An app costs about a tenth of what coaching costs and it will give you a programme that's better written than most of what people do on their own. I'd rather someone trained off an app than wandered around a gym for a year. But be clear about what it can and can't do.
Watch someone put a sock on. Some stand there and do it. Others sit down on the bed or reach for the wall, and have stopped noticing that they do.
We've all been there, the clock running out with everyone else finished, and you still going.
A 9kg ball, a target ten feet up the wall, and a movement you can teach in ninety seconds. Squat down, stand up, throw. Catch it and go again. Nothing technical about it.
There are several gyms within ten minutes of Amersham station and their websites all say roughly the same thing. Equipment, opening hours, a photo of someone on a treadmill. None of that is the decision you're making.
The alarm goes at 5am. You're in the car by 5:15 and on the floor by 5:30, and somewhere in those fifteen minutes is the question of whether you should have eaten something.
Term starts this week, and the week gets its fixed points back. Drop-off, pick-up, clubs on the same evenings they were on in June.
It's the last day of the summer holidays. Tomorrow the term starts, the diary resets, and for about a week everyone in Amersham is open to doing things differently. That window is short. If you've read this blog through August — the fear of being the worst
Most gyms sell you a membership and a door code. We don't, because it doesn't work for the person we're built for — someone who hasn't trained in years and is nervous about starting. Hand that person a door code and a timetable
There's a cost to meaning to. Nobody puts a number on it, so it feels like nothing — a decision sitting harmlessly on a shelf, available whenever you're ready. So here is the number. From around thirty-five, an adult who does no resistance training loses somewhere
Everyone who commits to early training in September commits to the alarm. Almost nobody commits to the other end of it, and that's why most of them have stopped by half term. The 5:30 session is an evening decision, made at about half past eight the night
Next week the timetable arrives. Football Monday, swimming Thursday, a match on Saturday that involves being somewhere cold at half past eight. And somewhere in that grid is at least one child who's going to spend the season being told, in a hundred small ways, that they'
Support Systems
The hardest thing you'll do all week is the ten seconds on a Sunday evening where you open the app and put your name against a class on Wednesday, knowing Wednesday-you will be annoyed about it. That is the rep that decides everything. The training itself is
Women's Health
Lisa asked how training, recovery and nutrition differ for women. The answer starts with an admission: we don't know as much as we should. For decades the studies were run on young men, because a menstrual cycle is an inconvenient variable. So a lot of what gets confidently
Nutrition
In a week the diary empties out, the routine resets, and people who've been meaning to sort their food out since January finally get a week shaped like a normal week. September, not January, is when the year restarts. So — what the Nutrition and Lifestyle Programme is. It&
Active Ageing
I get asked this in the car park about once a week, usually by someone in their fifties, usually with an apology attached to the question. Yes. And I'll answer it from the register rather than from theory. We've been coaching people over fifty in this
Recovery
Recovery has become an industry. Ice baths in the garden, massage guns in the kit bag, compression boots, saunas, patches, powders. Almost all of it is sold on the promise that you can buy your way out of being tired. The reality: Sleep. Seven to nine hours. Nothing else is
Lifestyle
A member asked me last week why her Saturday sessions have been so flat all summer. We went through sleep, food, the heat, her programme. Then she mentioned the two or three glasses of wine most evenings since the holidays started. The biggest effect is on sleep, and it'
CrossFit Kids
Term starts in a fortnight, and with it the annual scramble: which clubs, which nights, which one they'll actually stick with. Team sport is excellent and I'd never argue against it. But in a team sport, a child gets a place in a group, a set
Support Systems
The sentence I hear more than any other isn't on the gym floor. It's on the phone, on a first call, about four minutes in, usually with a slight laugh to take the edge off. "I just don't want to be the worst
Training
Stand with your back against a wall — heels, backside, upper back and head all touching it. Now put your arms straight overhead and try to touch the wall with your hands shoulder width apart and without your ribs flaring off it. Most adults can't. If you can'
Nutrition
The shop is sorted. Now the harder part: cooking, on a Tuesday, for people who all want different things, in the forty minutes between the end of work and the start of swimming. Most family nutrition advice is written by someone who's never had to do this. So,
Lifestyle
You've planned this autumn before. Not this one specifically, but you've had the exact thought — in September last year, and the year before, and probably in January. Once things settle down, I'm going to get back into it properly. Then term started, and things
Sleep
In about two and a half weeks, an alarm goes off at 6:30am in a house that's forgotten what 6:30am is, and the first fortnight of term is brutal for everyone in it. It doesn't have to be. But the fix starts now, because