1. Peanut butter. Actually any form of nut butter. Full of protein and healthy fats, the benefits of which multiply by 100 if you choose the ‘eating it from a spoon’ method. Also exponential benefits related to the size of tub purchased.
Month: March 2015
Kate and Katie go on the Rebound – Class Review of Rebounce London
Last Wednesday Katie and I went rebounding. No, I don’t mean we hit the dating scene of SW11 hard… rather, we were invited by Missie Frank (dancer, choreographer and founder of Rebounce London) to try a new quirky, sweaty, bouncy exercise class. Being the intrepid explorers that we are, we duly signed up and ventured to Fitness First at Clapham Junction (I say ventured, one of us lives in Battersea and one in Balham so it wasn’t like we had far to go).
Both of us had trampolined before, and there is still a trampoline in the back garden at our respective childhood homes (though, admittedly they are mostly now only used by visiting younger cousins or for sunbathing), but Rebounce is something quite different – it’s fast, choreographed and done to the beat of a pumping playlist!
So, I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t scrap school PE…..
What are your memories of school sport and PE? Bitchy netball cliques, gym knickers and being forced to run around a cross country field?
Mine were anything but. Teamwork. Fun. Pride. Patience. Frustration. Ambition. Emotions, experiences and qualities that rounded my education and my personality. So why is it causing so many problems? How is it being allowed to fall by the wayside as the first ball to drop? You don’t let people skip maths because they just don’t like it or aren’t particularly good at it. So why are we frequently letting this happen with PE?
10 Problems Sporty Girls Will Understand
Here’s a popular one from the archives for you peeps – still as true as ever! We’d love to hear your #sportygirlproblems in the comments below or on Twitter
1. Your bedroom is perpetually in need of hoovering.
Especially if you play anything that involves wearing studded or moulded boots… Why is it so damn hard to get rid of every last bit of mud / grass / dirt? Or worst of all, these little blighters:
Whoever thought 3G pitches were a good idea has CLEARLY never spent entire weeks, post-training session, picking rubber pellets out of crevasses they hadn’t realised they had.
My week in eats (and wine)
OK, so I promised last Sunday evening that I would document what I was eating this week as an attempt to vaguely undo any cheese-and-wine-and-beer-and-all-the-food related damage from a week in Chamonix. However, as I mentioned during the week, this is kind of a necessity when skiing because a) I ski hard and b) I am not working a season and doing this every week for 5 months and c) HOLIDAY EXERCISE = CALORIES DON’T COUNT
However, I am conscious that I’ve been a bit lax recently even before skiing because I’ve been injured, work has involved a lot of late nights and takeaway sushi, I’ve got to move out of my flat so there has been some mega stress there, far too many nights out recently……but these are pretty pants excuses so I have decided that I need to get a bit of a handle on things for a while as there is a difference between intuitive eating and ‘throwing all your toys out of the pram because sod it, I can do what I like and surely that’s better than obsessing over everything I eat’
Also apologies for all my pants iPhone photography.
How to fuel for a day’s skiing (properly AND practically)
DISCLAIMER: I’m not a nutritionist, nor do I claim to be – yes I have a vague academic background in it but please take everything I say with a pinch of salt from someone who wrote the majority of this in Chamonix with a raspberry and passionfruit Fanta in one hand and a prawn cracker in the other after eating approx half a cake and 32 gummy crocodiles.
Skiing is a toughie. If you do it properly (yes, you may define this differently to me, but I do not mean getting on the slopes at 11, having a 2 hour lunch and stopping at 3 for après) then you burn through a heck of a lot of calories. I ski hard. I choose to go skiing with people who ski hard and I wouldn’t have it any other way. If I’m going skiing, I want to spend AS MUCH time as I can on the slopes, I want to push myself, ski fast and get out of my comfort zone or I get bored.
So how do you eat enough for the energy you need….whilst being fairly conscious that the typical Alpine meal consists of cheese and bread, cheese and potatoes, or cheese, bread AND potatoes (not that there is anything wrong with that in my mind, but it’s not always slow-release carbs….) I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered it, but I think I’ve got enough experience to give a fairly good perspective of what works and what doesn’t, making sure you’ve got enough energy to power through some 4.30pm slushy moguls AND enjoy the finest that the Alps (or your destination of choice) can offer in culinary delights.
2015 Goals
Katie: I’m going to try and make myself accountable somewhere other than in my notebook so let’s put this year’s sporting aims out for all to see.
#1 3:29:xx at the London marathon.
#2 sub 21 5k
#3 do a triathlon
#4 tackle a century on the bike
#5 do this all whilst HAVING FUN (and sleeping more, going to work, having a super touch rugby season, eating well,learning Portuguese properly, eating less more raw cookie dough, not forgetting to do my physio exercises, icing, rolling, yoga, stopping buying kilogram tubs of peanut butter and eating them in like two weeks, doing my squats, drinking more prosecco, getting promoted, buying a new bike, getting the hang of tri bars, getting back to polo, saving some money….)
Kate: Alrighty, a few generic, but very serious goals to aim for this year. Here goes…
#1 Improve my attacking game when playing Touch. Relying on being good in defence is a cop-out.
#2 Go on at least three surfing trips. In the UK, or otherwise.
#3 Run my first half marathon. Probably begrudgingly.
#4 Get back to something resembling the fitness I’d attained by my final year of university.
#5 Try at least one new type of sport in earnest: Korfball? Murderball (wheelchair rugby)? “Real” Tennis? Soapbox Derby? Suggestions welcome!
Fit Mammas: A day isn’t enough to celebrate our mothers!
Let’s face it – neither of us would be where we are now without the most important women in our lives – and we probably wouldn’t have the same attitudes towards health and wellbeing that we do without our mothers playing the laundry lady/taxi driver/#1 supporter/ role that they do!
So, on this rainy Mothering Sunday, when neither of us actually have the fortune to be with them, we’d like to celebrate the top women in our lives and what makes them so freakin’ awesome
She May Look Healthy But…Why Fitness Models Aren’t Models of Health
A really interesting look at the other end of the modelling scale to my post on plus sized models (https://thesegirlsdo.com/2015/01/30/weighty-issues-loving-the-skin-youre-in/).
Time to strike the balance and promote health and happiness in fashion, sport and the media!
As our regular readers will know already, both Sam and I prefer athletic values and performance goals to aesthetic goals, even when the aesthetic goals include “looking fit” instead of the old ideal of being stick thin. It’s not because there isn’t something admirable about looking fit, not even because there is no accomplishment in looking that way. It’s because we distinguish between looking fit and actually being fit. And there’s a real range of body types among those who count as fit and healthy.
One less well known fact is that fitness models and people who compete in the figure category in fitness competitions aren’t actually at the height of healthy when they compete. By the time “game day” comes, they’ve followed a regime that no one recommending a healthy approach to fitness and diet would recommend. They’ve eaten too few calories for the intensity of workouts they’ve been…
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Q&A with Kate and Katie (Part 2)
Back for more are we? Really sold it to you with the Clare Balding love and egg hatred? In the second of our two-part, tell-all exposé, Katie reveals rather too much about her gross, old pants and Kate is thoroughly ‘smashing’…
- What would you always find in your fridge?
These Girls Do 