On the 3rd March, Tony Blauer himself is flying into London to give a Be Your Own Bodyguard 1 day seminar at Crossfit Central London. I’ll be there, along with many of the other Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) Coaches from around the UK and Ireland.

If you’ve never seen Tony teach his very unique brand of personal safety, I highly recommend you get your butt down to London in a month’s time and check it out. It’s no exaggeration to say that it will change for the better, the way you think about your safety for the rest of your life. People who attend the PDR Personal Safety courses that I run report a massive increase in confidence (double for women, +50% for men). How much better will it be to hear it from Tony Blauer directly?

It promises to be a very good course, get on down if you can possibly make it. I hope to see you there. Register here

Whilst it is a shocking affront to my delicate English sensibilities to post pictures of myself in my pants onto the net, in the circumstances, it seems like the right thing to do. For your reference, these series of photos were taken 3 months apart each, and so chart what’s possible over a 6 month period.

So if you’ve over indulged this Christmas, or are simply over weight and want to lose that beer belly or pot belly (or whatever it’s made of) I’m going to show you how I did it, step by step. You see many diet sites and books tell you what to eat and why, and give examples of stuff you could eat, but I took this a stage further by putting together a complete food diary that spans nearly 3 months:

• I carefully recorded everything I ate and drank.
• I took high resolution photos of every meal.
• I recorded every workout I did (not as many as you’d think).
• I weighed myself every day and compiled a detailed spreadsheet of stats.

It wasn’t the weight that I wasn’t happy with, it was how I looked

For reasons I won’t bore you with, I managed to pile on a load of weight in 2010 and ended the year weighing more than I had done in years and was not at all happy about it. However it wasn’t the weight that I wasn’t happy with, it was how I looked. Absolute weight for me is unimportant, but how you feel about yourself affects your personal confidence levels, which in turn affects every part of your life. Losing that belly had a big impact on my general feeling of well being and hence my outlook on life. What’s more, it’s not too hard, when you know how.

Now if you’ve been to this blog before, you’ll know I sporadically post about diet and exercise and have seen some major changes in my life. I could repeat all that here, but that would make this post ridiculously long so I’m not going to do that, instead I’m just going to highlight the salient points as I believe them, their explanations will have to wait for another day:

1. Almost everything you’ve been told about main stream dieting is wrong.
2. Fat is not the bad guy and for most people, calorie counting is an unsustainable answer.
3. Control your carbohydrate intake and you’ll control your weight.
4. The quality of your food is important.
5. The macro-nutrient balance of your food is important (that’s protein, carbs and fat).

Given the above, I eat what could be described as a “90% Paleo diet, in Zone proportions, + Dairy”. If you know what Paleo and Zone mean, you’re on the right track.  If you don’t, here’s a couple of quick definitions:

The Paleo Diet – don’t eat any food that was invented in the last 10,000 years!

The Zone Diet – balance your blood sugar levels (and hence your hormone levels like insulin) by eating a balance of protein, carbohydrates and fat, at *every* meal.

Dairy – Liquid stuff that comes from cows, duh!    I include dairy here as many pure Paleo eaters don’t believe in dairy products, I’m not one of them. I believe we were made to drink nothing but milk for the first 6+ months of our life, so I see no problem with dairy products.

Or you could use the CrossFit’s Diet definition, which is: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.” 

The most common question I get asked is: What do you eat for breakfast then?

When I qualify all that by telling people I don’t eat bread or pasta or cereal or potatoes or rice, or any other primarily starchy carbohydrate, the most common question I get asked is: What do you eat for breakfast then? This is what I wanted to show people by putting together a 3 month food diary.  Exactly what you can eat and still lose weight at a respectable rate.

