Roll out a new regime

Nov 13 2008 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Roll out a new regime

‘At the end of our workout I felt as if I had exercised every muscle in my body’

HILARIE STELFOX signed up for an exercise session with the personal trainer who trains personal trainers and discovered what she’s been doing wrong all these years

IF, like me, you’ve been a gym user on and off for years there’s a strong possibility that you’ve been doing pretty much the same workout for years.

As Matt Coulson, who runs the personal training company Performance Training Solutions with his wife Wendy, says: “People just go to the gym, hop on the cross trainer every time and use the weight machines.

“They don’t warm up properly, which would help them get the maximum from their workout, and they tend not to use the free weights and do exercises that improve core stability.”

Guilty as charged.

Which is why I took up Matt’s offer of a ‘movement assessment’ at his company’s new headquarters, the Health Academy, a smart, newly-refurbished building on the site of Huddersfield’s former Cambridge Road Baths.

For Matt the location of the training gym has particular significance; it’s where he began his lifelong interest in sport. As a child he was a competitive swimmer and trained every day at Cambridge Road.

Today, more than 20 years later, he’s a qualified personal trainer with a degree in sports science and spends his days training personal trainers and working one to one with clients.

The business, founded after Wendy gave birth to their daughter four years ago, was their solution to combining family life with the fitness industry. Until then they had both been travelling round the country, Wendy as sales and marketing director for a health and fitness club and Matt as manager of the David Lloyd training campus.

They now have a team of 29 tutors around the country delivering their personal training courses and include the Fitness First chain among their clients.

Their Health Academy gym has a few selected pieces of exercise equipment and a rack of free weights. But it is the large cylinders of foam stacked against the wall that attract my attention and are the first pieces of equipment that Matt turns to for our ‘movement assessment’.

It turns out that they are foam rolls used for warming up the muscles before exercise.

Foam rolling is, says Matt, widely used by physiotherapists in America but has yet to catch on here. “I’d be surprised if anyone in Huddersfield is using them, apart from Fitness First possibly, because we train their teams,” he explains..

“Using them is like having a deep tissue massage and they work on the same principle,” he adds, showing me how to position my calf muscle over a roll to find areas of tension.

Rolling up and down the outer edge of my thighs and the front of my legs reveals large areas of tension. The muscles feel tight and actually quite painful.

“It can sometimes feel excruciatingly painful,” says Matt. “Most of us have tension in our bodies, especially as our lives are so sedentary now. Nine out of 10 people will feel discomfort when foam rolling but it can help enormously.

“When you’re properly warmed up you will get so much more out of your workout and it reduces the chance of injury,” says Matt, who has been using foam rolls for the last seven years, both for warming up and after exercise.

As I go through the warm-up stretches Matt says he can tell that my muscles are tense and that I need to foam roll. After 10 minutes of rolling and stretching I say that I feel quite warm. “I’m glad you said that,” says Matt, “because it shows how efficient the warm-ups are.”

We move on to a selection of exercises with the free weights, working several areas of the body at once. While I’m no stranger to dumbbells, I can honestly say that I’ve never used them while trying to balance on one leg at a time.

But this, says Matt, exercises the core muscles and leg muscles as well as the arms and shoulders.

During my hour in the gym with Matt we never touched any of the machines that I would normally use and yet at the end of our workout I felt as if I had exercised every muscle in my body.

“Most gyms are full of equipment, whereas we only use a few pieces of equipment,” says Matt. “I can do a 35-minute circuit without using any of the machines.

“You can use your own body weight to realign your posture and get your muscles working properly.

“Certain machines in the gym can actually make problems worse, especially if you are not using them properly.”

Matt also believes that many gym users become bored with their weight machine routines and that’s why they stop going.

It’s also important, he believes, to exercise with a friend or in a small group.

“Research has shown that people prefer to exercise in small groups and are less likely to drop out because of the group dynamic,’’ he says.

As well as training the trainers Performance Training Solutions runs short courses for those wanting to lose weight, get fit for skiing or learn pilates.

Courses cost about £75 for six weeks and will be taught in small groups of up to six people.