We all know that to excel at sports like Football, Basketball and Soccer you will need an incredible amount of fitness. Skills are great to have, but if you gas out quickly due to poor fitness levels you are of no use to your team. This means you need to spend time improving your running fitness, and unfortunately for many sporting athletes and coaches this is where they make the mistake of over-using endurance focused workouts. Sports like football, soccer, and basketball incorporates multiple high-intensity efforts interspersed with periods of lower-intensity exercise. The physiological demands of these sports require players to be competent in several aspects of fitness, which include aerobic and anaerobic power, muscle strength, and agility. Running in a straight line for 10-15 minutes will improve fitness, but not the specific fitness of what these sports demand. In this article, I will discuss how you can design a running workout that meets all of these demands.

This time last year I wrote one of the most detailed articles about the damage of lock-downs for Covid-19 were causing to healthy people. Little did I know a year from now our governments are still enforcing these draconian restrictions on healthy people under the direction of “keeping us safe”. At no point during this entire pandemic has the government here in Melbourne Australia made any attempt to project the importance of eating healthy foods or exercise in strengthening your body’s immune system. As far as they are concerned it is irrelevant as the vaccine is the answer we all need. This ignorance to building a strong and robust body with the population of people who are not vulnerable (mainly people under the age of 50) has created a larger population of unhealthy people. And worse still, what is starting to be seen already is the development of auto-immune problems from excessive sanitising and cleanliness. For many years this was called the “hygiene hypothesis” that was often trashed by many experts as a theory that was not backed by science. However, this topic has more recently come up again and seen recently in young children and is referred to as “immunity debt. While I appreciate measures needed to be taken to control the spread of Covid-19, it is becoming clear our governments and health officials with their narrow minded approach to health may have exposed all of us to even bigger problems to come. I hope I am wrong.

As much as I love to exercise, I know that if I don't eat well my body will not allow me to do the tough things I love to do. Getting the right amount of vitamins and minerals from our food is essential and is one thing that many people, in particular the gym junkie ignores to their own demise. If you are like me and sweat a lot then you really can deplete your body very quickly leaving several important bodily functions to be compromised. Replenishing the body with the necessary vitamins and minerals is essential if you want to remain in great health. One mineral that is easily depleted yet extremely important to our health is MAGNESIUM. In this article, we will look at why it is so vital to your health, what happens if you are deficient, why older adults are more vulnerable to deficiency, and lastly what foods to eat to meet your body’s requirements.