Five Easy Ways to Eat More Vegetables

We all know we should eat more vegetables – you don’t need a degree in nutrition to understand that. Despite that, a lot of us don’t get anywhere near enough vegetables into our diet.

Here’s five easy ways to eat more vegetables. Practical advice that won’t make it seem like a chore to get vegetables into your diet.

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Add vegetables to smoothies

Even if you don’t like the taste of vegetables, throwing them in a smoothie is a perfect solution because it completely masks the taste of them. They’ll be easily hidden amongst the other ingredients that you put into the mix.

Vegetables such as carrots, spinach, cucumbers and beetroot can add amazing colour to a smoothie without dominating the flavour of the whole drink. They dramatically boost the nutrient profile, adding all kinds of vitamins, minerals and fibre to the smoothie. It’s a quick and easy way to up your vegetable intake.

You can make your own smoothies in seconds, so there’s no excuse. Pick up a blender and you can make healthy food in literally seconds!

Blender Suggestion!

Buy pre-prepared vegetables

A lot of people like the taste of vegetables, but they can’t face the faff of having to wash them, peel them, chop them, prep them etc. That’s understandable (lazy too, but whatever!)

If you fall into this category then pick up some prepared vegetables. Most supermarkets will sell pre-cut veg, some even sell packets with a mixture of vegetables ready prepared for a dish – you can get a stir fry pack of pre-prepared vegetables, which are washed, chopped and ready to throw into the wok. I’ve also a casserole pack where the veg is ready to add to the pot.

Buy a Salad for Lunch

One of the great things about living here in London is that we are literally surrounded by food and places to eat. You don’t have to travel far in any direction to get yourself some good quality food.

Take advantage of the great cafes and delis around us and pick up a salad from them for your lunch. It’ll be freshly-made, packed with all the veg you want and will taste great. Additionally, you haven’t had to do any of the work on it either so you’ll benefit twice – you’ll eat great food and wouldn’t have to do any of the prep work!

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Use a Meal Prep Service

The purpose of this article is to give you easy ways to eat more vegetables. The easiest of all (but the most expensive, admittedly) is to use a meal prep service. Essentially you pick from their menu and they will prepare the food for you, then deliver it to your home.

The benefits are that the meal options are usually really good, they’re portion and calorie controlled and they’re also usually really vegetable heavy, which allows them to maintain volume of food whilst keeping calories low. You can also specifically pick the vegetable-heavy options so you can get more vegetables into your diet.

Identify the ‘Easy’ Vegetable Intakes

If you broaden your horizons on vegetables you’re likely to spot new ideas. Think of it like this – some ready meals will contain 1-2 portions of vegetables. Your standard Heinz baked beans are a vegetable. Lots of pre-prepared soups will count as a portion of vegetables.

If you are a pretty lazy or even time-pressured cook, look for the easy wins such as those. They are ways of adding to your vegetable intake without having to go through the process of preparing and cooking them. If you’re not a big fan of vegetables in their ‘normal’ forms then these easy wins could be perfect for you. 

Five Easy Ways to Eat More Vegetables: Concluded

We could all do with eating more vegetables, but it shouldn’t be the source of a lot of stress. Take these tips and use them in your daily food planning and you’ll be eating more vegetables in no time.

 If you’d like any more help with your nutrition and fitness, contact us on 07921465108 or email us on admacfitness@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Press Ups: An Underrated Exercise

There are certain things in life that are great, but you just take them for granted because they’ve been around for so long that you’ve gotten used to them. Think of a hot shower after a cold day – it’s nice, but you’d be lying if you said you truly appreciated it, simply because it’s ‘normal’ now.

Press ups are a similar thing.

Press ups have been around for so long, are so accessible, so simple to do that we’ve forgotten just how useful they are. Without getting too technical about the nuances of why press ups may be the best chest exercise there is, let me just go through a few of the reasons why I love press ups so much and why they feature in so many of my personal training client programmes….

Press Ups are so versatile….

When you think of a press up, you’ll think of the standard version where you are balanced on your toes at one end, your palms at the other and keeping your back straight, you lower yourself to the floor and push yourself up. That’s a great exercise, but there’s so much more you can do with them. You can elevate your feet to make them harder. You can put your hands on blocks to increase the range of movement at the shoulder. You can add weight to your back to increase the weight you are lifting, you can do a plyometric press up, you can do an Atomic press up with a TRX. You’re limited by your capability, not the variety.

