Archive

Chris Hoy winning a life time achievement award at last nights BBC Sports Personality Awards, reminded me how much I had enjoyed Richard Moore’s book – Heroes, Villains and Velodromes. First published in 2008 and primarily focusing on Chris Hoy, it gives an unprecedented insight in to the secret worlds of track cycling at a time when everything was […]

Michael Hutchinson’s book ‘Faster‘ is genius and definitely worth reading if you are involved in or interested in sport in any way. Michael Hutchinson is a British pro rider who has focused his career on the domestic time trial circuit. Naturally talented and blessed with giant lungs, he found it relatively easy to get involved […]

Scientific Research confirms what parents and teachers have long suspected – the teenage brain is different. The book ‘Blame my Brain – The amazing teenage brain revealed’ written by Nicola Morgan was first published in 2005. Updated in 2013, it is a very good, easy to read, easy to understand summary of what science shows are […]

In 1998, the iconic Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie said he had been able to break the 2000m record by “synching his (running) cadence with the beat of the pop song Scatman” (by Scatman John), which was playing during his race at the Birmingham National Indoor Arena. At the time the benefits of using music to […]

With exam season approaching, is it best to scale back your sport commitments and training or to put your sport first and fit your revision in around your training ? I first came across the idea that exercise improves academic performance when I was recommended the book ‘Spark’ written by Dr John Ratey, a professor […]

In my article ‘milk the new sports drink’, I looked at all the research that shows cows milk is a good food for fuelling sport, as well as for muscle building and weight loss. However, if you google “milk and health”, you get as many health risks as health benefits, so what is the story […]

If you believe the headlines sooner or later eating sugar is going to kill you. Is this really true ? Surely we have been eating sugar for generations…… What is sugar? Sugars are the building blocks of all carbohydrates.  Monosaccharide sugars are the simplest of all carbohydrates containing just six carbon atoms, twelve hydrogen atoms […]

If you regularly read popular magazines and newspapers or listen to the news, you would be forgiven for thinking that the ‘experts’ are forever changing their minds. Advice about Super-foods and Killer-foods appears to change with the weather and new weight loss plans with amazing health claims are being invented all the time. Doctors advise […]

On the 14th January I have been wearing a Nike Fuel Band for a year. When a friend, a personal trainer, suggested I got one at the beginning of last year, I was sceptical. I wasn’t sure what benefit it could possibly have for him – he is one of the most controlled people I […]

In the US 80% of girls have been on a diet by the time they are 10 yrs old. This is a disaster, not just because most of them have absolutely NO need to go on a diet but because science has proved that dieting causes the body to go into starvation mode, for metabolism […]