I’ve heard about a lot of benefits to taking regular cold showers and ice bath therapy. Sportspeople swear by ice baths to speed up recovery after intense workouts. Wim Hof has popularised cold therapy with incredible feats of swimming in ice and climbing mountains like Kilimanjaro without a top on. Purported benefits of cold showers include: Improved discipline and mental toughness Boost to immune system Boost to mental state and positivity Invigorating wakeup and start to the day It’s amazing that something so simple has the power to give immense benefits like these. So let’s give it a go! Day 1 I always take a shower first thing and this morning, I hopped in and had a nice hot shower. It wasn’t until about a minute in that I realised that I was supposed to start the cold showers today! Doh. So I decided to do what programmes recommend which …[Read More]
Body
Getting a Covid-19 antibody test
Even though I was pretty sure that I had coronavirus back in March, I still wanted confirmation of that by test. Up until now, the tests for antibodies have had some bad press for not being too accurate, but there is a test centre in Hammersmith which uses South Korean tests which have high specificity and high sensitivity, as opposed to tests that have high specificity but low sensitivity. Here’s a screenshot of the test compared to other tests (taken from the Corona Test Centre’s website): The antibodies they are looking out for are IgM and IgG. IgM are produced around the time of the infection and during recovery, but tail off some time after the event. IgG are also produced around the time of infection and they stay around quite a lot longer than IgM after the event. Here’s a screenshot from the Corona Test Centre website of the …[Read More]
No alcohol for a month – here’s what I found
I wrote the below in August 2019 but it’s been in draft until now. I thought about it again now I’m basically dry until the baby arrives. I’ve never done a period off booze. Not that I’m a heavy drinker or ever have been. I’ve enjoyed social drinking and good binge session for more than 2 decades now and never felt the need to do a dry January. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed boozing less and less. I still love the taste of craft beer and good wine, but my hangovers are getting longer and longer. Sometimes they last until the third day. It isn’t always throbbing headaches. It’s also a feeling of not being too sharp and slightly foggy-headed. I’ve toyed with the idea of would my life improve greatly if I just gave it up. At the end of July, I went to a craft beer place with …[Read More]
This app will change your life AND this video will change your wife’s life
I’ve started using an app called Streaks app. It’s on iOS and you set a goal you want to do daily and each day, you mark it off when you’ve done that goal, and leave it unmarked when you don’t do the goal. If you do it two days in a row, you’ve built the smallest possible streak. The aim is to do the goal daily so that you build a huge, unbroken streak, and therefore built a habit. My Streaks app tracks me doing 5 mins of core workout a day, reading 25 pages a day, doing 12 glute raises (can you tell I’m trying to improve my core strength?), writing 200 words a day etc. I’m not always consistent but over the past month, I’ve done more in these areas than I did for months and months before that, if at all. What do you want to do? Give up …[Read More]
Getting fit for fatherhood
I’m 40 and just about to become a dad for the first time. I’m told that I need to work on my core and my lower back strength because there’s going to be a lot of lifting and a lot of bending over. I have a glass back these days so this prospect scares me a bit! After poo-pooing it for a long time, I’ve signed up to my first pilates class at my local gym. I’m expecting to be terrible at it but hoping it gives me a much stronger core. I’ve upped my speed work on the treadmills and trying to run faster instead of just steady-state 30 mins runs and I’m definitely feeling the benefits of extra lung capacity when I’m breathing in and out. I’m still doing the same upper body workouts on the machines. 85kg on the chest press, 70kg on the pull-down, and 90kg …[Read More]