Weight Loss

As a Personal Trainer many of the people I talk to, and a lot of my clients in particular, are interested in weight loss. But what are they really talking about? It’s often the case that trimming the body, getting rid of the overhanging belly or toning the bum are associated with weight loss. Numerous times I’ve been accosted by people telling me that they’ve been doing this and that and haven’t lost an ounce of weight. And why is that? Well read on, you may find out.

Firstly, we shouldn’t be talking about weight loss but a reduction in % body fat. It’s inevitable that when you start a new exercise regime your muscles are going to tone and there is going to be some increase in the size of your muscles. Don’t panic, you’re not going to turn into the incredible Hulk, unless of course you want to, but muscles that haven’t been worked before are going to grow in size with exercise (to further allay your fears, take a look at the picture of me in the blog about my gym, I think you’ll agree I look more like the incredible Sulk). As muscle weighs more than fat you could be losing body fat but gaining muscle, leaving you with no overall change in weight.

When starting out on an exercise regime you should look at the big picture, I always measure arms, chest, waist, hips and legs. You should also consider taking a before picture, to remind you what you used to look like whenever you think you’ve plateaued. At regular times you should get re-measured and take another snap. Naturally there is no problem with weighing yourself but take the other things into consideration too. In fact you can also get scales that can calculate a fat % too.

So how do you go about losing fat. Well, different people will swear by different diets, or long and slow exercise regimes or even using big weights to increase your metabolism and burn the calories. All of these methods can help but I prefer a more balanced approach, after all I’m a pretty balanced kind of guy.

The first thing I do when I meet a new client, as I’m measuring them up, is talk to them about their lifestyle. That includes things like, how often they exercise, what type of exercise they do, how often they eat, how much they eat, when they eat, what they eat, the same with respects to what they drink, what their work entails, what they do when they get home from work and how many hours sleep they get. That’s a lot of information to take in and the client may not always know all the answers, because they’ve not given it any thought. This enables me to build a picture of the client’s lifestyle and what needs to change. I discuss their motivation for making the change and what they’re prepared to do to achieve their goal.

From that information I’ll recommend certain changes and begin planning their exercise regime. I’ll motivate the client to achieve their goal but I’m not going to force them against their will, if I push them too far they won’t enjoy working out and it could put them off exercise for life, which isn’t going to achieve anything for anyone.

In my exercise routines I try to combine a number of principles; endurance, speed, strength, encouragement and nutrition. I like to mix my sessions around too, that way the client won’t get bored, though they do have to listen to my stories. I can pack a lot into an hour, as my clients would tell you, I even have one client who has a weekly 90 minute session, so imagine how much more I can pack into that. Obviously what I pack into sessions depends very much on the experience of the client. A number of my clients have been new to exercise so require more coaching and showing and this takes up some of the time of a session, which is probably a good thing as it gives them more rest between exercises. As they become fitter and more familiar with the exercises we can do more and therefore burn more calories. Naturally I’m constantly looking out for new exercises and will still throw in the odd newbie exercise, or combine exercises together to make things a little more interesting. Afterall variety not only keeps the client happy it makes me happy as I’m able to stretch the client’s boundaries. I also give advice about nutrition, which to my mind is not about cutting out food you love, it’s about cutting back on the things that are less healthy and portion size and the timings of when you eat. That’s why I recommend my own meal planning programme, it selects meals that you will like, in correct portion sizes and takes into account how long you have to prepare each meal (to find out more go to www.rogeralsop.co.uk/nutrition).

But when all is said and done there will be clients who are not completely happy with their weight reduction, they hear about the huge weight losses reported on programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing (not surprising as the celebrities are being paid to spend hours in a studio dancing and not eating too much, don’t get me wrong I’d happily spend 8 hours a day with a client, keeping them active and watching their diet and it would work and I’d be healthily paid, but it’s not really practical for my clients) or reading about these fantastic diets that help you to lose weight quickly (inevitably lots of people on those diets tend to put weight on quickly again after they’ve got bored of it). To me it’s about striking a balance between exercise and nutrition, which ultimately needs to fit into your lifestyle, and it will believe me, it does. Why might you fail to achieve your goal? Going completely against the meal plan and eating things that are not good for you, drinking too much alcohol, not exercising enough or effectively enough – but I’d soon know once we discuss your progress.

