Category Archive for : ‘Uncategorized’

We are all getting older. That’s my opening gambit this month. It’s pretty broad so we could be going anywhere with it, but one thing I can guarantee you is that you are a tiny bit older now than you were when you began reading this a few moments ago. Momentous.

Nothing good comes of aging other than lower car insurance. I can’t think of anything else. Most of us put up a little fight against the goose step of time… mine revolves around regular cycling, regular broccoli, and regulating my

Stuart Armstrong’s excellent blog article “why coaches like drills and how they are killing creativity” can be found here.  It is bang on the money. A message that needs to be heard, and you could opt to read it before this. My favourite line is:

“Imagine a world where trying new things was applauded rather then met by side of the mouth whispers by arm folded tracksuits on the sideline.” I’ve seen a lot of that.

Now I know Stuart and he sees the bigger picture, but he likes poking people with

I am not on a one man mission to deconstruct trainer gumph… but there is a lot out there. In this months video-blog I take on foam. You’d think its just foam really, but nope, the trainer manufacturers have turned it into something you should be lusting for and worrying about at the same time… Is your foam as good as the next guys foam?

My favourite doctor of all time was “Bones” McCoy from Star Trek. He was just so gloriously grumpy and reluctantly empathetic. You may have met similar doctors yourself. Of course he is part of science fiction folklore, as was the medicine he practiced. We can all play the Star Trek science game and marvel about how much of its show cased “tech” is now fact and not fiction… including Bones scanner devices and even his hissing hypo syringe. But what if we play the game further and look ahead into

It’s a video again this month.

I show you six exercises with strength band training loops that replicate 6 common lifting patterns. This is a generalised strength workout that can be combined with the workout demonstrated in my previous post Strong Runner. Perfect for cyclists and runners to integrate some strength work into their training… but don’t have the time, motivation, access or budget for the gym. No excuses now.

These types of bands are readily available now and I recommend the Valkyrie ones available here from this site/amazon. To order some Click

I see a lot of injured runners. Some of them are re-injured, or newly injured, or chronically injured and there are a few who aren’t really injured but they think they are. It would be easy to conclude that running isn’t good for you… because of all the injuries. In fact how likely are you to be injured if you are a runner? Well there are a few “incidence” research articles out there but it’s a difficult one to nail down… I mean one runners “minor niggle” is another runners

Are you gunslinger fast? Do you rate yourself when it comes to reaction times? Most of us like to think we are pretty sharp.

We associate fast reactions with elite human performance. Table tennis players, sprint starts, goalkeepers, clay shooting, jet pilots, motor racing… they are “lightening”. In it’s simplest form when discussing “reactions”  we are talking about speed of response to a stimulus. In most sporting contexts this response is expressed in terms of a physical movement with the selection process of eliciting this movement being either sub-conscious (essentially involuntary),

Winter 2006 The World Health Organisation recognise that AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu are not going to be the primary destructive health concerns facing our global population. Obesity with it’s associated medical conditions of type 2 diabetes, glaucoma, high blood pressure, renal failure and vascular disease will claim more lives and present vast financial challenges to even the most affluent nations in the coming decades. It will be 10 years on from this announcement next year. Have things changed?

Well they hadn’t this week whilst I listened to a radio interview with

This video blog follows up on the recent gait analysis one where I mentioned that I would film you some examples of strength exercises to compliment a runners training…. and I fancied a bit of a skip round the woods anyway. But before the main feature starts please read through these important trailers:

Strength underpins function. Strength comes first… what you do with that strength is up to you. Think of it as the fuel that you put into your running sessions. It’s like driving a car… fuel in, then go somewhere.

I decided this weekend that I needed a syndrome. I don’t mean that I should start shouting rude words on buses or develop something ferociously sore on a bony bit of my body. I have the utmost sympathy for any currently recognised syndrome sufferer, but I wanted a new one. What I really mean is that I wanted to invent one… or more accurately I am at that stage of my career where I should be “identifying” one. I could then talk about it a lot, which could pad out