Stable Strength

Through one of my clients I had the chance to meet Pawel. Him and my client Gaby have started a community interest company called Rebalance Wellbeing Hub with one simple idea. Help people get healthier through a more complete approach to health.

That’s something I care about. I run a strength training studio but I’ve always believed that getting people healthier goes beyond what happens in a session. Sleep, recovery, stress, energy. It all connects. And the reality is we need more people and more businesses pulling in the same direction if we’re going to make any real difference to how healthy this country is.

Rebalance are running free monthly workshops in Oxford to help people understand their health and their bodies better. That alone is worth paying attention to. There aren’t many companies giving up their time to educate people for free.

They also offer Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy which is essentially resting in a pressurised oxygen rich chamber for about an hour. People come out noticing better energy, deeper sleep and clearer thinking. It’s not a magic fix but it supports everything else you’re already doing for your health.

Worth a look if you’ve been feeling more run down than usual. Link to book in Rebalance bio

Do you have a graveyard of forgotten goals?

It's worth asking yourself. We all set them. Lose weight by summer, stop eating takeaways, finally get in shape. We set them with good intentions and then quietly abandon them a few weeks later.

Sometimes that's fine. Goals change because life changes. You plan for one thing and something completely unexpected happens that makes you rethink everything. That's not failure, that's just life forcing you to adjust. There's nothing wrong with letting go of a goal that doesn't fit where you're heading anymore.

But some goals keep showing up. You abandon them and then set the same ones again six months later. If getting healthier or stronger is something you keep coming back to, that's telling you something.

That usually comes down to one thing.

Your daily actions don't match the person you say you want to be. If you want to be someone who's healthy and strong, that means choosing to train when you're tired. It means preparing food instead of ordering in. It means putting your phone down and going to sleep instead of scrolling for another hour.

Not every single time, but more often than not.

You don't have to overhaul your whole life overnight, but you do have to be honest with yourself about whether what you're doing every day is actually moving you towards the person you want to become. If it isn't, something needs to change.

If fitness keeps ending up in your graveyard and you want this time to be different, the link is in the bio.

Everyone wants to look toned. Nobody wants to look bulky. So people spend hours on the treadmill, cut their calories right down and avoid the weights because they don't want to get too big. Then they wonder why they just look like a smaller version of themselves but not actually toned.

What you're seeing when someone looks toned is muscle sitting underneath low body fat. That's it. No secret, no special workout. Just muscle that's visible because there isn't much fat covering it.

So if you're not building muscle you're never going to get that look. Doesn't matter how much weight you lose. The scale can go down and you can still look exactly the same if all you lost was muscle. Which is exactly what happens when people cut calories too hard and skip the weights.

You need to lift weights and focus on getting stronger over time. You also need to eat enough protein to actually build and keep the muscle you're working for. That's what changes how your body looks, not just how much you weigh.

Build the muscle. Reduce the body fat. That's what you need to do to look and be more “toned”.

It's May. You've got about two months before you're on a beach or at a pool somewhere. That's not a lot of time but it's enough to make a real difference if you start now.

Link in bio if you want help with it.

Weight loss injections like Ozempic sound perfect on paper. They reduce your appetite, kill cravings and the weight comes off. It sounds great and honestly for a lot of people it is a useful tool.

I'm not here to scaremonger anyone. If you've struggled with your weight for years and your doctor suggests trying it, go for it. When my mum told me her doctor recommended it I told her to go grab the prescription.

But there are trade offs you need to understand. One of the big ones is muscle loss and bone density.

There was a study recently showing Ozempic can reduce bone mineral density. That sounds scary but it needs context. If you lost a large amount of weight through any method, whether that's injections, fasting or drastically cutting calories, you'd see similar effects. Your body gets rid of muscle it doesn't think it needs and when you're not giving it a reason to maintain bone density, that starts to decline too.

