Fitness and Nutrition Training Gym - Ladbroke Grove London
"So yes, at the end of the six weeks, I did get what I wanted. I got into my skinniest jeans, could see my jaw line for the first time in years and dropped from a size 14 to a size 12".
It seems that exercising at W10 not only gets you in shape, it also makes you a better person….. not sure that is true of us all!
Check out our mention in todays Daily Mail online>>
Ps. Great reference to our Jeans Challenge also.
It's a pretty safe bet that Sly was running those steps in December!
We’re now only two sleeps until we’re into December and all of the fun and excitement (and for some, the stress!) that the festive season brings with it.
What this means for most of us is that we’ve got about two, maybe three, productive weeks left in us before we down tools, kick back and enjoy some well earned down time. Fair enough, we’ll be doing similar. (We’re human, and we think we’ve earned it too!).
But here’s the thing. You know you’re going to indulge at some point over the next few weeks, multiple times no doubt. Christmas parties, client lunches, after works drinks, and of course what it’s all about Christmas and New Years celebrations. (And no, you won’t possibly be able to ‘get out of’ any of it!)
So, it stands to reason that your fitness program can relax for a few weeks whilst you kick-back. And for those with next years resolutions already in the bag, you can sit back, tucking gleefully away, safe in the knowledge that January is only around the corner. Seems reasonable right? We’d argue not quite.
Think of it another way……
If you’re already exercising, you’ve got three weeks to ‘bank’ some sessions so that you can afford to back off for a couple of weeks. Psycologically speaking, you’ll enjoy your food (and drink!) more, and physiologically, your body will quite simply be better equipped to handle the excesses that you throw at it (you can in fact make the work for you – especially if you focus on lean tissue building and glycogen depleting weight training!).
And if you’re not currently exercising regularly, then you’ve got a couple of weeks to dip your toe in and test the water before January 3rd comes around (the 1st is a Sunday, and health and fitness resoltions don’t tend to start on a Sunday!). You can get the initial aches and pains out of the way, enjoy your festive treats, and you can then attack January and your new goals with increased vigour. Sounds good to us.
With this in mind, we’re going to offer both movers and not yet movers an incentive not to write December off. Between the 1st – 18th December 2011 we will be offering:
Thats right…..we’ve left you with little, or no, excuse not to adjust your thinking and make the most out of your exercise through December!
Ps. From the 1st January 2012 we will be increasing the cost of our All Access Memebership. Existing members will never pay more than they do today, but all new memberships starting in January will be subject to the new increased rate – so get yourself signed up before the New Year!
(Not the usual tact in January we know, but we’d prefer to do it before people join, rather than shortly afterwards. It’s also our way of thanking our existing memebers in some small way for all the support that they’ve given us through this past year).
Week five: Let the metabolic circuits commence!
So, we’re four weeks down with two to go in our challenge to help six women get into ‘that’ pair of jeans…… and this week the training ratchets up a couple of notches.
The training shifts from more strength based training with some metabolic work to all out cardio-strength training. In a nutshell, it’s now cardio with weights. We don’t really go in for traditional cardiovascular training, particularly for fat loss, because it’s not the most effective way of going about things. We of course still do ‘cardio’, we just do it in a much more time efficient and more affective manner – which is also much kinder on the joints. (Think Crossfit with brains!).
We still have to respect the fact that we have chronic structural problems in three of our six women and that four of them have gone from zero exercise (we purposely made it challenging for ourselves!) to where they are now in just four weeks – and we need to program accordingly. ’Results’ certainly does not include causing injury or inducing absolute exhaustion in people who need to be effective at work and maintain a happy family life!
In fact, last week we took the decision to reduce the number of sessions that some of the guys did as fatigue was starting to take its toll and the quality of workouts was diminishing. It’s always better to do less with intensity than it is to be mediocre more often. It helped, and this weeks workouts have been better as a result.
We retested everyone at the end of last week to track their fat loss progress. The results were good. In fact in some cases they were very impressive indeed, with one the guys (girls) having now lost a total of 5kg, but more importantly a whopping 86mm of fat – which equates to in excess of 10% body fat dropped, in just four weeks! It’s the first time we’ve run a shortened female challenge over six weeks (we’ve previously done eight or nine weeks – in which we can pretty much guarantee two dress sizes) and so far the results are looking very promising indeed.
We’ve now got two weeks of serious metabolic training and we’re expecting some serious fat loss…..
Last week saw the start of our W10 Performance Jeans Challenge. Six women doing a six week training and nutrition program in a quest to get into ‘those’ jeans. The challenge is to condense our sixteen week fat loss blueprint into six weeks in an attempt to help these women drop a dress size (in some cases two) in just four hours per week over six weeks. No gimmicks and no fad dieting. Just honest training, conscientious nutrition and appropriate rest and recovery strategies.
So why are we doing this again? Two reasons.
Firstly, we want to show that our approach will work for women as well as men. Resistance training, intense cardiovascular training and adequate protein and fat diets are not for men only. They work extremely well for women. Women’s fitness extends way beyond calorie counting/cutting and traditional slow steady state cardiovascular training, done for an hour six days per week. It can be more ‘fun’, it can be much more time efficient and it can be a hell of a lot more effective. Don’t believe most of what you read. The way women’s fitness is being done is changing and we want to show the way.
And secondly, we want to show that ‘real’ people can see results in a relatively short period of time – by simply following a well structured exercise and nutrition program. We haven’t picked six injury free, seasoned gym-goers who can exercise at a level which is beyond most (that would be to easy!).
It would probably have been prudent of us to find six genetically blessed and previously very fit women and get them ‘back’ into shape. But that’s not what we’re trying to show here. Four of these ladies didn’t currently exercise at all. None of these women have previously done any resistance training. Two are carrying chronic back injuries. And one has a knee problem that prevents her from doing almost all lower body exercises. Not super-fit women by any stretch of the imagination. We haven’t made it easy, that’s not the point.
So what are we expecting from these six weeks? We think we can help every one of these women drop a dress size. In fact we’re reasonably confident that we can help some of them lose two. We ran a similar program over eight weeks last year and out of the twelve women who did this, eleven dropped two dress sizes. This was twelve months ago and we were less savvy about advertising our results back then.
This time its different. We want to help these women get the results their efforts deserve and we want to show other women that training approaches and gyms like ours are not just for the guys. Let’s see where the next six weeks takes us…..
Complete repetitions will make you both lean and strong!
Half reps = half results.
If you only complete half of the movement, you’ll recruit half the available muscle. This means that you’ll burn less calories and get less strong. You’re also likely to rapidly develop muscular imbalances that will restrict your mobility.
None of these desirable, so DO THE FULL REP!
As a female, the notion that weights ‘bulk you up’ is a myth. Lifting weights is actually the key for a lean and toned physique. Female bodybuilders look like they do because they use ‘help’ (steroids and other hormones, etcetera) to make them more ‘male’. And those who don’t, are very, very few and far between.
Women generally have twenty times less testosterone than men, which in theory makes it twenty times more difficult for females to put gain muscle or ‘bulk up’. Being that gyms across the land are full of men struggling to add muscle mass despite every attempt to do so, it would be a cruel world if women could simply pick up a dumbbell and ‘bulk up’!.
In truth muscle looks smaller than fat, so shed the extra fat and add a little muscle and you’ll have a stronger, more toned and smaller looking body!
