The 321 method that has really helped a lot of my clients to not only improve their sleep quality, but also helped them to reach, and sustain, their health and fitness goals:
3 hours before bed – STOP EATING
2 hours before bed – STOP DRINKING
1 hour before bed – STOP LOOKING AT YOUR PHONE
Try this method every night for the next couple of weeks and let me know what differences you notice with your health, lifestyle and training.
Is it true that what we eat has an impact on our mood, or can help with mood disorders like depression?
The short answer is yes, what we eat can impact our mood and brain health in a number of ways. Nutrition plays an important role in the health of every organ in our body, including our brain.
Consuming a balanced, gut-friendly, Mediterranean-style diet has been seen to be particularly good for our brain and may even be a useful add-on to treatment options for depression.
Important nutrients for brain health include:
🔸 Carbohydrates: These provide the best source of fuel for the brain and are needed for normal brain functioning such as memory, attention, alertness, mental and cognitive performance.
🔸 Omega-3: This essential fatty acid plays an important role in brain development, the structure of brain cell membranes and has an antiinflammatory effect. This has been found to support brain functioning including cognition and mental state.
🔸 Protein: This nutrient is needed to create chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. For example, the amino acid tryptophan is needed for the production of serotonin (aka ‘the happy hormone’). But there’s no convincing evidence that consuming a high-tryptophan diet, beyond what a balanced diet provides, boosts brain function or mood.
🔸 Minerals such as selenium, zinc, iron, magnesium are important for the brain, and low levels of zinc and iron in particular have been linked with depression.
🔸 B-vitamins are involved in nerve function, neurotransmitter creation, and vitamin B12 and folate deficiency in particular have been linked with worsened brain function and depression.
🔸 Other vitamins also play important roles. There is a possible link between vitamin D deficiency and cognitive issues and depression, but ongoing research is needed. Vitamin K is associated with improvements in cognition. Vitamin C and E are antioxidants that may be protective for the brain.
🔸 Choline is found in a number of animal-based foods as well as soya beans, quinoa and shiitake mushrooms. This is important for creating a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine that is important for memory and other brain functions.
🔸 Polyphenols are natural compounds found in a variety of colourful, mainly plant-based foods like berries, green leafy vegetables, as well as tea, coffee and dark chocolate. These are thought to be beneficial for the brain due to their antioxidant effect.
There is some evidence that taking some of these nutrients in supplement form may be beneficial as part of the treatment of depression, but never as the only treatment for depression, with the strongest current evidence linked to omega-3 supplements. Ongoing research is needed and the most important thing is avoiding deficiencies of these nutrients by consuming a balanced diet.
The Mediterranean diet is a great example of a way of eating that contains these brain-healthy nutrients, as well as other brain-healthy practices such as socialising, being active and relaxing.
Foods that are typical of a traditional Mediterranean diet include:
🔸 Fruit and vegetables – provides vitamins, minerals, fibre and antioxidants
🔸 Wholegrains – contain carbohydrates, B-vitamins, minerals and fibre
🔸 Legumes – provides protein and fibre
🔸 Oily fish – great source of omega-3 and protein
🔸 Nuts and seeds – contain protein, fibre and vitamin E
🔸 Olive oil – provides unsaturated fats and antioxidants
🔸 Herbs and spices – provides small amounts of antioxidants
However, so many factors impact the risk of depression, and diet alone should never be recommended as a sole treatment option.
Please speak to a loved one or your GP if you are struggling with mood issues or depression.
Ladies, when it comes to reaping the benefits of your hard work in the gym, the quality of your training must be matched by the quality of your recovery.
Basically, you need to train hard and recover harder.. because, unfortunately, it is in fact more difficult for women to recover from training than it is for men.
Why? Firstly, because our muscle glycogen turnover is generally lower, especially when our oestrogen levels are high. During these stages in our cycle, our recovery time is slower because our bodies need available carbs not only to prevent us from eating into our muscles during exercise, but also to help us recover quickly when we’re done.
Although women do mobilise more fat during exercise, the opposite is true during recovery. During recovery, unlike men, women tend to burn an increased proportion of carbs (men tend to burn an increased proportion of fat).
In addition, post exercise fat burning tends to drop back to normal after about 3 hours for women, whereas men’s levels can remain elevated for up to 21 hours – bloody hormones! 🫣😂
The hormone progesterone also increases muscle breakdown (catabolism), and with the above mentioned catabolic responses during exercise, getting a good dose of protein post exercise is critical for women to rebuild muscle and reduce the signalling to store body fat.
That’s why the men you train with seem to be able to drop weight more quickly – physiology at it’s finest.
It’s deload week for me, and that week just happens to coincide with the luteal phase of my cycle (more to follow regarding this in another post 👀).
If, like me, you’re a former volume/intensity addict, you can probably relate to the feeling that a deload workout feels like a bit of a waste of a workout, especially as you leave the gym knowing you’ve still got plenty in the tank.
