The new Personal Training Studio in Chichester is taking shape. More equipment to follow. Watch this space!

I'm not going to go all life coach on you and start posting Will Smith quotes. This photo taken at our studio should give you some idea of the Aegis approach to motivational quotes-

But recently I've been thinking about how one might go about writing a life (or perhaps lifestyle) workout. I've been surprised at how many of the principles I use to design programs can be directly applied.

Goals- Like any training program, we would need to start with a goal. Just as "lose weight" is not really a goal, just a vaguely defined good idea, the same could be said of many life goals such as "make more money" or "travel more".

We need to be a little more specific. There's a million goal setting articles online and they're generally a bit of a snoozefest so I'm not going to add to the pile here. I will suggest however, that you make behavioural goals which, if performed, will lead to your overall goal.

So in weight loss terms, rather than saying "I will lose 4kgs by x date" (a typical SMART goal) I'd rather you say "I will exercise three times a week and have a healthy breakfast every day this month"

This is a what I call a Yoda goal; "do or do not, there is no try."  There's no danger of reaching the end of the month and suddenly discovering you didn't quite make it. You either do it every day or you don't.

So for our "lifestyle" workout plan, think about the skills, knowledge and qualities you want to develop and then think of a behavioral goal for each one.

So, not "I will learn Spanish", instead "I will take a weekly Spanish lesson and listen to my Spanish lesson app every morning on the way to work"

Personally I like to have a "skill" based goal, a "knowledge" based goal and what I define as a "quality", which is a little vague but I see this as more positive attributes of your personality which aren't strictly speaking knowledge based. You might want to be a better conversationalist, earn more money, be less anxious or be more confident, these would be examples of what I call “quality” goals.

This is just how I like to categorise things, the point is to be a little more systematic, just like a training program.

Frequency/Intensity- just as you need to schedule more rest between the most fatiguing forms of exercise, while others can be done daily, so it is with training for personal development . Some activities, due to their relative ease and accessibility can be done multiple times throughout the day while others may require more travel, time and expense.

Listening to educational podcasts , reading, practising simple skills , these can all be done whenever we feel like it.

Classes and courses or more in-depth study on the other hand, these are the squats and deadlifts of the personal development world. Bigger commitments that use up more resources.

I try to do at least two of these "deadlift" sessions each week. This month I'm doing a private dance lesson once a week and an hour of meditation at the London buddhist centre.

The smaller commitments, podcasts, blogs, exercises etc, are more like stretching. Not nearly as fatiguing but they still make you a better person.

It's probably easier to give you an example of my "program" for the month. It's not really as regimented as it sounds and I don't generally write it down, this is just a structure I've naturally drifted into which I'm documenting in case you find it useful. Feel free to take the core idea (of being as organised about your personal development as you might be about your physical development) and adapt as you see fit.

Skill goal - Dancing-

“Deadlift" session - one dance class per week

"stretch" session- 5 minute daily exercises provided by instructor.

Knowledge goal- Philosophy

Daily philosophy podcast on way to and from work (total time, one hour a day)

Make notes on iPhone about what is covered as to re-read later, and to serve as a springboard for further learning if something resonates with me.

Quality- relaxation

“Deadlift” session- London Buddhist centre

“stretch” – Regular deep abdominal breathing and five minutes of daily meditation

I began using plans like this a while back when I decided to have a Self Improvement Month. I soon realised the obvious; that really a month isn't enough, what we need is a Self Improvement Life. But the month structure before reappraising things seems to suit my attention span.

Recovery-If all of this seems a bit manic and relentless, bear in mind that in reality it's a lot more fluid than this and not really as time consuming as you may think. It's just about deciding something is important to you (rather than just a vague "nice idea") and then booking it into your diary (also , I don't have a TV)

But just like physical training, there needs to be recovery time. An outrageously intelligent client of mine recently pointed out that two hugely important factors to the advancement of knowledge are also the very things that are in danger of being eroded by modern life; namely, deep research and daydreaming.

The advent of the schmorgasbord of learning that is the web can make intellectual magpies of us, googling rather than studying. And the endless distraction of streamed music, movies and social networking can eat into time that traditionally would have been quiet and reflective. So, much as I love the buzz of working on my self, I am sure to also just do nothing, or daydream or loaf about when I feel like it, and sure enough this is usually when the best ideas arrive.

