Personal Training in Liverpool Street

5 Tips for Designing the Best Workout Programme Possible

Once you’ve been training for a while, you will be tempted to plan your own workout programme – after all, you know yourself better than anyone. While I think everyone should get help from a personal trainer or strength coach, I fully understand that your budget or curiosity may drive you to write your own training routine.

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However, there are some common pitfalls that come with designing your own training programme. When programming for yourself, it’s easy to take certain factors for granted and over/under-estimate ourselves. These tips will help you design your training programme to the highest standard.

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A Guide To Bench Pressing

Outside of powerlifting, the technical aspects of bench pressing seems to get less attention than the squat and deadlift. While the bench press can be quite nuanced, I think this exercise encourages slightly more reckless training behaviours – due to the reasons we discussed in part 1 of this bench pressing guide.

Me spotting a bench press

Bench pressing is possibly more accessible than the other big lifts. However, in my experience of teaching clients to bench press for powerlifting and more general goals, there are still many facets of bench pressing that are not common knowledge. I will attempt to cover as many of them as I can here.

As with all of the lifting guides I’ve made, they’re long posts. Be sure to bookmark it so you can come back to the specific questions when you need to.

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Should You Include the Bench Press in Your Training?

The barbell bench press is one of the “big three” strength training exercises. I have given a little attention to the squat and deadlift already, now it’s time to give the bench press the same treatment.

As with my other guides, this first part will cover training considerations for the bench press, like how and why we might use the bench press in training. Part two will discuss actual bench press execution. Without further ado, let’s get started.

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Quick Post: Signs Your Training Programme is Spreading You Too Thin

It’s possible for your training programme to be spread too thinly between opposing training goals (like trying to improve strength, gain muscle, and improve running all in one programme).

Alternatively, your training may be focussed, but your approach might be too broad. For example, you’re solely working on your strength (one focus), but you’re trying to squat and deadlift heavy within the same week which can be hard to maintain long-term. You could also be trying to fit movements like deadlifts and pullups together which compete by adding extra fatigue to your grip or other supporting muscle groups.

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There will be clear signs if your training programme is spread too thinly in these ways – and soreness is only one of them. Here are some others.

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3 Tips to Enhance Your Kettlebell Workouts

Kettlebells are a well-established piece of fitness equipment these days. Kettlebell workouts can form a part of anything from a Crossfit session, to a group fitness class, to a strength and conditioning programme. You won’t have to look far to see people performing kettlebell swings, snatches, carries, and cleans in your local gym. However, the rapid acceptance of kettlebell training doesn’t guarantee that they’re being used optimally.

When I meet a new personal training client, these are the common responses I hear in relation to to kettlebell training:

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  • “I’ve heard they’re great, but I don’t want to use them wrongly.”
  • “I used them once, but I don’t think I did it right.”
  • “Kettlebell workouts look fun but I’m scared of hurting my back.”

If this sounds like you, don’t be put off. Kettlebells are very different to other conventional free weights, and this means you generally can’t just jump into a kettlebell workout without learning what makes this training equipment unique. Here are 3 tips to help you get on board with kettlebell workouts so you can do things like this:

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5 Logical Fallacies That Mess With Your Fitness Training

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Whenever you adopt a training routine, you make a huge amount of decisions without realising it. This is true even if you hire a personal trainer or subscribe to group exercise classes. Your decision-making process is at the mercy of common logical fallacies that all human beings exhibit from time to time.

What Are Logical Fallacies?

A logical fallacy is a gap in our reasoning process that leads us to arrive at incorrect conclusions. This can include faulty assumptions, biases, and inconsistencies in your thought process. If that seems a little vague, don’t worry – we’re going to dive into examples.

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How I Increased My Squat Personal Best by 10kg in 3 months

I’d like to write about how I got a decent increase to my front squat personal best in the latter half of 2021. It feels a little self-indulgent, but I’m confident these tips will help you develop muscular strength and set some squat personal bests of your own.

Background

Prior to this, it had been a while since I had made progress in my front squat. That being said, I’ve been squatting (relatively) heavy for around 10 years now. Therefore, it’s safe to say this progress wasn’t a result of newbie gains – I can no longer get a new personal best just by looking at a bar!

The lessons I learned from this training block will probably be most applicable if you’re an intermediate or novice lifter. I didn’t do anything super-advanced, so these strength training tips should be useful no matter what your end goal.

Click here to see why I think it’s important to get strong at front squats, and squats in general. Click here for a guide to a lot of the strength training terminology I use in this blog.

In this next section I go into more detail about my own training in 2021. If you want to skip ahead to the main strength training tips, use this contents table.

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Your Guide to Strength Training Terms and Definitions

I’ve previously provided a guide to general gym terms; now it’s time to get a little more specific and talk about strength training terms in more detail. An online glossary may not be the most exciting thing you’ve ever read, but if you’re comfortable with weight training terms and definitions you’ll be better equipped to learn about other strength training topics. Let’s get started!

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How to Improve Training Consistency If Your Life is Inconsistent

I previously extolled the virtues of sticking to a programme for long enough to get every last drop of progress from it. Training consistency in general is a big talking point with trainers right now, and usually the intentions behind this are pure: trainers want you to know that striving for consistency in training is more important than pursuing gut-wrenching intensity in every session.

However, a rigidly consistent training programme may be a pipe dream for those of you with busy lives. No amount of consistency-worship is going to change your life commitments, and that doesn’t mean you’re lazy, lacking willpower, or unworthy of results. Here are my tips for making the best of your situation.

This guy doesn’t care about your 3-day body part training programme. Picture by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
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