8 Reasons Why Training Outdoors Is Less Stressful

We have too much stress and worry in our lives. If keeping our bodies healthy and strong has to be stressful as well then we are getting nowhere. It’s just…wrong.

So here’s why training outdoors is far less stressful, just a few of the reasons

1. Dirty shoes, or shoeless, doesn’t matter

When you enter the gym with dirty shoes you feel awful or other people staring at you make you feel awful. Outdoors no one cares, not even the squirrels. They can be full of mud for a month if you don’t feel like washing them up. In the gym you can’t go with dirty shoes, they would probably kick you out.

And you can’t take your shoes off either, healthy and safety regulations. And if you do, or others do, imagine the smell 😉 No stress.

2. Where will you go?

A problem I faced with my clients very often when I was a gym PT. If there is sweat on the floor how many option do you have? Yuck. How far can you go? In the outdoors if there’s dog poo here you just take two steps to the side and it’s clean. No stress.

3. No space to move

In the gym if you don’t like a corner of the gym you can only move a few feet away before you hit a wall. Outdoors you can run or walk for 10 min and you find a totally different place. Unique. No stress.

4. Too crowded

In the gym, when it’s busy you struggle to find your little corner to do your sit-ups. That or do them in the middle of the gym…if you have room. In the outdoors you have km of land, you can go anywhere you feel comfortable. No stress.

5. Too close for comfort

In the gym is someone moves around to much, like skipping rope, or pushing and smashing things against the ground they almost step on your feet or hit you.

In the outdoors there is room for anyone to do anything, wherever they want whenever they want, and you as well. No need to go around others to make sure you don’t get hit. No stress.

6. Rainy days

If it rains and you want to enter the gym you have to dry up first. In the outdoors the more it rains on you get the more incredible you feel. And no one kicks you out. No stress.

7. Things break down

In the gym is your favorite piece of equipment breaks down….or worse if someone sits there for half hour, you need to change your routine.

In the outdoors there is no equipment. And you don’t need any, to get and stay healthy and fit. All you need is your body and creativity. Lots and lots of creativity. No one will take that and it won’t break down. You just have to make sure your body, the only equipment yo need, will not break down. Ahhhh…No stress.

Photo Credit: martinak15 via Compfight cc

8. On your own terms

Don’t you hate it when you want to do an early morning training and have to wait for the doors to open?

The gym closes and opens at certain times…..that won’t happen outdoors. No stress.
In the outdoors you can do whatever you want (with respect for nature, law and oters around you) and whenever you want! Who’s up for 3am training? No stress.

In summary…

Outdoors you don’t have to be worry about being clean, how you smell, how you look, your makeup, huffin’ a f puffin’ or any other sounds you want and feel like making. Not worry about throwing stuff around, about people looking weird at you, someone interrupting your training to say “hello” or give you their invaluable advice. Or worse, trying to sell you stuff. No stress.

Outdoors you are you, you can be anyone you want, you can do whatever you want, within the rule of law and respecting others and nature.

Outdoors training doesn’t mean you do the same boring gym routines just outdoors. Outdoors you can train for strength, cardio, flexibility, mobility, endurance and you don’t even have run on the hamster wheel (aka treadmill). And it’s a lot more challenging.

Finally, training outdoors is freakin’ awesome! And if you have the right guidance, knowledge and source of creativity you will have the time of your life and awesome stories to tell your friends and family. Who will ever tell the story of how they ran on the treadmill.

Ready?

Do you feel in any way intimidated by the gym book a free call with me and we can come up with an outdoors specific training routine for you. Are you ready for this adventure? Let’s make you life awesome.

April 26, 2015

Stop Looking And Start Feeling

We are so dependent on our eyes nowadays. We receive most of our information through the sense of sight. Not saying that’s a bad thing.

But it seems to me we are slowly losing the ability to feel. Particularly feeling our bodies, the position, the movement, how it feels, what it needs.

I will not claim I have absolutely mastered the art of listening and understanding my body and its needs. But I strive to get better and better every day at it. And pass on to my students everything I know.

Mirrors

This is what I actually want to write about today: mirrors. Particularly mirrors when we train. In the gym, in the house, in the Dojo, everywhere.

Mirrors are really good from one point of view. To see how you move and correct technique. Not talking about looking at how your biceps pump up. That’s another story.

I use the mirrors in the Dojo to look at my technique. And I use them a lot, I find them very useful.

However there is also the downside. The more we use them to watch ourselves the less we are aware of our bodies, how they move and feel.

Again back to the Dojo. The best thing is that what I do requires me to move away from mirrors so unlike the gym where you are static, in front of the mirrors while you do everything, here you move around a lot.

In the outdoors…..no mirrors at all of course. You are left with just feeling your body, becoming mindful of it. For many this is a challenge itself.

What I do with my clients

First of all we have no mirrors. We only see each other and we feel our own bodies. This enhances our kinaesthetic sense.

Kinaesthesia is knowledge of the position and movement of parts of your body, which comes from sense organs in the muscles and joints (Oxford Dictionary)

Sometimes, very seldom and only when really needed for advanced techniques, we take pictures and/or film the exercise to have a better picture of how the movement is and how it should be.

Another thing we do is walk with our eyes closed. Beware there is a high danger of injury so if you do this make sure you either walk very, very slow and/or there is nothing around you to make you trip, fall and injure yourself.

We do this barefoot as it enhances the sense of touch and orientation. We feel the ground beneath our feet from the moment they touch the earth to the moment they leave the surface and the journey they make above the ground.

It’s a wonderful and relaxing feeling. Also called walking meditation.