Now what’s been going on with me this week. Last week I told you I’d been to Edinburgh to pick up my previous life, which consisted of lots of boxes full of mine and Carole’s past as well as a couple of exercise machines and my bike. This week I’ve spent a lot of time moving stuff out of boxes and trying to find somewhere to put it in the house, but ultimately I think it’s time to declutter.

Having my Healthrider and rowing machine in my gym has changed my exercise regime a little and I now incorporate a 20 minute session on those machines. I brought my first Healthrider back in the mid 90’s and loved it for it’s overall muscle toning benefits and cardiovascular exercise, back then I used to do a 40 minute session every night and managed to break two machines within 9 months, for which the company replaced them, this ones much better, it’s still my 3^rd machine and it’s taken a battering off me for about 14 years and it’s still going strong (2 years of inactivity in an Edinburgh garage seem to have done it no harm and I’m already feeling the benefits of using it again). I used them every day Monday to Thursday and felt great afterwards, I felt so good I intended to use them on Friday too but following another session with Rich (in which we increased the quality element somewhat) on Thursday my legs were feeling a little tired on Friday so I just did a 4 mile run.

I was feeling so good I thought I’d look for a race, one that I could test myself against my peers. Ideally I would have like to have headed down to another part of my past and run for Herne Hill Harriers in the Surrey League Cross Country on Wimbledon Common, but I was conscious of trying to clear as many of the boxes as possible before Carole returned from San Francisco so decided against that (thankfully my team mates didn’t need me as they ran fantastically to record a huge winning margin). I looked at the Sandbach 10k taking place this coming weekend, but it was full, and the Congleton Half Marathon on Sunday but that was also full. Then Ray suggested the Parkrun, so that’s what I did.

It had been a wet and windy week and I knew it would be muddy at Pennington Flash but I wasn’t bothered about the time, I wanted to push myself and, to be quite frank, if you want a hard Parkrun I think you’ll be hard pushed to find many harder than Pennington Flash. Hard as it is it’s actually a really nice course and it’s a really friendly crowd who turn up, but I’ve said all that before so no point to keep reiterating it. It was so muddy they adjusted the course slightly, taking us away from the grass, which required a small jump over part of a gate (I haven’t run steeplechase since 1991, and that was a disaster, so that was a daunting prospect). I set off with intent and was soon away from the crowd, it wasn’t as windy or as muddy as I was expecting but I still managed to slip a couple of times and had a bit of bother slowing down for a tight downhill corner, though my jumps were good, all in all I had a good run finishing in 17:31, almost 3 minutes clear of 2^nd place. So I was happy with that, though having recorded my 5^th win at the venue I was starting to feel a bit greedy and thought I ought to give someone else a chance but then there have been 31 races so that makes 26 other chances. In fact Ray, who was watching with his son, Jake, Sharon, his wife, who was running, and I were discussing trying a few different Parkruns in the region, so we may well do that, though we’ve built up a relationship with Pennington Flash and Bill, the Event and Race Director, so we’ll always go back.

On Sunday it was the Chester Marathon, not only was Ray making his marathon debut but another of my Pennington Flash pals, Jeff Whittington, was also running. Ray finished in 3:49:35 (I go off gun times not chip times), a little off his goal of sub 3:30 but you just never know with the marathon. Jeff was also a little down on his best with 3:29:40 and there were others, I know, that were also slower than anticipated. Maybe it was the heat, it’s been a cold week so I went out for my 9 mile run in long sleeves and lycras and was sweating heavily within a couple of minutes, as the temperature had risen about 8 degrees C within a day. There will be other chances, in fact we start Ray’s recovery session and future planning this week.

Marathon The Final Tune-up

Many Marathon conversations have been going on lately, many of my running friends have voiced their own opinions over facebook. Most significantly, for British people anyway, is the decision of the IAAF to remove Paula Radcliffe’s World Record of 2:15.25, set at the London Marathon in 2003, because she was paced by male runners. Of course she’ll still be the World Record holder with her time achieved, in an all female race, of 2:17.42, her London time being stated as a World Best. Paula is keen to run the marathon at the 2012 London Olympics, but she has struggled with injury over the last two years. In a bid to show she deserves a place she entered this year’s Berlin Marathon and finished 3^rd in 2:23.46, well inside the 2:31 qualifying time. So it looks like Paula is on the way back and what a fitting finale it would be, to a great career, if she could win the gold at London, should she decide that it was then time to concentrate on other business interests.