Note this is not some unsustainable crash diet.  It’s not a “30 day challenge” or some similar typically unsustainable approach to weight loss.  In fact my food diary includes a cheat day every 7 days, when I could and did eat what I wanted. How do you fancy things like:

• All butter popcorn
• Prawn crackers
• Piles of fruit and double cream
• Bags of cinema pick & mix sweets
• Chinese take aways
• Nandos platters
• Sticky toffee pudding
• … I could go on

I was very sceptical of the cheat day idea when I first came across it

I was very sceptical of the cheat day idea when I first came across it, but in fact there’s some credence to the argument that a sustained reduction of energy intake alters your base metabolism  to compensate, so sporadic cheat days keeps your metabolism high. (I don’t like the word “metabolism” as I think it’s over used and regularly abused, but I’ll use it herefor the purposes of brevity.)

Certainly I found that it didn’t affect my weight loss when averaged over a week and it’s always nice to look forward to your cheat day as a reward for all your hard work in the week. It also gets over the psychological barrier of thinking: “What, you mean I can never eat XYZ food again?!?” if you can, at the next weekly cheat day. So in summary then I’m prepared to share:

• Nearly 3 months worth of food diary.
• Every single thing I ate and drank, every day.
• High resolution pictures of the meals.
• Full commentary on what and why I ate what I ate it
• How much weight was lost each day as a result.
• Details of every workout I did and what times I got and weights I used.
• How I completely removed my pot belly in just a few months

I’m going to be sending this out by email, so to get it you just need to pop your name and email address in below and day 1 will be sent to you in minutes:

If you’re a regular to my blog (there are several thousand of you) you will have seen me sporadically post about my shoulder injury. I won’t bore you with the sordid details again, as I’ve already done into details about my SLAP tear, MRI + Arthrogram scan, and how I did it doing CrossFit’s butterfly pullups.

Just to bring things up to the current day, I was booked in to have my surgery, a biceps tenodesis, this Thursday the 8th December. However the consultant suggested that I may want to think twice. I’ve since been to a Physiotherapist who told me that should wouldn’t recommend surgery; I’ve spoken to a 2nd shoulder Consultant over the phone who told me not to have the surgery, and I’ve exchanged emails with a 3rd shoulder Consultant who also said that I shouldn’t have the surgery. Guess what… I’m not having the surgery!! This is what they were going to do (in summary, cut off my biceps tendon from my shoulder, drill a hole in my Humerus (upper arm bone) and stuff it in there):

To summarise all their advice, the common theme is this: shoulder surgeries are not to be taken lightly. They carry not insignificant risks of failure (of various forms) in addition to possible long term problems like pain, stiffness and weakness. So the advice boils down to this: if you think you can live with your shoulder as it is, don’t have the op, and if there’s any suggestion that your shoulder is improving, like mine is, don’t have the op.

To be clear, when I first injured my shoulder back in February, I couldn’t even scratch my head with my left hand and it did not make much improvement for several months. Once I’d stopped sulking however (lol!) and started going back down the gym, focusing on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t do, things started to improve rapidly. Fast forward to November and I was doing the following, all without pain:

- Shoulder press: 5 x 45kg
- Snatch: 40kg
- Clean & Jerk: 60kg
- Pull ups (kipping): sets of 5, slowly
- Hand stands: multiple reps, holding for 10 seconds
- Front squat: 5 x 100kg

In fact the only thing that hurt, and then just a bit, was wall balls. But I managed to manage this by using a lighter ball and favouring my right arm on the catch (the bit where it hurt). I’ve yet to try things like Thrusters and Push Press etc. In fact I’d already decided not to have the op at this point.

It was only when I hurt my shoulder again (a PDR Self Defence session with a fellow PDR Coach Chris Worrall) that made me think twice about the op again. This time however, after just 2 weeks my shoulder felt as good as had taken 6 months previously. Cracking a rib wasn’t part of the bargain mind, but that’s another story!

So it’s left like this: I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what I can do, or rather what my shoulder can do. Time will tell if this is the way it’s to stay forever.

Below are 2 videos of CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman giving a lecture at Tony Blauer’s Combatives Camp in Las Vegas earlier this year. I could listen to Coach G talking all day, but I particularly like his answer to the common question:

“Which diet should I do, Paleo or Zone?”

To which he said:

“That’s like being asked out for dinner and replying with: ‘Which do you want me to do, get the right restaurant or turn up on time?’”

