If you are want to get fit and lose weight then our great value Windsor bootcamp is a great value option. Prices start from just £3 a class, and if you work hard you can burn over 500 calories in just an hour. The bootcamp combines group exercises, team building and strength work as well as a great cardio vascular workout.

It’s located in central Windsor at Bachelors Acre, and we have classes on a Wednesday and Monday at 6:30pm as well as a morning class on Fridays at 9:30. Our bootcamp mascot Wilson is always on hand to offer encouragement and support.

For more details and prices please our bootcamp page here.

Our muscles are made up of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of muscle fibres. These fibres are spun together usually in a slightly spiralling line that runs from the top of the muscle to the bottom. These fibres adapt and adjust to stresses placed upon them. Just as a muscle will get stronger of you train it, longer of you stretch it, inversely it will get weaker of you neglect it and tighter if it is never stretched. If you sit in a chair for long enough then your body (and the muscles) will adapt to work most efficiently for the challenge that they are presented with; you will end up chair shaped, with shortened muscles at the back of the leg and at the front of the hip.

Muscles run across all our major joints, working the bones like the chains on a drawbridge. If these muscles become tight there can be severe implications such as increased risk of injury, poor posture, back problems, reduced range of movement, headaches and general aches and pains. As the body and the muscles are a kinetic chain, a tight calf muscle can cause a tight hamstring, which will tilt the pelvis and give you a bad back. So, a pain in the foot can be a pain in the neck. Many knee problems are caused by quads (thighs) being either too weak (the knee cap will go wobbly) or too tight (the upper and lower parts of the leg will put pressure on the knee).So the muscles need to be both strong AND flexible.

Types of stretch are: Dynamic stretching: Rhythmical repetitive movements take the joint and its associated muscles through to a full or near full stretch. This is most effective before exercise as part of a warm up. An example of dynamic stretching could be swinging the legs back and forth or swinging your arms forward and backwards to stretch the chest.

Static stretching: the most popular type of stretching, this involves holding the muscle at full stretch to encourage lengthening and re-alignment. It also conditions the connective tissue (ligaments and tendons that attach the muscle to bone) and maintains the  full range of movement in the joint. To keep  flexibility hold each stretch for 15 seconds. To develop and improve hold stretches for longer, hold for 30 seconds or longer.

A static stretch should be held at the point where you can feel the stretch with a little discomfort. If you feel too much though, ease back on the stretch. Remember not to bounce when holding the static stretch. It is better to keep most of your static stretching for after your exercise session, as part of your cool-down when the muscles are warm.

Apart from static stretching, other methods of stretching are ballistic, dynamic and PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) stretching, all of which are best done under instruction from a qualified personal trainer or sports coach.

In a poll of 2,000 British men and women, more than 75% had tried a diet in the past year. But women had attempted the biggest array of eating plans to try to shift the pounds. There are now fears that these fad diets are rubbing off on the next generation, causing potential future health problems.

Six out of ten people surveyed said they had been asked by their children not to give them foods such as bread, potatoes and fruit, believing they are bad for them, when they are healthy as part of a balanced diet.  Around half of parents did remove some of these foods from their children’s diet. More than 85 per cent of those surveyed on behalf of the bread company Warburtons said they did not know calcium was important to their diet and around half did not know calcium was found in white bread. The fact that this survey was commissioned by a bread maker, and markets bread as a good source of calcium is also of some concern.

Traditionally the focus of our physical efforts to lose weight have been on gym based exercise, activity that takes place two or three times a week for a duration of an hour or so each time. Although this form of structured exercise is proven to improve fitness levels, provide huge health benefits and increase feelings of well-being, it’s a relatively small amount of energy expenditure when you look at the overall week.

Over a week, there are 168 hours. If you sleep for 8 hours a day that leaves 112. Going to the gym will make you fit and healthy, but even if you can manage 3 hours a week that’s only 2.7% of the time available for activity. Logic dictates that this wont make a huge increase in your overall calorific expenditure, so might not help to make you less huge! What about trying to increase your energy output for the other 97.3% of the time? It’s time to increase your NEAT.

