Who has never dreamed of being able to master the most complicated yoga asanas, such as the majestic Eka Pada Rajakapotasana ([One-legged] King Pigeon Pose), or the legendary double-hand Natarajasana (lord of the dance)? However, how embarrassing is it, when you step on the yoga mat for the first time in your life, feeling as stiff as a board, while everyone else around you looks like they were born on that mat? Good news is, you don’t need yoga classes to become a yogi, and you don’t need to be advanced to improve your flexibility.
Working on flexibility has a lot of benefits for your overall fitness
This is why setting a flexibility goal for yourself is a great idea:
the greater the ROM around a joint, the more efficient the movements produced by that joint. This means that you will be able to target the muscle correctly, stimulating all the fibres, and recruiting as many motor units as possible. In turn, this will help you achieve your strength or hypertrophy goals;
stretching a muscle group after exercising can help reduce DOMS and speed up recovery;
the more relaxed your muscle, the more relaxed your mind: regular practice of yoga and/or other types of stretching have been associated with stress management and overall, individual wellbeing.
1 Item that will make your yoga practice fun and easy
Yogi-me Yoga Mat (by @yogimeuk) is a revolutionary item that will turn your at-home yoga sessions into fun moments to look forward to: it is a yoga mat, with a full, laser printed flow on. It was originally designed for children however it can be just as helpful for beginners, too.
It comes in many different colours and 2 different flows to choose from: sun salutation, or freedom flow. Choosing the right colour was hard for me, as they all looked amazing however, I decided to go for the purple one, purple like the colour of my aura, according to someone who saw it. As to the flow, the choice was hard, too, and I eventually picked the sun salutation, as it is a different variation from the one I am used to doing, and I wanted to see how easy or hard it effectively was, to learn a new sequence just by looking at the images and reading the captions.
Well, the time-lapse down below speaks for itself: easy, fun, and QUICK!!! This mat will make it possible to improve your flexibility at home, without stress, and in as little as 5 minutes a day.
Feel free to check out and supportYogi-me on Instagram, for daily yoga inspiration. If you are considering purchasing Yogi-me Yoga Mat, I would really appreciate it, if you could use my Amazon Affiliate link: it is a free way to support both me and the seller. 🙂
A disciplined and focused mind can achieve anything. This is no secret, even in the bodybuilding world. In fact, some of the greatest bodybuilders ever, such as 6x Mr Olympia Dorian Yates and ‘bodybuilding yogi’ Ben Pakulski, have compared training to meditation, and emphasised the importance of mind training to improve physical training too. Moreover, more and more athletes have been experimenting with visualisation and some of them have even attributed their success to their constant visualisation practice (e.g. 2x Ms Figure Olympia Erin Stern). Lastly, the motivational benefits of self-talk in sports have been exhaustively explored and reviewed (see Hardy 2006). But how does this translate into your everyday’s workout?
I’ve always regarded my workout as MY moment, in which nothing else is allowed but training-related movements and thoughts. There is no room for stress or preoccupation, nor is there any space for looking at my mirror reflection and analysing my physique. When I lift, I just lift, rest, sip some water and lift again. I might listen to some music or greet a friend, as long as these ‘distractions’ don’t affect my workout. When I train, I want to be present in the moment, I want to train mindfully. As any other routine, you want to perform every single act in the same way, as a sacred ritual, however, you want to do so intentionally and purposefully. And, I can say, when you train this way, your physical strength, mass and technique will also improve. On top of it, you’ll feel less stressed out and more relaxed. Below are a brief description of what a mindful workout should look like, and some quick strategies to make your workout mindful.
Mindful Workout Structure
In order for your workout to be mindful, there are 3 points to concentrate on:
Feel muscles activating. When you focus on the ‘here and now’ in the weight room, it translates into shifting your attention from the surroundings to your own muscle contraction, trying to feel your muscle fibres shortening and lengthening as much as you can. Don’t worry if you can’t feel your muscle contraction very deeply initially, it will improve over time, as long as you keep your practice consistent.
Control muscle activation. This step comes immediately after feeling your muscles activating and enables you to become aware of your ability to control your muscles, and to feel such ability. Again, your skills will improve over time.