Hoho. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll enjoy them:

For the last 6 weeks I’ve been working hard on building a new website and am very pleased to say it’s now ready for public consumption. As you may know, whilst I might be a mild mannered office worker by day, I have a super hero alter-ego as a self defence coach. Well maybe not “super-hero”, I mean who doesn’t like to wear superhero pants?!? but hopefully you get my drift. (Pssst that’s not a picture of me, just in case you were confused.)

I actually don’t like the term “self defence” which conjures up all the wrong images I think. Certainly before I had my eyes opened to the alternative, self defence to me was all about taking years to learn martial arts, wearing Gi’s and belts, hitting pads, bowing, counting in Japanese / Korean / Chinese, learning lots of techniques and repeating them thousands of times till they are inch perfect. Sorry, but that’s just not my bag, as Jim Carey rather facetiously demonstrates:

You can learn to defend yourself in a matter of hours not years

Fortunately that’s not what Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) is all about and it was a massive eye opener to me to realise that you can learn to defend yourself in a matter of hours not years. The key to this approach is to realise that personal protection is influenced far more by mindset and attitude, than it is by physical techniques or skills.

The PDR system not only peels back the layers of Bad Guy behaviour to reveal what they want and what the don’t want (knowing this gives you a distinct advantage) but also allows you to open the door to your own emotional and psychological state, to free yourself of fear and to take the right action at the right time.

Towards this end, Karl and Rachel Steadman (from CrossFit3D), Chris Worrall (CrossFit Tameside) and I have all got together to launch PDR Manchester, which is a collaborative website for all present and future PDR Coaches in Manchester to work together to promote each other and PDR generally in the wider community. Together we can and will help to make the people of Manchester safer, with more confidence and I’m proud to be a part of that.

Our first collaborative course is open for bookings

The website has lots of information about PDR, the SPEAR System and it’s creator Tony Blauer. It also has a real-time list of all the courses we’re putting on with an online booking facility. Our first collaborative PDR course is currently open for bookings and is split over the 4 Thursday evenings in November at CrossFit Tameside. Go take a look.

In the mean time, I wonder what the best phrase is to replace the tainted “self defence”. Initial thoughts are:

• Personal Defence (obvious from the PDR connection)
• Personal Safety
• Personal Protection
• Self Protection
• Conflict Management
• Violence Resolution

If you have an opinion on this, please comment below.

When things in life are bad, it’s worthwhile taking a moment to check out some of the wonderful things you find on this great internet of ours, for the purposes of inspiration and motivation in life. Here are a few of my favourites:

The Holstee Manifesto

This is pure inspiration on a sheet of A4.

The CrossFit Motto

Or sometimes called the CrossFit Promise or Crossfit Mindset, depending on source. Either way, it does sum up a lot of CrossFitters I know, and reminds me to occasionally keep my mouth shut when I have stuff to moan about.

1. I will promise to do my best. My best will vary from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute. But in that minute, I will do the very best that I can.

2. Lactic acid is my friend. The wind is my friend. Anything that opposes me is actually helping me to become stronger. If I had no opposition, I would be weak.

3. If I can run, I run. If I have to walk, I walk. When I am forced to crawl, I crawl. And then I rest and live to fight another day.

4. I fear no man but I fear my workout. If I don’t fear my workout, it isn’t hard enough.

5. I may puke. I may cry. But I will not quit. Ever.

6. I never cheat. There is no honor in cheating. What joy can there be in a victory I did not earn?

7. The workout missed is the opportunity missed. I will not cheat myself of the opportunity to become a better athlete and person.

8. I understand the value of the push-up, the pull-up, the sit-up, the squat, and the deadlift. Just as there are a million ways to make chicken, so too are there a million ways to squat, sit up, pull up, push up, and deadlift.

9. I will give everything I have. And then I will find more within myself.

10. I don’t complain. Complaining is for crybabies. There are 250 babies born every minute worldwide. I will leave the crying to them and I will soldier on.

11. I will bite off challenges, spit out results, and beg for more.

What are you going to do?

