David @ DHPT

One of the best ways to make progress towards your health or fitness goals is to exercise with regularity.  I often tell my clients that consistency is king when it comes to moving the needle on their performance and health.  If you're struggling to get into a regular training rhythm, here are some tips that may help you out. 1: Schedule your day This one seems pretty obvious but it's surprising how many people don't do it.  Even I've been guilty of this at times.  One way to ensure that life doesn't get in the way of your workouts is to put them into your calendar (both your personal calendar and your work one if appropriate).  By blocking out the time it will both remind you that you have an appointment with the treadmill or squat rack and it will also prevent other people from requesting meetings or planning other events during that time.   2: Get your work in early This one follows on nicely from the first point.  If you can, schedule your wor...

Last week I announced on my Facebook and Instagram pages that I was rebranding my personal and group fitness training business.  I thought, seeing as I have a bit of time on my hands at the moment with this lockdown, that I'd explain the reason why I decided to do this - in case anyone was interested. My new company branding 360 Degree Fitness was a company that I started from scratch.  I built it with the help and support of a great many people.  People who probably don't even know how much they supported me.  To those people - my clients, my suppliers, my friends and family, those random people who read my blog posts when I was writing terribly and wondered if I would ever find my own "voice" to write with, I want to say a huge thank you.  I truly appreciate every blog view, every time you liked a post on my social media accounts or share it with your friends and family.  You truly have no idea how much that has meant to me over the years.  ...

It's been a little while since I posted an update about my training for the Oxfam Trailwalk that myself and 3 mates are looking to complete in March, so I thought I should fill you in on my progress. Training has been going well recently.  There was a little period a few months ago where my motivation to train just wasn't there - I think it was a case of the walk being too far away to scare me into action!  But suddenly March doesn't seem too far off anymore, which has prompted me to get out there and get my kilometres done. Two big things that have made a difference for me are competition and permission. Let's talk about competition first.  I'm a competitive person by nature, anyone who's seen me on a football field will know this.  One thing our trailwalk team has done has been to institute a minimum step count for each week of 100,000 steps with a penalty for falling short.  While this only averages out to about 14,000 per day which isn't a huge am...

Over the past few months, I have started on a different training programme than I usually follow.  It has included a lot of walking. And I do mean a lot.  What is the reason behind this shift in focus?  Well, it is to help a good cause and challenge myself at the same time. Three of my college friends and I have decided that we will be doing the Oxfam Trailwalk in March 2020.  We have decided to call ourselves the NOBS - aka the Newlands Old Boys Society. For those of you who don't know anything about the Trailwalk, it is a 50km or 100km walk based in the Bay of Plenty with the purpose of raising funds for Oxfam to continue their valuable work.  We have decided that we will aim to complete the 100km walk.  This is a fairly big ask, especially as the 100km walk has to be completed over a maximum time of 36 hours.   I have never been an endurance athlete of any kind.  As a teenager, I was a fairly good sprinter, and I could stretch out t...

The last few months have been hectic for me.  We've bought our first home which has been stressful (albeit very satisfying).  This meant moving house which added to that stress.  I also picked up a bunch of new clients at the same time as well as renovating and setting up the gym at the new house.  Don't get me wrong, these are all good things.  It has just meant that has been a very busy few months for me. But with that busy period has also come a drop in my motivation to get my own training sessions done.  Finding the motivation to work out after working a 12-14 hour day where I am on my feet for most of it, encouraging other people to get fit sometimes leaves me lacking the enthusiasm required to motivate myself.  But one thing has propelled me off the couch and into the gym.  The thought that if I only trained when I felt good then I would never achieve the results that I'm after. Training when you're feeling motivated, fresh, physically a...

Well, today is the final day of Bloguary and I have managed to successfully blog each and every day in February.  It has been a very rewarding process, I have found some days tough and some days have been easier, but overall I believe it has been worth it.  For the final day, I thought that I would share the ways in which Bloguary has been like a fitness journey.  So here we go... Some days are easy, some are hard... Like I mentioned above, some days were easy.  The blog posts not only came to mind quickly but the actual words flowed well once I got writing also.  This is similar to completing your workouts and eating to your plan each week.  Some days you will be on fire and things will happen easily and without stress.  Other days you will turn up at the gym and have to grind out a sub-par workout that was harder than it should have been.  This is OK, just turn up, put in the work, and the results will come.  It isn't always going to b...

