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Fitness

April 9, 2017
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When one Marathon is not enough…

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Our very own Claire H has been at it again! Not content with one marathon, she’s went ahead and ran an ultra-marathon two weeks ago and then Manchester Marathon last weekend. At the end of the run I asked her how she was feeling and she couldn’t put it into words at the time (well not polite ones anyway), but after a few days, she was able to put her thoughts together and work out what she learned from a challenge like that.

I’m not sure what possessed me last autumn to sign up for Manchester Marathon.  For those who know me, my signing up for a marathon was not an unusual occurrence.

However, the 2017 Manchester marathon, was on 2 April.  Seven days after I was taking part in the 50K Canalathon. Yes, I would be attempting to run 26.2 miles just seven short days after I’d run 50k or approximately 31 miles.  What was I thinking?

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March 26, 2017
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Tips to get you through a spring marathon…

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The lovely Claire Hougham, who will be joining the team at All Change very shortly, has had a really busy winter as she’s been getting ready for not just a spring marathon, but also  an ultramarathon (how cool is that!). I caught up with her a few weeks ago to see what clever tips she has for getting ready for spring marathon season. As always, she’s got some really sound advice…

If you are doing a spring marathon, this time of year brings with it the promise of more long runs, hunger and worry about whether you’re done enough training.

As a regular marathoner I often get asked for advice.  Funnily enough, the really important things I’ve learned have nothing to do with the training runs themselves but rather the more practical elements that you only seem to learn with experience.

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January 9, 2017
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How to bring your New Years’ Motivation into the rest of the year

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The question of keeping yourself motivated and engaged when the January Fitness Craze ends is one of trickiest ones to answer and following on from the last blog about getting stuck in the January cycle, I’ve been asked a few times about how to keep motivated beyond February.

One of the ways I keep myself motivated (and actively encourage my clients to keep motivated) is to book a couple of big challenges every year. Challenges that take a few months of concentrated training to get ready for. In the last few years, I’ve become more interested and more passionate about Triathlon. I love that you dive into a river or a lake and swim for half an hour, get out as fast as you can, get out of your wetsuit and onto your bike for an hour and a half and then with really heavy legs, set off for a run for an hour. There is something about the challenge of having three different things to master that I absolutely love.

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October 28, 2016
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How do you choose the right Personal Trainer for you?

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Over the last few months, I’ve been considering how quickly the fitness industry is changing from the development of the professional body REPs (Register of Exercise Professionals), to the companies that are responsible for developing and training Personal Trainers and ultimately how individual trainers work with their clients,  the range of PT’s you can choose from is huge. 

You only need to randomly select 20 trainers to follow on Twitter or Instagram to start seeing the differences in how each professional approaches things.

With so much variety to choose from, the big question is; what should you expect from your trainer? There are so many different training systems and significant variation in the types of course and how each trainer will have been trained themselves, I went back to Ben Newbould at Velocity PT where I did my own training and asked him what every trainer should have as standard if they want to help their clients progress. Here are his thoughts…

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September 6, 2016
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benefits of personal training

What is the key to long term health and fitness?

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Well this is one of the most interesting questions we’ve been asked so far actually.

And if we had one clear definitive answer, we’d all be millionaires (wouldn’t that be nice…!), but it is something we think about a lot, and talk to all our clients about on a regular basis.

The first thing that we understand is that fitness is a process not a goal.
It’s not a destination that you arrive at like you’re going from point A to point B. You’ll be driven by a series of smaller goals along the way, but it’s something that you’ll be working on for the long term. If you can get yourself out of the habit of thinking about going on a diet and doing massive workouts ‘to look good on holiday’ and just focus on being consistently active, then getting ready to go on holiday will be much less stressful (and you’ll have more energy to do more while you’re actually on holiday – bonus!).

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