If you've ever been to a gym I'm sure you will have seen the cradle devices that they have for doing abs exercises. I wanted to get one of these for my home gym, as I think they help in ensuring that you do your crunches in good form with your neck properly supported. My back is in good shape at the moment, but I have had trouble with it in the past, so I'm keen to look after it.

I checked a few fitness equipment sites and was surprised to see that the version that you tend to see in the gyms costs over £100. I suppose they get a lot of use and so need to be suitably heavy duty. I wasn't intending to spend that much but by searching a bit further I found the Weider Crunch Trainer which is a much more reasonable price. I bought mine from here.

It seems to work perfectly well, really no different to the gym versions. It also comes with a booklet and also a DVD showing then different exercises that you can do with it. These are all variations on the basic theme of upper abs, lower abs and obliques exercises, but they are graded according to how advanced you are.

Today is Good Friday, so I am going to venture into a topic previously untouched on this blog, namely religion. As far as I know every society, from the primitive to the modern-day, has belief sets which answer the questions "What am I doing here?" and "What happens to me when I die?". Why is it that these appear to be universal amongst mankind?

Now these belief sets are all different and irreconcilable. If you are a Christian then the view of life after death held by Moslems will be anathema to you. If any one of these belief sets is right, then the majority of the others must be wrong. But yet they persist. This universality and persistance suggests to me that the tendency to hold these beliefs is adaptive, which is to say that individuals with the tendency to hold these beliefs have, at some point in our evolutionary past, had an advantage over those who didn't.

How could this be? My feeling is that the heightened sense of self-awareness and the ability to project the future enjoyed by homo sapiens is a double-edged sword. At one level it gives us a great survival advantage over other species. At another level it confronts us with the knowledge that today we are alive and tomorrow we might not be.

Now the existence that we enjoyed back in the hunter-gatherer era was a precarious one. In particular the hunters who survived and prospered had to have great skills in personal risk management. Take too many risks and you end up dead and you don't get to pass on your genes. Take too few risks and you don't bring home the meat, so you do badly in the mating stakes and you don't get to pass on your genes. In these circumstances a belief that this life isn't all there is probably helps avoid the latter of these two consequences.

So, I think the tendency towards religious belief has a genetic component. I've just Googled 'religious belief genetic' and top of the search results was this article in New Scientist which supports this point of view.

Anyway, if you subscribe to a religion then I'm sure that your religion encourages you to look after your body and lead a healthy life. If you don't, then this life is all you have on offer and it makes sense to make the most of it. Either way, get lean, get healthy is my advice.

Some years ago when I was in paid employment we used to get sent on residential courses to improve our inter-personal skills. These were mostly a complete waste of time, but it did give you the opportunity to sit up late in the bar with some work colleagues that you wouldn't normally socialise with.

On one such occasion there were just the two of us left and my drinking partner was talking about a fishing trip that he had been on recently. He spoke of getting up early in the morning, watching the sunrise over the water and feeling at one with nature. Then, he said, he had a bacon sandwich. I laughed at this point, thinking this had brought a transcendental moment down to earth with a bump. No, he said, a well-made bacon sandwich when you really fancy one is practically a religious experience.

Now, one of the good things about Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is that there are no hard-and-fast restrictions placed on what you eat. Tom does publish a list of foods that are prone to turn to body fat which you should mostly avoid, but even these you can eat occasionally. In my goals you'll see that I've given myself exemption for white bread and bacon in this regard. Like my erstwhile colleague, I am very partial to a bacon sandwich.

So I was interested to see that researchers at the Department of Food Science at Leeds University have done a research project to determine how to make the perfect bacon sandwich (more details here). Mostly I'm in agreement with their findings, although to my mind the bread should be a fresh poppy-seed bloomer from my local bakery. My preference is also for a few grilled cherry tomatoes and some blobs of HP Sauce. I wonder how I should go about getting research funding to take this crucial area of scientific and human interest on to the next level.

My son is a second year university student and also a keen gamer. This weekend he is going to Amsterdam to meet up with fellow members of his World of Warcraft guild. That suprised me as I would have thought that keen gamers who were in need of some rest and recreation would have taken themselves off to the Amsterdam equivalent of Second Life, or some such. Even dedicated gamers need some face-to-face interaction, so it seems.

This makes me think that the science fiction vision of the future where we all stay home and live out our lives through sleek, muscular, attractive online avatars is still a long way off. For now, I'm afraid, it still matters what we look like in the flesh. Unfortunately if you are overweight then that is going to cloud other people's perception of you. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his excellent book Blink, this all happens down at the subconscious level. Irrespective of how clear of prejudices a person manages to be in their conscious thoughts, their initial impression of you and their initial reactions to you will still be affected by that first visual image. This is pretty significant when it comes to things like job interviews.

