It’s time to lose the gut

Tucking into a third fish sandwich and sipping my, ahem, fifth beer on day one at Cup Match, life felt pretty good.

Fast forward a week or so and I feel pretty, well…rubbish, not to mention heavy. I suspect I’m not alone.

Good living — as in the fun, summer kind — comes at a price in terms of fitness and body shape. Gym devotees and CrossFit addicts are still throwing off their shirts and rocking the bikinis but now for the rest of us, we’re thinking twice about showing off what God gave us now our dreamed-of six-pack resembles more of a keg.

For us blokes, the tell-tale sign of more hours spent boozing than benchpressing revolves (quite literally) around one area of the body — the stomach. For the infamous back-packer’s Sydney stone, read the Bermuda bulge.

So now Cup Match is done, it’s time to get in trim. Court House head trainer Colin Ayliffe reckons it can be done in six weeks — so that’s the challenge he’s laid down to me and all of you who want to follow this ‘Lose the Gut’ programme.

Apparently, it’s not quite as simple as hammering away at the crunches, going on a few runs and cutting out the carbs.

First you have to get assessed. And while having a man seemingly massage my hips was not on the agenda when this plan was first discussed, I was assured it formed an essential part of the ‘corrective stage’, where your body’s kinks are identified and the exercises tailored accordingly.

As it turns out, my left shoulder is significantly lower than my right, my hips are not aligned, my head juts out further than it should, my lower abdominal muscles are there in spirit only and the less said about the flexibility of my hamstrings and hips the better. 

“These results”, says Colin, “can be generalized as having an upper cross syndrome posture with a twisted pelvic tilt and a flat back. But all can be corrected.”

Which is nice to know.  Neanderthal man has nothing on me, I thought. But ‘Lose the Gut’, ‘Lose the Gut’ — think long game etc, etc

Daily stretches are the first step to achieving this — and while it’s hard for the uneducated like me to fathom why correcting my, frankly, odd shoulder imbalance will help me gain a flatter stomach, Colin assures me this is essential for the workouts ahead. See right for an outline of the stretches.

The next part of the assessment focused on biometrics and body composition. In layman’s terms: how heavy and fat you are, and how well your arteries are working. The verdict for all of them? Could do better.

Weighing over 193lbs is a personal career-high not to be proud of, the 18.6 per cent of body fat is fine until I realized it was largely all in one place (gut, of course) and the blood pressure of 148mmHg or 100mmHg is above normal, probably a result of the ‘five’ beers I already mentioned.

The overall picture is I’m not about to be sent to fat camp any time soon — but there is clearly some trimming needed. I’d like to call it the ‘common man problem’, that beneath this exterior of beery nights and too many trips to Ice Queen there is a lithe, efficient, dynamic athlete laying dormant. If only we had the discipline and, let’s face, weren’t so lazy.

But for the next six weeks, my mission is to turn that around and test out Colin’s plan.

The initial workouts focus on improving core conditioning and are explained above. 

That, plus the stretches, is just the start before I’m put to work in a full-on session, which hopefully won’t involve Colin being  anywhere near my hips.

Should be fun. I think.

This is the first weekly ‘Lose the Gut’ column over the coming six weeks. For more information email Court House head trainer Colin Ayliffe at cayliffe@courthouse.