Conclusion

STOP Watching Yourself & START Feeling Yourself

Other ideas to try:

lying on your bed at night, before you fall asleep, become aware of your toes
imagine your breathe going in through your nose and all the way down to your toes
become aware of the position of your body as you sit, stand and walk
pay attention at how you use your body when you eat and drink

January 29, 2015January 29, 2015

Why your workouts are boring and 4 ways to make them exciting

I used to be a Personal Trainer in a gym. I loved it and I learnt a lot. However I could not help but noticing how many people would come to the gym and seem bored by what they were doing.

I used to talk to many of them, and although they had a good training program in place, one that got them results, and change it every 6-8 weeks to keep getting results, they were bored….bored of everything.

To be honest until I went to USA for my studies I never stepped into a gym. Really, why would I? I was practicing sports, Karate and others, 6 days a week, sometimes twice a day. And I had a purpose, I had variety, I had excitement. I never thought about health or weight loss, those came with the purpose and excitement.

I went to the gym in the USA and after a few years here in UK. Everything the beginning was exciting, new stuff, new things. But after a while no matter how I changed my routine it was still boring.

And I dare to believe that there are many of you who feel the same. So I wanted to give you the salt and pepper of efficient, always interesting and never boring training routine.

1. Purpose

I will begin by saying that health and weight loss are not part of your purpose. Sorry girls, but it’s not.

Health should be there all the time, we should not make of it a goal. Health is the foundation of success in business, life, career and whatever you want to excel at. Health is not a milestone.

Weight loss is something many of us want but we never consider that this is not one of those things you will have forever, it’s not there to stay for the rest of your life. You lose weight then at some point in your life you gain, then lose again, then gain.

I tell you this because I had many ups and down with my weight. But because I always had a purpose behind my training I never stressed to much about it.

Weight loss comes as a result of health. And health should always be there, you should not even have to think about it, it should be automatically part of your life. If should be your life for that matter.

So what’s the REAL purpose?

When I coach my students I give them a purpose. It can be a challenge to learn and master a technique, or a run, or any other event, or something they’ve always dreamt about doing or achieving but never could.

Training outdoors is a challenge for most so that itself can be a purpose for a while.

Personally, the purpose behind my training is to get really, really good at what I do. And the milestones are races and competitions.

For a while my purpose was to condition myself enough to train outdoors in the winter in shorts. Achieved this winter!!

But do you know why those are purposes and weight loss is not? One of the reasons is that when you master a technique, you cross a finish line or you get that medal no one ever can take that back from you.

That’s an achievement for life, while a slim body (which you will get anyway because you train with purpose) with come and go throughout your life.

So train hard but train with purpose.

Photo Credit: Michael Cohen / Wild Forest Gym

2. Variety and creativity

This is one of the reason the outdoors are such a big part of my life. When you train outdoors you will never, ever experience 2 identical sessions.

Even if you try and replicate it going in the same places and doing the exact same exercises, it will always be different. And these are some of the reasons:

– weather will be different from day to day, even from hour to hour

– the earth will be different, muddy, frozen, dry or wet.

– the ground is never flat, you will go up and down, left and right and you will need to adapt

– if you get bored of one place you run 2k and you find something totally different. The difference can be from field to thick forest. This is what one of my students said to me once. And he was right.

In a gym environment the trick is to be very creative. When I was coaching in a gym it was difficult not to fall into monotony like others.

I was always coming up with new stuff and so my clients stayed with me for months and some of them are still with me now after 2 years.

One of the reasons they liked training with me was because I bring variety and creativity wherever I train. Outdoors is my most creative environment though.

So, no matter where you train, be creative and search for variety. Don’t fall into routine and monotony, it’s not exciting.

3. Experience every moment

No matter how much purpose and variety you have if you don’t experience the moment you will not love what you do.

This means to breath, feel, see, touch, smell. And so many times we don’t do it. But when we are outdoors the different aspects of nature automatically make us open up our sense.

Because everything is different all the time we suddenly need to become aware of what’s around us. There is no monotony.

No matter what you do don’t do it for the sake of it.

Have a purpose and experience the journey. Then the results, whatever they may be will soon follow.

Photo Credit: Michael Cohen / Wild Forest Gym

4. Learning

And finally whatever you do never stop learning, developing, evolving. We are humans and learning is part of our evolution. We are hardwired to continuously learn and develop.

Take you training routine as a personal development journey, because that’s what it actually is.

Stop being a little robot and use your cognitive skills to be creative, develop and learn something every time you do your training session.

Combining 20 years of sports, particularly Martial Arts, and bringing natural movement training and running as well yoga, in my coaching gives me the possibility to show my students so much about movement and make them enjoy every moment they spend with me and then working out alone.

This way they:

– always have variety

– always experience the moment

– always look forward to our sessions and…

– always have a purpose behind their training – learning more and more and getting better and better if we don’t have an event planned for them ;).

Hope this inspires you to take your training sessions to the next level and actually enjoy them if you aren’t already.

As always if you want to chat with me feel free to book a call with me or if you want to learn more about my philosophies read my free ebook The Merisoiu Technique

January 2, 2015May 17, 2015

10 awesome things about training outdoors

1. It’s the best way to warm up when you’re cold. You will walk around in a t-shirt while others have coats.

2. When you’re bored of one place you have the option to move in a totally different place 2km away

3. Research shows that people who spend more time outdoor are happier.

4. There’s no one standing in your way. There’s more room to do more things.

5. Raises your vitamin D level

6. Harvard Health Publications say that it improves concentration

7. May help you heal faster

8. Researchers found a link between connecting with the Earth and Mental Health – depression, anxiety, emotional stress, panic, fear, headaches, cardiac palpitations, and dizziness

9. It is never boring

10. There is loads of clean, fresh air and no or few viruses to come in contact with

If you’d like to learn more please download my free eBook “15 Healthy Habits For The Body” orbook a free consultation with me.