Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

I can’t even begin to describe this, but it has me mesmerised. Would love to give it a try, if I thought for a moment that I wouldn’t do myself a serious injury!

In Copenhagen at the end of 2009, “rich nations” were slated for back tracking on helping tackle climate change. Now don’t get me wrong, I think climate change is a very important issue, but what got me annoyed, was who defines which nations are “rich”? I live in the UK and it certainly doesn’t feel like us right now.

Classically nations are ranked by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which I think it silly, as the government doesn’t get the GDP in it’s pocket, it only gets what it taxes, which is much MUCH less than GDP. Similarly national debt is often quoted as a percentage of GDP, which I also think is silly, it should be quoted as percentage of government income too. Let’s look at some numbers (I like numbers!):

This table shows countries ranked by absolute national debt. Which puts the US at #1 and the UK at #2 with $14Tn and $9Tn respectively. Now the UK national debt is listed as 398% of GDP, which is pretty bad, but when you compare it to total UK gov’t receipts of around £550Bn (roughly $900Bn) then we owe 10x our annual income! That’s pretty damn shocking. In fact, if I went to my bank and asked for a loan, and they discovered my over draft was 10x my net income (salary less tax) they’d laugh so hard they’d bust a gut and probably try to call in the loans.

Let’s quickly look at gov’t spending then. Here are the charts from last year’s budget at the end of 13 years of a Labour government:

3 things catch my eye. Firstly receipts (government income) = £548 but spending = £697bn, a massive £149Bn deficit. Or put another way, we are spending 27% more than we earn.

Secondly, interest payments on national debt are £44Bn, which is 8% of income. Or put this another way, that’s enough to build 49 Wembly stadiums per year! How would you have liked a wembly sized stadium in your local town?

Thirdly, Income Tax (£150Bn) + Corporation Tax (£43Bn) = £193Bn, but spending on Social Protection = £194bn. So let me get this straight, every penny of personal income tax added to every penny of company tax, still isn’t enough to pay our benefits bill (and that doesn’t even include the much vaunted NHS). No wonder half of Africa is prepared to risk life and limb to make it into this country.

I don’t know about you but I find all these big numbers are hard to equate to, so let’s make a comparison which can all understand. The average (median) salary in the UK is £24,700 which according to this calculator, means a take home pay of £1,596 per month.

So let’s pretend the UK government was bringing in each month what the average person does and see how the debt numbers change:

Monthly income = £1,596
Monthly spend = £2,027 (1,596 x 127%)
Monthly deficit = £431 (£2,027 – £1,596)
Monthly interest on overdraft = £128 (£1,596 x 8%)
Current overdraft = £191,520 (£1,596 x 10 x 12 months) !!

How would you feel if your personal finances looked like that, a take home pay of £1,596 but an overdraft of nearly £200k that’s getting worse by about £5k per year?!?

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t say we were rich, I’d say we were completely stuffed! This country will be broke within my lifetime. Enjoy your NHS and your pensions whilst you can, they won’t be around for long.

If you’ve not seen it yet, you may like to comment on my How to cook a Blue Steak which has attracted a lot of polarised views!

There’s been so much debate however, I thought it was time I put up a video showing how I cook my blue steaks. Note that I don’t say that this is *the* way, or the best way, but this is just how I cook my blue steaks. (Sorry for the sizzling sound when the steaks go on the pan!) Enjoy:

I hate being injured. HATE IT I tell you!

It’s so damn annoying not to be able to workout effectively or do the things I want. Having been given a healthy strong body again, it’s a pain in the butt not to be able to use it. I had to drop out of the CrossFit gymnastics certification in Manchester a few weeks back. There’s a Self Defence Federation seminar I want to go to in a couple of weeks but am unsure whether I’ll be able to. There’s a PDR demo going on at the NEC in Birmingham in a month’s time that I’d better be fit for. Not to mention the CrossFit Olympic Weightlifting certification in Swansea in a few months time.

