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Vitruvian Health

Sydneys premier personal training company

3 things you can do to improve recovery

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Karl from Vitruvian Health shares some tips on how you can boost your daily recovery – not just after exercise, but also after each work day, so that you can perform even better the day after a long and taxing shift. 

Tip 1 – Start winding yourself down early

Karl’s daily routine actually begins at his nighttime.  He believes how you sleep is how you perform so instead of planning his day from when he wakes up, he focuses on what he can do to recover and sleep so that the following day he’s full of energy the whole day.

Want to know more about how you can plan your routine, starting with your recovery?  Check out this video with Karl  

Tip 2 – Have a pre bed routine

Whenever you finish your shift and you get home, you need to have a few things you do that signal to yourself and your body that it’s time to switch off and rest.  Do these every night and your body takes these as cues to switch on the parasympathetic system and wind yourself down.

For example, we all love eating, right?  Well if you eat a meal that is carb rich pre bed it stimulates the release of the relaxation hormone serotonin which means that you’ll go to bed on a full stomach with sustained energy to help your body rest and recover while you sleep.

Give this meal a go (yes, sounds weird but it is delicious!) – 180g cooked white rice mixed with 180g blueberries or raspberries, 120ml coconut milk and cinnamon.  Microwave for 1 minute or heat up in a pan and enjoy after dinner.  

Other things you can implement into your pre bed routine are:

  • Enjoy a hot cup of cacao 60 minutes before bed. 
  • Journal your thoughts and finish with 3 things you’re grateful for today.
  • Have a hot shower.

Tip 3 – Turn your bedroom into your sanctuary 

Have you ever gone to a hotel and seen the room where you are staying thinking ‘Wow that bed looks so comfy, I’m going to sleep so well!’?

Basically you want that response each time you see your own bed!  The bed is for sleeping, not for talking on the phone, reading a book, or watching a movie.  Every time you see your bed before you sleep, you want to trigger your body to think ‘I’m about to sleep’, so that when you get into bed, you are ready to sleep.

To help with this, set your room up for sleeping.  This is the best way you can set yourself up for the best recovery between shifts.  For example you can:

  • Make your bedroom like a bat cave – use heavy blinds to block out the light from outside, cover all lights from any smoke alarms, technology that’s in your room and close your bedroom door when you sleep.  Alternatively you can just wear an eye mask;
  • Leave your technology outside your bedroom.  Before you say “my alarm is on my phone”, trust me, your alarm works outside your door as well, it doesn’t need to be next to your ear to wake you up, simply turn up the volume;
  • Use side lamps or a salt lamp for light rather than the overhead light;
  • Invest in some soft bedding that makes you feel rested just by touching it;
  • Play some relaxation / sleep music to help you drift off to sleep.

The next time you look at your bedroom, consider whether it is set up properly so that you can maximise the time you have to rest and recover between your day to day.

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Karl from Vitruvian Health shares 5 things you can do to reset yourself over Xmas.

Tip 1 Are 

Tip 2 You  

Tip 3 Serious?

You don’t really need tips, the only thing you really need to do to reset yourself over Xmas is to be realistic.  Reflect on your past year and ask yourself what you have achieved vs what you haven’t.

If you haven’t achieved something in the time you wanted to, outsource it to someone who can help you achieve it. Then focus on the things you love, enjoy and value. 

Doing this helps you refocus your mind and gives you purpose.  

Once you’ve reflected, set 90 day goals of what you want to achieve in that time.  Be specific.  Map them out.  Write them out and stick them on your fridge.  Look at them every day and ask whether you are progressing towards them.  

By the end of the 90 days, you will be able to then cross them off, Hi 5 yourself, your partner or a friend and then set some new ones.

Need some other inspo to guide your reset?  How about:

  • Spending time with loved ones
  • Watch a movie, or several
  • Go for a super long walk
  • Laugh so hard your belly hurts
  • Read a book you can’t put down
  • Take a long hot bath that fogs up the whole bathroom
  • Eat foods you enjoy

Last tip – do the solar plexus release twice a day.  

Never heard of it?  See this video with Karl in which he explains how to do it

Why is it good?  The solar plexus release can help relieve the tightness in your breathing, which in turn can help reduce the stress in your body.  Many of us hold tension in our diaphragm which forces us to breathe through our chest, not our belly.  Chest breaths stimulate the sympathetic nervous system (stress response), while belly breaths stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (relax response). 