Press Ups are Scalable…

Whether you’re a complete beginner only capable of performing press ups from your knees, or you are a calisthenics pro who can perform press ups with all kinds of levels of difficulty, there is always a benefit to be had.

From a technical point of view they’re a simple movement to learn and the benefits are huge. As an exercise that has quite a low metabolic cost (doesn’t require absolute gut-wrenching effort), they’re suitable for people of all levels of fitness. When you’re more advanced, there’s a range of progressions. When you’re an absolute machine, there’s still ways you can make a push up a worthwhile exercise in your programme. As a personal trainer, it’s a really useful exercise to programme. Our current client leader is a guy called Raf and his best in the studio is 39. Not bad!

Press Ups Require Little/No Equipment…

When I’m expecting personal training clients to do accessory training in their own time, an exercise like a press up can be perfect. If you are the kind of person who trains at home, in the park or a really crowded gym, any exercise that can be performed without the need for a tonne of extra kit is really useful. All you need is a floor (and there’s plenty of that around) and enough space to lie down and you can do all the press ups you want (or I tell you to do!)

Press Ups Are Great for Shoulder Health…

OK, I’m going to get a tiny bit technical here. Your shoulder blades are called your scapular bones. In many chest exercises, the scapular are ‘pinned’ and unable to move properly (think bench press, flyes, incline presses etc). This is fine on occasion, but if all the exercises you do pin the scapular then you could be storing up shoulder trouble down the line. With a press up you allow the scapular to move freely and keep a full range of motion. This can help your shoulders regain the movement they should have and keep them strong, healthy and robust for the long term.

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Press Ups can be Paired Easily…

As a personal trainer I’m thinking about movement patterns rather than just ‘exercises’, so by adding press ups to training programmes I’m including an upper body push that doesn’t exhaust the client, allowing me to safely and effectively pair them with another exercise in a superset, or as part of an exercise complex. These serve to burn more calories, illicit a bigger training response and see my personal training clients improve their fitness, build muscle, burn more calories and make general progress much more quickly.

Press Ups Train a lot of Muscles…

Perhaps unfairly, press ups are considered a chest exercise because the main muscles

trained are the pectorals. That’s a bit misleading though, because they are so much more than a standard chest exercise. With a press up you are training the chest, the shoulders, the triceps and the forearms. You are engaging your core muscles to keep your back straight throughout the movement. In addition, the erector spinae muscles keep the back locked further in place and the quadriceps muscles at the front of the thighs keep your legs rigid and prevent collapse. Yes, press ups train the chest, but they also train other muscles too.

Press Ups: Concluded

The humble press up is an exercise that is so simple and easily ignored. Not here at AdMac Fitness – we believe in effective training methods, not fads and gimmicks. We don’t select exercises because they look cool or would make great Instagram content, we select exercises because they make our personal training clients fitter, stronger and healthier.

Why not come down to our private personal training studio in Bow, East London to see how we can help you? Contact us on 07921465108 to book a no obligation consultation.

Whether to use scales

Using the scales as a marker of progress isn’t for everyone. It can be a great tool for some people and we do use it in the studio for a lot of clients. However, if after discussions with a client it seems as though they would get fixated on the scales as the ONLY marker for progress OR if they have experienced stress in the past from using scales then we would chose not to use them. Using them alongside photos, strength markers, food/calorie tracking. daily activity tracking can be really effective if its understood that the scales may stay the same (or sometimes go up) but we are still heading in the right direction based on the other markers.

If you are interested in hearing more about how we can help you with your goals, feel free to call AdMac for a chat on 07921465108.

AdMac Fitness has expanded

We are now a team of three - consisting of AdMac and the fantastic female trainers Marta and Larrie. We are focussed on bringing high quality personal training, putting the clients’ needs first using strength training to help lose body fat, strengthen joints and improve confidence.

If you are at all interested in seeing what we do please contact AdMac on admacfitness@gmail.com to book in a trial session.

We are based opposite Bow Church DLR, 5 minutes walk from Bow Road station.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Where to start with bodyweight strength/skill acquisition.

This is hugely dependent on your level of fitness, how often you train and where this lies in your fitness priorities.

However, if you are interested in learning some bodyweight strength exercises but dont know where to start my advice would be to start on one skill for 2-4 months. I made the mistake of trying to learn too many exercises at the same time and progress was slow with a lot of them.

If you train 4-5 times a week, a good place to start would be to complete 4 sets 3 times a week. (If you train less you could start with just twice a week.) Each week you can add a set on per workout until you are up to 24-30 total sets per week. 

