Strength For Health

27/11/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Crc29AgY4/

26/11/2025

I'm sharing this particular video for three reasons:

The first is that pretty much any information offered by Dr Berry is worth paying close attention to. He does a very good job at explaining complicated health & medical issues in reasonably simple terms without oversimplifying them.

The second is that consuming adequate Vitamin B1 is vital for health & low B1 has negative implications for metabolic health (e.g. Type II Diabetes, PCOS & cardiovascular disease) but also for neurological health (e.g. Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis & Alzheimer's). So please make sure you are consuming some.

Personally, I eat quite a lot of pork (not just in the form of bacon) but I also take a Vitamin B complex supplement that hopefully gives me abundant amounts of all the vital B vitamins.

The second is to highlight just how complicated the consumption of micronutrients is. First, you need a good source of the nutrient; then you need to ensure that you are not eating another food that blocks the uptake of that nutrient; then you need to have enough of the other nutrients that make the first one work properly (& they all need to be balanced out in turn); then you need to know if your health condition and/or the medication used to treat it are blocking the uptake of those nutrients as well.

It is a lot more complicated that just taking a multivitamin tablet a couple of times a day.

It is a subject area that I spend quite a bit of time trying to get my head around purely for my own benefit & it is something I feel I can only offer general guidance on to my clients. The best advice I have to offer is that eating plenty of a variety of meats, eggs, fish (& seafood) & dairy gives you the best opportunities to be well nourished.

Vitamin B1 (thiamine) is essential for healthy nerves, proper carbohydrate metabolism, mitochondrial function, and overall metabolic health. In today’s video...

24/11/2025

Sometimes I read an article that I really wish I had written myself. The one below, written by Dr Howard Luks, is the best summary of osteoporosis that I have encountered and I highly recommend you have a read of it because osteoporosis affects us all. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men in Scotland will be diagnosed with the condition later in life. But the true numbers are probably more like that half of women and a quarter of men will have it because most will only receive a diagnosis after a fall when they fracture a bone. If you don’t break something you will know someone who does and it may well be the thing that shortens their life considerably or makes the last few months of their life a bit of a misery. This is all rather personal for me at the moment, as a close family member is in hospital with two broken wrists after a bad fall.

Any bone can break but the most common are wrists and ‘hips’ after a fall (it is usually the neck of femur at the top of your leg that fractures) but in severe cases of the condition, bits of the spine will break from actions as gentle as rolling over in bed. Some people fall and break bones while others break a bone then fall. Either way, the experience is unpleasant at best and ends lives at worst.

Please note that I call it a ‘condition’ not an illness, injury or disease and it can’t be caught from someone else. It is a condition because it is almost always entirely preventable and it is, to some extent, reversible even for people well into their older years. It is not an illness that can be treated with medication (though the doctors try) but a condition that is addressed by appropriate exercise and nutrition.

We all know that calcium has something to do with bone strength but it takes a lot more than a calcium tablet or a glass of milk to keep your bones strong. Proper nutrition for bone strength starts with protein and, as we age, we need to eat more protein to meet our needs than we did when we were younger. But most people eat less protein as they age. Animal protein (i.e. meat and eggs) are by far your best sources. But you also need sufficient vitamins and minerals too. Calcium is one of them but you also require vitamins D3 and K2 to make sure that the calcium ends up in your bones (and teeth) rather than in your soft tissues. (Vitamins A and E also need to be in balance.) If you are supplementing with calcium you should take magnesium too, and sodium and potassium have to be balanced out as well.

But even more importantly, you need to load your skeleton with significant amounts of force by moving heavy weights and creating high impact forces by jumping and landing heavily. This goes counter to just about every advert for fitness classes that claim to be suitable for older people which emphasise low impact, light weights, chair based exercises and the like. Inappropriate exercise (low impact, gentle movements, walking, cycling, swimming, etc.) may be great for your body in so many other ways but they do nothing whatsoever for the health of your skeleton.

Combatting frailty (the combination of low bone mass, low muscle mass, low strength and poor balance) is one of the primary reasons that Strength for Health exists and the methods I use are aligned directly with the latest scientific understanding of the importance of building and maintaining bone and muscle strength. The facts are that people with more muscle, bone and strength are less likely to fall in the first place; more likely to bounce rather than break bones if they do fall; and more likely to survive serious injury if they do hurt themselves badly enough to be hospitalised. And this is true whether the ‘fall’ was as a result of tripping over one’s own feet or because you are unfortunate enough to be caught up in an accident that someone else caused. More muscle also means that you are more likely to survive severe illnesses of virtually any kind.