All this is put in jeopardy due to the recurrence of a shoulder problem, this time brought on by having a pop a nailing the butterfly pull up, as shown here:

Anyone who thinks that the kipping pullup is “cheating”, is going to have a fit when they see the butterfly pullup (or butterfly kip if you will). Just to be clear then, the CrossFit pullup standard is: straight arms at the bottom of the pull up, and chin over the bar at the top. Whatever happens in between is irrelevant. Just as the kipping pullup recruits more muscles so that you can perform more reps in a shorter time period (thereby increasing your power output), so the butterfly pullup does the same.

The reason is even with the more efficient kip, the first thing to fail is often your grip and not your strength or stamina. Hence the more efficient you can make it, the more you can do before your grip fails. As power output is one of the main pillars of CrossFit, anything that increases power output is all good. So in a focus session I spent 30 minutes trying to learn the correct movement pattern to string several butterfly pullups together and to be fair, I managed 3-5 after the 1/2 hour.

It was only the next day when I woke up and couldn’t scratch my head with my left hand due to the stabbing pain in my left shoulder. I’m not sure it it’s an impinged shoulder or rotator cuff tear as they have similar symptoms, but the fact that it’s lasted a month now is not a good sign.

Interestingly I read Greg Everett’s Thoughts on the Kipping Pullup article recently and he pretty much maligns the butterfly kip for all but competitive athletes, for the primary reason that the risk of injury is too high. Ho hum, I’m sure it’ll get better eventually, it always has before.

I decided in the New Year to lose the weight I’d stupidly allowed myself to put on last year, and get back to a more manageable weight. I set an arbitrary target of 12st7 (175lbs / 80kg) to achieve in 2 months. Well the end of Feb arrived and I’d hit the dreaded weight loss plateaux.

So I reset my expectations and set a new target of the end of March to achieve my goal. I’m pleased to say I’ve hit and sustained 175 lbs with a week spare. I’ll post up in the coming week some more details about inch loss and physique change (possibly with more revealing before and after pictures if you can handle the horror), but for now, you’ll have to make do with a pretty graph:

I’ve kept a food diary of the last 3 months, recording pretty much everything I ate, including with photos. That might prove interesting reading, so I’ll see what comes out of that.

3 years ago I got Golfer’s Elbow (medial epicondylitis) which is essentially very similar to Tennis Elbow (lateral epicondylitis) except it hurts on the inside of your elbow, not on the outside.

After trying all sorts of treatments, I posted a long blog post discussing my Golfer’s Elbow Treatment and Cure. This post contained lengthy discussion on all the things I’d tried and researched regarding how to treat golfer’s elbow, including:

1. Complete Rest
2. Physiotherapy – Ultrasound
3. Physiotherapy – Interferon
4. Physiotherapy – 10 min Massage
5. Golfer’s Elbow Exercises and Stretching
6. CT Cream off the internet
7. Band-It forearm Band
8. Acupuncture
9. Physiotherapy – Remedial Massage
10. Golfers Elbow Exercises
11. The Zone Diet
12. Fish Oil Supplements

To be honest I didn’t expect anyone on the internet to notice, the post was for my own benefit really. I was extremely surprised then to discover that it became one of the most popular pages on my blog and has attracted over 100 comments and literally thousands of visitors. But most importantly, there has been a wealth of information added to the page in the form of the experiences of others who have suffered elbow pain.

At the time I said I was 95% cured of my golfer’s elbow, but things have changed in the last 3 years and I’m older and wiser at treating golfer’s elbow, so I thought it would be useful to post an update and also to summarise the extra advice given by all the commentators on my original post.

Have My Golfer’s Elbow Treatments Cured Me?

I would say the answer to this question is yes… mostly! That is to say I’d call myself at least 99% better. Almost all of the time I have no more pain. I continue to workout down the gym, can do all CrossFit exercises, including all the Olympic lifts. It certainly didn’t stop me becoming British Master’s Weightlifting Champion in 2010 so I guess from the point of view of functional fitness, I am cured.