At the same Berlin Marathon the world record was again broken, as Patrick Makau reduced it to 2:03.38. Getting ever closer to the 2 hour barrier that Michael Crawford attempted in the 70’s, in the film The Games – worth a watch on a wet afternoon with no real sport on.

At the end of this week the Chester Marathon takes place, this is now my local marathon, but more significantly, for me, it marks the marathon debut of my client, Ray Tran. You’ll have heard about Ray before, I’ve mentioned him in a few of my blogs, he’s also my Pennington Flash Parkrun buddy. Throughout the time that Ray has been training with me he has had a number of goals and one of these has been to run this marathon. Ray has been training hard for the marathon and is being realistic in his time goal (sub 3:30). You’ll recall I’ve previously mentioned the Yasso session we did, which indicated he was in 3:23 shape. Well this week it’s wind down time, which started on Sunday (after a final burn up session).

When I did my own marathon, in 2003, in fact the same one that Paula broke the World Record in, I had lots of knowledge about training for the marathon, gained from the many people I knew who had taken part in numerous marathons, I also had a great marathon coach in David Lucas, who had a reputation of coaching ladies to sub 3 hour marathons and also coached Junior Galley and Jim Estell to AAA Marathon Championship honours. However I also carried out some separate research and discussed my ideas with Dave, which Dave didn’t disagree with. One of the things I found out was that many top runners considered a 10k race, a week before the marathon, to be ideal preparation for the marathon. It also appeared that this fitted in nicely with the various regional 12 stage relays, held in Britain, which tended to be about a week before the marathon and had legs of 3 and 6 miles (approx). Of course, when I came to do the marathon, the Southern 12 Stage relay was being held in Milton Keynes and the long leg was nearer 5 miles. This didn’t phase me and, as I’ve always been a team man, I decided to do the relay rather than try to find a 10k. I requested a long leg from team manager, Alan Mead, which I got. Alan, being the sensitive type, gave me leg 1 so I could do some extra miles after the run. It was a typical long leg around the lake from the Open University grounds, typical being windy, I don’t think I’ve ever run there when there hasn’t been a strong wind out by the lake, those doing short legs have it so much easier. I hadn’t been doing any short distance speed work all winter, just lots of long hills and 1 mile reps so I settled into a steady pace around mid pack. However, as we hit the wind everyone around me seemed to slow down, well I felt strong so I pushed through and soon I found myself in the top 10. Once we joined the short stage path to home there was no stopping me, I just pushed all the way to the finish, coming in 7^th and running 24:50 for the close on 5 mile leg, I even got the better of local rival and now team mate, Dave Robinson, who I hadn’t beaten for some years, always a nice feather in your cap.    

But returning to Ray’s marathon, based on my own approach and the fact that Ray doesn’t have a lot of running years in his background, I decided to do my final pre-marathon session with Ray this Sunday and I decided I was going to pace him to an 8k at his predictor 8k pace, this turned out to be 4:45min/k pace. Session time was set for 16:00 and I’d worked out a fairly safe and flatish (or so I’d thought) run along the bypass towards Gadbrook Park, turning down towards town and back via the cemetery to the bypass, I was going to then turn back towards Leftwich but as it turned out the traffic junction at London Road was clear so we crossed it and carried on up the bypass. The finish was just before Hartford Hall, meaning that the last k would contain the steep hill, but it was the end of a race and I’d make Ray fight for it up that hill.

