In recent years, it has become fairly common for athletes involved in bodybuilding to use the healing peptides BPC-157 and TB-500 to improve their recovery from injuries such as tendonitis and/or muscle tears. These peptides can have significant positive effects on tissue repair, and although many people may use these, most don’t actually know or understand the mechanisms behind how they work.

The fact that creatine can increase training performance, aid recovery and help us in our endeavour to continually add muscle mass is widely accepted and extensively supported by research and evidence. However, it wasn’t until one of my clients asked me “how does creatine work?” that I actually realised that many of us might not know but are curious about the physiology of creatine. Therefore, my aim with this article is to provide a simplified explanation of this process.

Maximum recoverable volume (MRV) and Minimum effective volume (MEV) were relatively new terms for me a couple years ago: although they were concepts I had a basic understanding of, I had never really looked at them in depth. And now, whenever I use those terms with new clients, I am often met with a blank expression. Therefore, the purpose of this article is discussed maximum recoverable volume, minimum effective volume, and how (and why!) you can work this out for your own individual needs

Do you have a burning desire to have big glutes, jacked quads or massive shoulders? You may have thought that to do so, then it would make sense to work the area more, so it gets bigger, right? You might even think that if you aren’t sore the next day then the workout must have been poor?

This is a really common question, one that I get asked daily by clients. This is because when myself and the team write programs for our clients, in the denoted “rest period” tab I always state that you should rest as required between sets. You might be wondering why I may prescribe this, so let me explain.

Have you ever seen myself or anyone else wear ‘ridiculous’ looking glasses in the evening? Have you always wondered why on earth we would do this, if it’s not to look cool? These glasses are known as blue light blockers. For those of you who’ve never heard of blue light, here’s a brief explanation of what it is and how it works:

Have you ever considered the effect that stress is having on your progress? Did you know that a body in a state of stress is less efficient at burning fat or adding muscle mass? It’s no secret that we live in a society where stress is elevated throughout the day. This can be down to work pressure, bills, family, and day-to-day living. Unfortunately, we’ve come to accept this as the norm – almost to the point where, despite stress levels being high, your average person does very little to try and manage that stress. In fact, most new clients I take on board have no stress management tools in place at all!

Do you train on different days per week and find that your performance during sessions is sometimes poor? Are you strategically having rest days before or after certain sessions Unfortunately, not everyone will have the luxury of training at the same time, or the flexibility of assigning specific workouts to a given day due to work/child commitments. However, for those who can, having set days off can massively improve their progress and physique.

Do you find yourself constantly tired? Does your performance during workouts suffer because of a lack of energy at times. Without a shadow of a doubt, two of the most common things that are overlooked in developing a physique are sleep duration and the quality of that sleep; and this only happens because sleep isn’t “cool”.

Are you constantly tired because you go to bed late? Are you training so much in the gym that you’re always sore when going into your sessions? Tiredness and constant muscle soreness are both indicators of poor recovery – importantly, what many fail to realise is that recovery is absolutely critical to achieving your physique goals.

Are you experiencing frequent cycles or perhaps you have lost your cycle completely (Amenorrhea)? If so, then go speak to your doctor if you haven’t already. ⁣Over the years of working with hundreds of women, I have noticed trends. Specifically, I have observed that the relationship between stress and the menstrual cycle is a delicate one: if stress is high, then cycles can become irregular, frequent or in some cases, cease.

Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed an ever-growing trend: adding bands to machines. You may think that it’s just some new-school bodybuilding faff, or that it just makes machines look cooler and is in fact, pointless. Either that, or you simply don’t understand the rationale behind banding up a machine.

Program design can feel like a tricky and complicated process. Not only are there a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration, but there are also hundreds of different methods and opinions out there. This can leave you feeling confused and questioning whether you’re doing everything “right”.

I’ll admit it: back in the day, I would train chest on a Monday, back on a Tuesday, and so on and so forth. Although the “bro split” was something that worked for me in my early days, after trialling some sessions where I added shoulder work into my “chest” and “arm” days, I have never gone back to dedicating a day per week to a specific body part.

It has always been believed that the only way to elicit muscle growth is by training with high mechanical load in the gym. This involves working in a 6-12 rep range, taking each set to failure throughout the majority of your session, and adding in some high rep/low rest work towards then end of your workout.

Let’s be honest: who doesn’t want to have a thick and wide back? Nobody, right? This is why old school bodybuilders – or the “bros” – have historically followed a “bro split” program which had a set day for training their back. However, for the intermediate gym-goer (or the new school bodybuilder), a “pull day” may provide greater stimulus to grow their back in the early stages of their journey.

One of the most commonly asked questions surrounding cardio is whether doing it fasted, first thing in the morning, burns more fat than if you were to do it at any other time in the day. I won’t even encourage you to google it, because there is an overwhelming number of different opinions out there. Some coaches swear by it without any logical reasoning behind it, whereas others are completely against it and will always encourage you to eat before cardio.

On the occasional consultation call, I can often be asked about the frequency with which I change my clients’ programmes, to which my response is usually “whenever it needs to be changed”. This might seem blunt but let me explain. The model I follow is that of progressive overload, and as such, of increasing mechanical load over time on the muscle(s).