My name is Marc and I have just started training at James Ross Healthcare on the Elite Training Programme.

 

A few years ago I was petty good at Triathlon, I was young and fast and felt no pain. I got quite a long way in the sport with absolutely no knowledge of what I was doing, surviving on very little food, very little sleep, quite a lot of drinking and a few hours of all out working out half a dozen times a week. The highlights of my career so far were a 3rd place in several local races such as the Gloucester Triathlon in 2005 and a failed attempt at Ironman France in the same year.

 

Now I am a bit older (I’m 31) and seemingly not much wiser as several failed attempts at getting back to fitness have failed again! Several of my friends have carried on in the sport and are now right at the top of their game. I know runners who can run 1.13 for the half marathon, triathlete’s who can do 8hrs 50mins for the Ironman and then there’s me, who people acknowledge has the ability to be much better than I am. This frustration leads me to train really hard for 3 weeks, then get tired and injured, or just fed up generally at the lack of immediate results, then give up for a month or so, then try again, and so the pattern continues.

 

I have been coming to JRH for a few years now for treatments for various injuries, the worst one requiring surgery involving a double fasciotomy of both lower legs (to you and me that means that I was having really bad calf soreness after running so had the muscle sheath on the front and back of both of my legs split to allow the muscle to breathe and the blood to flow.) 2 years on and this seems to have done the trick and I no longer suffer such excruciating pain after every run.

 

The last time I was here seeing James for treatment he mentioned that they were launching a new service aimed at sportspeople who were trying to get maximum results from their sport - that sounded like me. He told me that together with regular treatment (which I need), and sessions with the sports massage therapist and Pilates instructor (which I need), and one to one training sessions with Ed, the personal trainer, who would teach people to train properly to maximise the effects of training and help them to learn the correct way to exercise (which I definitely need), they would be able to help people maximise their potential. Well, you can imagine what happened next!

 

So we are back to the start of my blog, where one week in I have discovered that I am mentally strong and physically not so much.

 

This was a surprise to me, I always thought I was pretty damn tough. I had after all done ‘loads of cycling and triathlons’ and could go faster than anyone in the gym and in body pump classes!!

 

So there I was on my first session with James, really excited at finally being able to unleash my potential…and he punished me! He told me that I needed to go back to basics and that the first job was to dissociate my Lumbar Spine and my pelvis. This meant lots of small range movements with Ed and lots of stretching and treatments with him.

 

This still didn’t sink in and after my first session with James which involved lots of twisting, turning and prodding I had my first session with Ed. We were to do testing on our first session to see how strong and flexible I was at that point, with the idea to base all future activities on these base figures. Well after 30 mins of this I felt pretty good and decided that I knew best and needed to do more so decided to do the ‘workout of the day’ as set by Ed. 30 mins later and I was sat in the toilet being sick and wondering why God was punishing me for past sins!!

 

Following this inauspicious start I decided to listen to the advice of the experts and knuckle to some hard (but slow and steady!) work. In the first week I had sports massage with Gaynor to try to free up my tight muscles, I had Pilates with Elizabeth to get me thinking about my posture and which parts of my body do what, and at what time. Now I will grant you, at first I thought this wouldn’t do me any good, but once I took a step back and listened to what I was being told instead of worrying that it didn’t feel any good because I wasn’t doing everything at a million miles an hour, everything started to make sense!

 

Today’s session with Ed was all about teaching my body to move correctly, simple as that. My pelvis, back and hips move almost completely separately from each other and this causes me no end of problems with soreness and weakness, especially when running. This involved deadlifts, squats, seated rows and some single leg squats with no weights at the end…and even though it wasn’t eyeballs out, million miles an hour stuff, it felt hard, really hard, because I was forcing myself to exercise properly, not just quickly.

 

So after the first week, we know I can push myself, we now know that this is not necessarily the best thing for me to do, yet, that time will come though and when it does my ability to do this will stand me in good stead. We have learnt that I need to get myself moving correctly with good posture and firm core, and we have even looked at my nutrition programme, which looking back was extremely poor! Once all of these elements come together, with good mechanics and a good training regime and quality nutrition, then I will be able to go out and fulfil my potential and race fast!