However, one of the main purposes of a deload week is to give your central nervous system a break from the heavy weights so you can prime it back to start another heavy lifting block.
Instead of seeing a deload week as “I’m doing less”, reframe it as an opportunity to lift less weight while practising technique to improve with lighter loads so your higher load gets better.
My deload leg workout consisted of working at 60% usual weight lifted, and included:
🔸 Low Bar Barbell Back Squats
🔸 Trap Bar Deadlifts
🔸 FFE Dumbbell Lunges
🔸 3 Second Eccentric Leg Press
The benefits of a deload week go beyond improving form, they:
🔸 Help to prevent injury and avoid overtraining
🔸 Allow your central nervous system, joints and muscles to fully recover
🔸 Assist with advancing past performance plateaus
🔸 Help you to recover from decreased energy levels and to mentally re-charge
🔸 Help you to come back stronger during your next training block.
If you’ve not taken a deload week for a while, schedule one in to your current program and feel the benefits for yourself.
Too often, I see people prioritising going to the gym and neglecting their recovery. Why is this bad? Well poor recovery can lead to decreased performance in the gym, injury, feeling like you’re not progressing with your goals, and just a general sense of feeling burnt out and frustrated.
Without adequate recovery, you’re continually putting your body under stress and not giving it any time to repair itself and get stronger. By ignoring the importance of recovery, you won’t reap the full benefits of all that effort you’re putting into your training.
Recovery doesn’t need to look complex (or expensive!). Here’s some tips to get your recovery on point:
🔸 Sleep – one of the most important ways to recover from the physical and mental demands of hard training is to sleep. Try and aim for 7-9 hours of sleep per night, and see how much better you feel for it.
🔸 Nutrition – food helps to restore the body’s energy supply and helps your muscles to repair. Keep your protein intake high, ensure you have fats and carbohydrates with each meal, and choose nutritionally dense whole foods for the most part. No food group needs to be avoided, but recognise which foods help you to recover faster.
🔸 Hydration – one of the most vital aspects of training and recovery is ensuring you’re staying properly hydrated throughout the day! So if you haven’t got a bottle of water by your side right now, treat this as your sign to top up your glass!
Following on from my post about DOMS yesterday, (give it a quick read if you’ve not already done so), here are some things you can do to alleviate them:
When you’re experiencing DOMS, there’s a tendency to rest because exercising when sore seems counterintuitive. But actually, light activity is one of the best things you can do to alleviate soreness.
Any light activity will do – walking, swimming, cycling, even performing the exercise without weight (or using a very lightweight) is a great way to alleviate soreness.
For example, let’s say you trained your lower body on Monday and you’re really sore on Tuesday – you could do 20-30 minutes on the stationary bike at a light intensity. Or, you could do a few sets of bodyweight squats for 15-20 reps.
Massages are also an effective treatment to help alleviate muscle soreness.
Massage therapy after strenuous exercise is an effective way to alleviate DOMS and improve muscle performance.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the soreness you experience on starting a new program is due to the novelty effect and the more regularly you perform the same program, the less of a novelty factor there is.
Try to program your workouts to have you training with sufficient frequency – or hire a coach to do that for you.
Most people know what DOMS feel like – you know, the excruciating soreness felt after an intense leg day – but fewer people understand what DOMS actually are and why they’re not really a good sign of an effective workout.
DOMS is the acronym for Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness, and, as the name implies, is the muscle soreness you feel 24-36 hours after working out.
While the term has the word ‘muscle’ in it, it isn’t the muscles that become sore. Rather, DOMS is the inflammation that occurs due to tiny tears in connective tissue that sensitise the pain receptors in the body leading to a heightened sensitivity to pain.
DOMS is simply an adaptive process to a novel stimulus: your body will be sore when you initially start to train.
However, ‘chasing’ soreness as many people do is not a good way to measure progress and it’s definitely not the goal of training.
In fact, it may even set you back.
Firstly, ‘muscle damage’ may be one of the tenets of muscle growth, but it’s the least important out of the three (mechanical tension is the most important with metabolic stress coming in second).
This is why soreness doesn’t correlate to muscle or strength gain.
Secondly, if you’re training so hard you can barely move and this prevents you from training as frequently, you’re going to hinder progress. If you trained legs on Monday and went so hard that you were still sore by your next legs session a few days later, your performance at the subsequent session will undoubtedly be affected.
The first and most important thing to understand is that some level of soreness is likely and normal. As I mentioned earlier, this soreness is due to the novelty factor of starting a new program and the more you train, the less sore you’ll be.
The goal with your training should be to progressively progress session to session, whether that’s doing more reps or lifting more weight – if you do happen to be a bit sore, this is a byproduct of progressive training and not the cause. Conversely, just because you’re not sore doesn’t mean you didn’t have a good workout or that you didn’t make progress.
Chase progress, not soreness.
Joanna Derry, Personal Trainer and Nutrition Coach 