Disordered eating is a disturbed and unhealthy eating pattern that can include restrictive dieting, compulsive eating or skipping meals.

Disordered eating is a real problem. But is disordered eating a real problem in the functional fitness world?

This is a question that when scouring the research I couldn’t necessarily find a cold hard answer to.

We all have thoughts, opinions and experience on this matter, however, do we actually KNOW if it is a problem and if it is how big a problem is it?

These are questions I was asking myself earlier this year and so I decided to look into it. I launched a little research project designed to quantify the issue. The question we were looking at was:

Fasted training is an area that can cause some confusion. Should you do it? If so what type of training should I do? Is it going to result in muscle loss?!

As with pretty much everything in performance nutrition fasted training is all about context! Here we’re going to dive into what fasted training actually is, bust some common misconceptions then dive into when it’s worth doing and of course HOW to do it.

There are a lot of claims out there around fat burning and unfortunately it means that it’s fairly common to be confused about fat burning and what’s actually going on! So here we’re going to dive into what fat “burning” or oxidation actually is, how this relates to fat loss and then dive into the actual whys and whats about increasing fat oxidation!

If you’re in the fitness world, it’s very likely that you’ve come across the acronym HRV before. Perhaps the most common place you’ve seen it is on your favourite (or least favourite) fitfluencers instagram stories as they proudly show off their score from their whoop that morning. But what is it, why do they care so much about it and should we or any other population care?! Well that’s what we’re going to dive into today.

We all know hydration is important! It’s been ingrained into us for most of our lives and if you’re in the sporting world then it’s probably a little bit more important to you too.

This blog is going to ultimately expand on why it’s important, where we obtain our fluid from, where we lose it and what happens when those losses outweigh the gains!

As some of you may have seen, Sam Briggs has been training with a small circular patch on her tricep. Turns out this patch is a blood glucose monitor, it is the same as those with diabetes use to track their insulin levels, only Sam is not diabetic, she’s simply an athlete trying to optimise all aspects of her game, including her blood glucose levels.

Here we’re going to be tackling the nutrition side of things and how to best fuel for muscle hypertrophy. We’re going to be following the classic pyramid of nutritional importance, so starting with energy balance then working up all the way to supplements. Stop with the bicep curls, grab yourselves a whey shake and let’s do it.

Muscular hypertrophy is a relatively common goal with most people in the fitness world. It’s a less common goal in Crossfit as opposed to body building but there are still a tonne of benefits from increasing muscle mass that aren’t just a case of getting jacked! In this two part blog series we’re going to dive into all things hypertrophy. Today I will dive into what hypertrophy actually is, the benefits of seeking muscle hypertrophy for functional fitness, what’s going on at the muscle itself and how we can stimulate muscle hypertrophy.

We will look at the physiological determinants of success in endurance training and how training brings about improvements in these factors before then diving into how to manipulate your macros to marry the training. We’ll look at being as efficient as you can with your macros and fuelling the work required.