Timekeeping: Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays
Bob Geldof is hardly alone in being less than enthused about the start of the week, and the mystery as to why we don't like it has been equally universal.
We can point to psychological factors that might make it less appealing, than a Friday certainly, but there's a corresponding physicality to it that has, seemingly, made less sense. An off-ness to it that makes catching your tram on Monday morning feel more like you’re struggling to make your connection through Frankfurt.
Aesthetic vs Athletic: Form will always follows function, but not vice versa.
In just the same way that different training methodologies will help or hinder us in achieving a particular goal, so will our point of focus.
Breathe Easy: When you're doing something 20,000 times a day, you want to do it right.
As with our quality of movement - for whatever reason, whether through injury, posture or habit, even with fundamental flaws in our patterns, the body will find a way around things - a compensation. For breathing it is no different, and our posture and daily habits can also be feeding subtle breathing pattern disorders.
Comfortably Dumb - part 2: Cold Comfort for Change.
If this degree of discomfort presents an insurmountable barrier, how do you think that type of self-limiting thinking will play out in your everyday life? Your brain is a learning machine, and this becomes a practised and ingrained behaviour - catastrophising anything that doesn’t fall inside your neatly drawn parameters.
Comfortably Dumb - part 1: The misery of eternal comfort
Comfort and convenience cocoon us but this is a reverse chrysalis, transforming us from butterfly to caterpillar. Instead of stepping outside your comfort zone - the mantra of all personal development - it's become far more likely you'll leave it only on a stretcher.
Walk the Line: Keeping your balance
Good balance and core strength go hand in hand, and any focus on quality of movement must also be 'balanced' - they can hardly be separated. Insurance from a fall becomes nothing short of life-saving as we age, but our skills here, or lack of them, extend well beyond these more obvious associations, to better posture, and less pain.
Everything In Its Right Place: Learning to switch off.
Soon enough, after repeated practice at ignoring our bodily cues, we lose all subjective measure of our true state of being. Any reference point to help us gauge what stress is, and isn't, has become skewed - as has our response to it.
Enter Sandman: The Forever Overlooked Game-changer.
Sleep remains largely a mystery, and any understanding we have of it's purpose, is divined only through what we are able to measure in it's absence - physical and mental decay.
Man Down: Training around injury
Within reason we should always be looking to challenge and ask more of our bodies and the possibility of injury is a risk inherent to that process. But when injury does strike there is a lot we can do to make the process as short and painless as possible while also giving ourselves the best chance of recovering with no lingering issues.
More or Less: How recovery determines your fitness
When people talk about 'overtraining', what they really mean is 'under-recovering.'