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When it comes to preparing for competition, I want my athletes to be as ready as they can be and this includes down to their preferred method of caffeine consumption (pending they are able to tolerate caffeine)

If unsure what their preferred approach is, I like to get my clients to test multiple methods around their training to help determine what works best for them.

Before we get into it, why would someone use caffeine to assist with performance? For starters, we experience the following benefits:

Physiological changes occurring following caffeine ingestion:

- Stimulation of areas of the brain and nervous system reducing tiredness and improving cognition
- Releases epinephrine, which is involved in increased performance and the fight or flight response
- Increased neuronal activity and excitability, improving motor performance and increasing the strength of muscle contractions

Some other potential benefits specific to performance and strength training:

- Improved...

Like everything else in the health and fitness industry, there's no one set way to identify your maintenance calories - which makes it confusing for someone who doesn't know where or how to start. 

Below, I'll go through the options we can draw on when trying to set ourselves up for a maintenance, deficit or surplus phase. 

The first thing we want to do is, identify the amount of energy we need to maintain our current body weight. There are a few ways we can do this which I’ll discuss below

1. Tracking intake for 7 days to figure out your average daily energy intake:
   If you are familiar with tracking and have a general understanding of how to use applications and databases, you could track your natural intake for a week. The key thing to stress here is that you’re accurate and being honest with yourself when it comes to your regular eating patterns. At the end of the week, add up your calories for the entire seven day and divide by 7 to calculate your average daily...

You have been dieting hard for the last few weeks to shed off a few of those unwanted kilograms. But you have got a few social events planned over the coming weeks that you are worried will side track all of your hard work and put you back where you started or worse.

You have agreed to go to these social events, but have no clue how you’re going to track the food you are eating out. You don’t know what type of cheese is being used, how much oil the chef has added to your steak, or what extra flavours have been thrown into your main meal to really accurately track your calories. So now you are unsure how to address the setting, do you just sit there with your diet drinks or water and not eat anything or do you tell yourself, YOLO diet starts tomorrow?

Here is a guide to help you address these social settings and minimise the impacts of eating out can have on your fat loss phase. Before any social event I always say, know what you’re getting yourself into and plan...

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, unless you’re on a fitness journey in which case this is a time fraught with temptation! Many a promising fitness routine has been disrupted over the holiday season, don’t let yourself be another! 

1.       Set realistic expectations

The first step to preventing a full blown blow out over the holidays is to set realistic expectations for yourself during this period. This is key for routine especially. You know yourself, and you know what the holiday season usually looks like for you, let’s start there.

The biggest mistake people make, is to set a plan that is dependant on everything running in a perfect world (6 gym sessions a week, meal prepping every day and no drinking) and more times than not, this never happens. Worst of all, once you set a strict plan and then break it, you’re much more likely to give up entirely and be another ‘next year’ person!

So, let’s start by...

Based on the concept that your muscles post exercise require maximal exposure to certain nutrients, commonly directed around protein and carbohydrates. These nutrients are required to be consumed within a certain window of “insert given time allocation”. Failure to consume these in adequate dosing means your gains and session has been minimally as effective.

So why do people have this ideology?
It is fundamentally created around the fact that your muscle cells are more sensitive to nutrients post workout due to the ‘damage’ inflicted during that session. By consuming a quality intake of food will help boost the speed of your recovery. Makes reasonable sense.
It is a known fact that post training your cells are ABSOLUTELY more susceptible for absorption of nutrients. But we are talking about a harder gym session, not just your daily walk.

So without going too far into the physiology behind things, how relevant is this information and how are you actually going to...

‘Not today fatty!’

Gaining weight, getting fluffy, bulking or cultivating thickness, however you wish to phrase it, getting bigger has always been a fascination to myself and I guarantee to the majority of people clicking into this article!

The quest to be big enough to scare babies and old people, or for the ladies to look like Marge off the Simpsons episode where she is jacked beyond belief will always be something linked to the culture of strength sports.

But why is this! Well, from the outside looking in it is not hard to see that the bigger someone is the more weight they can move, there will always be some exceptions to this, but at a glance most top end strength athletes are not normal sized people. For many years this seeming link between bigger and better has perpetuated a quest for mass by ANY means (although usually by the means of excess cheesecake).

Over the last few years however, there seems to be an emerging shift to this attitude, which has followed a...

The dreaded weight cuts. Something that causes any athlete more stress than what’s needed the week coming into a competition if done incorrectly. So before pursuing this article I want you to reflect on your last prep and ask yourself if you have done everything in your power to improve quality nutrition and safely drop some unneeded body fat? If you haven’t done that then you have already got the next step of improvement in your next phase.

The next thing I want you to ask yourself is why are you weight cutting in the first place? Are you looking at being extremely competitive in a high level competition or are you looking at setting a new all time record?
Even with these in mind how much impact to your performance are you willing to sacrifice to make weight? This may mean, not even putting up a total. I can almost guarantee you will never perform at your best and are now opening yourself to much greater injury risk.

In my honest opinion, most weight cuts are used as a...