I’m sure I'll be back next week with something about the development of nice pecs and abs. But for now I'll leave you with a scene from my favourite film and the words of this lady, because if she's right, and all we have is this life, why not try and be as good at it as you can?

King employed a little bit of socratic questioning , crafty antipodean that he is, asking us a series of questions;

How much time do you currently spend stretching your clients in comparison to strength training or metabolic training? (answer: not much)

Where do you schedule your stretching? (answer: at the end of the training session)

What would you say is the biggest limiting factor that prevents your clients from moving pain free ? (answer: flexibility)

So why aren't you stretching more and stretching first? (answer: silence, except for the sound of fifty pennies dropping at the same time)

So, I committed myself to 40 minutes of stretching every day for a month (if it's worth doing its worth overdoing, that's what I say)

The result? Initially I experienced a bit of random knee pain. I remember an episode of the Simpsons where

Mr Burns discovers he has every disease known to man, and is still alive only because they all balance each other out. I fear my stiffness may have been having a similar effect, my muscles may have been tight but at least they were equally tight, holding everything in place albeit a little too aggressively.

So the pain was simply the orthopaedic equivalent of my knee saying "wtf?!" and settled down after a few days.

Stretching is desperately un-trendy these days. Due to massive over interpretation of one or two pieces of research, many trainers would have you believe it will instantly make you weaker and increase your risk of injury. This is a great illustration of another of King's concepts; the fitness industry is constantly in a state of under or over reaction to a particular methodology.

Aerobic training is essential for fat loss, no wait, aerobic training makes you fat. Carbs are essential, no, carbs are Satan, and so on. Rarely is it acknowledged that these are all just tools, not inherently good or bad, just appropriate or inappropriate for a particular person at a particular time.

Rather than getting involved in endless debates about stretching I simply tried it for a month.

As a result I move better and feel better with no loss of strength, funny that. I would suggest that by trying things and listening to our bodies we can learn a lot, probably more in terms of real world, useful information than we ever will from just reading about it.

So next time you're wondering if you could benefit from cardio, stretching, Olympic lifting, greens drinks or any training, nutrition or supplement regime whatsoever, don't just google it. Try it for a month.

Over the past months I've done this with stretching, fasting, Olympic lifting every day, meditation, deep abdominal breathing and fasted cardio. It's been fun and effective and kept me excited about training. So have a think about something you'd like to try, make it reasonably challenging , and give it a month.

Stretch yourself. (bit of a pun there)

Here's a link to the stretching routine I used

And here's a quick video of me and Sam Feltham demoing some simple shoulder mobility routines.

Enjoy.

In this article, Graeme and Zack will share their top lunch options, as well as how to customise your order so you can stay lean without resorting to, God forbid, preparing your own food. Because lets face it folks, Tupperware is a pain in the ass.

Zack says try- the GBK Man Burger. synonymous as it is with our golden-arched Olympic sponsors, the burger has a bit of a bad reputation. But as usual it's all about food quality. Decent beef and fresh ingredients do not a health disaster make. The trouble with burgers is the bun. Two gluten filled patties worth of the baddest carbs in town are enough to make a regular burger a dietary disaster. So we're going to order this bad boy bunless.

My favourite option here is the bacon avocado burger. It's a man sized feed with plenty of protein and healthy fats, plus to quote John Travolta, bacon tastes good.

For extra awesomeness order the halloumi bites , not as a starter, as a side. Dump the halloumi on top of your salad. Party in your mouth right there.

Here's Zack enjoying it...

What to order- the bacon avocado burger, with no bun, with halloumi bites on the side. Now, bear in mind no matter how much you stress the fact that you want the halloumi at the same time as your burger rather than as a starter, this will be utterly ignored. They'll just bring it out when it's ready. But hey, you can always try.

Graeme says try: The Giraffe Man Salad . If the idea of chowing down on burger, bacon, and halloumi doesn't sit well with the red meat avoiding, fat-fearing folks out there, then this little number from Giraffe should be a winner. It's full of healthy green stuff and is certified yoga-friendly. You'll have to request the grilled chicken and halloumi (can you sense a theme developing?) as an added extra, so it is even suitable for those of the vegetarian persuasion (providing cheese isn't also on your hit list). You get a decent plate of food for your hard-earned and the service is usually snappy.

Giraffe also do a very nice drop of Pinot Noir, a small glass of which makes the perfect accompaniment to this bowl of goodness. It gets our thumbs up as either a lunch or dinner and costs around £12 with the added chicken.