Gaining strength is a common reason why people join a gym.  Writing a good strength workout is not as simple as it might first seem. There are many different ways to split up a strength workout.  Each has its benefits and its drawbacks.  Each can work well for specific goals, but you need to know these costs/benefits before choosing a split.  Before we get into the main part of this blog post, let me say this, If you find a split that works for you and you are getting results then go nuts, you can't argue with results!  But for myself and my clients, I prefer to write full-body workouts where they are appropriate. You can split a program into body parts (often called the bodybuilder split) such as chest and shoulders on one day, legs on another day (never skip leg day!), and back and biceps on another day.  You can have a push day and a pull day (e.g. squats and bench press on a push day, deadlifts and cable rows on a pull day).  You c...

Core exercises are important for many reasons.  The core is essential in most human movements.  It gets used in the following ways: transferring power through the body, stabilising us as we move, bracing and protecting us when moving heavy stuff around, and in many other situations too. I'm sure most of you know a few core exercises, they are fairly common knowledge really - planks, various crunches, medicine ball twists, and the like.  But if you're looking to add some extra options to your core training, here are some great exercises that I use with my clients to really get their cores firing. Pallof Press - This is a great exercise for working the anti-rotation element of your core - basically the act of preventing your body rotating.  You get a little bit of light chest and arm work with it too as a bonus.  It looks deceptively simple, but when you select the correct band, it will light up your core.  Give it a try next time you want to add some va...

The answer to the above question is anything. Really.  I really, really dislike running. But to be a little more helpful, here are a few of the ways I get my heart rate up when I am not resistance training. Boxing/Kickboxing: Boxing is an amazing workout.  Kickboxing is awesome too.  They both provide great cardio benefits and will challenge you mentally too.  You don't have to get in the ring to get the benefits either.  Working a heavy bag is great if you don't have anyone to train with (once you learn how to strike safely of course so you don't injure yourself).  If you have a training partner who can hold focus mitts that's great too.  Even shadowboxing can be a good workout for beginners and it is a great warm-up once you have got some experience working the different strikes and your footwork.  My advice would be to join a class or hire a trainer who can work with you and teach you how to strike safely.   Station...

Before I get emails complaining about my grammar, no that wasn't a misspelled title.  Today I'm going to be talking about different planes of movement, and how sometimes we get stuck training in one plane more than the rest. But first, why do we care about different planes of movement?  To understand why they are important, you should first know what they are.  Bear with me for a second while I nerd out a little. There are three planes of movement in the human body: frontal, sagittal and transverse.  The easiest way to describe these planes is this - the frontal plane cuts the body into two even halves front and back, the sagittal plane cuts the body into two even halves left and right, and the transverse plane cuts the body into two even halves top and bottom. Now that the nerdy bit is out of the way, why should you care? Well, quite often people get into the habit of doing the majority of their training in one plane of motion.  Often, this is t...

I recently read something that drastically shifted my thoughts about goalsetting and I thought that I'd write a quick blog post about it, as I feel that it's something that a lot of goalsetting posts/books/articles leave out. The traditional practice of setting goals is to make them SMART: -Specific -Measurable -Actionable -Realistic -Time-framed The categories may differ slightly depending on what article you read or who's theory you are working from but the general practice of goalsetting doesn't differ too wildly. You take a pen and some paper and work through the process above for each goal, working out exactly when and what you want to achieve. Makes sense right? It nails down everything to a very specific achievable goal and a timeline as to when you want to achieve said goal.   But it leaves out one very important piece of the puzzle.  Have you guessed what it is? Well I'll tell you. It doesn't ask you why you want to achieve your go...

I have a four year old son who is a constant ball of energy and adventure.  It's been awesome to see him grow up and develop in his motor skills and physical abilities as he gets older. Currently his favourite activity is jumping.  Mainly jumping between pieces of furniture or off anything that is high enough to be exciting.  Sometimes as a parent this terrifies me - what if he breaks something? But at the same time I understand he is testing his own limitations and capabilities.  Something we all used to do as children. To him this is both play and learning, but he only understands it as having fun.  How high can I jump? how fast can I ride my bike? Can I do a cartwheel? These are all things we have done, and for the most part as adults we stop doing. Some of us still get out on bikes and ride trails for fun, or rock climb, or kayak, or do gymnastics classes, but the number of adults who partake in these activities are few and far between. I follow ...