NEAT, or non exercise activity thermogenesis, is made up of all the energy you burn while not taking part in structured exercise. Rolling over in your sleep, sitting at a desk, walking up the stairs, throwing a ball for the dog are all examples of NEAT. In fact it includes any type of movement that requires muscle contractions.

Although structured exercise has been the target of most exercise physiology research in the past, new evidence is suggesting that NEAT plays a role in both health and obesity. The first paper to focus on NEAT (performed at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota) examined weight gain in 16 non-obese adults who were given a 1000 calorie surplus (roughly the same as 2 Big Macs) every day for 8 weeks, while keeping their level of structured exercise at the same level. Not surprisingly, all of these subjects gained weight, but there was a huge variation: some individuals gained just 1.4 kg while others gained as much as 7.2 kg. What is very interesting is that changes in NEAT accounted for roughly 50% of the variation in fat gain. So, when overfed, some individuals naturally began to burn more calories through activities of daily living, postural changes, and even fidgeting, and this increase appears to be at least partly responsible for their resistance to weight gain.

A second paper by this same group compared the amount of NEAT in obese and non-obese individuals. As you might expect, obese individuals performed less NEAT than lean individuals. In fact, if obese individuals had NEAT levels similar to the more active people in the study, they would have burned an additional 350 calories a day, equivalent to roughly 1lb of fat every 10 days. Or 40 minutes of strenuous exercise in the gym! What is also interesting, however, is that this reduced NEAT was found in obese individuals even after weight loss, suggesting that NEAT levels are at least partially influenced by genetic inheritance.

In a recent BBC Horizon program, “The truth about exercise”, Dr Michael Mosley further investigated the effects of NEAT on individuals with different jobs and lifestyles. Using specially designed GPS monitors (fidget pants) the show concluded that even small changes to lifestyle can make a huge difference to the amount of energy expended during the course of a single day. Repeating the mantra “the chair is a killer, the chair is a killer” Mosley started cycling to work, having walking meetings, standing up to type and taking the stairs rather than the elevator. The fidget pants showed that he was burning up to 500 calories more each day – the same as attending a bootcamp. So of you would like to do a bootcamp without actually breaking into a sweat, get NEAT!

Ways to increase your neat could be walking to work, getting off a stop early and walking, parking a bit further away from your destination, sitting down for less time, having meetings walking and pacing up and down the office while on the phone (studies show that this also increases confidence and is a often used tool of sales people). Strength training will also increase NEAT, as small, non-exercise related movements will burn more calories if they are having to utlise more lean muscle.

Jack’s official profile is here, call or email us to book a free consultation with Jack to discuss how he can help you finally achieve your health and fitness goals.

Proprioception is a component of fitness that informs an individual where all the parts of their musculoskeletal systems are and what they are doing relative to each other in space and time. Or in real-speak an innate sense of positional  awareness. It’s a very important part of all round fitness, and all of our personal training programmes will contain elements of this. It really helps you to stay on your feet in sports and every day situations, when children/large labradors/husbands bump into you, uneven pavement threatens to tip you into the road and so on. Open chain exercises where your limbs are free in space as they push a resistance are great for this, as are wobble boards, bosu balls and stability balls. Free weight training is a good example of this open chain exercise.

Balance can be defined as the ability to maintain the centre of mass within the base of support. Again vital in everyday life and really helpful if you want to have fun and be an active outdoorsy type.

Co-ordination can be defined as a controlled interaction between two or more body parts that produces a desired movement under the control of the neuromuscular system.

All human movement requires some degree of these motor skills. The more complex the task the more motor skills are required. Different activities require different combinations of these motor skills, and they are just as essential to a great life and physical well being as being functionally strong, having a healthy heart/lungs and looking great. The whole package if you like. So try something new, get your personal trainer to make you do things that you may not be used to doing. If you can skip, try to skip backwards. If you like to jog, try to do some agility footwork before you go out; you never know when you might need to be agile.

Keep it varied, and good luck!