Stress can derail even the most disciplined training plans, but it doesn’t have to. At Hard Way Fitness, we believe in turning challenges into opportunities. This article explores how chronic stress impacts your fitness journey and provides practical, science-backed strategies to master stress management.

At a high level it doesn’t matter where or what you start with, the important thing is to start. You can see from my health and fitness origins that I didn’t exactly set the fitness world a blaze and I slipped, tripped, and stumbled my way for a lot of it. What I started doing differed significantly from what I moved onto, this is evolution and especially as a beginner you can expect a similar experience.

To grow you must hurt it is as simple as that and the more your challenge hurts the more you will grow when you beat it. That food that you cannot resist, if you can get past that addiction or bad habit you will grow so much in terms of your discipline and confidence in yourself. Your training journal and plan are powerful tools for you to use to remind you of your ‘why’ and for reflection on how far you’ve come.

Psychologically I believe things really started coming together when I began to make the smaller changes. Winning the little seemingly insignificant battles, at the start which mainly involved making sure I didn’t skip a day’s training. At that point I still considered training to be the 100% of most crucial element of a health and fitness lifestyle.

Adopting a healthy lifestyle is so often about the little choices you make on a day-to-day basis. These might seem like small and meaningless acts but if you add up the cumulative benefits of making the right choices when it comes to your health and wellbeing they will add up and you will feel the benefits.

All things being equal and without any valid excuses (be honest 99% of your excuses are lies) it doesn’t matter what I put on these blogs, what plans I outline to you, what I write to motivate you, what I write about nutrition, I can show you a all the motivational videos and posters in existence but the fact of the matter is none of that matters if you don’t get up off your ass and start to work for what you want, attack the thing you think you cannot do.

Your mind is an extremely powerful vessel. If you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You should be picturing yourself one year from now having consistently made little changes and consistently stuck by the changes when you made them. You might be eating and training in a completely different way than you are today but that’s because you’ll have learned and adopted so much that you’ll be applying it and building on previous results.

The media have labelled it an epidemic; the politicians are calling it a crisis and those in the medical profession are forecasting dire metrics as regards the increase of weight related illnesses in the coming decades. It makes for frightening reading for everyone and is only gaining more and more media attention as we all apparently gain more weight.

I still eat bad food and I still love it. The only difference between the unhealthy version of me and the person I am today is that today the ratio of good food I eat is much greater than the ration of bad and I consistently eat good food when I plan to. As I’ve mentioned before if you can nail down your Monday – Friday diet it gives you some wiggle room on the weekend to eat some bad food. Think about your shopping trolley, what goes into it will go into you and your loved ones.

You’re probably seeing a pattern here with our Blog articles. Ignore the media hype around foods, instead focus on getting a balance of healthy wholesome foods and don’t exceed your daily calorific intake levels. That’s really it, I’m going into a lot of detail on the various aspects of dietary requirements and tweaks here but that is it in a nutshell

Many people talk about hitting the wall, this is a mental wall where your mind attempts to stop you because things appear difficult or painful. The more you bring yourself to this wall and push passed it the stronger your resolve will be, the more confident you will become and as a direct result you will start to achieve things.

By learning that both obstacles and failure are necessary for you to continue to grow and develop in all aspects of your life. Failure is not the end, it’s not even negative. Failure is a lesson that will allow you to find the answers you need. At the start of your health and fitness journey expect to fail and fail again as you build a path to success.

COVID-19 has brought about a major shift in how employees operate, with many being forced to work from home for well over a year at this stage. While employees dutifully adapted and have performed admirably, companies for the large part have not. Initial messages of support and camraderie have given way to messages of getting everyone back into offices. I’m not so sure many of us really want to go back.

A lot of food manufacturers love to put the calories for a tiny amount e.g. 25g of our product is 50 calories and you think that’s fantastic and then you go and smother your meal in it not realising that it’s 200g worth and you’ve just added 400 calories to your intake without even realising it. It’s better to spot this when you’re out shopping than a few weeks down the line when you’re trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Giving up is the easiest thing, continuing despite the adversity builds character, it builds resilience, and it feels good to accomplish something when it’s difficult. If it was easy there’d be no joy or satisfaction in completing whatever challenge you’re facing. If it was easy, we’d all look like whatever the media brand today’s perfect physique.

‘Health and Fitness’, a short collection of words that are fully capable of conjuring up deeply personal feelings and viewpoints on what exactly it means to be healthy and fit. Often these personal feelings and viewpoints can bring up painful emotions and memories from your own experiences, you might say the good the bad and the ugly.

Physical activity although it is not the lynchpin of living a happier, healthier, and wealthier life it is a fundamental pillar from which one can build and rely on. It is a strenuous voluntary activity through which you can look to nurture, grow, develop, and master your body and mind

Having been in gyms, clubs, teams and many personal as well as group training sessions it’s apparent that the most successful clients and trainers, in terms of the results achieved are less about the ‘Training’ and more about the ‘Personal’. Having solid knowledge, skills, and aptitudes and indeed a love of training is absolutely essential for personal trainers and coaches, you can’t fake that or at least you can’t fake it for very long.

There is no better metric than how you feel, if you eat clean and train dirty you will feel better in yourself. From time to time your metrics might not change all that much but it’s important to remember that how you feel; how your clothes feel on you and your general well-being are not something you can really measure. Remember this isn’t a quick fix it’ll take time; the most important thing is consistent effort.

Your body is capable of great things, things you don’t even realise. Nobody should pass away without experiencing the power their body possesses. Don’t waste your ability and your body. There are people out there that would pay any price to simply be able to walk for a day. Don’t waste your good fortune.