Now that solid foundations have been laid, Yvonne is ready for a more complex training phase
Yvonne has been training for eight weeks and it is encouraging to see her continue to work-out with enthusiasm. It is this enthusiasm to keep on challenging herself that will separate her results from many people in gyms around the country and help her beat the odds in changing her mind and what her body can accomplish.
A common challenge for someone embarking on a new fitness regime is that they are in love with the goal or the end result but not the everyday activity that will help them achieve their goal.
People are not born with the fitness gene. They do not love it when they start out, but successful people stay with it in good and bad times.
Initially, after five or six minutes of training, Yvonne was shattered and it hurt during it, straight after it and for days after it. In all fairness to her, she didn’t
whine and she was not necessarily doing what she loved but over time she has learned to love the effects.
Each time she trains, we attempt to change the variables of the exercise to prevent the body adapting and becoming reluctant to change. This was done by increasing weights, making exercises harder, changing the tempo or speed of an exercise or shortening rest periods between exercises.
Our goal is to be two per cent better than the day before.
Fitness, training and nutrition have now become part of Yvonne’s identity. I see a lot of people working out in gyms performing the same exercises every day, lifting the same weights, and wondering why they are not getting results.
Questions
If you want to change your body shape then you should ask yourself some questions. Who do you have to become to attract the body you want and are you training to improve or are you just doing enough to get by, to tell people you are training?
Yvonne has continued with her target, which was to lose 0.6pc body fat each week. Her initial weight was 81.3kg, of which 56.4kg was muscle and 24.9kg was fat. This gave her a body-fat percentage of 30.6pc, or 55lbs of fat.
On our last weekly assessment her weight was 75kg, of which 58.4kg was muscle and the remaining 16.6kg, or 36.5lbs, are fat. This gives her a body-fat percentage of 22.1pc. It also means that she has lost 18.5lbs of fat during our eight weeks together.
This month Yvonne’s body lost 1.2kg of muscle in comparison to last month. Although she still has an increase of over 2.1kg of muscle compared to when she first started, it is something we will monitor.
A lot of weight-loss programmes never distinguish between muscle and fat loss. Muscle loss is not a good thing as muscle helps speed up our metabolism, maintain joint stability and it is a sign of health and longevity.
Her weight loss is at a slower phase on her second month but her body is going through other physiological changes and, most importantly, she is getting stronger.
When Yvonne started training, her body was structurally imbalanced.
Structural balance testing involves running the upper and lower body through a series of length tension and strength tests to determine which muscle groups are basically ‘underachieving’ or restricting her performance.
This involved a lot of single-arm or single-leg exercises, with the goal to get one arm as strong as the other so that when we go to double exercises we can lift more weight that enables our body to change shape.
In order to achieve our goal of fat loss, we used short rest intervals, varied the repetitions and weights to target different muscle groups to cause a response from her body to change shape. A simple method is to alternate a lower body weights exercise followed by an upper body weights exercise. This is called peripheral heart flow and the heart has to work hard to pump the blood down to the legs and then up to the arms.
This, along with energy system work in the form of sprint intervals, will increase the heart rate and create change in the body.
When someone starts on a training programme a lot of the changes that occur are neurological. The brain is improving its co-ordination with the body part. This is called intra-muscular co-ordination and the brain controls which muscle fibres fire and how much tension is activated.
For example, if a novice female boxer threw a punch at you, it may hurt if she hit you but she may only be able to recruit 20pc of the muscle fibres.
The body may only let you recruit 50pc of the total muscles even at its peak. The brain will be reluctant to allow your body to use more muscle and power for fear that you may do damage to your muscles and joints.
The more you repeat the exercises, the more the brain allows you to recruit more muscles to generate force and lift more weight.
In the case of a boxer, I would much prefer a punch from a novice than a punch from Katie Taylor.
In Yvonne’s case she will be able to lift more weight, which in turn increases motor units, creates more damage so the body will regrow with thicker muscle that burns more calories.