Doing the solar plexus release targets the complex system of radiating nerves and ganglia found in the put of the stomach in front of the aorta.  It has an important role in the functioning of the stomach, kidneys, liver and adrenal glands.  Doing this release stimulates this nerve hub and forces you to consciously focus on the depth of your breath and diaphragm.  

While doing the release, you will actually feel your diaphragm and solar plexus ‘let go’.  Yes to start it is uncomfortable, but likely anything, practice makes perfect and the more you do it, the deeper your breaths will be.  Enjoy!

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So you want to build muscle. One of the key ingredients is progressive overload. But what is it? In this video Karl explains what progressive overload is and how to achieve it during your training sessions.

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Did you know this is actually a back (lat), not a shoulder exercise?!

This is one of the most INCORRECTLY performed exercises in the gym. Working the lats in a lat pull down requires correct shoulder placement. Without this your lats won’t be properly engaged and you’ll likely end up using your traps instead and then get a tight neck.

Featured in the video is a MAG neutral grip bar which Kate is using to perform the lat pull down – this maximises external rotation of the shoulder which helps with… you guessed it, lat recruitment. MAG grips are available exclusively for VH client use in the club. Yet another perk of working with us. Happy lat day!

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Warm up routines are THE most underrated routine in the training world.  Most people before they exercise usually swing their arms or legs a little, do a ‘runner’s stretch’ or simply walk to wherever they’re exercising.

Unfortunately this is not enough to get the body prepared for exercise, particularly lifting weight or running.

At Vitruvian Health, we believe warm up routines are the most important part of a person’s training program.  So important that we’ve created our own warm up routine called ‘The Core 4 Complex’.

We recommend the Core 4 Complex to be done at the very beginning of a person’s session.  It can be done whether you are lifting weights, running, swimming, gymnastics etc.

What does the Core 4 Complex do and when is it used?

The Complex focuses on opening up the hips, glutes, thoracic, shoulders and neck. The aim here is to create as much length as possible and to use the breath to guide the movement.  It is a great exercise for building body awareness, particularly if you have not done yoga or flow movement patterns before.

As most of us are generally feeling tight and stiff from sitting down for long periods before exercising, the Core 4 Complex gives the body the chance to ‘soften up’ in preparation for your exercise of choice that day.  As the Complex focuses on creating space and lengthening in the body, it can assist with bringing your awareness to any areas that are unusually tight in the body, which will allow you to then pay more attention to them in the exercises that follow.

When the Complex is used at the start of a training session lifting weights, we recommend that activation exercises are completed following the Complex.

The great thing about the Complex is that it can be completed not just before exercise, but also as part of any morning or evening routine to help the body open and promote relaxation.

Here’s how to do the Core 4 Complex:

1. Hip switch

  • Start with the feet parallel with the hips, knees bend up
  • Engage your forearms, biceps and shoulders as your arms are pressing to the floor at the back
  • Open up the chest
  • Move your knees from one side to another to stretch out the hips and open the whole body up

2. Side to side rotations

  • Sit with one leg crossed in front and the other one crossed at the back
  • Rotate your upper body from side to side
  • If you start feeling stiff at any point, pause and take a deep breath to the chest, ribs and back and feel it opening up
  • Feel the hips, mid section, upper body and neck engaged as this exercise corporates the whole body
  • Repeat the rotation 4x each side

3. Forward fold

  • Sit with one leg crossed in front and the other one crossed at the back
  • Front foot should be in dorsiflexion
  • Curl down over your leg letting your head fall forward and then slowly roll up
  • To modify, lengthen up the back leg to get more out of this exercise

4. Arm circles

  • Sit with one leg crossed in front, push your knee down, the other leg crossed at the back
  • Place your forearm as far behind you as you can without back pain
  • With the other hand make a big circle all the way round; by pressing to the elbow you create the length in the body;
  • Repeat 4x each side

Let us know your feedback on the Core 4 Complex!

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Did you know your body stores fat in different places based on your stressors, what you eat and your lifestyle?⁣

For example (from our experience testing our clients), we’ve found that:

  • high fat around the calf has been a result of poor quality sleep⁣<.li>
  • high fat around the belly button is due to increased stress
  • high fat on the cheek is because you ate something you shouldn’t have

    • Why do we care?