In a medical sense, there is no such thing as a person who is too strong. Nobody can yet tell us how strong is strong enough but we are increasingly knowledgeable about how hard people need to train in order to significantly improve the strength of their bones. It is very simple really: you need to lift heavy weights often, regularly and for the rest of your life if you want to reduce the risk of frailty limiting your life prematurely. I can’t promise that training this way will be easy but it is simple and it is effective and it doesn’t take that much time out of your life.

As always, if you want to explore this further, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me by WhatsApp or Messenger.

Get Strong, Stay Strong!

And an exercise guide to help you build bone

16/11/2025

For those of us born in the late 1900s, this seems like good advice, doesn't it? But I am not at all sure I agree.

In a previous life I was an ambulance technician and I went to many calls where an older person - more often than not, a woman - had fallen in their home and couldn't get up again. Frequently they hadn't injured themselves in any way (beyond a bruise or two) but were just unable to get back up to their feet again. Very often they were like a turtle, stuck on their back and unable to roll over onto their front. Sometimes excess weight played a part but mostly it seemed to me as if they had simply lost the skill they had developed as a baby before they could even walk.

I remember one in particular who had been lying on her back in a cold conservatory for 10 hours before being discovered by her son who popped by for an afternoon visit. She had no injuries but by the time we got to her she was hypothermic (and, of course, had soiled herself) so she had a wee trip to hospital.

Getting to your feet from the floor requires both strength and skill and both require you to train and practice. You have to be very weak indeed to lack the strength to get to your feet again (young children are not strong but toddlers can drag themselves to their feet) but loss of skill can affect any of us. The only way to ensure that you can safely get to your feet from the lying on the floor is to get onto the floor and get up again. And again and again.

Many cultures around the world - think of the Japanese - sit on the floor all of their lives so there is nothing inherently bad, dangerous or impossible about doing so as we get older. So if you want to reduce your chances of taking a blue light taxi to A&E sometime in your future, maybe sitting on the floor to wrap presents is exactly what you should be doing.

13/11/2025

This looks like a ridiculous image, doesn't it? Surely this can't be true? Yet it is.

According to the World Health Organisation, red meat is classified as carcinogenic. The data they use to make that claim lumps pizza, sausage rolls & steak in the same category & concludes 'red meat' is the problem.

I'll not even go into how poorly they gathered the data or how correlation does not equal causation...

Complete & utter junk science.

13/11/2025

There are two main forms of carbohydrate that the human body can use: glucose and fructose.

Blood sugar is glucose. All of the things we think of as complex carbohydrates or starches are chemically converted to glucose in your digestive systems. The glucose is then absorbed into your blood and circulated around your body to be made available to your organs for use as fuel. If you are not involved in vigorous activity (think, running) or recovering after a long period of vigorous activity then most of that glucose will end up being converted into fat and stored in fat cells. While this is going on your body is unable to access its fat stores because your insulin is high.

The primary job of insulin is to remove glucose from the blood by moving it into other tissues, including fat cells. But while insulin is high, fat is unable to leave the fat cells and, over time, you will gain weight. If your insulin is high you will find it nearly impossible to lose weight and the only way to keep your insulin low is to minimise the quantity of glucose your body ingests.

Fructose is sweet and is found in sugar, honey and fruit. Sugar and honey are a carbohydrate called sucrose which is a combination of glucose and fructose. This gets chemically split into the two sugars in your gut. Your body can't use fructose directly for energy so when it is absorbed into your blood stream it is transported to your liver and converted into fat. If your glucose is low (as it would be if you were only eating a piece of fruit or drinking fruit juice with no added sugar) then your insulin will be low and you will be able to use this fat for energy. If your insulin is high (because you have also consumed glucose) then this fat will need to be stored in fat cells. Unfortunately for many people (including those who are overweight), they don't have sufficient fat cells available so this fat (and fats made from glucose) end up being stored in the liver (leading to fatty liver disease) or around the internal organs (visceral fat), both of which are bad for your health.

(Your body converts alcohol to fat the same way as it does fructose. Which is one of the reasons heavy drinkers can gain a lot of weight.)

The bottom line is this: while your body requires a small amount of glucose to be in your blood at all times (only 4 grammes - about the size of a teaspoon) it generally does not need to eat anything containing glucose. And your body has no requirement to eat fructose (or alcohol) at all. Too much glucose, fructose or alcohol are not good for the human body. Your body's idea of 'too much' will probably change over the years and may be very different from the person next to you.