Zack adds "giraffe is our go-to venue for a healthy dinner when we can't be arsed cooking, which for me is about twice a week and for graeme is every day and twice on a Saturday"

What to order- the super healthy veggie salad, large, with added chicken and halloumi. And if you're eating in the Spitalfields branch be sure to tell them the two bald, jacked guys sent you.

Not content with the current fare on offer around town, Zack and Graeme also felt it necessary to design their own lunches to their own nutritional specifications and persuaded some of the city's finest purveyors of grub knock it up for them. Hence, we have our next few options....

The BLT Aegis Lunch- based on the corner of Great Eastern street and Curtain road , BLT are renowned for their cheery service and gigantic portions , making them an obvious choice for us to collaborate with when we decided to design the best lunch in shoreditch.

The Aegis lunch changes every day, rotating between red meat, white meat and fish. It is , however, always high protein, low carb, organic , cooked with coconut oil and gluten free. Honestly...How many health boxes can you tick??

And for the foundry, Graeme helped design -

The Poncho No.8 Slow carb Box:

"If low -carb/high-fat isn't up your street then the Foundry designed 'slo-carb box' from the burrito boys at Poncho No.8 is the perfect grab 'n' go lunch. Poncho's expanding empire has seen our creation join their menu at the new Soho branch and is a favourite at their Spitalfields location. A blend of chicken, veggies, and beans this little box is not only good value for money but provides more than enough calories to get the average city worker through an afternoon of cognitive effort. It is our recommended post-workout meal for its combination of slower releasing carbohydrate, protein, and healthy fat."

There you have it. So next time you catch yourself reaching for a miserable white bread sandwich at your local coffee establishment, slap yourself on the hand and get thee to one of the joints we've mentioned. You deserve better damn it!

Scrape this off the wall, rub it onto your brain and absorb its informative goodness.

1- Train the biggest muscles first, and then don't- the general rule of thumb that the big exercises should be done first is a good rule. But a couple of times a year, a three week period of training the smaller muscles first in isolation is extremely effective. So on a pulling workout you might train biceps first, then the upper back and then finish with chin ups (if you can manage, it’s a humbling experience)

2- If you want to use high intensity techniques like drop sets, rest pause, forced reps and negatives, use them mainly on isolation exercises. Train smart on the big lifts like deadlifts and presses, but feel free to smash yourself on curls and lateral raises.

3- when using pec flyes, utilise one-and-a-quarter reps. Lower the weight, lift it a quarter of the way back up, lower it back down, then lift it all the way up. That's one rep. This way you spend longer in the most effective range of the movement.

4- When training for strength and performance, seek to make the exercise as easy and efficient as possible. For example, when benching, place the feet firmly on the ground, retract the shoulders, arch the back and drive the traps into the bench. Press as explosively as possible.

When training solely for hypertrophy , try the opposite and make the exercise harder. With our bench press example, you could perform the Gironda press, or wide grip press to the neck on a slow tempo like 6240.

Same movement pattern, dramatically different exercise.

5-same-muscle supersets are useful in general, but in particular the shoulders and upper back respond extremely well.

Shoulder example - bent over flyes for six reps, straight into lateral raises with the same weight for 6, then frontal raises for 6, finally Arnold presses for 6, all with the same dumbbell. That's a shoulder smasher right there.

6- Vary your exercises- when seeking to build muscle, choose exercise variations you haven't used for at least a few months. If you've been back squatting switch to front squats. If you've been doing pull-ups (palms facing away from you) switch to chin-ups (palms facing you) You still want to train the key movements (upper body push, upper body pull, lower body knee dominant, lower body hip dominant) just with slightly different variations.

You should vary your methods too. When a new client arrives and wants to build muscle one of my first questions is "what have you been doing up until now."

Then I do the opposite of whatever they've been doing. If they've been using a high volume approach I'll drop the volume and increase the intensity. If they’ve done nothing but full body routines I’ll split things up. If they've trained bench press first thing on a Monday every week of their adult life, guess who's going to be occupying the squat rack on a Monday evening from now on?

Variety in itself is enough to build new muscle.

7- See those weird exercises you see people performing in the gym on unstable surfaces, with a big plastic tube thingy, on one leg? Yeah, don’t do those. Zack’s Rule Of Thumb on this is; “if you look stupid doing it, it’s a stupid exercise.”