    If you are looking to lose weight, look more muscly or build muscle, the amount of fat you have on your body, and where it is stored, can give you great guidance as to whether your current training, nutrition and lifestyle plan is working for you

    What is BioSig?⁣

    The test is done using callipers to pinch your body at 12 different sites to test the amount of fat stored in each area of the body ⁣

    Why do we use BioSig?⁣

    Quite simply, it’s a tool we use to track our client’s performance ⁣

    Whatever the client’s goal, BioSig gives us more information about our clients and how their body is responding to their training, nutrition and current lifestyle⁣

    The results of the test help to give our trainers feedback so that they can tweak the client’s program to suit what the results show when coupled with feedback from other ways we track⁣

    What sorts of things can you tell from the test?⁣

    • If you’re eating something you shouldn’t ⁣
    • How high your stress is⁣
    • If you’re body is inflamed⁣
    • Whether you’re sleeping well⁣
    • How tolerant you are to carbs⁣
    • For the ladies – problems with your menstural cycle⁣
    • You’re being exposed to too many oestrogen promoting substances ⁣
    • If you’re over training ⁣

      • Etc etc

      ⁣

      Does the test take long?

      ⁣

      The test takes about 15 mins⁣

      Not an existing client but keen to have your BioSig done?⁣

      Get in touch with us and mention this post to receive an initial complimentary BioSig test on us!⁣

      Keen to know more about BioSig?

      Check out our YouTube channel!

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Why are grateful logs a secret?

Well, remember when you were a kid and you had a ‘secret diary’ which all your personal thoughts and feelings would be scribbled into – what your mum said to you, your crush at school, how you’d really like to give that teacher a piece of your mind…

Grateful logs are a similar principle to the ‘Dear Diary’ concept though this is focused on flipping your mindset from a negative one to a balanced one.

What are grateful logs?

Grateful logs involve establishing gratitude, that is an appreciation for what is happening or has happened.

The process of the grateful log drives you to acknowledge the things you appreciate and are thankful for in your life.  It helps to balance out your perspective, particularly if you come home at the end of a long day and feel more drained than energised.  If used consistently it can also be used to balance out any experiences you are seeing as ‘negative’ to a ‘neutral’ experience by finding both the positive and negative side.

When writing a gratitude log, you want it to be very specific to you expressing your personality and stimulate grateful, positive feelings. Not only what you write but also where, how and what you use can impact the overall outcome and benefits you experience from going through the process.

How you get started

So get started with a couple of simple steps:

  1. Buy a new notebook – this is the most important step.  You need to buy a notebook that you like with the exact intention that it is going to be used for your grateful log.  This will help you slip into the right reflective mindset every time you pick up your notebook.  Moreover, writing down things you appreciate isn’t just something that ‘needs to be done’, it is a purposeful task specifically for you to reflect on your own feelings and thoughts, so the notebook you choose needs to reflect you, and only you.
  2. Find a pen you LOVE writing with – this may be you want to also buy your own special pen, or maybe you already have one that you like writing with.  Whatever kind of pen you choose, it needs to be one that you find easy to write with and glides across the page.
  3. Lock in a time every day when you will write your gratitude log.  Ideally this is the same time every day, eg 8.30pm every night.  If you have an erratic schedule with different start and finish times every day, you can elect to write your log within 30mins of you getting home.  However chances are you have at least 2 – 3 consecutive days with similar scheduling so you can pick a time for those 3 days, then adjust for the next 3.

What you write down

Here is how it’s done.

Write down 3 things that you are grateful for. Do not write down just a list of items. The choice of words is the key here. Start with “I am” as you are taking the ownership of the gratitude. You are appreciating something that is in your life and you are grateful for.

Repeat this three times to capture the three main things of the day you are grateful for.

Even when you have a really ‘bad’ day and you think there is nothing you can be grateful for, think of the little things. These can be, for example, that mum made you dinner, your partner made you a bath, a colleague bought you a coffee at work, even a stranger smiling at you can make your day and is something you can be grateful for.

It is important to start realising the small things to be able to develop our gratitude.

You can also repeat things you are grateful for everyday but it is necessary to write them through every time.

For example, you can write down “I am grateful for food” one day and the next day go “I am grateful for food that nourishes my body”…

This allows you to continuously expand your gratitude for the initial thing you wrote down. Even if you get stuck, just go back a few pages, look at what you were grateful for in the past day and elaborate on it.

In this way you can constantly evolve your gratitude and your log. So being grateful simply for food can evolve in several weeks into being grateful for food which nourishes our bodies so we can work and be with people we love.