Clearly in an ideal world it wouldn't be like this, but there is no escaping it. Until the day arrives when we all mostly live our lives through the virtual world, then meeting people will be just that little bit easier if make yourself as presentable as you can.

Here in the south of England we are enjoying a prolonged spell of fine, high pressure weather. This is quite unusual for April, as this time of year tends to be changeable and showery.

On Sunday we went on our favourite walk from Seaford Head up to Beachy Head. The route takes you across to Cuckmere Haven then up the river to the Golden Galleon at Exceat. This is a massively popular pub despite, in our opinion, having been spoiled when taken over and refurbished a few years ago. The last time we ate in there it took an hour for them to serve up some really poor quality food. So instead we went along the road and had a ploughmans at the Farmhouse Tea Rooms at the Seven Sisters Country Park, which was pleasant enough.

From there we picked our way back to the coast and up and down the Seven Sisters to Birling Gap and further refreshments at the pub there. From there it's the final uphill stretch to Beachy Head. As we neared the top we saw five people strangely attired standing near the cliff edge so we went to investigate. They turned out to be base jumpers, preparing to jump off the cliff with paraglider-style parachutes.

Now Beachy Head is 530 feet high. We weren't quite at the top, so let's say they were jumping 500 feet. That doesn't give you long to get your parachute launched, under control and able to pick a safe spot for landing amid the rocks at the bottom. How mad do you have to be to want to do this? Just this side of certifiable if you ask me.

Anyway, they all got down safely and we continued our walk to the top, then took the bus back to our starting point. A fine day out.

The gym I use has TV monitors tuned in to the music video channels. As it's a university gym they are mostly showing Q, Kerrang or Kiss. The other day due to some aberration they were tuned to Classic and were showing early 80's Genesis playing Turn It On Again.

The video was live performance footage interspersed with back-stage shots. Phil Collins was seen putting on his T-shirt in the dressing room, then later singing on stage without it. He looked in pretty good shape, in a wirey, rock-star sort of way.

Fast forward twenty five years and Genesis are touring again. I wonder if Phil is planning to appear on stage similarly attired. This photograph taken from their last tour suggests to me that he won't. It looks to me like there's probably a bit of a paunch there.

Time takes its toll on all of us. Many of us when we were young were able to eat what we liked, take next to no exercise and we still stayed in reasonable shape. But as middle-age sets in the body starts to pile on the fat reserves and we need to put more effort into keeping trim.

For Phil Collins this ought to be easy. He can afford a well-appointed gym in his country mansion, a personal trainer and a personal nutritionist. For the rest of us there's Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

There has been a lot of press coverage recently about a newly discovered gene variant that has the effect of casuing some people to be overweight. The press, with their usual tendency for overstatement, have called this "The Obesity Gene". The danger is, of course, that this gives the impression that there is nothing that can be done about the condition. Nothing could be further from the truth!

The findings show that people carrying the variant are likely to be 1.2 kilos heavier than the norm, or 3 kilos heavier if they have two copies of the variant. These weight differences are not enough to cause obesity. Really this gene variant should be labelled "The Slightly Overweight Gene". It also only appears in 16% of the population, so in the balance of probability you probably haven't got it.

The fact of the matter is that if you are obese then you are at substantially greater risk of contracting diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. The presence of this gene doesn't change anything at all in respect to this. Even if you are lucky enough to avoid these conditions then your quality of life is going to be impaired in some way.

Now the great thing about humans is that they have the conscious ability to try and rise above whatever shortcomings nature might have dealt them. So, even if you are carrying this gene it doesn't mean that you have to be obese, it doesn't mean that you even have to be overweight. It just means that you have to try a little harder in order to avoid these consequences. Choosing the right lifestyle with good nutrition and regular exercise is what it is all about.

My new weight training regime is starting to bed in now, so this is a good time to tell you about it. The concept is that I do alternating heavy weeks and light weeks.

The heavy weeks are designed to build muscle strength. The focus here is to do primarily compound exercises, which is to say those that engage more than one muscle group. Heavy weights are used with a small number of repetitions, typically in the range 4-6. I tend to do four sets, starting off with a weight a couple of notches back from the maximum that I managed last time. Rest intervals between sets are long enough to allow a full recovery, typically 2-3 minutes. Progression is through increasing the reps up to 6 then increasing the weight.

The light weeks are designed to build muscle bulk, or hypertrophy as it is known. I use 8x8's here, which involves light weights, isolation exercises, eight sets of eight repetitions and short rest times. The weight should be chosen so that it feels easy for the first few sets but really tough by the time you reach the last few. Progression is initially through reducing the rest times, starting at 50 seconds then dropping by 5 or 10 seconds each week. Once you get down to about 20 seconds then it's time to increase the weight.

It's taken a while to get this organised, finding the right exercises and the right weights. However I think it will be a good programme and I intend to stick with it for at least the next three months.