20/10/2025

Anyone who has been around me for more than five minutes knows that I love bicycles and cycling. When I am not extolling the benefits of strength training I am talking about the delights of riding a bike. I am so keen on cycling that I have ended up running a local cycling club, Ride63 www.ridesixtythree.net for those who are interested. (Note to self: do not join any more committees if you don’t want to end up running them in a few years’ time!)

So it might surprise you that I don’t generally recommend cycling as a form of exercise for health. (Though I might specifically recommend it to some clients who might not be able to walk or run.)

Cycling can offer enormous health and fitness benefits but if you are looking for the best return on your investment then walking and running provide much more than cycling generally will (in terms of time and effort resulting in health and fitness improvements). The graphic below (please see the link at the end of the article) illustrates that: take a look at the efficiency of a human being on foot vs. on a bicycle and understand that the more efficient a movement is, the less effective it becomes in terms of fitness. The very efficiency of cycling that makes it such a great form of transport can be its downfall when it comes to improving (or even maintaining) fitness.

When I am looking at forms of movement for fitness and health benefits I consider the safety, efficiency and effectiveness on various systems in the human body (I am not going to discuss safety here). For my clients I want activities that get their bodies moving (i.e. joints rotating, flexing and extending, muscles contracting, lymphatic and venous fluids being returned to the trunk), impact loads acting on the skeleton, increased and sustained demands on the cardiovascular system (e.g. heart and breathing rates increased and increased capillarisation) and metabolic effects (increased mitochondria, improved processing of lactate, etc.). Time spent on your feet walking and running deliver all of these, limited only by how fast and far you go and if you incorporate steep hills or not. Dancing (done vigorously enough) can be excellent in these regards as well. Cycling (and swimming) can deliver most of these but don’t deliver impact forces to the skeleton. (For some people, that might just be what the doctor ordered but most of us benefit from experiencing these forces.)

I don’t ride a bike for fitness, though I do reap considerable fitness benefits from doing so. It is something I do purely for the fun and joy that it brings and that is incredibly good for my mental health, even if I wasn’t getting any physical benefits as well. For me, riding a bike is more about recreation and escape from my everyday than it is about getting or staying fit. Strength training, walking and running are what I do to keep fit (though here again, walking is more about movement and enjoyment rather than cardiovascular fitness). Essentially, I keep fit in order to be able to ride my bike because the fitter I am the longer and farther I can ride and the more enjoyment I get from riding.

Cyclists can be amongst the fittest of athletes but only if they are willing to push themselves hard and not allow the efficiency of the machine to give them an easy ride. I do push myself hard therefore I get a lot of cardiovascular exercise but it is relatively easy to cruise along on a bicycle, especially if one avoids anything that looks like a hill, and exert much less effort than you would if you were to walk, never mind run, over the same route. This is doubly so if you use an e-bike. I took one for a spin a few weeks ago and rode up one of my local climbs. On my ‘analogue’ bike it usually takes me about 18 minutes of maximum sustainable effort (with a heart rate of 160-170bpm) while on the e-bike (I was deliberately not pushing the pace but I did not use the maximum electrical assist either) my heart rate barely topped 110bpm, which is less effort than I might show during a brisk walk along a flat path and considerably less effort than I typically exert riding down hills (at high speed) on my usual bikes. During a short run a couple of days ago I sustained an average heart rate of 150bpm over 15 minutes while during nearly two hours of riding the e-bike I barely went over 110bpm even for a few seconds. You can clearly see that the cardiovascular benefit of a short run is considerably more than riding an e-bike up a fairly tough hill.

So if you are going to cycle for the fitness benefits please make sure you put some considerable effort in. Buy a device to track and measure your heart rate so that you know just how much effort you are putting into the activity. Get familiar with your maximum heart rate (Zone 5), your maximal sustainable heart rate (Zone 3 to 4 – your lactate threshold, for those in the know) and your Zone 2 heart rates (for me that is 183bpm, 165-170bpm and 110-144bpm). Aim to spend most of your time in Zone 2 but at least some time pushing into Zone 4 (Zone 5 is something you can only manage for a few seconds – maybe minutes – at a time because it is so hard work).

If you want to take this further, monitor your efforts while walking and you will see that the cardiovascular benefits of walking do exist but are considerably less than you’d get from running and hard cycling. (Unless I am climbing a particularly steep hill I can rarely raise my heart rate into Zone 2 while walking, but that is an indication of my generally high level of fitness.) That said, I am less bothered about getting your heart rate up than I am about getting you stronger and moving regularly. Strength training and walking are just about all you need to do and everybody – top level cyclists included – should do both for the benefit of their health. Running adds considerable benefits but can be thought of as the cherry on the cake.

