The Day After You Went Hard
You emptied it yesterday. Today the temptation is to do nothing at all, and that is isn’t your ideal move to recover.
Latest
What a Competition Day Looks Like From the Floor
Move-Lift-Work is today. If this is your first time, here is what the next six hours feel like.
The Day Before: What to Eat and When to Stop
Move-Lift-Work is tomorrow. Nothing you do today makes you fitter. It’s like cramming in study the night before an exam, except you’ll be doing even more har…
Vitamin D From October to March
From the middle of October until the end of March, the sun in this country sits too low for your skin to make vitamin D from it.
The Press-Up: A Standard Rarely Met
The press-up is the movement people are most confident they can already do, and the one where our standard surprises them.
Training When Work Is at Its Worst
The deadline moved, you are behind, you are answering emails at ten at night. An hour in a gym seems a luxury.
Dark Mornings Are Coming
It was light at half five in June. This week it is not light until seven, and by the end of the month the clocks go back and it will not be light until the m…
The Plate, Not the App
If you want to eat better, do not start by downloading something. Two weeks in you are weighing porridge, guessing at a restaurant meal, and deciding the who…
Move, Lift, Work: What the Three Parts Are
Move-Lift-Work runs a week today, Saturday 10 October. Entries closed on 21 September, so this is for the people already on the list, and for anyone who want…
How a Strength Cycle Works
You will have noticed the same lift coming round on the same day each week, with a number written next to it. That is a strength cycle. Here is what it is do…
Momentum Is Easier to Keep Than to Build
September gave you your routine back. Term restarted, the fixed schedule returned, and if you stuck with two sessions a week from the start of the month you …
Twelve Weeks From Today
Today is the 30th of September. Twelve weeks from today is the 23rd of December. Twelve weeks is long enough for the following to happen.
Support Systems
Why the Class Beats Training on Your Own
Plenty of people have trained alone for twenty years and done perfectly well out of it. If you've got a programme, you follow it, and you know how to load a squat, solo training works.
Training
Where the Strength Work Sits in a Session
We put the lifting before the workout. Warm-up, then strength, then the metcon, and that's been the order all summer. From November it changes, and the strength work moves to the back end of the hour.
Training
What Two Sessions a Week Buys You
The question comes up near the end of most first phone calls, usually apologetically. What's the minimum? People expect to be told five.
CrossFit
Why We Score
Every workout here has a score. A time, a number of reps, a load — something goes on the board at the front and something goes in the app. For a nervous beginner that looks like a leaderboard, and that can be somewhat off-putting.
beginners
What a 60-Minute Class Fits In
People arrive expecting an hour of shouting and burpees. It's a fair thing to expect from the internet.
Movement
Touch-and-Go or Singles
Twenty-one deadlifts at a moderate weight, somewhere in a workout. The clock starts and within three reps you've made a decision that determines the next four minutes, and you probably made it without thinking.
Lifestyle
Your Watch's Recovery Score
You wake up, reach for the phone, and it tells you you're 34% recovered. You haven't sat up yet.
CrossFit Kids
Teens in an Exam Year
September of an exam year, and something has to go to make room for revision. Sport is usually near the top of that list — two hours a week plus travel, for something that isn't on any syllabus.
beginners
Coming Back After a False Start Somewhere Else
You joined a gym in January. You went four times in the first fortnight, twice more in February, and then not at all. The direct debit is still going out.
Training
You've Entered a 10k. Now What?
You signed up in a moment of optimism, probably out for dinner one night, and it's in six or eight weeks. You train two or three times a week already and you're reasonably fit, so the assumption is that you'll be fine.
Movement
Farmer's Carries and the Shopping
Four bags of shopping and fifteen metres from the boot to the front door. Two trips or one? Everyone goes for one, and what gives out is the hands, then the shoulders.
Active Ageing
Testosterone After Forty: What Training Does and Doesn't Do
The ads have found you by now — Numan, Manual, a finger-prick test through the door, a mate who says he feels twenty-five again. Meanwhile you're tired at 3pm and the middle is softer than it was.