That said, there are just 2 exercises that always give me a little niggle: front squats and shoulder press. Either one of these I can do to max effort and come away with a bit of pain that lasts 24-48 hours and then goes. The only time I have a problem is if I try to do both these exercises in the same workout. If that’s all I have to avoid, then I’m happy happy happy!

Of all the things I tried, and all the advice given on the other post, there is one simple thing that I credit with my recovery.

But before I get onto that, I thought it would be a good idea to summarise some of the advice given by other golfer’s and tennis elbow suffers from the other posts comments, which should be considered in addition to the list of things above:

13. Active Release Technique (ART)

ART works on the principle that over time, adhesions or scar tissue on your muscles build up (and I guess possibly tendons) and prevent normal movement of your squidgy bits. Through hands on manipulation, these adhesions etc are broken (I’m guessing that hurts!) resorting full and normal movement.

Several commentators mentioned this but only one reported any success with it (though she wasn’t using it in isolation, so you can’t be sure this was what helped). I would say that if that’s your problem, it sounds like it might work. However I am very sure that muscle adhesions weren’t the cause of my elbow pain, so I didn’t use this as a treatment for golfers elbow.

14. Cortisone Shot for Golfer’s or Tennis Elbow

Cortisone shots (not Cortizone but sometimes called Corticosteroid Injections) are the injection of anti-inflammatory steroids into the elbow. (Cortisone is a type Corticosteroid and the 2 words are often used interchangeably.) Usually people report good results are reducing pain with Cortisone Injections, but the benefits are temporary (typically only 3 weeks!) and this is treating the symptom (pain), not the cause of your elbow injury.

Personally, unless you are a competitive athlete and need to be pain free for a competition, I think they are a bad idea and here’s why: pain is your body’s feedback mechanism to tell you something is wrong and what you’re doing could be doing yourself more damage. If you use the magic of modern medicine to hide your pain, you could easily be injuring yourself more and not knowing it. At best this will just prolong your elbow recovery time, at worse… who knows what additional injury you may cause?

Further more, inflammation is your body’s natural defence mechanism against further injury. We have evolved that mechanism over millions of years of evolution (or God gave it to us, if you prefer, either way we have it) so to mask your body’s normal mechanism for resolving an injury, doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. To be clear here, I’m all for medicine helping the body out (casts for making broken bones heal straight etc) but we’re not fixing golfer’s elbow with a cortisone shot, just masking the symptoms. So for me, cortisone injections for elbow pain are just not worth it.

15. Icing and Heating the Injured Elbow

Icing any injury is typically a way to reduce swelling and inflammation, and reduce pain. (Sometimes extended to RICE: Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation.) Again in my opinion this simply treats the symptoms, not the cause, so I’m not a fan. Having said that, heating does appear to have some use: Tendons (golfer’s elbow is a form of tendinitis) have few blood vessels and so don’t get much in the way of blood circulation. Heating is a way of improving that circulation which gets extra nutrient rich blood flowing to them. This can only be a good thing if the cells are trying to repair themselves.

There’s some thought that icing before heating is better than just heating on its own. That’s a tricky one, as ice is good for reducing pain. A physiotherapist told me that the combination of ice and heat can help to get blood flowing better than just heat, which may be true. Massage is also good for getting new blood into the tendons. On balance, I would suggest that a combination of icing, heating and massage certainly can’t hurt and can only speed your recovery.

16. Laser Treatment

A couple of visitors mentioned this, but mostly as a way to line their therapists pockets! Lasering away at your body isn’t high up on my list of ways to pass the day, though I suspect in order to keep it safe, the power of the laser is so low as to probably not do much anyway. Personally I wouldn’t do this.

17. MRI Scans

These are obviously not a treatment in their own right, but a tool for diagnosing the route cause of your elbow pain. Some people who have had them report that they have shown up tears. This can provide your doctor with the information on whether to refer you for surgery, or whether just some specific golfers elbow exercises would cure you, as I detail below.

18. Prolotherapy

This is the process of injecting a mild irritant into the body, in order to trigger some regenerative reaction. Irritants include things like sugar water, glycerine or cod liver oil. It claims to be useful in a wide variety of common ailments.