There is, of course, a lot more context and nuance to add to my recommendations here. So much so that I probably need to write that book I keep thinking about! So in the meantime, Get Strong, Stay Strong and Happy Cycling!

For Scientific American’s 180th birthday, they have updated a classic graphic comparing different forms of animal locomotion, first published in 1973. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-human-on-a-bicycle-is-among-the-most-efficient-forms-of-travel-in-the/

14/10/2025

If you've got joint pain to the point of considering surgery, you may well need surgery but maybe you don't. Maybe you just need to get stronger.

07/10/2025

We tend to lose muscle as we get older not because we get older but because we don't use our muscles enough. This process can start just as soon as our teenage bodies stop growing. But we can still grow new muscle well into our 70s, if we train hard enough.

We tend to get fatter as we get older because we eat more of the wrong things & move less, not because our metabolisms slow down. (Eating the wrong things matters far more than moving more. People can easily gain fat while training to run marathons because of eating the wrong things.)

Metabolism doesn't slow down until we are into our 60s (& even then, only a little bit), but as we get older, those of us prone to insulin resistance become more insulin resistant which increases that rate at which we store fat.

06/10/2025

There are times I really detest science journalism. Either the headline OR the data (showing a U-shaped graph) is correct: they cannot both be true (though both could be wrong).

On skimming through the article I was less unimpressed than I was by the headline. What multiple studies have shown is that alcohol is generally toxic to the human being but at very low intakes it is hard to measure the effects.

I'm not about to give up all alcohol on the basis of this headline but I am reminded that we don't benefit from drinking too much or too often.

29/09/2025

Twelve weeks, three months, ¼ of a year; that’s the time you’ve got available if you want to start getting fitter and stronger this year. And that is a huge amount of time in which to make a positive impact on your life.

It is still September so I’m not going to mention the dreaded ‘C’ word, but now that summer is officially over we tend to start thinking about putting off things (like new exercise programmes) until the New Year. But if you start training now you will be – if not transformed – a better version of yourself long before then. Now is the perfect time to get started in the gym.

I focus on getting ordinary people stronger in order to live their lives better. Very few of my clients play sport or enjoy exercising all that much but all recognise the benefits that strength training brings them after a few short weeks of training with me. But I am an athlete (a very mediocre one, maybe, but still an athlete) and I am delighted to work with people who are looking to improve their performance as well look after their health. All of my current clients train once a week and that has proved to be enough to make great improvements in their lives so please don’t assume that you need to find a huge amount of time to dedicate to your fitness.

If you are looking for private, one to one training to get you stronger then Strength for Health offers strength coaching and health and fitness advice in a private gym facility (with no audience, mirrors, measurements, scales or progress photos) in the heart of Beith. I have a few training times left Monday to Thursday afternoons and I am soon going to be opening up a couple of times on Thursday evenings (though they will only run until late March).

If you are interested in find out more about the benefits of strength training then please contact me via Messenger or WhatsApp on 07961 199746 and we can arrange for you to come and have a no-obligation chat with me.

24/09/2025

The "periodic table of vitamins" explained simply

We all know vitamins and minerals matter, but keeping track of which ones do what can feel like chemistry class. Here’s an attempt at the plain-English version:

1️⃣ Vitamins = Activators
They turn enzymes and reactions on, making energy, neurotransmitters, and hormones possible.
💡 Example: B12 and folate drive methylation, critical for DNA repair and brain function.

2️⃣ Minerals = Spark Plugs
Minerals act like cofactors that help enzymes run.
💡 Example: Magnesium is needed in more than 300 reactions, from ATP production to muscle relaxation.

3️⃣ Antioxidants = Shields
They neutralize free radicals that damage cells.
💡 Example: Vitamin C recycles Vitamin E, while CoQ10 protects mitochondria.

4️⃣ It’s a Network, Not Solo Players
These nutrients recycle and regenerate each other. One deficiency can drag the whole system down.
💡 Example: Without selenium, glutathione can’t work; without B2, folate can’t activate.

5️⃣ Food Sources Matter Most
Vitamins and minerals don’t float alone. They come packaged with synergistic compounds in real food.
💡 Example: Eggs give you choline + B12 + selenium, a combination you’ll never get from an isolated pill.

Think of your nutrients like a periodic table. Each one has a role, but together they form the chemistry of life. Focus on variety in whole foods, not just single “hero” supplements.