DC Coaching

21/09/2024

Happy 5th Anniversary

Not the day we planned, but that’s now our future with our perfect little squish ❤️ I wouldn’t have it any other way 🌟

31/01/2023

I can simplify the benefits to having “more consistent energy levels throughout the whole day” and “easier to follow a good sleep routine”

Don’t get me wrong, the first few days were awful. The first two weeks were not fun and full of yawns 🥱 and big dips in energy levels. But from two and a half weeks, things levelled out (phew).

Workouts definitely dropped off as well as my ability to get as much work and household work done throughout the day. But once again, after that two and a half week mark, everything began to pick up again and then stabilise.

I could quite happily continue without caffeine but I do like a little extra pep in my step when working out. So I will find a new caffeine “normal” routine.

Lessons :

1. I didn’t realise I was dependant on caffeine to maintain my lifestyle UNTIL I gave it up.

2. DON’T give it up without planning in the initial withdrawal phase. (Work it into your life to try to minimise the initial negative effects.)

3. Be aware of coping mechanisms. My brain sent all the signals possible to stabilise energy levels and I had to swap out caffeine for all the food and sugar for 2 weeks.

4. I rekindled my love of early nights and early starts. These last couple of weeks I have shifted my bedtime forward an hour because I naturally get sleepy at 9pm. I can now fall asleep at 10pm easily rather than forcing a bedtime routine as well as wake up for a 6am start in the studio without caffeine.

5. Know why you’re doing it. I’m not saying anyone needs to give up caffeine or even should. I like making myself a Guinea pig and testing areas of my health and lifestyle to see what “normals” don’t need to be and whether I can manipulate a sustainable new “normal.”

I shall now continue with decaf coffee as the norm but I will give myself the option of having one caffeinated coffee before training. Sometimes I will have it, sometimes not. It worked well today, so we shall see how that pans out over the longer term 🤞🏻

🤤

20/07/2022

?

This has nothing to do with fitness. As you can zoom in on a post… Who can find Arla 🐶

17/06/2022

I will be very British and make a post partly about the weather. It is hot hot hot ☀️☀️☀️

When it is 🥵 🥵 🥵 , your body’s cooling system is under greater stress than usual to maintain your body temperature.

This means it requires greater amounts of water than normal for that cooling system to function optimally.

The colour of your urine is a great indicator of your current hydration status because it changes in real time.

This means you get constant feedback throughout the day on your hydration status and then you can change your behaviours as needed.

Get into the habit of checking your hydration status and adjusting your water intake as necessary.

❗️Especially when it is hot hot hot.

‼️Especially especially if you are training/exercising when it is hot hot hot.

Stay cool 😎 Stay hydrated 💧

• You’ll train harder 🏋️‍♂️
• You’ll train for longer🚴🏻
• You won’t feel as fatigued 🥱
• You’ll be more supple 🤸🏻
• You’ll sleep better 💤 (assuming you don’t drink it all just before bed 🛌)

But wait… How much water should I drink ?!

-> Enough to keep you towards the top of the p*e chart 🤓

*e *echart

13/06/2022

This is so true !

Find good people to go on a fitness adventure with and you won’t regret it.

Focusing on the process is great, but if you need help starting that process, find someone to share the journey with.

Training with a great coach / in a great community based studio like can help pull you towards a fitness process rather than continuously trying to push it onto yourself.

Find yourself a Big Panda 🐼 and/or Tiny Dragon 🐉

30/05/2022

Training is important. But recovery is iMpoRtaNter… hehe.

Our body repairs and remodels itself every single day. It does this at all times through various biological processes without us even knowing it is happening.

I believe because we don’t need to read the manual fully before operating our biological machinery, we can sometimes take it for granted, forgetting the importance and necessity of our daily recovery practices.

The lifestyle we live every day directly impacts both our fitness as well as our health because of its effects on our ability to recover, repair, re-build and remodel our body to counter the demands of our life.

The lifestyle we live everyday impacts our physical resilience because it improves our ability to recover from daily challenges.

Fitness training is a purposeful stress, designed to break down our body a little bit with the intention of re-building it back up a little better than it was before. Our fitness training improves our bodies ability to withstand physical challenge.

Without the necessary recovery from a healthy lifestyle, we won’t recover from, or adapt to, our training stress and therefore won’t improve from it either.