 

As for goals, we have decided that an Olympic distance Triathlon by August/September in a good time (close to 2 hours) for this year and an Ironman distance race in 2011 are the primary targets. We will see how this goes and review as we go. It is important to me and the guys to have a target, this way we have something to work towards and on the hard days we can all remember what we are trying to achieve!

 

In the meantime, wish me luck (and the team luck, they will need it!). We will keep you up to speed with how we are doing regularly.

I had no idea that doing so little exercise can be so tiring…that’s because we are doing it properly! I started Pilates this week as well as 2 sessions of weights with Ed and I am ready for bed (it’s 6.30pm on Fri!) What a difference a week makes too. Last week I was dead keen to get started and wanted to do everything at 1,000,000 miles an hour, really quickly I figured out that was what I had been doing wrong and now am happy to tone it down a bit while I get that all important strength building and muscle recruitment work done…I am reliably informed by James that there will be plenty of fast activity to come so for now I am just enjoying building my body up ready for the workload. Also I have started eating properly, I realised after Ed made me keep a food diary, that I had been living on very small amounts of food and frequently missed meals, then wondered why I was so tired all the time when I tried to train before.

So now I am eating 5 times a day, and straight after training I am having protein shakes and a protein meal such as tuna salad. I have also started to drink more water, cut out fizzy drinks and cut down on tea (I only really drank tea in meetings anyway and I don’t miss fizzy drinks even though the first few days my body didn’t thank me for giving them up!). I still have the occasional bit of rubbish as I figure that if I give up cakes and pasties (only on a fri after training) life would be pretty unbearable and that isn’t the point of training, I am training to have fun after all!!

So now I am off to bed and won’t wake up until maybe next Tues?

 

Another good week of training and eating. I am starting to feel what my body is doing now. That may sound odd, but I used to do everything at a million miles an hour until it hurt and then I would either keep going believing it was good to feel pain, or would stop and berate myself for being a wimp!

The main difference is now I am thinking about what my body is telling me, receiving feedback from activities and general everyday functions such as driving and standing up! That may sound odd, but since learning how to ‘switch on’ different muscles at different times I have now started to master the ability to do this at any time…for example, I have problems with my knees and this caused by having dominant Quad muscles (the big ones on the front of your legs) which means they do lots of work when exercising and put stress on my knees. So now I have started to do more work on my Glutes (my backside!) so that those muscles actually start to take some of the strain. This will help me especially as I start to get tired as the workload will be shed by more than one muscle. So now when I am standing I am aware of my posture and use my glutes to stand up straight…this sounds so simple, but I guarantee that you don’t do it properly at the moment. It is hard and slow progress to switch these muscles on, but with everyday stretching and rehab exercises that James gives me, and regular massage with Gaynor to relax the muscles that we're trying to do all the work previously, I am starting to understand what I am trying to do, and my body is responding.

The increase in strength this week has been noticeable too, I have upped the weights with Ed, but kept the good form, now correcting my own bad posture, meaning Ed can spend more time devising horrible new activities to do as a reward for all the hard work…such as a pretty nasty but fun circuit session at the end of this weeks training that involved rowing sets of 400m, doing deadlifts and shoulder presses and repeating more times than is healthy!

 

I am now officially over my tiredness and feeling great! I had a really hard week last week, I was tired all the time, adapting to the new regime. Ed explained to me that the body has several different energy systems, and that I was asking my body to use a different one by doing weights. This along with the new diet and an increase in my work contributed to me feeling pretty lousy. But luckily I have the support of some great people around me and they pulled me through when I felt like giving up. James explained how my body was adapting and along with Ed’s advice about nutrition it gave me confidence that nothing was wrong and that I should keep up the good work. Also it helped that after my massage Gaynor let me sleep on the massage table for 10mins after a particularly gruelling session! Thanks Gaynor, sorry I told tales on you but I want people to get the full picture ;-)

So keen to press on we upped the weights again and I am now deadlifting 85kgs fairly comfortably. I also started some specific rehab exercises for my shoulders which after years of swimming are prone to soreness after sessions. I am told that the Welsh Rugby team and Bath Rugby team do the same exercises as James has worked with them so if it helps them smash 10 bells out of eachother I'm sure it will help stablise my little shoulders!

