TThe following article is an excerpt from my newsletter: Well enough with Harry Bullmore. To get my latest thoughts on fitness and wellbeing pop your email address into the box above to get the newsletter straight to your inbox.
This week, I’m here to tell you the goal of reducing exercise. Most of you, anyway.
This may seem like strange advice from a fitness writer, but bear with me – there is method to the madness.
“Trying to throw the kitchen sink at training often doesn’t work or create the best results,” top trainer Paddy James recently told me. “To get results, whether it’s building muscle, getting stronger or healthier, the most important thing is to find it [an exercise plan] we can be consistent. ”
A few hours of weekly exercise may not fit this criteria. If you’ve got work stress, a busy social life, or kids to take care of, an unmanageable workout plan can cause you to throw in the towel after a week or two.
Whereas a more enjoyable program of two or three time-savvy sessions each week will bring greater precision and offer more fitness in the long run.
That’s the theme of this week’s newsletter: exercise for life, rather than live for sport.
As I wrote in this recent post: “Most of us are not Olympians – for us, fitness is not about being optimal or puritanical in our approach.
“It’s simply about doing what we can, when we can, while balancing this with an enjoyable life. The goal? To gradually build a capable and resilient body that we enjoy living.”
And for most people, this is a smaller commitment than you might think.
Paddy prescribes two 45-minute sessions of full-body strength training each week. He advises prioritizing compounds or multi-muscle exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows and presses for added efficiency, trying to work the main muscles (chest, back, shoulders, quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes) in each session, and aiming to collect six to ten sets of work per muscle during the week.
Each exercise must be done with good technique, and each set must feel challenging, brought to the point where your movement involuntarily slowing down as your muscles tire.
And there it is: what Paddy calls the “minimum effective dose” for building a stronger and more competent body. There is an example of a four-movement exercise that demonstrates this approach in the feature linked here.
If you can outline this with a reasonable amount of daily movement – walking, swimming, cycling or whatever you like – you will have a fairly comprehensive fitness plan. If you can add in an occasional Pilates class or something similar for a little more varied movement (twists, turns, etc.) then you get an A+ from me.
In this topic, the second piece we reviewed has a varied movement routine from experienced physiotherapist Alex Morrell, who worked with several professional sports teams before setting up Move Physiotherapy.
The goal is to ease and prevent back pain by establishing mobility through the spine and teaching the body to move as one strong and cohesive unit.
My goal with this newsletter, and all my posts, is to try and provide information that is accessible, actionable and helpful to people. Given that low back pain affects more than 80 per cent of people in the UK at some point in their lives, according to the NHS, this felt like a good topic to cover.
Morrell’s tips for combating back pain press this brief. He recommends managing our stress levels through breathing work (breathing through the nose, five seconds in, five seconds out, for ten rounds), strengthening the surrounding muscles, and monitoring lifestyle factors that can contribute to our discomfort: poor sleep, stress, diet.
I enjoyed this insight in particular: “People forget the importance of nutrition, hydration, sleep and other lifestyle factors that are taken for granted – they underpin everything,” says Morrell.
“If you think about an athlete, the coach will try to optimize everything they do for better performance and recovery. Getting out of pain is a process of improving performance.”
And this weekend, I spoke to Professor Sarah Berry, associate professor at King’s College London and chief scientist at ZOE.
As a slight tangent, I recently looked to lose a little fat, but instead of overhauling my diet, I focused on changing the things I regularly do – having one slice of toast instead of two with my scrambled eggs, for example. In this way, without weighing food or counting carefully, I can be quite sure that I have slightly reduced my calorie intake.
Professor Berry’s advice is useful in achieving this. “On average we get 25 percent of our energy from snacks, so opting for healthy snacks can be a great simple way to improve our health,” he said.
“Our research has shown that swapping typical British snacks for almonds can reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease by an estimated 30 percent,” he said.
“Almonds are a good source of fiber, unsaturated fats, vitamin E, magnesium and B vitamins, and they are very beneficial for your long-term health and well-being.
“We found that people who reported higher almond intake reported lower levels of anxiety, and were less likely to report neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia or Parkinson’s.”
So, if you can swap out your daily sweet treat for a handful of almonds, or simply subsidize some of the nuts, the benefits are likely to pile up over time.
Now, to our conclusion. The body is brilliantly adaptable, and if you make changes in your life, it will change accordingly. But the changes you need to make to see results are rarely as dramatic as you might think.
For exercise, diet and so on, find a health-promoting and (if possible) delicious routine you can stick to for the long haul. Then learn over time and make subtle adjustments to fit your goals and lifestyle.
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