Isolate exercise execution from gym environment and noises. This is the hardest part of a mindful workout, as it means that you should be able to isolate yourself from the gym environment and not let distractions interfere with your training. For advanced mindful athletes, this also means being able to not let inner distractions, such as thoughts or emotions, interfere with their workout. As a beginner, trying not to look at the person using the machine next to yours for the entire exercise duration is enough.
Strategies to Make your Workout Mindful
Here’re some strategies to practice mindful fitness. Some are meant to help you get into a mindful state, others are to be used during your workout, some others are general tricks or tools which you can implement in your everyday life to help your workout become mindful:
Scan your body before warmup. Individuate stiffness, pain or aches, or areas that need to be focused on when training.
Focus on stiff areas during warmup and try to loosen them up (you can also use a foam-roller or a lacrosse ball).
Focus on muscle contraction and relaxation during each rep and try to control muscle activation. You can literally visualise your muscles shortening and lengthening, as well as your brain pulling your tendons through your nervous system, as if it was a puppeteer pulling the threads.
Make sure you breathe deeply throughout, and don’t let your increased heart rate make your breath too shallow (you want to bring in as much oxygen as you can and you want to feel in control of your breath all the time). Needless to say, this doesn’t apply to intense cardio (I’m mostly referring to weight training).
Keep a training journal in which you record parameters such as ‘ability to feel the muscles’, ‘ability to control the muscles’, ‘ability to concentrate on exercise in a busy environment’.
Always start your workout from those exercises in which you feel you struggle to control or activate your muscles and see how they improve over time (again, a journal is the most helpful way to do so).
How Long for?
I encourage you to keep a mindfulness journal for at least 4 weeks, and to review your progress both at the end of each week and at the end of the full programme. If you need some more advice, or if you’d like to use my Mindful Fitness Journal, schedule a FREE session today.
Apply here to work with me:
I hope you’ve found this article helpful. If so, feel free to read more of my posts and articles.
After quitting veganism and enjoying the benefits of animal products for a couple of weeks, I decided to switch up my diet and experiment with a Keto-Carb Cycling one. The concept is very easy: I rotate my fat-carb ratio, alternating high-fat-low-carb and high-carb-low-fat days. From Saturday to Tuesday, I keep my fat intake very high (50-70%) and my carb intake very low (5-10%); my protein intake is pretty much consistent (25-40%). On Wednesday, I have a carb refeed, so my carb intake spikes up to 50%, while my fat intake goes down to 20%; Thursday and Friday are moderate-carb days, with Thursday being a little higher in carbs and Friday a little higher in fats. I like this way of eating, because it allows me to enjoy all of my favourite foods, without stressing myself out on macros too much.
This is a super easy recipe for my high-fat dinners, and is really enjoyable alongside some baked haddock or salmon.
Ingredients
350 g Courgettes (1 medium-large Courgette)
30 g Goat Butter
1 Stalk Spring Onion
1 piece Ginger Root
Himalayan Salt
Fresh Parsley to Garnish
350 ml Lukewarm Water
Cooking Method
Chop your courgette(s), spring onion and ginger.
Melt goat butter in a saucepan or skillet.
Add in the spring onion stalk, the piece of ginger, the chopped courgettes and some salt, cover and cook for 5-10 mins, stirring from time to time to make sure they cook evenly.
If you have a Vitamix, pour your water in and place the rest of the ingredients. Set it on “soup” programme, and allow it to blend your creamy soup for you. If you have an ordinary blender or food processor, just blend your ingredients in the traditional way — you might need hot water, rather than lukewarm, though.
If you want to be as ethical as possible, not only do you want to buy local and sustainable, you also want to maximise your food while minimising your waste. An excellent way to do so is making broth out of your leftovers. Whilst chicken bone broth has become increasingly popular over the past few years, not many people know you can make a delicious — and very healthy — broth out of fatty fish too. All animal products are indeed high in collagen, which is the most abundant protein in our body, and the most important one, as it’s responsible for connecting our organ tissues (including tendons, ligaments and skin). Vegetable collagen is unfortunately very hard to be absorbed and used by our bodies, but animal collagen is easily absorbed. Collagen is also held responsible for healing our guts, hair and damaged skin (it can also help with stretch marks and cellulite). When cooking broth, collagen is released from the animal’s bones and flesh, and loosed into the water in the form of gelatine. This is what makes broth so precious for your health.
