MATT ROBERTS’ SECRETS TO LIVE A LONGER, HEALTHIER AND HAPPIER LIFE.

As the General Election race continues, David Cameron’s former personal trainer shares eight tips on how to live a longer, happier and healthier life.

1. Make sure your age is just a number. If you live to 100 years old and 30 years are spent in a chair, it’s not good. The challenge for me now is making sure that age is just a number. When I turned 30, I was almost in the same shape as I was when I was 20. The goal was to make sure I get to 40 and in the same shape as when I was 30. Therefore ,when I got to 40, I was in the same shape as when I was 20.’
2. Build bone density. An essential part of training for a long and healthy life is having strong bones which can support you and allow you to remain active and have that strong skeleton for muscles and tendons. But this isn’t a quick turnaround.  In theory, to get bone density, you get to the gym, slap a massive weight on your shoulders, pump out a number of squats then you’ll build some bone. But at the same time we can crack some bones as well and tear some tendons so you can get set back by several weeks or months. So it’s a slow process. It’s a 12 to 24 month process of developing that bone structure, creating a base of bone strength and mobility and then creating real strength.’
3. Regular blood testing. This allows you to understand what’s going on so you can make the appropriate changes where needed. The information and data from those checks, particularly hormone levels, really matter.
4. Don’t just go flat out. This is particularly important as you age. My training has had to change. I go for super high intensity, whether that’s on a cardiovascular or on a strength basis, but I don’t do it regularly. I used to do it maybe two, three days a week, going for the really high loading. I’d say the really high loading now might be once a week, and the rest is probably at about 80- 90% of the max loading. Now often it’s more around probably 75% of maximum loading. So it’s much more spread out to allow the recovery time to happen.
5. Spend time in Zone 2. That’s nothing to do with the underground, but your cardio output level when your heart rate is at 60-70% of its maximum. My longest runs I do these days are probably 10k and I’ve spent a lot more time in the last two or three years doing significantly more quantity or zone two cardio training. It’s very straightforward; you’re just going to sit on the bike for 40 minutes or watch a TV show which is 45 minutes long so you’ve got a time frame, and I sit there with my heart rate at about 65 to 70 of its maximum. I do that for about three to four hours a week.
6. Listen to your body when you pick a workout. Often people go to the gym when they’re stressed. There’s a bit of a natural kind of a desire, especially in men, to go in there and go smash a workout, go and do something quite big: lift heavy, run faster, and so on. We can overload it and often that can be the wrong thing to do. We’ve got to listen to what’s actually going on in your system and in your mind, and the point at which you have to say, I can just delay on doing the heavy, big stuff to another day, and what do I need to do now?’
7. Get enough restorative sleep. I would say my biggest challenge is getting enough sleep. I probably have about six hours per night and within that, my restorative deep sleep and REM sleep is a high percentage so I wake up feeling refreshed. I find that a cold shower 10 minutes before going to bed is the best way to get a longer sleep at a higher quality. Getting to bed after a hot shower, I tend to wake up sooner.’
8. Get advice from an expert. This is vital before you start a new training regime to increase bone density. You’ve got to get to that load level at some point in time, you can’t avoid it, because you do progressively build up. Expertise will ensure that the things that are going to fail when you’re at the highest level will be bad technique, or lack of mobility or lack of flexibility. If you haven’t got those then the failure is going to be bad.

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