My PC’s Wallpaper

This collection of quotes I’ve put together is what I have as the wallpaper on my PC, to help keep me focused every day:

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

You will never get this day back again, don’t waste it!

Every man dies, but not every man really lives.

On your deathbed, are you going to wish you’d watched more TV? Or wish you’d made more of your life?

When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?

Construct sufficient meaning to support actual living, and not just mere existence.

Would you rather have less work to do, or more work you actually enjoy doing?

What is the difference between being alive and truly living?

The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

This comes from the amazing mind of Frank Herbert, in his classic book Dune.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Hmmmm, time to do some more work!

This morning I had a Consultant’s appointment to get the result of my MRI and Arthrogram for my shoulder injury. Previously I’d been diagnosed with a PASTA lesion, which is a tear of the supraspinatus rotator cuff tendon, and the MRI was to look for a SLAP tear as well, which is where the cartilage cup inside the shoulder socket (the Labrum) which connects to the bicep tendon, comes away. Here are the findings:

1. The PASTA lesion that he identified with an earlier ultra-sound didn’t show up on the MRI.
2. I have a “not obvious” 1.5cm SLAP tear.
3. Also there’s a small Inferior Glenohumeral Ligament (IGHL) tear.

The PASTA tear may or may not be there and the SLAP tear may not be as big as 1.5cm (which is small anyway) as he said that MRI’s are not great at showing up tears (missing maybe 40% of tears) and where they do, they tend to exaggerate. It seems there’s nothing that can be done about the IGHL tear.

At 39 I’m too old for a normal suture and anchor SLAP tear repair!

However the big news was that apparently at 39 the likelihood of success of normal SLAP tear repair (suture and anchor the labrum back into place) is not good, and so he would do a bicep tenodesis instead, which is where they simply cut the bicep tendon away from the Labrum and anchor it to the humerus (the upper arm bone) instead and bypass the shoulder altogether. That doesn’t sound like much fun!

But it gets worse as the bicep tenodesis has risks of life long shoulder stiffness, or frozen shoulder syndrome and that’s on top of the more obvious risks of infection, the operation simply failing or the tendon rupturing. Either way my Consultant reckons that recovering 75% pre-injury capacity from a bicep tenodesis would be a good result, and that’s after a year or 2 recovery period.

I’m able to do more and more things, e.g. push-ups and burpees

The issue is that I’ve been careful not to make my shoulder injury worse and through exercise and some home base physio, my shoulder has improved to the point that I’m 99% pain free. In fact this morning before my appointment, I actually couldn’t find any shoulder or arm movement that caused me any pain! Now it’s true that I’ve only been going to the gym say once a week, and only been doing a small subset of exercises, e.g. nothing overhead, but I have found that I’m able to do more and more things, e.g. I can now do push-ups where I couldn’t 4 months ago, and I can do burpees too where I couldn’t before. And a weekend full of martial arts recently didn’t give me too many problems.

So this leaves me with something of a dilemma. Do I elect not to have the surgery and keep up with my own recovery and stay 99% pain free through normal life, but maybe will never be able to do some exercises or workouts (no more butterfly pullups for example!)?

Or do I go for the surgery and get a proper repair done, albeit my bicep tendon now won’t be connected to the normal place, but after enduring a long recovery period, there’s still a significant risk that it’ll make the situation much worse than it is now?

I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what my limits are

It’s a tough decision. Fortunately the delays of the NHS mean that I don’t have to decide today. The current plan is that I’ve booked in the for the surgery, but as there’s a 4-5 month waiting list anyway, I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what my limits are, starting slowly and working up of course. I have 4 months then to decide if my current ability is sufficient for my needs for the rest of my life, and I suppose if it gets worse again later, I can always get the surgery then.

These things are sent to try us, as they say. But as my father pointed out when I told him: “At least you’re not coming back from Afghanistan with an arm or leg missing!”