It was around Easter time, and we found an incredible offer at Asda’s: a whole salmon (3Kg) worth £30 was reduced and on sale for only £13.99. Yes, 3Kg is too much for too people alone, unless you want to freeze the salmon, but the offer was too appealing not to take advantage of it — mostly because those poor salmons would otherwise have been fished in vain. So we bought one, cut it in 3 pieces, stuffed it with fresh ginger, rosemary, bay leaves, thymes, fresh parsley, Himalayan salt and lemon wedges, and baked it at 180°C for 30 minutes.
Whole salmon stuffed with fresh ginger, rosemary, bay leaves, thymes, fresh parsley, Himalayan salt and lemon wedges, and baked at 180°C for 30 minutes.
We ate nothing but salmon for 3 days straight, keeping all fishbones, head, tail, uneaten skin and flesh aside. At the end of the 3rd day, we decided to make some broth out of such leftovers.
We placed head, tail, fishbones, skin and flesh in a saucepan with: water, 1 carrot, 1 piece of ginger, some spring onions and regular onions (they’ll change their composition while cooking, losing some of their FODMAP contents in the process). We added some salt and simmered for 3-4 hours.
The broth was unbelievably good and satiating. We had it plain, after our dinner, but it would have been just as delicious with some prawns or shrimps, courgettes and maybe rice noodles.
What’s more important for us, however, is that that poor salmon hasn’t died in vain: we benefitted from its death for 3 days, not harming any other animals meanwhile, and used it in all the possible ways. This is what mindful eating really means!
As I said in my post on why I’m no longer vegan , one of my favourite meals is organ meats for 2 reasons: they’re extremely cheap, as they’re not typically popular among average meat eaters; they’re incredibly packed with nutrients and extremely absorbable by our bodies, because they’re what we, as a species, have evolved on.
Livers (from cows, lambs, pigs, geese, chickens and fish) are incredibly rich in B12, B2 (Riboflavin), B9 (Folate), Vitamin A, Iron, Copper, Choline, according to healthline.com. This is due to the liver’s functions of: processing the digested food from the animal’s gut and absorbing nutrients from it, while filtering and clearing the blood from toxins. Livers are also light in calories and high in proteins, making them fit for most diets. This is why everyone should be consuming livers on a regular basis.
If organs are cheap and highly nutritious, unfortunately, they’re not necessarily as tasty, especially when not cooked properly, or when overcooked. With a few adjustments, however, organs can become part of a very enjoyable meal. In this specific post, I’ll focus on livers exclusively. Just stay tuned for further posts on hearts and kidneys. 😉
My Tips to Enjoy Liver
Don’t overcook it. Liver is soft, tender and creamy, but tends to get a bit stiff when overcooked. The best thing you can do is chop or mince liver prior to cooking it, and not cook it for more than 1 minute on each side.
Use plenty of herbs (such as rosemary, thyme, chives and bay leaves), onions or spring onions, salt and pepper to stir fry your liver. These will enhance the liver’s flavour, while hiding its animal-like taste, which not everybody enjoys.
Squeeze some fresh lemon or lime juice on your liver, to enhance its flavour even more.
Don’t quit liver just because you didn’t like it the first time. Keep trying out different recipes until you find a way to enjoy it: you’ll sure get used to its taste and texture.
If you have any tips that would like to share with me, feel free to comment down below. 😉
Thanks for following me along my journey!
Lamb liver stir fry with: red pepper, mushrooms, ginger, spring onion and fresh parsley.
Thousands of lambs are slaughtered every year around Easter time, just because it’s a tradition to consume lamb on Easter Day. I’m not gonna lie, lamb is my favourite meat, taste-wise. However, I’ve always opposed this silly tradition, as this unfair massacre is just senseless. After all, I can still enjoy lamb any other day.
On the other hand, however, I’m well aware of the fact that nobody will stop slaughtering lambs for Easter just because I refuse to buy them, and the unsold meat (mostly organs) will be wasted, without reducing the numbers of lambs to be slaughtered the next year. How can this dilemma be solved in the most ethical way?
Our Ethical Choice
We decided not to order any meat from our local farmers market this Easter, but to go and see what was available, namely, to buy what no one else wanted to buy and would most likely end up in the trash. Most meat was obviously lamb, and that’s what we also bought. However, rather than buying legs, shoulders, chops or popular cuts in general, we went for hearts and necks, which are: cheap, delicious, nutritious and less popular (therefore more likely to be wasted).