Our recovery capacity is the net effect of our total recovery strategies. I simplify this down to five key areas of our lifestyle :

1️⃣ Stress Management

2️⃣ Sleep

3️⃣ Nutrition

4️⃣ Hydration

5️⃣ Play

These all contribute to our bodies ability to recharge and go again tomorrow.

We all live very same same but different lives and so your own individual needs for each recovery area will be individual for you.

Try to keep an eye on the whole rather than just one strategy.

You got this 👍🏻💪🏻

For a deeper dive into each area, check out the lifestyle section of my website. Link in bio 🤓

17/05/2022

‼️ Fatigue is a NECESSARY ingredient towards an effective fitness process. The body NEEDS a reason to make costly upgrades.

Remember, training is the purposeful application of movement and stress to cause our body to adapt/improve.

Well, training stress is not separate from life stress. They both accumulate to give a total level of stress/fatigue which our recovery strategies must pay the price for.

❗️Training stress is applied in three ways :

1️⃣ Frequency : how often training stress is applied

2️⃣ Volume : how much training stress is being applied throughout the above frequency

3️⃣ Intensity : how challenging (relative to your maximum limits) is the training stress being applied

These three factors combine to give your total training stress.

Training stress is applied on top of your life stress, which is your total mental, physical and social stress.

All of these combine to give a total level of fatigue. All of which is changing constantly.

Therefore, whenever applying training stress to a client, I must be aware of their training stress outside of sessions, their current life stress AND their current ability to recover.

This allows me to adjust and tinker with training stress to fit into an effective fitness cycle.

‼️ Fatigue and stress work within the Goldilocks principle :

❌ Too little - no improvements

❌ Too much - no improvements

✅ Just right = improvements

Effective Personal Training is never about working clients to exhaustion and then waving them out the door hoping they can recover 👋🏻🤞🏻

It is about understanding clients, their lives and their recovery to then give them juuuuuust the right amount of training stress to keep them moving forward towards their goals.

For more info on effective fitness principles, check out my website. Link in Bio.

16/05/2022

A lot of this is just language games, but, fundamentally, when you “train”, you need to move and you need to challenge that movement in order to create a need to adapt/improve.

❗️ The way you move has an impact on your training results.

-> The way you mechanically move will impact where, as well as the amount of stress going through joints, soft tissues and muscles etc

This is why I focus on “movement quality” as the first phase of a clients training.

My definition of “movement quality” is based within the context of training longevity, not maximising performance (although there is definitely crossover).

This simply means moving in a way which minimises overall joint stress (there is always some) and maximises muscular stress (as muscles recover the fastest).

You learn to control and move your body as one system, slowly building your movement library over time.

❗️ Then you “purposefully” stress/challenge that “purposeful movement” with a desired adaptation/outcome in mind.

e.g

-> A squat + full range = squat mobility

-> A full range squat + relatively heavy load = squat strength

-> A full range squat + high repetitions = squat endurance

-> A full range squat + light/moderate load to near failure = squat muscle growth

A full range squat + powerful jump = squat power

If you want more than one improvement, you create a training plan that ticks the right movements and stress boxes.

‼️ If you turn up to “train” and you only do one movement, but you do it well and you push it towards failure. You have trained.

You can build a really big fitness puzzle over time without training for hours like a stereotypical fitness influencer 🌟

Remember :

Turn up, move well, challenge yourself a bit, go home, carry on living your normal life with some recovery, repeat and progress SLOWLY over time.

You won’t become a CEO after 12 weeks, just like you won’t look like a fitness influencer in 12 weeks.

It takes as long as it takes. But Health and Fitness can be built up from any starting point.

You got this 💪🏻

To see my movement library, check out my YouTube channel. Link in Bio.

13/05/2022

Here is a graph representation of effective fitness principles.

1️⃣ You turn up and purposefully train some movements

2️⃣ You purposefully challenge your movements in some way, shape or form, juuuust right

3️⃣ You recover sufficiently because of effective lifestyle habits

4️⃣ You adapt to your training and make small improvements to your physiological system(s)

5️⃣ You find a way to enjoy the process so you keep turning up again and again

-> Pow 👏🏻💪🏻 Good job 👍🏻

—————————

Now, if you are not improving, swipe across to see graph representations for the ONLY reasons you won’t be improving your fitness.