I was reminded of this recently while chatting over too much black coffee with my friend and fellow trainer Graeme Marsh. Graeme mentioned that while he hasn't lost his love for training, he has lost his emotional attachment to it, and oddly is in better shape than ever with less effort. 

I've written about this recently on this blog but it's a subject I'm currently finding interesting as I'm going through a similar transition myself, and it's left me wondering-

I wonder if an obsession with getting the best possible results is actually counterproductive. 

Let's start with an observation- there appears to be no correlation between the level of training knowledge a person has and what kind of shape they're in. In fact, I've come across a huge amount of people who despite being very knowledgable are in fairly ordinary shape. Meanwhile, at least in my experience of hanging around gyms for my whole adult life, many of the biggest and leanest people are not necessarily the most educated in teens of training and nutrition.

There could be any number of reasons for this phenomenon. Perhaps those of us with less than stellar genetics naturally educate ourselves more in order to overcome them, while others lucky enough to have picked the right parents never need to learn how to train, it simply comes naturally. 

But I don't think this is the whole picture. I think being obsessed with the best program, the best diet, the best supplement protocol can end up causing far more problems than it provides solutions. 

Paralysis by analysis is one such problem, wherein this search for the ideal program results in never sticking to any program long enough to yield results.

But oddly I think the obsession with and constant glorification of "hard work" is part of the problem too.

A cursory glance at most training books or websites will provide enough "motivational" quotes about pain, sacrifice and suffering for your goals to power a small sun. I'm not sure how motivated we need to be, or how motivating these slogans even are, they certainly motivate me to unfriend people from Facebook when they constantly post them, and occasionally inspire me to tear whats left of my hair out. Beyond that I find them tedious. 

The result of these un-spirational quotes (wordplay, see that?) is that people are constantly thinking about working hard, questioning if they're working hard enough and berating themselves if not.

The thing is, I suspect that some of all that hard work they put in is wasted unnecessary effort . Preparing and eating 6 meals a day for example, is as far as I'm concerned a hugely difficult habit that does not give a commensurate return on the time and effort involved. I've also experimented with reducing my own training volume and that of my clients with no loss of benefit. 

I don't think it's as hard to be in good shape as people like to make out, and I don't think that brutally hard work in and of itself is particularly virtuous. If I can get the same results without suffering for it or thinking about it all the time, well then isn't that preferable? More often I think people confuse the cognitive effort of constantly looking for the perfect diet/program with the actual physical effort necessary to make changes. If they simply trained and then forgot about it they'd perceive it as easier. 

Training should be hard, sure, but then it should be over. And when its over, why not go read about or do something else? 

Theres more to health than just training and nutrition, and theres more to life than just health.

You can do a lot in a week with a bit of clever carb and water manipulation. Here in a nutshell is the cheat your way lean guide to “peaking” for a photo shoot in a week. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, the caveat here is you must be reasonably lean in the first place for any of this to work. This stuff wont take you from beer belly to cover model, but you’re Mr Four Pack and already look in decent shape (in that one corner of the dressing room where the lighting is just right) then this will work.

1-    In the week coming up the photo or event you want to look good for, drop your carbohydrate intake to 50 grams a day or lower. This is essentially bugger all, and not easy to do. Dropping carbs dramatically has a string diuretic effect, meaning you drop water weight rapidly.

2-    At the same time, increase your consumption of water. You should have at least 6 litres of water a day. That’s a huge amount of water and you might as well invest in a catheter and a pee-bag as you will be urinating like a nervous race horse. The goal here is to down-regulate a hormone called aldosterone which among other things regulates water retention.

3-    On the day of the shoot itself, do the opposite. So you can eat carbs, even including “bad” foods like simple sugars. Start out by “carbing up” with fruit in the morning, then move to starchier sources like rice and potatoes later in the day.

Sounds fun doesn’t it? Well, that’s because you’re forgetting about the water.  On this last day we drop water suddenly and completely. Is this clever or healthy? No. I did it but I felt like absolute crap and I am not advising you to do it, I’m telling you what I did and what many fitness models and bodybuilders do in order to peak for a show or photo shoot.  It was actually a pretty horrible experience.

4-Training wise the only goal this week is to deplete your muscles of glycogen.  Big exercises in the 10-15 rep range  and full body routines will do the job. You can do cardio but it should be very low intensity. Now is not the time to smash yourself with interval training or try to build muscle.