We can start compound exercises like squats and chins because her body is stronger and the muscles that support these exercises have been previously prepared.
That is what it takes for success. Average people look for ways for getting away with it; successful people look for ways of getting on with it.
Catch up with the next instalment of Yvonne’s progress on May 17.
Yvonne’s Take
‘It’s amazing the difference a dress size or two can make to how you greet the advent of fine weather’
Two months in and I am rapidly running out of clothes that fit. I have a couple of dresses and one pair of jeans that I can wear and I have bought one or two tops, but I am putting off buying anything significant until I know what size I will eventually settle on.
There are two items of clothing, however, that I did have to buy out of necessity. The first being a new pair of tracksuit pants, following a rather embarrassing incident in the gym three weeks ago when the pants I was wearing literally fell down while I was on the running machine.
Thank God for the emergency stop button.
The second, a bra. I was measured at the weekend and I have gone down two cup sizes. I am now roughly around the same size as I was when I was 17. I am not sure how I feel about that and I have become obsessed with the size of other women’s bosoms.
I think I might be suffering from boob envy.
That aside, I feel absolutely great. It is amazing the difference a dress size or two can make to how you greet the advent of fine weather.
When you are fat, discarding the winter garb is something that you really don’t look forward to.
There is that awkward couple of days before you have plucked up the courage to ditch the tights and bare the arms and you end up spending the day all hot and bothered.
While everyone else is enthusiastically pulling on the shorts and flashing the flesh, you are endlessly putting together outfits in your head, analysing what would be most flattering.
This year, I am very grateful that I don’t have that problem.
The first month saw me drop about 13lbs in fat. During the second month, though my body was changing shape and getting smaller every week, the figures changed a lot more slowly.
I have lost five-and-a-half lbs of fat this month, which seems a little underwhelming in relation to 13lbs and I find myself getting a bit impatient but, as Damien keeps telling me, I have to be patient.
I have stayed very disciplined when it comes to food, having a protein breakfast every morning, bringing my chicken breast or fish and salad to work every day for lunch and, if I know I am going to be late, for dinner also.
In the first month I didn’t have any cheat meal, as I was intending to have some treats when I visited Vienna for Easter. I enjoyed this weekend away immensely and feel like I got a lot more out of it than previous weekends away because it didn’t revolve around eating and drinking.
Vienna is amazing — if you ever get the chance to visit, take it — but I must say that I did find the food a little tricky.
Breakfast was fine, I had scrambled egg one morning, an omelette the next and some smoked fish on the last day of our visit.
The snacks were easy too — I bought a bag of cashew nuts and some apples and kept them in my bag, but lunch and dinner were more difficult.
It wasn’t so much the food, all of the restaurants we visited had fish, meat and vegetables of some sort on the menu, but the logistics of eating at regular intervals when you are not in your normal routine.
We were out sightseeing all day and went to shows, which started at 7.30pm at night, so we didn’t have dinner until about 10pm. I got really cranky.
I had decided that Saturday was to be the night for my treat. I was going to have wine with my dinner.
We went to a lovely restaurant and ordered the ox steak and a nice bottle of red wine. I had three glasses and was quite tipsy.
I think I might have built it all up a bit too much. Though the wine was delicious, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would and the whole thing was a bit of an anti-climax.
And I had a hangover the next morning, as well as a huge sense of guilt that was only slightly alleviated by a session on the running machine at the hotel gym.
If I could do it again, I would go for a nice slice of apple strudel instead.
When I got home, I enjoyed getting back into my routine of going to the gym five or six times a week.
The weight training, which I do three times a week with Damien, is still very intense and painful, but I find that I can endure it better as the weeks go on and I always feel great afterwards.
The other two or three times I exercise, I go to my local gym, usually in the morning before breakfast, and do sprint intervals on the treadmill.
This involves running ridiculously fast for a period, say 50 seconds, and then resting at a walking/jogging pace for a period, say two minutes, for a number of repetitions.
My fitness has really improved, as has my general mood and my ability to deal with stress. I can’t wait to see what the next month will bring.