It may not be apparent to everyone, but I put a lot of thought into what to name my fitness business before I finally decided on 360 Degree Fitness .  It involved many hours of staring blankly at a piece of paper trying to pick names out of thin air before I decided to get a bit smarter about the whole process. I sat down after about a week of being frustrated with not coming up with a decent name and started to go about it in a more structured way.  I asked myself what I wanted the company to represent, what it's aims were for it's clients, the  training/coaching philosophy that I believed in, and then I went to work. I took that blank piece of paper that had been taunting me for a week or so and started writing.  Big ideas rather than detailed things - things like mental health not just physical health, not getting bogged down in the minutia of the fitness industry, meeting people where they are rather than forcing them into boxes, and so on. What eventu...

One question that I always ask clients when they first start with me (and ongoing over the time we train together too) is how are you sleeping? It is not just a question to fill in the time while resting between exercises, it is an important one to be asking.  How often do you think about your sleep?  Do you think about it at all? Sleep is a vital component of a training program.  It is the time when our body refreshes itself, rebuilds itself.  If you are going through a phase where you are trying to build muscle, it isn't when you are lifting the weights in the gym that you build muscle, it is when you recover after those lifting sessions. The training helps to break the muscle down so that when we rest and the body rebuilds the muscle, it rebuilds it bigger (if following the correct program) and stronger.   Quality of sleep can also influence your success if trying to lose weight.  It does this in a couple of different ways.  Firstly, a ...

As men, often when we train we focus on lifting big weights, training at a high intensity, and pushing ourselves to our limits.  While there is a time and place for this sort of training, we also need to balance this out with other forms of training which help the body to recover for these high intensity bouts of activity. I have had a guest blogger write about the benefits of massage previously, a method of recovery which I put great value in. If you are interested, you can read about it here . Another form of training I have been using for a while now and highly recommend for guys especially is Pilates.  I work one on one with Carolyn from Pilates by Design .  I began doing Pilates because I have had tight hips for a while now, and during my Krav Maga training I found it difficult to get my round kicks high enough. Pilates has helped me to loosen up my hips and as a result get my kicks up to chest height (the plan is for them to get to head height, but one step at...

This is a guest post from Tim Spackman a personal trainer based in Auckland who trains athletes for endurance events.  Check out his profile at the end of the post and give his social media accounts a like/follow.  Enjoy the post... _________________________________________________________________________ You’ve signed up with a friend for a half-marathon or been talked into being part of a team for an adventure race. If you’re going to put in your time, effort and money, it makes sense to train smart as well as train hard. Here are 5 things to keep in mind when training for any endurance event. 1. Have a training plan... The plan doesn’t have to be perfect, but some structure and progression around when you will train, for how long and how hard is necessary. A good plan fits in with your life, it doesn’t control your life. If family, or friends are important to you, make sure plan allows for this. A good athlete listens to their body. If you feel like you really...

This is the one answer I seem to give people more often than any other. And believe it or not, it really isn’t a cop-out. Because most often the question they are asking is very subjective in nature and not at all one based on a solid background in terms of the information they give me. This happened this week in fact which is what prompted me to write this little piece. I had a mate call me the other day (I won’t name names but they will know who they are if they read this). They asked me about what rest periods they should be using at the gym as they were having a discussion with their lifting buddy (another mate). I asked him what goals they were working towards. He then proceeded to tell me the workout they were doing.  If you look closely at the last two sentences you will note that he didn’t, in fact, answer the question I asked. As it turns out they were lifting to get a bit bigger. As such, I gave them the appropriate rest periods and that was that. But had he said t...

Note: This article contains affiliate links With the cricket World Cup moving into the knockout stages and the Black Caps performing well there has been a lot of talk in the press and by the commentators about choking. As well as choking there have been many comments about players being “pumped up” for a big game or having a look of calm focus prior to a big innings.  The big question Can you get too fired up before a big match? The answer is yes, but it also depends on the individual player. What is too fired up for one person may be just the right level of focus for another. Technically, how fired up an athlete gets is known in the sports psychology world as arousal. The optimum level of arousal has been studied fairly heavily over the years in the hopes of finding the “sweet spot” where players are in the optimal zone for high performance. In a nutshell, it has been found that the level differs for different people. This means that athletes must find where they ...