4-    Right before your photo shoot, its time to “pump up”. Just pick a few exercises for the shoulders, chest and arms and bash out a few high rep sets till you look good. Exercise selection is pretty irrelevant at this point, here’s a video of me and Sam having a go right before the shoot-

There are far more complicated ways of doing this, if you wan to get really fancy you can try this approach. We kept it simple, it was cheat your way lean after all.

And here’s my final “before and after”

Cheat your way lean-Done. On to the next one.

We have an irritating habit of appearing to change our minds in the fitness world. One minute cardio works, the next it's making you fat, one minute fruit is healthy the next it's not, and so on.

It would appear we can't agree on anything and spend more time arguing with eachother over the minutiae of program design or macronutrient ratios than presenting a clear and concise message to the end user, namely, the confused, frustrated and increasingly sceptical public.

But the truth is , this bickering is all just tidying up the edges of a body of knowlege that is pretty well established. We know the underlying principles behind nutrition and training, it's in the discussion of methodology that we tend to have discord.

I begin with this little preamble, because I'll probably say a few things in this article that run counter to what you've read in the past.

When I first started training at 16, there were two "facts" which were set in stone.

1- If you trained the same muscle group two days in a row, you would overtrain. You needed to allow the msucles time to rest and recover.

2- You had to eat every 2-3 hours to build muscle and keep your blood sugar "balanced." There was much talk of grazing throughout the day to keep the muscles fed and avoid going into starvation mode , where we would surely store fat like an industrious hibernating animal preparing for the winter.

We all bought into it. We broke our weight training up into different days for different body parts and always gave the individual muscle groups at least 48 hours to recover. In fact discovering the optimal recovery period was something I really obsessed over, experimenting with anywhere from 2 days to a full week between body parts.

Meanwhile, I was diligently adhering to a strict protein schedule. 30 grams every 2-3 hours was the rule so thats what I did. I remember going to friends parties with a tin of tuna in my coat pocket, experiencing real anxiety while travelling when confronted with poor food choices and a long journey, all the while obsessing over how I could do better, train harder, be more dedicated.

On reflection, all of this was quite a source of stress.

Nowadays I have periods of very intense training twice a day, and periods of much lower volume work or even total rest while on holidays. This is dictated by my goals and level of enthusiasm at the time, not by guilt. But my go-to method is short intense sessions twice a day.

Meanwhile, fasting is the nutritional method du jour, and I must admit I'm well and truly on the bandwagon. It's not a method for everyone and I use it quite sparingly with clients, but for me it's a great solution. It's a method of eating that actually removes a stress rather than introducing a new one, no more carting chicken and broccoli around in Tupperware, no more obsessing about meal timing. You just choose a period of time where you don't eat. The rest of the time you eat good stuff.

So to recap, as I kid I stressed about training and diet all the time. I ate every 2 hours and believed in "grazing" to grow. I obsessed over the optimal rest period for muscle groups.

Nowadays, I "graze" on training, don't eat til 12 o'clock and have 2 or 3 big, healthy, tasty meals every day.

I'm probably in the best shape of my life while giving the whole process the least amount of cognitive effort.

That’s the lesson. I’m not saying brief, twice-a-day training sessions and intermittent fasting is “the solution”, just that its my solution, because it fits my schedule, my lifestyle, my preferred bahaviours. Fundamentally, because it causes me the least amount of stress.

I don't regret the journey but its interesting to reflect on the things I once believed to be set in stone, and to feel how freeing it is to let those preconceptions go. It's also handy not to need to bring a tin of tuna to dinner parties, that shit is just weird. 

Today I took another step towards metrosexuality by popping round the corner to our friends at Taylor Taylor London for a spray tan.

Our beautician quite sensibly didnt feel like appearing in the video, so instead you can look at Sam having a crack at tanning me up, even developing his own unique spraying style much to his own amusement and the distress and confusion of everyone else. He's named it The Feltham Method, and any beauticians keen on learning from Sam, aka the Rainman of Tanning, should contact him directly.

Thanks again to Taylor Taylor. The results were genuinely great and ever since I've been experiencing a profound internal struggle between my desire to retain some semblance of manliness and the grim realisation that I look way, way better after all this grooming. Thanks for the cognitive dissonance guys!

Here's the video-