I do try to keep up with what’s going on in the medical profession when it comes to golfer’s elbow treatment and recently came across this interesting article regarding a particular case of steroid injection for golfer’s elbow. If you don’t like all the technical speak, skip straight to the last sentence which is the most important one:

Examination revealed atrophy of the skin and subcutaneous fat over the medial epicondyle causing the epicondyle to become prominent like an osseous mass (). Marked tenderness was observed over the prominent medial epicondyle by palpation.

Intraoperatively, the atrophied skin and subcutaneous fat tissue were excised from an ellipsoid incision. Two chalky, whitish deposits of corticosteroid were observed over the flexor aponeurosis. The deposits were excised. The common flexorpronator origin was partially detached by sharp dissection and reflected without disturbing the medial collateral ligament. The underlying fibrous tissue was debrided. The medial epicondyle was drilled, creating multiple bleeding small holes, and then the flexorpronator origin was reattached. The adjacent subcutaneous tissue and skin were released and brought over the epicondyle, forming good soft tissue coverage. Three years postoperatively, the patient had unlimited range of elbow motion with no epicondylar pain, and no pathologic bony prominence of the epicondyle was observed.

Although steroid injection for the conservative treatment of medial epicondylitis is an alternative method, previously reported complications of periarticular injections and the case presented here demonstrate related adverse effects or complications. Injection into the medial site of the elbow may not be as innocent as expected if appropriate injection technique is disregarded.

Now I don’t want to be a doom munger here and if you read the 150+ comments on my golfer’s elbow cure page, you’ll notice that a few people have experienced good success with steroid injections, and I realise that this article is referring to poor injection technique. However my personal view is that injections of corticosteroid for medial epicondylitis is generally a bad idea. Not just because it can go wrong, in the case of the lady above, but also because it’s just masking the pain rather than treating the cause. If you like weightlifting like I do, I think there’s a real risk of making the injury worse. After all, the pain is there to make you aware that something is wrong and needs your attention. Pain is your friend!

As if getting over golfer’s or tennis elbow wasn’t wasn’t bad enough, you have to watch out for scammers too. Take a look at this blatant scammer on Amazon selling a single elbow pain product called TenDLite LED. Why do I say this is a scam? Here’s why (figures correct at the time of writing):

• There are 7 reviews for the product, all suspiciously 5 star with 5 of them very suspiciously submitted on the same day (20th April) with a 6th the day after (21st April).
• Between the 7 reviewers, they have only done 12 reviews in total, an amazing 10 of them are for the TenDLite LED (3 have reviewed it twice, including a previously withdrawn TenDLite LED listing).
• Despite the 10 impressive 5 star reviews, TenDLite as a seller has only had 4 life time purchase ratings!
• Checking the TenDLite website “FDA Approved” is all over it, except where, in their haste to shout this from the rafters, it was misspelled as “FAD Aprooved“, along with “Strenght and flexibility“. It may be being picky, but basic spelling mistakes are fairly dodgy.

Maybe I’m being harsh, but I don’t think I’m wrong. Watch out guys and gals, not all is as it seems out there, and at the end of the day, it’s your health that’s at stake, or at least your hard earned cash anyway.

Mikael Kornihkov, over at the CrossFit Message Boards has posted up a really interesting medical paper that details the results of an experiment on shoulder surgery patients, to determine whether it’s best to keep the shoulder immobilised for several weeks (as per current conventional thinking) or whether you should start exercising the day after shoulder repair surgery? For those without the patience to read a full medical report, here are the highlights:

The study was on 62 patients with a subtype of SLAP lesion: arthroscopic Bankart repair using suture anchors. Specifically addressing the following research questions:

1. does early motion increase the recurrence rate of shoulder instability, and
2. does an accelerated rehabilitation program promote functional return and decrease morbidity?

Exercise from the day after surgery

The accelerated rehabilitation program meant coming out of the sling during the day from the day after surgery and starting exercises e.g. day 1 was Pendulum with 10deg forward leaning. The patients were evaluated at 6 weeks and a final follow up evaluation at 2.5 years (on average).

The Results

Pain
At 6 weeks after surgery, patients who underwent the accelerated rehabilitation expressed significantly less pain than patients with conventional rehabilitation (P = .013) The pain scores at the final follow-up evaluation showed no significant difference between the 2 groups (P = .855).

