Personal Trainer Roy Vermeulen The brick

Personal Trainer Roy Vermeulen On Staying Healthy During This Christmas Season!

When the weather got colder and the days darker, we got autumn blues and start working out less. With Christmas, we feel like we have so little time to work out enough to compensate for the massive Christmas dinners. And then, New Year hits, and we have these big ambitions of getting our first sixpack or summer body. Don’t like that scenario? Great, because we spoke with PT Roy Vermeulen of YORROY about how you can best stay healthy and fit during this season.

First thing first: do you ever get sick?

Rarely. If you take care of your body and make sure you get the nutrients it needs, your body is overly qualified to take care of itself. You can train as hard as you want, but if you aren’t eating the right food, sleep too little to give your immune system the proper rest and train the right way, it’s like working yourself into a health problem or injury.

So, food wise, what would you recommend?

For people to stop thinking about weight, and focus on feeling right in their own skin. Everyone has that magical number, whether through either fat burning or mass building. But someone that weighs 80 kg with a fat-percentage of 8% has a different body than someone off the same weight with a fat-percentage of 20%. Weight is just a number.

If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less than you normally do. This creates a calorie deficiency. But it’s also about eating the right things and living healthier. If you want to build muscle mass, you have to eat proteins. During Christmas, there’s nothing wrong with eating fat, proteins and vegetables. Fat, especially unsaturated fats, helps you create the hormones needed to build muscle mass. And the Christmas turkey isn’t a bad choice for that, but even that comes with an asterisk: the skin of a turkey counteracts that effect.

Any other things people can do to stay fit this ?

If you want to stay healthy, you have to live healthy: this doesn’t mean focusing on what you can’t do, but more on what you can do. Besides food, you need your sleep. It has a massive influence on the amount of energy you have, but also the amount of fat you burn.

What you might also want to do is be outside more. We leave our house when it’s dark, and leave our work when it’s dark. And the body needs about 20 to 30 minutes of direct sunlight to the skin. I personally take Vitamin D supplements and creatine, which is important for performance during sports, but also for your future cognitive prestation. The older you get, the more you’ll find the benefits of creatine.

And for those who already got sick or had a setback?

Sometimes you just have to combat that mental blockade. It’s super easy to find excuses. If someone doesn’t follow his program, I’ll contact him or her and ask what’s going on. It’s one of the benefits of having your own personal trainer!