David @ DHPT

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...

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.  ...

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...

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...

That is a confronting question to ask, I know.  But I think it's an important one nonetheless.  As we get older there's a tendency to slow down a little.  We tend to exercise less, or certainly with less purpose.  We enjoy those sweet or fatty foods a little more often than we did previously.  We're less active in general, we sit more, move less, and carry more weight than we used to. These things are understandable, as we get into our 30s and 40s, and older, we have families, full-time jobs, busy lives.  Fitness often just isn't a priority.  This a common trend for many people, and it's understandable to some extent.  But here's one thing for you to consider if you find yourself in this position.  We all pay for our health in one way or another, it is just where and how we pay for it that is the variable. Some people pay earlier, up front.  They join a gym, keep walking, watch what they eat (mostly), hire trainers.  They r...

With the age of the smartphone in full swing, I thought that I'd use today's blog post to share with you the apps that I have on my phone.  Throughout the years these have changed as I have found better and more useful apps.  But the ones I have on my phone at the moment have been there for a while so they're solid, reliable, and useful.  Here they are. Firstly, we have an interval timer.  This one's pretty self- explanatory - it's a timer I use for my interval training workouts.  Well both mine and my clients, so I guess it's doubly useful for me.  The great thing about this timer is that it's very programmable.  You can change the work and rest times very easily, but it also has a warm-up timer before the workout begins.  You can save the various workouts in an easy to access dropdown menu so you can quickly change between timing protocols which is useful when you have back to back sessions and need to quickly access a different timer settin...

Too often we look at only one measurement when it comes to our fitness goals.  When looking to lose fat for instance, we take weight and only look at the scales to judge our progress.  But there are a lot more measurements that we can look at.  For most people fat loss is a huge goal so I thought that I would focus on this, if you'd like another goal discussed, send me a message through my website and I can write a separate post about your preferred goal. For those who can't afford the cost/time of getting expensive scans to judge fat loss, there are some basic measures you can observe to see how you're tracking towards your goal.  Firstly there are the scales as mentioned above.  Scales are great at showing us a trend, but on their own they're a poor judge of fat loss - they vary with water loss, water retention, time of day, whether we've used the toilet, and more.  So if you can only use the scales, then make sure it's at the same time of the day eac...

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...

Today's blog post is a quick one about why it's important to stay strong as you get older. As we age, we start to lose a couple of things that are pretty darn important to us when it comes to avoiding injury.  One thing that starts to go is bone density, and another is our muscular strength and power. Luckily both of these thing can be worked on through strength training.  Strength training, be it using bodyweight, resistance bands or free weights/machine weights has been shown to improve both muscle strength/power and bone density. Why is this important you ask? Well the better our bone density, the less chance we have of breaking a bone if we fall.  And the better our muscular strength/power is, the better chance we have of preventing a fall should we stumble in the first place. Think about it, when you trip over a uneven pavement, you tend to throw your foot forward in an effort to catch yourself.  This is fine if you have leg muscles that are ...

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 ...

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...