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There were a large group of youths in the park while I was conducting our regular boot camp class at Edinburgh gardens on Tuesday night.

We were doing a drill followed by a sprint and an intense 60 second burst of boxing. While the Fitmates were performing shuttle runs to the end cone marker and back, one extremely inebriated member of the group decided to join in.

There was a feeling of danger, not knowing how this kid would react or whether the group of youths would wish to take offense to such a discussion. Fortunately he understood that I was just trying to conduct a fitness class and he responded with “I just want to get off the drugs and get fit man”.

Kelly, the Fitmate I was partnering with sent through an email recalling this incident.

It’s a sad reflection of our society when teenagers today are not only drinking alcohol to such intoxicating levels that it not only creates a risk to their health but to innocent  bystanders within their vicinity.

Judging by his reaction, such activities seemed to be a regular occurrence.

One of our Fitmates Pascale M had a funny story about her Scottish terrier Hamish who gets excited with white socks and trainers.

Hamish has become accustomed with the daily ritual of an afternoon or evening walk which is usually precipitated by his owner putting on her white socks and trainers. This process is now associated by Hamish as a cue for going for a walk.

However poor Hamish is left a little confused when Pascale M starts to put on the white Socks and trainers only to be left waiting as his owner hops in a car to get to boot camp training.

I have met Hamish and he is an extremely cute little Scottish terrier, maybe he can join one our Boot camps as dogs are always welcome.

While we were boxing, a Fitmate “Tina K” made a funny fitness comment while she was focus padding, she was day dreaming about chocolate.

On average our Fitmates burn between 450-750 calories so based on a 55 gram block of branded chocolate (mmmm, have they reduced the size from 60 grams???) containing 292 calories, this means that for our Fitmate, she will need to work hard for 45 minutes to burn off the chocolate bar.

Chocolate seems to be very popular theme with a Fitmate late year saying that after burning 800 calories during our bootcamp session, that he can now eat a mars bar.
Mmmm, sounds good in theory but why waste all of that hard work by putting back all those calories into the body plus the trans fats as well.

Well if you’re looking for chocolate you cannot beat Belgium, or even better still in Bruges where they have the most amazing selection. So how many squats and burpees will need to be performed if you went crazy in this shop?

Very funny fitness quote this morning at Boot camp from a Fitmate (KK) “The girls were right, morning people are hard core, there was no chatting at all! ….Down to business”

At our evening sessions, it’s very social with Fitmates catching up with other Fitmates about what they got up to on the weekend but with the 6amers, there’s no mucking around, it’s straight down to business:)).

That’s not to say the the evening Fitmates don’t get a great workout, it’s a little different when you are waking up at 5.30am or earlier to get to boot camp, every second of extra Zzzzz’s count in the morning. Fitmates arrive at 5.58am ready for the session while the evening crew like to spend the 15 minutes before boot camp unwinding from the days activities at the office before launching into the workout.

Come 7.00am, the 6amers are leaving boot camp to get home in time to get ready for work while the 6.30pmemers are going home to relax:))

It’s interesting though, whether you’re a morning or evening person generally determines your preferred exercise time unless of course work or family commitments make things a little trickier.

While asking about a Fitmate how she felt after Saturday’s boot camp session she replied “where there is pain there is gain”. The main point is we’re not talking about massive, bad sort of pain, that ligaments or muscles have been torn but rather the muscles have been challenged.

It’s all about recruiting more muscle fibres and stressing the muscle cell which leads to muscles adaptation or hypertrophy. The key element is to manage the volume of training and the intensity.

As our Fitmate commented, if there is muscle soreness there has been some muscle adaption, so it’s all about overloading the muscles and going leaving your comfort zone. Most importantly exercise within your safe limits, if you don’t have the muscle stabilisation to perform a single leg squat, it would be foolish to attempt a dynamic lunge, that is performing a lunge, jumping up and switching leg positions mid air.

Ultimately you wont to vary the type of exercises you are performing to stimulate a response from your muscles, how often have you heard that people run on a tread mill for 60 minutes at the same spped without any improvement in their fitness levels. Well you need to vary the intensity and volume of the exercise you are performing to see any changes.