Tag Archives: fitness

The Guardian: Bend it like Salma Bi

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At the age of nine, Salma Bi first picked up a cricket bat, handmade for her by her father, and taught herself to bowl after watching hours of cricket on television. But despite their enthusiasm for the sport, convincing her parents to let her play cricket at a more serious level was not easy. “In the beginning, I felt as if I was on my own. I used to come home after practice and my parents would say, ‘Why are you always out so late?’, or they would complain because I’d been out all Sunday playing a match,” she says. “Sometimes they would say I couldn’t go, and I had to miss training. But when I signed for Worcestershire and started bringing back trophies and medals, they realised I was good at it. Now they’re really proud of me.”

One of nine siblings, Bi was born in Pakistan and moved to Birmingham with her family when she was a toddler. Now 24, she plays for Five Ways Old Edwardians at club level, and is the first British Asian player to be selected for Worcestershire county. For more than a year, she has been recruiting teenage girls and young women from Birmingham’s Asian community into her weekly female cricket coaching sessions, and last year her initiative to bring young Asian women into cricket won her an outstanding achievement award at the Change4Life British Asian Sports Awards (BASA). This year, she narrowly missed out on the BASA coach of the year award.

“Asian boys think Asian girls can’t play cricket; they think we’re only good at cooking. But I’ve watched cricket as much as my brothers have, and I want to see more Asian girls take up cricket competitively to show they can do it,” she says. “I’m proud of Asian girls who go against the norm. If there are more of us taking up a competitive sport that’s normally seen as a man’s game, it will change the way people look at us. It proves we are capable.”

Click here to read the full feature online. This piece was published in the Guardian G2.

Metro: Metabolism – what is it and how can you boost your’s?

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Published in Metro, 5 September, 2010

Impossibly skinny friends. You know the type, they eat chocolate every day, rarely exercise, never think twice about ordering dessert and are constantly chomping and snacking day and night, their scurrilous eating habits making not an ounce of difference to their waistline.

Those impossibly skinny friends are often blessed with good genes and a natural predisposition to burn off calories before they’ve had a chance to settle at the back of their thighs. The rest of us have to work a little harder to get our metabolism churning faster.

Metabolism is one of those words casually bandied about by personal trainers and gym-obsessives – but what does it mean, and what effect does it have on your bodyshape and weight?

‘Your metabolism is the speed at which your body cells burn calories and use energy,’ explains Yvonne Bishop-Weston, Harley Street nutritionist at Optimum Nutritionists. ‘The faster your cells work, the faster you burn calories; the slower they work, the longer it takes.’

So, the slower your metabolic rate, the more likely you are to put on weight and find it harder to shift. But it isn’t something that can be measured as simply as, say, your BMI (body mass index). Metabolic speed is determined by the activity of your thyroid gland. This gland secretes thyroid hormones, which in turn control the speed of your metabolism. ‘So if your thyroid gland is working fast to produce thyroid hormones, you’ll also be burning calories fast, and vice-versa,’ explains Bishop-Weston.

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Metro: These shoes were made for walking

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Published in Metro, June 21, 2010

They say the perfect pair of shoes finishes an outfit, but as I rush out of the door, discarding summer wedges for black MBT trainers, I’m not sure this is what the fashionistas had in mind.

While they may not be the stylish stuff of catwalks, tone-up fitness shoes such as MBTs, Reebok EasyTones, Skechers Shape Ups and FitFlops, are proving to be this summer’s hot sellers, being snapped up by shape-conscious women across the country looking for an easy way to stay trim. In John Lewis, FitFlops are selling at a rate of one pair per minute, with a 146% year-on-year uplift in overall tone-up shoe sales.

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City Am: Stress-busting in a Cyprus spa

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Published in City AM, Monday 12 April, 2010

It’s Monday morning and while the rest of the guests at Aphrodite Hills are catching the Cyprus sun and feasting on fry-ups in the breakfast buffet, I’m being lectured in the gym. Timi, my stocky Cypriot personal trainer for the week, has more or less just told me and my five foot two, eight stone frame that I’m fat. Great.

“Okay so you’re sleem, but you can be much sleemer,” he croons. “You pee a lot? You pee a lot, means you burn a lot of fat, you see?” he says, as he shrugs his shoulders and increases the incline. I just want to tone up, I say meekly. “Tone up, lose weight – everyone wants same thing, everyone wants be sleem; so it’s okay, we make you sleemer, lose fat,” he says. Okay then…

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