1️⃣ You don’t train, therefore you do not create a stimulus for improving your fitness

2️⃣ You don’t challenge yourself enough OR you challenge yourself too much

3️⃣ You are not recovering enough to afford the upgrades your body wants to make

4️⃣ You are not training consistently and your body slowly loses any improvements you have previously made without the stimulus to keep them

—————————

This can be a simple framework to troubleshoot your fitness progress.

Now this is a very simplified model assuming only looking at one adaptation.

In reality, training gives multiple signals for changing multiple systems at once. Program design has a big part to play in this, but for simplicity, assume we’re looking at one part of the whole.

❗️Sometimes we need more training
❗️ Sometimes we need less, but more efficient training
❗️Sometimes we need to focus on levelling up our recovery rather than more training
❗️Sometimes we just need to train more consistently

Context, context, context (as always 😇)

For more info on the whole fitness process as well as how I manipulate it to get clients fit, strong and resilient, check out my website. Link in Bio.

10/05/2022

Just because it is simple, does not mean it is easy.

Movement and training are skills. They take time to learn, practice and apply.

❗️But… Once you learn how to move your own body well, it is a life long skill that (hopefully) won’t change drastically.

Just like learning/building effective recovery strategies and lifestyle habits.

The principles of training and recovery don’t ever really change, only the methods used to achieve those principles.

❗️I don’t usually give any blanket statements but, when it comes to fitness training, ALWAYS prioritise maintaining movement quality.

This is the most underrated fitness skill because unfortunately there are not as many 60+ fitness influencers sharing their high quality of life because they can still move well.

Then to further increase your quality of life, add some purposeful and progressive challenge to your movements.

This will build overall resilience by improving :
❗️Muscle mass to support your joints and pain free movement
❗️Soft tissue quality and strength including tendons and ligaments
❗️Bone density to reduce risk of breaks, fractures and injury
❗️ Cardiovascular health by challenging the cardiovascular system
❗️ Muscular endurance that lowers the stress of daily activities
❗️Plus so many more physical attributes complimenting a high physical quality of life

Effective fitness training can improve and maintain anyone’s physical quality of life from any starting point. You just need to find a way to consistently turn up and practice… Slowly, but progressively.

🏆 You got this 🏆

Check out my YouTube channel for a wide selection of quality movement variations from beginner to advanced. Link in bio.

10/05/2022

Check out my latest reel on Instagram going through some core progressions. These can be started at level 1 by nearly anyone and built up over time to some tough variations.

Check it out and save for later if you need to remember the order to practice 💪🏻

Otis McDonald • Boom Bapness

05/05/2022

Fitness builds physical resilience.

-> Resilience is the capacity to withstand, recover from and adapt to physical challenge

The body builds this resilience through purposeful adaptation to physical stress.

Therefore fitness training is our controlled environment to place purposeful but controlled stress through our body in order for it to adapt and build itself stronger, faster, fitter etc.

I cannot emphasise enough, the importance of knowing the difference between a fitness principle and a fitness method.

-> A principle is a fundamental rule of the game that must be met

-> A method is just one way of playing the game within the rules

‼️ Below are the principles of fitness :

1️⃣ TRAINING

This is the combination of purposeful movement (or resisting movement) with purposeful stress / challenge.

2️⃣ FATIGUE

This is the dose dependent stress caused purposefully through training. Physiology must be pushed outside of its current comfort zone in order to cause change and improvement.

3️⃣ RECOVERY

This is the necessary repair work to counter balance the effects of training stress (and all other stress) leading to potential adaptations.

4️⃣ ADAPTATION

This is where the magic of fitness training really occurs. It is the body’s natural way of dealing with struggle and adversity to better help us survive / increase our odds at reproducing.

❗️If our recovery capacity is greater than our training (and life) stress, then our body can afford to make adaptations.

❗️If our recovery capacity is lower than our training (and life) stress, then our body cannot afford to make all of our adaptations and we may not improve.

5️⃣ CONSISTENCY

This is the necessary ingredient to turn small unnoticeable changes into big life changing adaptations.

——————

Find a METHOD of fitness that works within these PRINCIPLES of fitness and that you will ENJOY keeping it up.

I’m not here to say this is easy, but it will be life changing ‼️