Range of Motion
No significant difference was seen in range of motion at the final follow-up evaluation between the 2 groups. However, patients with the accelerated rehabilitation were faster in resuming 90% of the final range of external rotation (P = .001).

patients able to return faster to the previous activity

Return to Activity
No significant difference was seen in the status of activity return between the 2 groups at the final follow-up (P = .799). However, patients with accelerated rehabilitation were able to return faster to the previous activity (P = .001).

For reference, this is the protocol for the accelerated rehabilitation program:

Phase I: Protection phase (weeks 1-5)

Day 0: Rest with a sling, sleep in a sling for 2 weeks

Day 1: Pendulum with 10° forward leaning

Day 3:

• Submaximal isometric exercises
• Passive range-of-motion (PROM), Active assisted range-of-motion (AAROM) exercises to tolerance: Forward elevation and internal rotation (rope & pulley/bar)

Day 7: Forward elevation to 90°

Week 2:

• PROM and AAROM forward elevation to 90°, external rotation at side to 20°
• Isotonic internal rotation exercises: Arm at the side initiating at neutral rotation (light rubber band)

Week 3: PROM, AAROM forward elevation to tolerance, external rotation at 30° of abduction to 20°

Week 4:

• Permit full range of motion to tolerance, except extreme abduction and external rotation
• Isotonic strengthening exercises for external rotation at side and forward elevation

Week 5: External rotation at 90° of abduction to tolerance

Phase II: Dynamic strengthening phase (weeks 6-12)

Weeks 6-9:

• Continue range-of-motion exercises
• Isotonic dumbell exercises for internal and external rotator, deltoid, supraspinatus
• Diagonal strengthening (rubber band)

Weeks 10-12

• Tubing exercises in 90/90 position
• Isotonics for trunk muscles

Obviously this does not constitute medical advice, but I certainly intend on bringing this study to the attention of my Consultant and/or physiotherapist, if and when the NHS ever get their act in gear and sort out what’s happening with my shoulder!

Since I’ve returned to exercising and prehabilitating my shoulder’s torn rotator cuff by doing rotator cuff tear friendly exercises, I’ve noticed a marked improvement in my shoulder pain. No it’s not fixed, nor close to it but to be honest, if it wasn’t for wanting to exercises fully again, I reckon I could live a normal life how it is now. Most of the pain has gone and the dull aching has disappeared completely.

Whilst doing a CrossFit / SPEAR System type workout to fellow PDR Coach Chris Worrall at CrossFit Tameside, that involved Combat Squats, Half Spears, and Burpees with a medicine ball(!) I realised that it didn’t hurt as I had expected. Previously I was unable to even get into the plank position, so any form of push up was out, which meant Burpees were out too. So this week I felt confident enough to try out a slightly modified burpee in a workout to see how it went.

What I discovered is that I could do narrow stance push ups without any significant pain, so narrow stance burpees are also in then, providing I don’t do them to excess I think. So the workout I did was this:

Torn Rotator Cuff Workout 6

In x minutes, do As Many Rounds As Possible (AMRAP) of:

• 1 Box Jump
• 1 Burpee
• 1 sit up
• Each round, increase the number of each movement by 1, so on round 3, you do 3 Box Jumps then 3 Burpees etc

You can pick any time over which to do this. I’d already done heavy sets of 5x deadlifts and didn’t want to push the first time trying burpees on my shoulder, so I just did AMRAP in 6 minutes of the above.

2k row with Death By Burpees built in

Rowing doesn’t aggrevate my shoulder injury so I think I’ll be able to do a workout suggested by Tom Bold of CrossFit Bold which is a 2k row, with Death By Burpees built in, so it works like this:

• Start the first minute by doing 1 burpee then hop on the rower and row as far as you can
• When the minute rolls around jump off and knock out 2 burpees
• Get back on the rower and continue from where you left off…
• Continue in this fashion adding one burpee per minute until you’ve completed 2km or you can’t finish the burpees within the allocated minute.

It looks rough!