Brother Gym goes International.

Tuesday July 26^th 2011 – Brother Gym lands in Dubai! Cue excitement, sunnies, factor 2000 and a sweatband.

Having grown tired of Britain’s rather lackluster attempt at a Summer Season, yet again, I decided to hop aboard my own private jet – which looked oddly like a KLM Airbus – and take a jaunt over to Dubai. I wonder how all those other people got on my aircraft? Hmmm, baffling.

It had been a strange month already, with my beautiful fashionista sister (check out her fabulous fashion blog here) getting married in typically understated style in Marrakech. Ahem. Actually, scratch that – understated it was not. Having three wedding ceremonies in a week, two of which are in a foreign country, is not quite normal. But fabulous it was. In preparation I had spent 3 months getting into tip-top shape.

Or so I thought. It turns out that looking like a mini-hulk as opposed to a lithe Clark Kent is not exactly the ‘in thing’ at the moment. Plus, it meant I needed assistance to get my Indian ceremonial garb over my head… and a lot of acrobatic maneuvering to get it back off again too! Cool…

Things took a turn for the good though; in wonderfully unpredictable fashion. Basking in the adoration of after-speech glory (raised my own eyebrow at that too), I was rather stunned to see myself being approached by the most beautiful lady at the party. It turns out she was after my father, but noticing the busy night he was having – you know, at his daughter’s wedding – I took the dutiful step of intercepting this lovely ladies’ path. Two hours of excited conversation later, and the rest, as they say, is history.

It turns out, though, that Lady X is not a fan of the muscle-on-top-of-muscle look. So I’ve taken the rather drastic step of leaning back down to my natural size and shape. This is not as easy as it sounds…. If you go from pounding the iron like a beast to laying back and waiting for the muscle to disappear you are likely to end up looking more like the Michelin man than you did before. And so after racking my brain a little I decided to do two things….

1.    Lower the weight, up the reps… and start using my whole body to perform ‘functional’ movement patterns. That’s rather a misnomer… after all you don’t exactly see many people performing multi-planar lunges and plyometric jumping kettle bell movements in the middle of the mall. But there you go, I now look like a monkey on acid in the gym rather than a gorilla on ‘roids. (For the record, I’ve never been anything but natural). ‘Check your ego at the door, right…’.

2.    And I’ve gone Roman too… having  heard the buzz about the Warrior Diet for some time, I decided, against all my professional instincts, to give it a go. And boy does it do something… I lost 12lbs in 2 weeks and looked leaner than ever. It just shouldn’t work. This ‘diet’ goes rather against the scientific eating approach that I have been so used to.

The Warrior Diet 101.

The warrior diet follows an under eat/overeat process. This means grazing on small portions of fruit, nuts, perhaps a boiled egg or some tuna during the day. This supposedly allows the body time to stabilize hormone levels and ‘detox’. I wouldn’t exactly buy into that… but that’s the ‘scientific’ advice given. At around 7 in the evening, though, it becomes a foodies dream. One is supposed to prepare a feast - raw salad first, steamed veggies second, protein third and some carbs if you are not yet quite keeling over. Just to give you an idea, my protein element has been as large as a full chicken and a half… or around 30 oz of steak. And that large salmon sitting in front of me… that’s just for afters.

I must say, you do feel fantastic at this point. Your body feels like it’s guzzling down on this fuel like a supercar being driven by, well, let’s say Jeremy Clarkson, ie pedal to the metal, screeching, drifting…the Daily Mail sentiments are optional however.

Success so far, and after a week back on my standard diet, I am going to launch into another warrior week… I’ll keep you updated. I would suggest you go ahead and check out the Warrior Diet site to learn loads more about how you can make a quick and drastic change.

My next post will be on how to optimize your workouts in a gym so under-equipped it looks like the fitness section of the Argos catalogue…

Reasons to Train with Brother Gym - No. 3... Expertise

With the advent of the internet we've all become 'experts' in pretty much anything we'd like to be. It's quie useful actually, I mean who doesn't want to be an expert in something... but this can throw up a few problems.

If you make a search for how to lose weight or gain muscle you'll come up with a million different pages and a million different ways of doing it. It can get quite confusing, and in the end pretty counterproductive. You end up going to the gym not knowing whether to run slow and for a long time or quickly in an interval pattern. You don't know whether to lift heavy weights a few times or light weights over and over again. Do you train every day? How much rest do you need? How many reps is enough to achieve what you want? How DO you get bigger arms, a flatter stomach and washboard abs?

All these things require a complex combination of different methods in order to achieve them... that's where Brother Gym comes in. We've made this our expertise, this is our raison d'etre after all.


We'll remove your doubts, straighten out all the complexities and remove all the frustration, doubt and wasted energy you might feel when going it alone.

Come and try us out...

Brother Gym

Reasons to Train with Brother Gym... No.2 - Results

I don't know about you but I don't particularly liking sticking at a thing if it isn't really doing anything for me. Results are key...

Take Jason Statham, for example.

Everything he does is results driven - he was an Olympic diver after all. He has trainers who propel him forward, workout after workout - writing down his lifts, using those figures to make sure he doesn't go back on himself. This takes planning! Someone telling him what to do and when to do it.

Brother Gym can do this for you. We'll make sure your programs are interesting, varied and most importantly - they'll be geared so you that you never take a step back!

We won't make you star in Death Race though...

Brother Gym
www.brothergym.com

Reasons to Train with Brother Gym - No. 1... Specificity

We all train in some way or another; whether we walk to the bus stop, run on a sunday morning, patrol the supermarket aisles or endeavour to train under a rigorous regime - we train. In some way or another we are training to function in our lives. If you need to get to the bus, then walking there every day adapts your body to that particular function. If you want to run a marathon, you need to systematically train your body for that function.

Should you want to lose weight it seems there is no immediate training to function paradigm. That makes it a little harder. There are answers though. You just have to consider the function that is being played by all the things you put into your body and all of the ways in which you expend that energy. If you put nothing into your body, then it can serve no function - so that isn't the answer. If you want to reach your leanest weight - 'your' leanest, not someone elses - then you have to take a close look at your habits and see what function they serve. Too often, through an abundance of choices in the gym, it becomes easy for someone to train a little randomly - to just do a bit of this and that in the hope that all that energy expenditure will add up to one tidy little package. But if you aren't seeing results, perhaps you've worked out that this is not working for you...

It's our job to take a look at your lifestyle, your habits and your potential and give you the correct, and specific, way of achieving your potential.

Be specific with us and we can give you specifically what you want. It's as easy as 1,2,3...

Brother Gym
www.brothergym.com

Well, hello brothergym.com - our home is finally built! (just a bit of decorating to do)

Dear followers and all soon-to-be followers,

We are now live at brothergym.com! In the spirit of motivation we are kicking off with some brilliant special offers!! As follows:

3 months - 30% off
6 months - 40% off
12 months - 50% off

Your fitness and health does not have to cause your bank account to collapse in a shocked heap after all.

(PLEASE NOTE: at the moment the site is only accepting payments if you go directly through paypal so at the payment page please check the paypal box)

Go to the site and have a look... Check out the exercise section to see some free previews of how we do it!

As a fledgling start up we aren't perfect... You may notice a few little bugs and even spelling mistakes. Dont't fret though, we are proactive and very open to suggestions so please give us some feedback.

You can email james@brothergym.com if you have any questions or if you would like us to discuss a topic in a blog or article!

Welcome to the family!

Brother Gym