Our Easter Table
As you might or might not know, I have Argentinian roots on my maternal side, and for my family, Easter is a serious tradition. In particular, something that can never miss from our Easter table are empanadas. Since I quit gluten, however, I also stopped making empanadas for many years. But this year I wanted to try something new, and decided to make tuna empanadas again, using only buckwheat, goat butter, salt, water and 1 duck egg for my dough. Although the overall consistency came out quite different from the empanadas my grandma used to make when I was a kid, the taste was awesome and both me and my husband really enjoyed them.
Alongside empanadas, we had a huge salad, halloumi, cheddar, mushrooms, lamb necks and hearts, all cooked on a raclette grill. It took me less than 5 minutes to prepare everything, and it turned out to be one of the tastiest and most enjoyable Easter lunches ever.
Lamb hearts, halloumi and mushrooms cooked on stone on top of our raclette grill (underneath, some cheddar is being melted meanwhile)
As a dessert, I just combined some eggs with raw cacao powder, protein powder, liquid stevia, bicarbonate of soda, Himalayan salt and vanilla extract, and made some muffins out of it. It could never be Easter without some chocolatey dessert. 😉
My gluten free, sugar free, high protein chocolate muffins. A perfect finisher for a mindful Easter lunch. 🙂
Stunning Christmas decorations at Covent Garden Market…
Stunning Christmas decorations at Covent Garden Market…
Stunning Christmas decorations at Covent Garden Market…
Stunning Christmas decorations at Covent Garden Market…
 Christmas is just around the corner and New Year’s Eve is just behind it
My living room is all set up for Christmas and I look forward to celebrating! 🙂 🙂 🙂 My husband’s iPad on the table is playing Christmas songs from YouTube…
Although I am a Summer person and can’t stand the cold, I love this time of the year. I love decorating my Christmas tree in advance, playing Christmas songs all day long from mid November onwards, and planning my Christmas lunch in detail. I just like the feeling of have something to wait for, something to magically turn the cold weather into warm emotions. However, this aren’t the only things I like about this time of the year. As winter is about to begin and the dark is reaching its apex to give way to the light and the new year to start, so, every year, I too rethink my past achievements and prepare for new ones to come. This is when I seriously express my gratitude for what the current year has allowed me to accomplish and set new goals for the next one. Interestingly, I’ve never missed a single goal that I’ve set for myself as part of my New Year’s resolution.
My tiny, lovely, Christmas Tree
This year, this process has been a little bit more fun than usual, as I’m sharing part of my 2019 challenges with my best friend. It all started as a game, while I was advising her on weight loss. As we all know, sharing a challenge with someone else helps you track your progresses better, and prevents you from getting lost along the way or giving up your resolutions.
What Am I Grateful For?
2018 has been one of the years I’m most grateful for: it has brought me a lot of physical achievements and professional successes. The fitness goal I had set for myself around 1 year ago concerned my upper back and shoulders: I wanted to get bigger and stronger in those areas, and improve my performance on pull-ups/chin-ups and rack-pulls. And I did it! Although I didn’t increase my shoulder size that much, I definitely increased their muscular density and strength. On my upper back, instead, I managed to gain a few inches as well. Strength-wise I was able to improve my rack-pulls performance significantly: 1 year ago, I could do 6 sets of  5 reps with no more than 80 Kg, around the end of August this year, I reached 100 Kg for the same volume. As to my pull-ups and chin-ups, after 10 years of resistance training, in 2017, I still couldn’t perform one single complete rep. Now I can easily perform multiple sets of 7 reps.
Professionally, I had promised myself that I would have finalised two editorial projects I had been working on for a long time. Not only did I succeed in both, I even exceeded my expectations, in that I set up a small publishing house with my colleagues, which might even expand in the long run.
I’m grateful for all of the people I have been surrounded with this year, for their positive energy and influence on me. As naïve as it might sound, I’m grateful to my husband and my family, for just being there. I’m grateful to my body, for allowing me to accomplish my goals, and to my mind, for staying focused and motivated 365 days a year. I’m grateful for all the opportunities I have come across this past year, and for those that are yet to come.