To be honest, this gets my spider sense tingling and it just feels like quack remedy, but you never know. A few commentators tried it but only 1 claimed it was the cure they were looking for. Apparently there’s a clinical trial under way at the moment specifically looking at prolotherapy as a treatment for tennis elbow. If I spot the result, I’ll post it here.

19. Thera-band Flexbar

In ascending order of difficulty Yellow, Red, Green, and Blue Theraband Flexbar bars are hand exercisers that claim to be an effective tennis elbow treatment and golfers elbow treatment.

Certainly I’m a proponent of appropriate exercise as a golfers elbow treatment and the Thereband Flexbars can help and several people have reported success with them. It ‘ll cost you $56 for the full set, which I’d recommend in order to start off light and work up. The prescription seems to be 3×15 rep 3 times per day. However these bars only really help with rotational exercise which I think is limiting, so see my specific comments on golfers elbow exercises below:

20. Voltaren Gel (also Voltarol Gel)

This is a topical anti-inflammatory cream based on the NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug) Diclofenac. I think everything I said about cortisone shots apply here too, it’s a symptom treatment, not a cause fixer. I didn’t try it.

21. Remedial Exercises

Combined with the original post that started all this, I’ve now covered 20 different treatments for golfers elbow.

There is good news however, given enough time, everyone gets better!

Our goal of course is to minimise that recovery time, and bring it down from years to months. From all the differing treatments attempting to find a cure for golfer’s elbow that people posted about, there is a common thread amongst those that reported successful recovery, and it’s one that mirrors my own experience. I said above there was a simple golfers elbow cure and this is it: specific exercises! If you read my other post, you’ll note that my conclusion at the time was that eventually your elbow pain will go away, and you will credit the last treatment you had for it’s cure. However in most cases, people who got better stated that they did some form of remedial golfers elbow exercises.

As mundane as it is, I agree with them. Sure we’d all like to buy a that magic cure, but if nothing else I think the myriad of alleged treatments proves that there is no silver bullet here. Cessation of whatever caused it, some rest, and a slow and steady program of remedial golfer’s elbow exercises and stretches, designed specifically to gently work the appropriate area, is the best and most effective cure for golfer’s elbow, and I would say, tennis elbow too.

Having come to this conclusion, I set about to look for the best program of exercises I could find. After all, I didn’t want to be splashing money out for physiotherapists for month after month. There had to be something out there that was quick and easy to do, and cheap too!

It took me a while as there’s a lot of fluff and nonsense out there, but I finally found a program that met my criteria as being low on bull and high on simple, effective stretches and exercises, that’s cheap and you can get your money back if it doesn’t work! There’s no expensive kit either, you start with a hammer and an elastic band, lol! What’s more, because it’s a set of downloadable PDFs, you can be up and running in minutes and the videos make it impossible to get wrong.

It’s by an unassuming guy called Todd Scott, and deals equally with Golfer’s Elbow and Tennis Elbow Exercises and Stretches (click here) That link takes you to a big waffly sales page, a sad reality of internet existence these days, but don’t let that put you off. At the end of the day it’s up to you, but it only costs $4.95 for a 7 day trial and of all the different golfers elbow treatments I tried, these exercises are what I credit my cure and continued pain free existence to.

Should I exercise if I still have pain?

This is a question that I’ve been asked several times, and is something that Todd deals with in his videos better than I can here, it was certainly something I was keen to find out the answer to. I’ll leave it to Todd to answer that then.

I know I was a bit worried the first time I bought something like this online, so I thought I’d put together a quick video of the order process, so you can see exactly how it works (note that this video was taken when I still had my old website theme, not this groovy new one, and also before Todd changed the name of his product to Golfer’s Elbow Solution), take a look:

The link you need is this one: www.ColinMcNulty.com/tips/golfers-elbow Good luck, and do come back and let me know how you’re getting on, I love reading everyone’s comments!