After a period of time consistently completing your grateful log, you will see that you’ve engrained a pattern of thinking that is reflective and thankful for things in your life that you may have not otherwise noticed before.  This in turn allows you to build a stronger, more grounded mindset that doesn’t get tripped up on the pebbles in life.

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Coffee.. How it’s hiding an underlying health issue

Coffee.  It is the most popular, legal stimulant in the world.

Its popularity has blinded consumers to its effects and most people, we find, are using it to cover up deeper health issues.

Coffee has caffeine.  Caffeine is a stimulant.  A stimulant raises blood pressure, increases heart rate, increases cortisol etc – the combination of which can make you feel ‘more alive’.

It’s a trap!

In the personal training world, coffee is like a bank loan.  You take the loan out with the bank, but then the t’s and c’s say that you need to pay the loan back, and with interest.

When you drink coffee, you take out an ‘energetic loan’ – within an hour of drinking the coffee you feel good, stimulated and ‘more focused’.  But in a few hours time when your body starts to clear out the caffeine, your energy starts to dip and you think ‘I’ll have another coffee’.

When you have this second coffee, you might feel a little energy spike, but generally you feel less energetic than you did with the first one.  Chances are that night you’ll get home, feel too switched on to fall asleep quickly, wake up several times, toss and turn and then wake up in the morning and do it all again.

This happens because caffeine hides the build up of adenosine from your receptors in your brain. Adenosine is a chemical messenger telling your brain to become less excited so as to slow down the build up of cellular junk. This mechanism is put in place to help you get more sleep, so it can consolidate memories, and refill its energy stores. That is until it wears off and a tsunami of tiredness is unleashed upon you. Aka the “coffee crash”.

Why is this bad?

When a client of ours says they have a coffee when they wake up, another at 11 and another mid afternoon, this rings alarm bells for us.  Usually this is a sign that this client has become immune to the effects of the caffeine and there is a deeper issue occurring in their body.

If you’re a healthy individual, you won’t need a coffee to ‘wake up’ in the morning, nor will you need them to stay awake throughout the rest of your day.  So what is it telling us?  The coffee is covering up something else that’s happening.

What is the underlying issue?

Generally, the biggest underlying issue is poor sleep.

As caffeine is a stimulant that has a half life of 3 to 5 hours, if you have coffee after 12pm, it is very likely you will still have caffeine in your body when you are ‘trying’ to go to sleep.  This means your heart will still be beating fast, blood pressure is up and cortisol is high inhibiting the release of melatonin.

Waking up during the night, tossing and turning, needing to pee at 3am – are all signs that you have low sleep quality.

Other underlying issues can be:

  • anxiety
  • high stress
  • dehydration
  • digestive issues (bloating, farting, slow movement time)
  • electrolyte / magnesium deficiency

In short, if you have these issues and you are drinking coffee, chances are the coffee is, and will, make these issues worse over time.

If you want to continue drinking coffee then…

  1. Drink it when you are about to do something physical, for example exercise!
  2. Reduce your intake – 1x single shot of coffee from your local cafe contains about 100mg of caffeine.  The average person can tolerate about 60mg of caffeine per day.  Opt for a ‘weak’ (½ shot) coffee or a black tea instead.
  3. Drink it before 12pm, or not at all
  4. Replace your 2nd / 3rd coffee with a tea
  5. For every caffeinated beverage you drink, drink 1+ glass of water.

Join the weak coffee club today!

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Calling all fellow chocolate lovers!

At Vitruvian Health, we LOVE eating chocolate.

The most common thing our clients say when they start working with us is that they’ve been told they “need to stop eating chocolate to lose weight”.

This makes us CRINGE!

If you’re a chocolate lover like us, then being told you it’s something you can’t eat is like telling a child they can never eat ice cream or need to go in ‘timeout’ – it makes you want to cry!

At Vitruvian Health, instead of labelling chocolate as a ‘bad’ food which you need to avoid, we recommend making ‘smarter’ chocolate choices.

How do you make ‘smarter’ chocolate choices?

This starts with looking at the type of chocolate you are eating.

If you are eating anything that has ‘dairy milk’ in the title or come in a small, easy to unwrap bar, then these are the chocolates that you do want to avoid.  Why?  Because generally these chocolates are packed full of sugar, gluten and dairy.  Eating these will lead to a rapid spike in your blood sugar which will make you feel good for a little bit, but then you’ll have a big crash in your energy levels and your body will just crave more chocolate leading to a decrease in mental function and productivity (aka riding the sugar rollercoaster).  The energy crash will actually be bigger because you ate the chocolate, than if you didn’t.

