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I first discovered kickboxing in 2006. I started with the intention of building my fitness for a few months and then moving on to a traditional martial art. Instead, I got the kickboxing bug, and I’ve continued to train in kickboxing ever since.

Competing in kickboxing helped me focus on my priorities in training and forced me to tackle some of the issues that can hinder training progress.

I wanted to pass on some of the lessons I learned from getting punched in the face, so that you don’t have to try it yourself. I’m no superstar kickboxer, but I clocked in enough time in the ring to have learned some useful lessons that you can apply to your training, whether that’s for a competitive sport or just in the gym.

Maintaining your workout focus can be one of the toughest things about getting results.

Training is a marathon, not a sprint, and consistency governs most of your progress. During a year of training, you’ll do hundreds – if not thousands – of repetitions of the same movements, and spend many hours of the gym.

With that being the case, no one can really blame you if your gym focus slips a little. You could chug a load of pre-workout to get yourself in the zone, or you could just use these tips to maintain your focus and develop a more effective training style.

Sales is an inevitable part of life, but what grinds my gears is marketing that preys on insecurities and lazy stereotypes to get men to pay up. If someone has a financial incentive to make you conform to their standards of behaviour, then it’s very unlikely they have your best interests at heart.

This is especially true when these tactics involve trying to dictate how an entire group of people should behave. These tactics are on display in fitness clothing brands, nutrition products, membership adverts, and social media. In most of these cases someone stands to profit from pushing lazy archetypes upon you to make you want to be more like their brand.

In my opinion, there is far more awareness and discussion around how this sort of pressure is directed at women. It’s time for men to catch up.

In the previous post, I discussed how it’s important to know what you’re looking for when you seek out a new core exercises for your training programme. Approaches to core training can vary, and I divided them as follows:

• Core training – an emphasis on positioning and control, taking into account the effect that a huge array of muscles have on the lower back and hip area.
• Trunk training – a focus on movement skill and force production, possibly for sporting performance.
• Ab training – the practice of directly training the muscles that sit on top of the stomach, with the aim of growing the abdominal muscles or getting a more defined stomach.

The terms used are fairly arbitrary, but the distinction can be quite important if you visit a six-pack specialist in the hope of resolving your back pain or strengthening your deadlift. Unfortunately, many of these training aims have been grouped under a much broader, hyper-marketed idea of what core training is.

I’ve tried to group these core training exercises into categories so you can jump straight to the ones you’re most interested in, but there will be some crossover between certain exercises.

Core training is one of the most frequent topics that new clients mention during consultations. Unfortunately, when you dig a little deeper into people’s motivations for training their core, the answers you get can be quite wide-ranging.

“My back feels weak.”

“I think a stronger core will make me better at my sport.”

“I have bad posture.”

“I want a flatter stomach/six-pack.”

“I get back pain.”