When you lift weights, the force going through your bones stimulates them to grow stronger and denser. Your body adapts to the stress you put it under. Squats, deadlifts, presses. They all send the signal that your skeleton needs to stay strong. Without that signal, especially when you're losing weight quickly, your bones and muscles have no reason to stick around.

That's why resistance training is the single best thing you can do alongside any weight loss approach. The drug can help with the food side. But the training is what makes sure you don't lose the things you actually want to keep.

You probably follow someone online who looks incredible and you think if you just did what they do you'd finally get results. That perfect diet plan or perfect training programme that's going to be the one that works this time.

But where has that got you so far? Did you actually start it? How long did you stick with it? And where are you now?

The reality is we don't get very far when we try to follow someone else's perfect lifestyle. It doesn't exist and even if it did it's not natural to you. It was never going to stick.

What actually works is committing to small improvements. Think about the smallest possible step you could take right now and realistically stick to. That's your starting point.

Say you don't eat fruit at all. You know you should but you just don't. A good start would be one piece of fruit before breakfast every day. That's it. Doesn't sound like much does it? The goal isn't to overhaul everything, it's just to stick with that one thing for a couple of weeks. Then maybe you add a piece of fruit before lunch. Now you're eating two portions a day without it feeling like effort.

That's how it works. One small change at a time, stuck with long enough to become normal, then you add the next one. The change you need to make right now might feel embarrassingly small. But given enough time and a few of those changes stacked together, your outcomes look completely different. Maybe slower than you'd like, but they'll actually stay with you.

Something that winds me up about this industry is how everything has to be a niche now. Menopause training. Women's only programmes. Ramadan fitness plans. Over 50s strength. It's all packaged up like it's some completely different thing that needs a specialist approach.

It doesn't.

The fundamentals of getting stronger, losing weight and feeling better are the same for pretty much everyone. Lift weights, eat enough protein, sleep properly, move consistently. That applies whether you're a 45 year old woman going through menopause or a 30 year old bloke who wants to shift a beer gut. The basics don't change just because your circumstances do.

I get why women's only gyms exist. Some people feel more comfortable training in that environment and that's fair enough. But the training itself isn't different. The nutrition isn't different. It's about the environment, not the method.

What annoys me is when coaches market these things like they've got some secret formula for your specific situation. They haven't. They've just taken the same advice that works for everyone and repackaged it with a label so it feels more personal. And all that ends up doing is confusing people. You watch 300 reels in a week and every single one gives you a different secret tip. By the end of it you're more lost than when you started.

The actual advice is simple. Eat a high protein whole food diet that's high in fibre. Cut back on refined sugar. Resistance train 2 to 3 times a week. Get 90 to 150 minutes of cardio in. It sounds like a lot written down but if you can get that structure in place you'll probably never look back. And if you struggle with building that structure or keeping yourself accountable, that's what I'm here for.

We threw a birthday party for the studio and when everyone walked in I just stood there for a second. You see people in ones and twos every day and you don't think much of it. Then you get them all in one room and it hits you how many people this place has brought together.

Something I think about a lot is how isolated we've all become. Everyone's at home on their own screen. Even when you're in the same room as your family, everyone's watching something different. We're more connected than ever and somehow lonelier than we've ever been.
Making new friends as an adult is hard. You don't get thrown into situations where it happens naturally anymore. No school, no uni, no forced proximity. So you just stop meeting anyone new and don't even notice.

People come in to train. That's the reason they're here. But what ends up happening is they build friendships without even trying. You're working next to someone who's got a similar goal to you. Maybe they're a bit further ahead and they tell you what worked for them. Maybe you're the one passing something on. Those little conversations between sets are how people actually connect.

It reminds me of being younger when we'd all go out to pick apples or dig up potatoes. Nobody remembers the work. You remember someone launching a potato at your head and everyone losing it.

That's the best bit about this place. The training is the reason people walk through the door but it's not the reason they stay.