2 Pilates sessions with Elizabeth this week and again I feel like I am now starting to listen to what my body is asking me to do, thinking about my posture and in turn engaging the right muscles at the right time, I was open minded but nervous about it at first but now I really see the benefit of it to what I am doing and am delighted that I have the chance to take part in it.

I signed up for a 3 hour spinning session in aid of Sports Relief about 6 weeks ago which is tonight (Fri) so I am not really looking forward to that! So I am going in to see Gaynor in a minute to massage and prep my legs and to strap my knee up so we don’t do it any damage on the bike later…having these guys to call on is really good when you do stupid things like I do sometimes! I have promised that no more surprises, from now on I am sticking to the schedule!!  

 

Busy week at work this week with the Bristol Schools Olympics for 3 full days, but still managed to squeeze in my 3 training sessions this week.

Things have changed a bit now. The first 4 weeks were all about getting my body ready for lifting some serious weights, and now after 4 weeks of ‘adaption’ exercises, that time has come! So we started learning some new techniques and upping the weights.

 

New activities include lots of Olympic lifting, cleans, squatting, deadlifting and even some snatching! It’s quite a difficult thing to take in all the new exercises but I think I am there or thereabouts! Ed has been keeping his beady eye on me to make sure that my form doesn’t go out of the window now we are lifting more and doing more powerful dynamic stuff. The key seems to be to be explosive early power in the movements, using the Glutes and Hamstrings rather than the chest back and arms. That will help me when I start running and cycling in a few weeks…although at the moment that seems a long way off!

 

Generally feeling quite motivated due to the new regime and my tiredness wearing off, although my diet is still in need of some tweaking so once that is sorted that will give me even more energy.

 

The weights are upping quite quickly this week. We are now deadlifting well over my bodyweight…which itself has gone up from 12 and a half stone to just over 13. Visually my body is starting to change too, some of the issues we were trying to deal with were my shoulders being pulled forward due to the amount of swimming I was doing and a powerful chest with weak back muscles and this is starting to be less obvious, my back muscles are kicking in and my posture is a lot better as a result. 

 

Pilates is certainly helping with that too. Elizabeth helped me this week by looking at my posture while driving. As I spend so much time driving every day, between 2 and 3 hours, I thought it was important that I was sitting correctly and not undoing the hard work we had been doing in the sessions, so we put my seat back more upright and I now sit with my shoulders back and when I remember I also try to work on my core muscles by pulling in my TA’s (Transverse Abdominis - a deep inner abdominal muscle) and practicing relaxing the rest of my body while holding this in…not as easy as it sounds trust me!

 

Also had a good massage with Gaynor which helped to loosen up the muscles which had been getting so tight due to upping the volume of weights last week. It is amazing how tight you can get without realising, and it’s only afterwards that you realise how bad you had got! Definitely recommend having a massage as often as you can! The only problem with the massage is Gaynor looks just a bit too much like she is enjoying inflicting pain on you for my liking!

 

 

This week was all about running! You can imagine my delight when James told me I could run this week…only for that joy to disappear when he gave me the session I was allowed to run! I will give you the full details…bear in mind I have not been allowed to run for nearly 2 months so this was quite a shock to the system…

 

Time   Incline (hill)         Rest       Speed

60secs 2.5     60secs 16.0

45secs 5.0     60secs 17.0

30secs 7.5     60secs 18.0

15secs 10.0     60secs 19.0

15secs 10.0     60secs 19.0

30secs 7.5     60secs 18.0

45secs 5.0     60secs 17.0

60secs 2.5     60secs 16.0

 

Try it at home if you dare!

