Reading blood pressure

Currently, hypertension is defined as having a sustained blood pressure of over 140/90.  According to the NHS 40% of adults in England suffer from hypertension and all available evidence shows that your lifestyle plays a significant role in regulating your blood pressure. Risk factors for high blood pressure include:

• Age
• Excessive alcohol consumption
• Poor diet
• Lack of exercise
• Obesity.

Of those risk factors, only one of them is out of our control (age, in case you couldn’t guess which one).  All the others are a result of the choices we make…we choose to drink too much, eat badly, not exercise and get fat.

And that is great news!  Because that means we just need to choose to change these things!  

Click here for 10 simple rules to improve everybodys diet.

Click here to find out about improving your exercise levels.

Click here to find out about losing excess bodyfat.

But here are some specific guidelines for people who suffer from hypertension:

Goals

• Reduce blood pressure
• Reduce risks of chronic heart disease
• Increase physical activity levels
• Reduce bodyfat levels

Types of exercise

• For aerobic exercise, choose large muscle group activities such as walking, cycling, rowing, stepping, group exercise classes, swimming.
• For resistance exercises, perform them in a circuit fashion.  This means do a single set of the first exercise, then move directly onto the first set of the next exercise etc.  Once you have performed 1 set of each resistance exercise, loop back to the beginning and do the second set in the same fashion.

Things to avoid

• Holding your breath, especially during resistance exercises.  This can spike your blood pressure in a few seconds.  So keep breathing steadily all the time.
• Isometric contractions.  This means holding your muscles tight in one position for a period of a few seconds or more.  Make sure your body keeps moving all the time.  Be aware that gripping a bar/weight/object tightly is a form of isometric contraction…so keep a light, loose grip on any equipment you may be holding.
• Overhead resistance work.  This one is dependant on the person.  Some people can do this, while it makes others feel dizzy/faint.  If you are one of these people, avoid it.
• Decline exercises.  These are ones where your head is below the height of your body.

How often

• Aerobic exercises should be done 3-7 days per week.  Start with however often you feel comfortable with, but gradually progress to trying to do some every day.
• Resistance exercises should be done 2-3 times per week.

How long for

• For aerobic exercises, 30-60 minutes.  Choose steady, continuous activities instead of short, intermittent bursts.
• For resistance exercises, choose 10-15 reps for 1-3 circuits.

How intense

• For aerobic exercises, low to moderate intensity.  Aim to be comfortably out of breath and still able to hold a conversation with someone.  For the technically minded, your heart rate should be between 40-70% of maximum.
• For resistance exercises, keep intensity low.  Remember, the aim is not to have you gritting your teeth and struggling to push a weight, but to keep your body moving in steady, continuous movements.

What next

Once you find a workout too easy:

1. increase duration (make it last longer)
2. increase frequency (do it more often)
3. increase intensity (make it harder)

in that order!

And as always, if you live in and around the Skipton area, feel free to contact me for one to one coaching.

• Cannot swim yet
• Wants to learn to swim
• Doesn’t mind being on TV
• Can get to the swimming pools at either Burnley or Colne in Lancashire

If the above sounds like you, I need to hear from you NOW!

Just contact me by clicking here, or leave a comment below.

Thanks!

We were looking at Karens current training timetable and she cycles through “hard” and “easy” days each week.  What this meant was, she would crank it up to 11 and go all out on her “hard” days, but simply ease back and go through the motions on her “easy” days.

This kind of thing is ok for getting your body in the right condition, but doesn’t really do anything to improve your technique.  You can’t improve your technique if you are concentrating solely on going fast…and you can’t improve your technique if you are “going through the motions” and disengaging your brain.

So we simply changed the names of her workouts…nothing else has changed…just the names.  They are now “intensity” days and “technique” days.

• Intensity Days - the priority is working at a high enough intensity to improve her conditioning.  Don’t worry too much if the technique is a bit raggedy…just work the body hard enough to get a training response.
• Technique Days - the priority is getting her form perfect.  Don’t worry that she is not so fast today (she is supposed to be taking it easy today anyway), just make sure the form is spot on.

This way every training session has a goal to aim for and has a purpose.  There is never any “going through the motions”, and you don’t run the risk of burning yourself out by over training.

Even though only the names have changed, psychologically speaking, this makes a hell of a difference!

The same idea can be applied to any event.  We get better by working hard and getting fitter…and by moving better and more efficiently.

So instead of having “rest” or “easy” days…have “technique” days.  It keeps us moving and avoids us just filling time with “stuff”.

She got 4th in the 800 metre freestyle (only missing out on the bronze by 0.6 sec! ), and knocking 3 seconds off her personal best!

She got 3rd in the 400 metre freestyle (yay!!! )

And she got 13th in the open water freestyle, knocking a fantastic 3 minutes off her personal best!

Karen Driver Swimming

We have trained together a lot here in the gym, and we worked hard to make the time as productive as possible.  She spends hours every day in the pool, so the last thing she needs is “work for works sake” in the gym.  We scaled back on exercises that were not helping her with swimming and fine tuned others to make them as specific as possible to her events.

The only reason we were in the gym was to improve her swimming time.  So there was no thought of showing off, posing in the mirror, or doing the things the bodybuilding boys were doing.

“If it did not directly help with improving her swim time, we didn’t bother with it.”

I loved every minute of training with her, because we got loads of strange looks from all the bodybuilding boys confused as to what we were doing.  I even got told i was training “wrong” because i wasn’t “isolating the muscles”!  The human body does not work in isolation.  It is 1 incredibly complex unit that needs to work in a coordinated fashion.  So that’s how it should be trained.

The most important moves we were doing were big, compound exercises (full depth heavy squats, pullups etc), explosive plyometrics for the legs (to help improve her turns) and very swimming specific moves on the cable machine (so we were “swimming” on dry land!).

Barbell Squat

Vertical jump

It highlighted a big difference between people in the gym.  Some come in and do things because it looks good/sexy/cool (and they read it in a magazine that sell a lot of “supplements”), and we come in and do things because they WORK!

What kind of person are you?