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...

Health and fitness are often perceived, and even promoted as an all or nothing prospect.  We regularly get shown images of fitness models with captions underneath promoting a mindset of no pain no gain, or advising people that if they aren't all about the fitness lifestyle then they aren't going to get results. This is not true. You may not get results as quickly as other people, you may not get to the same level of fitness or body fat percentage as someone who is completely on point with their training and nutrition, but to say that if you aren't perfect all of the time you won't achieve anything is just incorrect. This blog post is about taking a different approach, a better approach.  No seriously, that's the approach - just try to do a little better.  Just a little bit. Instead of changing your usual breakfast of a bacon and egg pie and a coffee from the local bakery to a fruit salad with Greek yoghurt, or an egg-white omelette and a glass of celery juice, how a...

So, every day since this lockdown started (except when in the torrential rain) we have gone on a morning family walk.  It's something that I'd quite like to continue even after the lockdown ends as it's good quality family time and gets all of us out of the house as well.   We usually ask each other 4 questions on the walk as a sort of check-in to see how we're all doing.  First, what's one thing that makes you happy today? Second, what's one thing that makes you sad today? Third, what's one thing your worried/anxious about today? Fourthly, how can I help you today?   For us it works as a way to check in with each other, it's a time for us to feel free to talk about how we're feeling in a supportive way where the people we're with can use the time to see if there are ways to help each other.  But most of all it's a way we can air our feelings, frustrations, anxieties, and happiness and feel heard. Today on our walk, I had a proper anxie...

Right now every trainer, psychologist, life coach, herbalist and their uncle have been doing blogs, vlogs, articles, TV Interviews and short operatic musical dramas about how to make the best of this COVID-19 lockdown.  While I don't want to add to the noise out there, I figure if this helps one or two people get through it then it's worth writing. Being cooped up inside can be tough, even for introverts like me.  It brings a certain level of stress into life.  This is before we even get to the prospect of illness, job and financial insecurity, trying to manage kids and animals that are out of routine and stressed themselves, and trying to help other friends and family members who may not be able to manage in this situation as well as us. Here are some strategies that may help reduce the stress you could be feeling.  Firstly, breathe.  In particular, try square breathing.  It's a technique that I've used in the past when feeling anxious.  It's simp...

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...

Over Easter weekend, I went on a little trip away.  Two school mates and I went on a fishing trip to the far north of the North Island.  It was great.  We did a lot of driving, camped a lot, fished a lot, did a lot of catching up, and made fun of each other a lot.  What guys tend to do when they catch up after a long period of not seeing each other much. More importantly for me though, it was great to just get away from the city.  For the most part, we were in areas where our mobile phone coverage was iffy at best.  It meant that there was no point in having our phones with us so, for the most part, they stayed in the vehicle.  And I enjoyed the change.  I heard someone say recently that we are so connected that we are disconnected these days, and I thought that that made a lot of sense. Another thing I enjoyed about the weekend was getting out into nature.  I make no secret of the fact that I am a city boy.  Born and raised in the s...

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...

Before I start this post, know this - I am not a doctor or a physiotherapist, I am just a personal trainer who has had his fair share of injuries.  So the advice below is just that, advice from my own experience.  Always follow your doctor or physiotherapists  recommendations. Injuries suck.  Take it from me, I have had a pretty vast array of them over the years and they have been frustrating each time they have happened.  Not only is there the pain factor to deal with, they interrupt training programs and can stall progress if you don't find a way to work around them. Now this may seem like just common sense, but the best way to keep your progress in the gym from stalling is to work around your injuries.   Common sense it might be, but it is pretty easy for an injury to derail you.  Especially if you are following doctor's advice.  When I ruptured my Achilles tendon my doctor told me to go home and rest (they told me this both times I ...

This is a relatively short post about the power of perseverance.   One thing that I have discovered over years of training people is this: the ones who persevere and battle to keep going are the ones who reach their goals. February seems like a very appropriate month to be discussing perseverance when it comes to health and fitness.  Mainly because a great many people who made a new year's resolution to get fit and healthy have most likely already given up on that goal.  How many people do you know that said on and first of January that they are going to get fit this year? Maybe you were even one of them? The ones who are still going probably have not followed their training or nutrition plan to the letter.  They may have even made some huge missteps along the way, but they are closer to their goals than the ones who have given up entirely already. You will make mistakes, it's OK.  Everyone does.  Nobody is perfect.  But what differentiate...

It seems like every week there's a new study showing a quick and easy way to lose weight, gain muscle, or some combination of the two.  Often, each new article can also contradict a previous one which makes life confusing for people trying to keep fit and healthy.  While researchers are doing their best to help the general public, how these studies get communicated doesn't always make this easy. Sometimes, well a lot of the time actually, we need to look more closely at the details of these studies and think more critically about them to determine whether the things we are reading live up to the hype surrounding them.  Basically, we need to ask the following question: "Are the results of the study saying what I think they are?" Here are some important points to consider. Sample size and study length - how big was the study and for how long was the research conducted?  If it was a case study of one person and it was a weight loss trial run over 10 days, then ...

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 thing that many people struggle with when it comes to health and fitness is keeping their motivation over the long term. Motivational quotes and inspirational YouTube videos can help, but often only in the short term.  Of course as Zig Ziglar said:  One way to cement some form of long-term motivation is to dig a little deeper into the reasons for wanting to exercise or eat healthier.  You need to ask yourself "why?". And not just once. Keep asking until you dig right down to the root cause or reason for wanting to chase those goals that at times can seem so illusive.   Here's an example that comes from one of my clients and a long-term mentor of mine.  He has been training with me for around 5 years - pretty much since I started 360 Degree Fitness.   We were talking about why he was keen to get up and get to the gym by 6:00 am twice a week to train with me. He said that he wanted to keep fit.  I asked him why he wanted...

Last week I wrote about sleeping and how important quality sleep was in reaching your health and fitness goals.  So this week I thought I would write a follow up blog post, giving out some quick tips that may help you improve your sleep.  There are a few things to try and cut out of your routine, and a few things that you could look to add in to your routine.  As with most things health and fitness related, it can take some trial and error to find out what works for you.  SO feel free to try some of the things below and let me know how you get on. Let's start with the seemingly obvious first.  Caffeine before bed is not the best idea for dropping off to sleep quickly.  So some things to avoid in the hours after 4pm (depending on when you go to sleep) are coffee, energy drinks, teas with high caffeine content, really anything that has a decent hit of caffeine in it.   Some teas do not contain caffeine, and a number even claim to aid in sleep q...