In addition, this type of chocolate is packed full of calories, so if your goal is to lose weight then you are limiting your progress by not only eating food that inflames your body, but also the body will prioritise using the sugar from the chocolate as energy rather than the glucose in your fat cell (the latter process results in fat loss).

Which chocolate is a ‘smarter’ choice?

Generally any dark chocolate is a ‘smarter’ choice than it’s ‘dairy milk’ cousins.  Some brands we sample regularly are:

  • Haighs
  • Green & Blacks
  • Frey
  • Lindt

All these, except Haighs, can be found in your local supermarket.

We recommend dark chocolate over dairy milk because it:

  • Generally has a lower sugar content, and higher fat content which means it helps to regulate your blood glucose levels so you’ll have less of an energy spike and drop off
  • The darker the chocolate, the higher the concentration of magnesium which can stimulate the release of serotonin in the gut which promotes relaxation
  • Makes you feel more satisfied because of the higher ‘good’ fat content

If you are not a dark chocolate fan, the flavoured dark chocolate (eg dark mint) is a good way to ease into the bitterness of the taste.  Also you can make a ‘chocolate sandwich’ by eat a piece of dark mint with 90% dark at the same time!/

When is a ‘smart’ time to eat chocolate?

We generally recommend that chocolate is eaten in the late afternoon and / or evening.  Why?  Because you may want a ‘treat’ at the end of your work day to reward yourself for your hard work.  Eating chocolate in the morning will only spike your blood glucose and remind you of that time when you were a kid at Easter then you ate all your chocolate Rabbits before 12pm and then for some reason felt like the Energizer Bunny, only to then fall into a deep nap that afternoon.

Bonus..  Want to eat chocolate and increase your cognitive function?

Check out this video with Vitruvian Health Founder, Karl McKenna, where he explains chocolate that is combined with lion’s mane.

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Stress.  Its a popular word that’s commonly used as a ‘catch all’ term as to why someone is acting / feeling / responding a certain way.  What if you could manage this stress in a way that allows you to feel in control of it and how it affects you? When you’re in the game to win you need to look short term and long term.

Here are 5 tips for managing stress.

  1. Don’t underestimate sleep
    Sleep is critical for your personal and professional performance. Sleep deficits have an adverse effect on your mental wellbeing, and can even make you physically unwell. The average person gets six hours of sleep a night – nowhere near what you need to recovery properly after a stressful day at work. Aim to get eight hours of quality sleep a day.
  2. Work on your mobility and posture
    Your mobility and posture can help with your breathing and movement – leading to a greater release of stress. For example, exercises that release your diaphragm can help deepen your breath. Exercises that open up the body also help with releasing muscles, and the pent up stress within them.
    Working on your posture and mobility has a number of benefits, from improved flexibility to better quality sleep. So give exercises like yoga, pilates or our Core 4 Complex movements a shot.
  3. Consume good quality food
    They say that “you are what you eat”, and that statement rings true for feelings of stress. If your diet is full of terrible foods, then this may lead to your mood being adversely affected.
    Consider the amounts of salt, sugar that you consume on a daily basis. Processed foods can also have an impact on the body’s stress responses. Replace common “junk” foods with organic foods that are free from chemicals. And make sure you eat your vegetables – I recommend consuming 200-300 grams of vegetables, three to four times a day. For example, you may like to start with raw measures of alfalfa, bean shoots, bok choy, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, capsicum, celery, cucumber, eggplant, green beans, kale, lettuce, radish, silver beet, spinach, snow peas tomato or zucchini.
  4. Consider taking supplements
    Sometimes, not even diet, sleep and exercise can fix the stress we feel on a daily basis. When this is the case, consider taking supplements. For example, magnesium can help the body relax. Foods such as cacao and Manuka honey can also have a positive effect on the body.
    Of course, make sure you seek medical advice if you decide to go down this route.
  5. Have an Epsom salt bath
    This one’s a personal favourite, particularly after a particularly physically taxing day. Having baths and using Epsom salts can help muscles relax and recover, and the time taken away from our busy lives can help refresh you mentally. If you’ve never tried it, it’s something worth considering.
    By taking a look at your daily activities, you’ll be able to decide what parts of your schedule are maximising recovery or decreasing your recovery. By analysing your daily routine and taking on board some of these tips, your body will reap noticeable benefits.