 

Oh also we did some ridiculously heavy weights and some pilates and massage…a good steady week of training.

 

Feeling really strong and following a week of poor eating I have also had a cooking lesson off a friend who is a chef. He showed me how to put together a balanced meal with Carbohydrates, Protein, vegetable and a bit of roughage too! Amazing how simple it is to eat properly, and amazing how badly I was doing it before. If you think it takes ages to cook food then, like me, you will be surprised at how little time it actually takes. Also a top tip is to prepare veggies, potatoes and other bits and pieces like that and leave them all in the fridge, then get them all out and bang them together if you are running short on time!

 

So armed with my new diet tips I was feeling full of energy and got some really good training under the belt. Another run session like last week and will up the speeds for the next sessions as it felt a lot easier this week. Also went up more weight on the deadlifts, I am now lifting over 100kgs. I know that is a lot because my hands will not let me lift it up, my legs are fine, but my hands need help from some rather clever straps which help them to grip the bar better. Also added in some dynamic work on the shoulders, so lots of stretches, engagement activities, press ups and pull up’s, which must be just about the worst thing in the world. Pull up’s are officially my new most hated thing, but Ed insists that I do them!

 

Had a session with the new Physio Lee this week too, he has been looking at my troublesome knees. Apparently I have the same injury that causes Rafael Nadal to miss so many games so James has been 'pinning' me, a rather nasty technique where acupuncture needles are put into the muscle to spark a reaction and encourage the muscle to start to repair itself. Although it isn’t particularly pleasant it does yield some amazing results. Lee then has a go at frictioning the knees, which basically means having a good old prod around under the kneecaps and trying to ease the pressure a bit. The knees have been troubling me for a few weeks now so hopefully this combination will help to ease some of the pain…

 

 

Really sore knees this week so haven’t done the running as planned, and James has decided that I am not to do squats any more, instead I am focusing on deadlifts and some new exercises for glutes and hamstring activation which should help alleviate some of the strain on the knees.  I am also icing and treating my knees at home too, as well as carrying on with my foam rolling, stretching and the decline squats that are so important. To be fair this has been the biggest revelation of my training programme, that revelation that you can’t just turn up and expect everything to happen for you. You also have to work at home and think about all the activities you do in your spare time. You can’t just forget all about it and then expect to pick up where you left off…if only it were that simple!

 

I know what you are thinking…how much did you deadlift this week? Well we are now lifting 4 sets of 3 reps with 105kgs…not bad, slight strain in the back doing some dodgy squats last week so taking it a bit easy.

Back to swimming now too, just easy stuff, few hundred metres and most of that is technique stuff, single arm drills, catch up, chicken wings…all the boring stuff! Still, it feels good to be back in the water and to be getting a feel for the water again.

 

 

Sore week this week. The muscle soreness is quite bad so have had a couple of treatments, including the dreaded neck cracking, which actually is the best thing afterwards…but during the build up to it, it’s terrible, like waiting to pick up exam results or any other horrible feeling of anticipation! Basically I was getting headaches and soreness in the neck and back so James laid me down, 'pinned' my back and neck, then cracked my neck to ease the tension…and as I sit here writing this at the end of another tough week, I feel great!

 

We kept everything the same this week, it was a case of getting through it without getting in any trouble due to the muscle soreness…at least we didn’t go backwards, and next week I will be feeling a lot better after a weekend off so we will be back and raring to go.

 

I tried my wedding suit on this week and was surprised to find that it no longer fitted! I am getting married in 5 weeks and bought the suit around 3 months ago, so thought I would try it on to check, and lo and behold it was too tight! Ed reliably informs me that as soon as I start the endurance part of my training I will drop all of the weight I have built up over the past 10 week, but that is after the wedding. The good news is that I will be as buff as I ever will be on my wedding day, the bad news is that then I will have to start running and cycling until it all fades away!