My 2019 Resolutions
As I mentioned before, some of the expectations I decided to set for 2019 arose as a challenge with my best friend. Whilst she has some weight to lose, I’m not fully happy with my back and shoulder size yet, and wouldn’t mind to increase my arms too. To make our challenge more attainable and accountable, we decided to break down the year into 3-month periods, and to set a certain amount of Kg or cm to lose or gain for each period. Our first of such periods started on the 26th of November and will terminate on February, the 26th (2019). My goal is to increase my upper-back, shoulder and arm size by 1 cm for these first 3 months. Depending on how it goes, I might decide to challenge myself even more, by raising the attainable size up to 1.5-2 cm for the next trimesters.
To achieve our goals, I created a meal plan for my friend and one for myself. She committed to long walks, whereas I didn’t make any changes to my current workout routine, as it’s already shoulder and upper-back focused. I might incorporate more arm exercises later on, if I don’t see any significant change in the next month.
Other than this challenge, I committed myself to improving my skin appearance and getting rid of some awful stretch marks that I’ve had on my thighs for over 16 years. I’ve never had any patience with dry brushing and moisturising, but I just can’t stand the view of those stretch marks, and I’ve postponed for long enough…
As to my career, I have a clear plan in mind, but can’t really talk about it now, as I hope I’ll be able to share more details within the next 6 months or so. However, creating this website is already a dream come true to me, and I’ll do my best to find more time to write posts, recipes, and shoot videos in 2019.
Tracking Our Progresses
My (still too small) back at the beginning of the challenge, let’s see how far I can go… 🙂
So far, I’ve gained about 4 mm on my upper back and around 2 mm on my shoulders. My arms haven’t really grown yet, but I’ve had a bunch of people making nice comments at the gym. My bestie is doing much better than me though, as she’s already lost much of the weight she was supposed to. 🙂
Will my arms manage to increase by 1 cm in the next 2 months and a half???
My skin challenge hasn’t started yet, as buying reliable, vegan, and highly effective oils costs a lot of money, and I’d rather spend that money on nice presents for my friends and family around this time of the year. However, I’ve already planned to buy a lotion I saw online with my January payslip — I’ll keep you updated.
Epilogue
Regardless of the outcome of my challenge, setting goals for oneself and pushing one’s own possibilities to the extreme is always a learning experience: it can show you what your limits are, and surprise you with some amount of strength and willpower that you didn’t know you possessed. Keeping your expectations attainable and accountable, however, is key to achieving your goals. Proceeding step by step, and measuring each and every daily improvement in your life will lead you to accomplish anything you want. If, on the other hand, you set too high goals for yourself and don’t allow yourself to keep measurable trace of your success, you’ll be more likely to give up. With that being said, however, even working on small, accountable bits of improvement can be hard at times. There’ll be inevitable moments, when you’ll lose your objective perspective and start comparing with others; in such moments, you’ll become your own enemy number 1. Don’t worry: those moments won’t last forever. In fact, if you practice daily mediation, and visualise in your mind your goal and your path leading to it, your focus will come back as soon as you detach from the negative emotions caused by comparing yourself with others and seeing your objective as unattainable. A good way to do so, is to dedicate at least 10 minutes a day to express your gratitude. This can be done first thing in the morning, during your day, or at night, when you’re in bed and about to fall asleep (it’s actually an excellent way to improve your sleep). Remember, gratitude is the farthest feeling from fear and oppression. Try to think of 3 different things in your life you’re grateful for everyday, and you’ll achieve whatever goal you set for yourself.
Bonus tip (this is actually something I’ve never shared before): in the last year of my PhD, when my stress levels were crazy high and couldn’t stay focused without panicking for more than a couple of hours a day, I used to visualise an entire stadium, crowded with supporters wearing T-shirts with my face printed on them, holding a jar of green smoothie or juice, chanting my name supportively while shaking their drinks proudly. As odd (and embarrassing) as it might sound, it really helped me find balance and accomplish all of the tasks I had set for myself at the time. Fun fact: this is also where my “keep calm and drink smoothies” motto originated. Find your own mantra to support you throughout your journey and you’ll reach your destination safe and sound! Good luck! 😉
PS As I wrote above, expressing gratitude before sleeping is an excellent form of meditation that can even improve your sleep quality. Mine has improved significantly, since I started using a nostril expander. The amount of oxygen that gets through your nose is impressively calming and relaxing. If you have trouble breathing with your nose, you might want to apply some surgical tapeon your mouth, to keep it shut throughout the night (it’ll also prevent you from snoring!).