We started off with a 1k warm-up in 5:18 and then kicked off. As has often been the case in my racing career the first k was too fast, 4:25, but not so fast that we couldn’t correct and also I’m a great believer in going how you feel – of course on some occasions this has lead to me suffering mid-race, but on others I’ve smashed pbs. We edged back the pace but still only to 4:31 for the next k, but hey, Ray was still chatting away so I wasn’t panicking. Two further ks, each in 4:39, and this was looking good, we were half way and well within schedule. The next 2k had a long drag of a hill in it, I could sense Ray was struggling a bit, conversation was more one-way and it felt like we’d slackened the pace. I urged Ray on but we went over the 4:45 goal with 2 4:48s, but that was only a 6 second deficit and we only had 2k to go. We were reaching territory we regularly did reps on and Ray lifted his pace a touch with a 4:45 penultimate k and then it was the hill at Hartford towards the end of the final k. It is a tough hill to run up at the best of times but at 7.5k into an 8k hard run it’s a bit irritating, still I wasn’t about to let a hill ruin Ray’s run, I’ve already embraced this hill and made it my friend and at this point it was time for Ray to shake it’s hand, and he did so climbing to a crescendo finish with a final k of 4:43. All this gave us a final 8k time of 37:26, averaging 4:39, which, as Ray reminded me, would have been a pb at 10k if we’d carried on (particularly as the next 2k would have been flat), but there’s time for that in the future, now it’s time for Ray to ease back and smash that Chester marathon. We discussed the final week’s training and went home.

With the marathon in his legs it’ll be a few weeks before Ray and I train together but on the plus side I’ve just started running with the 38 minute 10k man, who shall be forever known as Rich (Ray, Rich, Rog, make sure you don’t get confused, I need a Julian or Henry for a bit of variety), we had our first run last Thursday and it was fast and furious. Rich is young and strong so over the next four weeks I’ll be expecting him to take me to pieces, but within that time he’ll gain an appreciation of my style of training (which has been proven to get you pbs and even world records) and I’ll also be passing on many tips for his marathon, he’s entered Edinburgh 2012.    

It was a Sunday session for Ray, that’s quite unusual for me, I decided a long time ago that it’s important to have a separation between work and play and that meant not working for the two days at the weekend, or even the extended weekend. I know this means that there are some lucrative opportunities I’m going to miss out on but life’s not all about making money. Anyway this weekend I found myself alone and I also wanted to do this final session with Ray, to ensure I gave him the best service I could prior to his marathon. Of course I’ll not always turn down weekend work, but it would need to be something of great interest to me, to tempt me away from spending it with Carole. I wasn’t supposed to be alone this weekend, it’s Carole’s birthday and we were planning to go somewhere exciting, such as Blackpool, but then Carole was given the opportunity to go to a conference in San Francisco and those who know Carole well know how driven she is when it comes to work. So Carole jetted off early on Saturday to the States. Poor Carole had to wake up on Sunday to take part in an organised wine tasting tour of the Napa Valley wineries. Over the next week she’ll be in networking mode for the benefit of her company and she’ll even have to take in a concert one night, featuring some singers from the past, Sting and Tom Petty. I feel for her, she could have been here being taken through her paces by me.

With Carole away it gives me the opportunity to do some things I wouldn’t normally do, like stay up a little later, watch non weepy movies and switch off the TV when Coronation Street and Emmerdale are on. It also gave me the opportunity to pay a brief visit to Edinburgh over the weekend. It was time to pick up the remnants of my previous life and move it to Northwich. Unfortunately I’d forgotten how many remnants I’d left in my garage and now they’ve filled up our house, a box of medals alone weighs about 6kg, I’d forgotten how successful I used to be, considering I haven’t won anything this year, mind you I haven’t entered much. The best thing is I now have my rowing machine installed in my gym and I believe it will help me add an edge to my training, it did before.

Whilst in Edinburgh it also gave me a chance to catch up with some people, I was only there a few hours so I didn’t make an effort to contact everybody but I had been invited to the engagement party of Richard Meade and Gail. Richard was in the group I helped to coach with Alex McEwen so I was keen to catch up with him and many other members of that group and other runners I’d met in my time in Edinburgh. Unfortunately I had to leave early as I was making an early start back to Northwich the next day. Before the party I had a bite to eat with fellow PT, Jim Buick, who’s working on his new website www.jimsgym.org

Finally while I was shopping in Chester, during the week, I came across the 2012 version of the Guinness book of World Records. I couldn’t resist having a quick peek and there in the Marathon records was a picture of Lee Riley. Incidentally Lee tells me that he’s managed to get Ann Packer along to support his mile world record attempt, for those too young to know she was Olympic champion over 800m at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.