Curses! February has not gone quite according to plan, take a look:

It was all going swimmingly well and I’d been losing about 2lb per week throughout January, until about the 7th Feb, then I hit the dreaded plateaux that so many dieters encounter, and in fact I hit the exact same thing at the same point back in 2008. So what happened?

It’s a fairly typical scenario:

• things are going well so you feel that the odd like cheat won’t hurt
• portion sizes increase a bit
• snacks between meals get a bit bigger
• cheat day gets blurred a bit with the preceding and following days
• you go out a few times during the week and have some things you wouldn’t normally.

And so it is. In many ways, I blame the Zone diet for being too good! It almost encourages you to cheat, because losing weight becomes so easy when the weight just falls off, you’re eating good and tasty food and you’re rarely hungry.

Looking at it another way, I’ve just switched to maintenance mode 6 lbs too soon. In February I’ve:

• eaten out at restaurants
• had takeaways
• been to the pub
• drunk a bottle or 2 of wine at home
• had chocolate on more days than I can remember (oops, there goes the New Year’s resolutions!)
• been to the cinema and eaten far too much pick & mix!
• drunk full fat milk every day, several glasses of
• had cheese almost every day (I love cheese!)
• every Saturday has been cheat day
• had popcorn several times
• had sticky toffee
• eaten fatty foods like sausages, lamb, chorizo, peanut butter, coconut cream, crisps and cheese dips, roast pork, meat balls, double cream
• the list goes on…

And yet… I’ve still lost weight in February, and whilst I’ve hit a plateaux, I’m not putting any weight on. Which is pretty amazing considering the list above!

EDIT: if it doesn’t translate into American, this is “Pick & Mix”:

So really I need to decide: am I happy with my weight and the balance of food that I am eating (yes to both by the way), or do I renew my efforts to get to the 12st7 (175lbs / 80kg) I originally had in mind? Remember it was an arbitrary target. I have already lost 2.5 inches off my waist and 5.25 inches altogether, although another inch or 2 off my waist wouldn’t hurt.

I think on balance I would prefer to lose that last 6 lbs, I just now need to think over what time scale?

I’m going to be migrating this blog to a new host in the next day or so, so there may be some disruption. I’ll disable comments whilst I make the move so if you can’t comment, you’re probably on the old site and the internet hasn’t caught up yet with where the new site is. Fingers crossed, you won’t notice a thing. After all, what could possibly go wrong! Lol

I have just finished the latest book in Barry Sears’ Zone Diet series: Toxic Fat. I’ve read most of Dr Sears’ many books that he’s written over the last 15 years of his research and whilst all containing good advice, some have not been great.

His first book Enter the Zone was a cracking book in terms of content, but was a terrible read for the layman. To be fair, I think he targeted the book at the medical profession as it contained a lot of in depth medical detail, but it was a tough read for someone without any such training.

What I’ve found most interesting in reading his books is how he’s adapted his approach over the years, not only based on his progressing research, but also in an attempt to make his material more accessible. Certainly Toxic Fat is the best example to date of this. In fact I think already it’s my favourite book by Dr Sears, as it brings together all the elements of his research and presents them in a succinct way that easily read and understood.

The initial chapters of the book deal each with a separate topic and Barry talks about fat deposits in the body as stores for Arachadonic Acid, which he is now casting in the same light as a cancer, as it exhibits many of the characteristics of cancers. He deals neatly with diet and supplements (mostly fish oil) in a way that’s easily understood and not overloading. What I particularly like are the examples given, with actual amounts and the dosages of fish oil are explained. How much fish oil to take is a very common question which Toxic Fat answers well. Though if you really want the low down on fish oil, I’d recommend Barry Sears’ Omega Rx Zone: The Miracle of the New High-Dose Fish Oil as a revolutionary book on the subject of fish oil.

If more detail is your thing, then there’s plenty to be had in the Appendices with in depth breakdowns of the physiology involved with everything that Barry Sears teaches. Of interest to many will be the sample menu plans for eating in the Zone Diet, which are accessible and easy to follow.

Altogether Toxic Fat is Barry’s best book in my opinion, and if you were only to get one Zone Diet book, this is the one I would recommend.