exceptionally rare… – and combined with a social occasion that really merits it.
As I said, four weeks to go, and bodyfat to come down from 12% to 9% if I’m going to do well on stage on April 6th.  I hope the above steps will all contribute to that.  Wish me well for the final run-in…

The story of Anne and Eric

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It’s Valentine’s Day as I write this, so I thought I would tell you about two good friends of mine, Anne and Eric. Very much in love with each other, they’ve also been just a little bit too much in love with fattening foods over recent years.

Five months ago, they jointly decided to do something about this. 50 year old Eric, at 5 feet 10 inches, weighed in at 260lb (118kg), and had just received a health warning from his doctor. The medic had noticed increasing levels of bodyfat in Eric over the years, and had just seen the LDL cholesterol, blood sugar and triglyceride numbers all outside the recommended levels. Blood sugar indications had put Eric as pre-diabetic.

Anne had recieved no such warning, but at 203lb (92kg) for her 51-year, 5 feet 9 inch frame, she also knew that she had some weight to lose. By both having the same weight loss objectives, and following similar programmes, they knew they could be mutually supportive and increase their chances of success.

So they took on the services of a dietician, and followed the prescribed diet carefully for those five months. Weekly meetings with the dietician ensured they continues to progress, and as Eric now says, they didn’t want to let the dietician down as well as themselves by having unsuccessful weeks.

Their diets were pretty extreme. In summary, they eliminated sugar and other simple carbs from their diets, and kept fats to a low level too. Protein was kept relatively high – but only high relative to the levels of carbs and fats, not high in absolute terms.

The key principle behind the diet uses a body process called ketosis, and here’s a simplified version of the theory. The body employs energy from three reserves created from the food eaten: carbohydrate – stored in the form of glycogen – protein and fats. In activity, first the body uses its glycogen reserves as fuel. Once this supply is exhausted, It turns to using fat and some protein as the fuel source following on from the depleted glycogen. Looked at another way, once there’s no fuel in the normal tank, the body turns to the backup full source to keep the engine running.

If simple carbs, sugar, are consumed again, then all fat burning stops – because you’ve put fuel back in the glycogen tank, and the emergency back-up supply (mainly bodyfat) is no longer needed. This state of depleted glycogen reserves, in order to compel the body into consuming its fat and some protein reserve to provide calories, is known as ketosis.

The majority of people rarely enter this ketogenic state – they eat sufficient simple carbs and sugar so that the body doesn’t need to turn to the fat reserve for fuel. In fact, they usually eat more than sufficient sugar and simple carbs so that their weight increases.

Following ketogenic diets requires a big change in mind-set. You have to start thinking of ketosis not as being the emergency, carb-depleted, short-term back-up plan, but as being the regular and normal state of bodily function. This wouldn’t have been a huge shift for the humans of between 10,000 and 200,000 years ago (who hadn’t discovered sugar), but it is for those of today. This idea that ketosis is the correct state to be in, rather than an emergency back-up, is – as I said – a massive mind-shift.

Away from the glance at science, and back to my chums Anne and Eric. Their prescribed ketogenic diets provided 800 calories per day on average. This was a protein-supplement based breakfast, a small protein bar at mid-morning, then a lunch consisting of green salad items, and a single portion of grilled meat or fish, with green vegetables, for dinner. Most green veg and salad items are high in nutrients, low in calories and zero in sugar – so they could be consumed in big quantities on this diet, including the substantial 7 ounces of lettuce they each had for lunch.

It may not sound wonderful, but it did the trick for them. He is down to 180lb (82kg), and Anne is 158lb (72kg) – a substantial weight loss which has pleased Eric’s doctor and has moved all Eric’s parameters back to the normal zone. Both are massively happy with the results, Eric has now reached his target weight and Anne wants to lose a further 13lb to take her to 145lb (66kg).

And they achieved this without exercise. That’s right, Anne and Eric didn’t do any exercise during the last five months. They discussed it with their dietician, who said any exercise beyond the normal activities in daily living was not part of the plan. Anne even cut down the activity of her twice weekly spinning session, in order to comply. The reason for this given by the dietician is that the low caloric input didn’t allow them enough energy for exercise, so therefore they shouldn’t do any.

What do I think? Well, in a perfect world, I would have made some changes. Both Eric and Anne say they have lost strength on this diet, which doesn’t surprise me – for they have lost weight (being fat and muscle), rather than fat alone. If I’d been advising, I’d have added some exercise, a daily session of light cardio and a progressive weight training programme to add back at least some part of the muscle lost, just a few sets of the key compound weight movements with regular, incremental increases in resistance based in improving performance. To fuel this, I would have upped the calories by adding more protein and introducing good fats, increasing the daily calorific value to probably somewhere around double the amount they consumed, changing the exact amounts over the months depending on progress, and with perhaps more food for Eric than Anne.

Away from my thoughts, and back to reality. Eric and Anne are now committed to maintaining their new slimline selves for the future. Eric is happy at a weight of 180lb, and Anne wants to lose a further 13lb to take her down to 145lb. And seeing the results first hand, I’m not going to criticise Anne and Eric’s resolve, commitment and health gains. They’ve done massively well. And, for this Valentine’s Day, they have just as much love for each other as before but less body mass on each of them, resulting in more love per cubic inch, and that has to be a good thing – as well as a corny way to end this week’s blog.

Have a loving, healthy and fit Valentine’s weekend!