As you get stronger, although you are adding more sets per workout, you'll find each set less taxing and therefore will be able to handle more volume. After 2-4 months, or if you are able to complete the skill, you can decrease the sets to just 'maintain' the strengrh it requires to complete the skill and then use the same philisophy to work on a new skill. 

Bootcamp going through the winter!

Bootcamp is still going strong, dont be afraid of the cold! Wrap up warm and come and get a workout in to start your weekend off right! 

Bootcamp is still going strong, dont be afraid of the cold! Wrap up warm and come and get a workout in to start your weekend off right! 

Fatigue and stress management

Whether its fatigue or stress, old habits tend to return when control is decreased. This is why striving for balance should be a case of working towards preventing sleep deprivation, not allowing yourself to get too hungry, not overloading your schedule and priotising food shopping/cooking/preparation.

Nothing magic in this advice, but factors that take time and a lot of effort to cement into ones 'normal' routine.

 

 

Monday evening HIIT and abs 6.30-7.30pm indoors

I've moved the Monday night class indoors in my studio and have made it an hour long, condensing the HIIT and abs into one.

Next week will be the third week of the class - its pretty intense!

Coach AdMac

Bow, East London Personal Training, class and bootcamps.

NEW CLASS ALERT

Thursday 7-8pm Power Circuits inside my studio. This class has a 14 people capacity. Think battle ropes, TRX, kettlebells, slam balls, dumbbells.

This is booked on a first come first serve basis and already looks like it wil be very popular!

Email admacfitness@gmail.com to book.

Strength training

Here you can see my client Sarah doing a Bulgarian split squat with a kettlebell loaded on the opposite arm to that of the leg that is being worked. This means the glutes have to work that bit harder to stop the knee collapsing in. In addition to this, the video on instagram will show how we were getting Sarah to pause at the bottom of the movement and ensure her hip was as low as her knee. These cues mean her glutes have to really work to control the movement - quite often i see this exercise done almost exclusively using the thigh muscle. Good coaching allows you to target the muscles you want to work in a safe manner.

 

My studio is based in the Bow Business Centre, E3.

Fitness doesn't have to be a chore!

An important part of the AdMac brand is learning new skills whilst training. I start every session with a skill element, whether it be juggling, skipping, boxing, handstands, yoga or calisthenics:- now this isn't just because i'm a looney, i've found clients enjoy sessions more when they are working towards something more than just a body goal. And guess what, enjoying sessions leads to a better adherence rate to training - which means they actually do a better job of hitting those fitness goals!

 

Coach AdMac

Bow, E3 based Personal Training, classes and bootcamps.

Bow Bootcamp

Working the hamstrings with the clan down in Grove Hall Park, E3. Practice makes perfect with this.

Bootcamps, personal training and classes.  AdMac

Pistol squats

One of the bodyweight exercises that requires a great deal of strength and mobility. This is something i practice twice a week and encorporate into a lot of my sessions with clients.

Simple recipe for those body goals!

-instil a 'slight bit' of discipline with the food and drink you consume

- but then aim for COMPLETE dedication to your training

Aim for these two week in, week out and watch your body take shape

Put another way, dont get too hung up on the two gin and tonics you had in the sun Tuesday evening... those 100/150 calories arent going to ruin your week - however do have a word with yourself if you are skipping your training.

Discipline with your training = freedom in other areas of your life.

AdMac

 

Personal training, bootcamps and classes in Bow, East London.

Shuttle runs and partner races

Added some variety this week to the Saturday bootcamp. Due to the wet weather we went in the beautiful garden area of Grove Hall Park and included did a section on shuttle running. The feedback was positive and i think you can tell they enjoyed themselves...

 

Personal training, bootcamps and classes available in Bow, East London.

New midweek abs class!

Due to the success of the bootcamp on a Saturday morning, there is going to be a new midweek abs class outdoor in Grove Hall Park, Fairfield Road, Bow E3.

This will be 45 minutes of working your abs in every concieveable angle, to both improve your core strength but also develop the muscle tissue in your abdomninals and obliques. 

This will be running from June until September,  come and get involved!

AdMac

Games, squats and splits practice at bootcamp this weekend

Another great turnout this weekend. 11 lovely ladies and an exciteable cockapoo! Some silly games mixed in with some hard work, plenty of drinks breaks and an entertaining coffee with a couple of the group down at the gallery cafe. Fun start to the weekend.