Unfortunately we’ve received the following email this morning from Parcelforce:

Good morning,

As a result of vandalism at an electricity substation last night in
Coventry, there was disruption to our sortation process at our hubs. This
may result in a delay of 24 hours to some items due delivery today.

Pete Langley
Central Midlands Customer Services Manager
Parcelforce Worldwide

So due to this incident, some of the parcels sent out yesterday with Parcelforce may arrive a day late.  You should have received tracking numbers by email so you can trace your delivery on parcelforce.com.   We are attempting to call all customers on next day by noon and next day by ten services to advise of the issue.  Unfortunately we arent able to do the same for all our shipments, as there are just too many for us to be able to call every one of you, plus we dont know which parcels are affected.  We apologise for the delay and if you require us to resend you your tracking number, then please submit a support ticket.  We hope you can understand that this is beyond ours or Parcelforce’s control.  Unfortunately something like vandalism is something you cant really plan for or have any control over. 

We have a couple of great special offers just gone live:

First up, for all the Pro Peptide fans out there we have a special deal on their 5lb bags.  If you buy 2 bags, you save £8 per bag and pay only £80.  If you buy 3 or more bags, you get them at ony £39.33 each - a big discount off the RRP of £59.99.

Secondly, by popular demand we’re doing a new offer on Optimum Whey 10lb bags - each bag is now only £65 and comes with a free shaker.

On the new product releases front, USN have a very exciting new product out called USN Muscle Fuel Anabolic:

I like the look of this product as it takes the basic muscle fuel formula and incorporates creatine, BCAAs, Glutamine and very unusually it also has testosterone boosting ingredients such as tribulus terristris mixed in.

We’ve had a few other new products come in stock recently also, such as Boditronics’ new protein bars, Reflex Anti Oxidant Collection and Nutrex Volugrow.

I have to say two of my favourite new products of 2008 so far are the Blender Bottle and Dorian Yates’ Max Nutrition multivitamin. 

The blender bottle is a simple little thing, but just so effective.  I recall when our suppliers for this item came over to visit and were describing this item to me and saying how good it was, I was listening along and said we’d give it a go, but in all honesty I was pretty sceptical.  After all, its just a wire ball in a shaker cup with no sieve.  How good could it be?  So we ordered a few in to see what the fuss was and they’ve been selling very well for a whle now but I still wasnt that impressed until I tried one last month.  The result?  Well depending on whether you’re religious or an atheist, this thing is either the work of the devil or it defies all laws of quantum physics.  This little wire ball just obliterates any protein powder you put in it.  And its easy to clean too.  I had visions that the wire ball would get clogged with powder, but so far it just doesnt happen.

The Dorian Yates multivitamin is something really unique - a multivitamin that gets all its ingredients from natural sources rather than chemical derivatives.  As a believer of the theory that vitamins and minerals are better absorbed from raw food sources than from chemicals and cooked food, I really think this is a brilliant addition to the sports nutrition market.   And not only that, but the range of stuff in there is quite incredible.  Its all-encompassing.  People buy half a dozen products to get what is in there.  The only downside is that its a powder rather than a tablet, so a bit less convenient than most multivitamins.  I’d certainly recommend anyone looking for a really good multivitamin with all the trimmings to give it a try.

Frequent visitors to the site may also notice we’ve made some price cuts across the board, including in particular the Animal brand - for which we now have the likes of Animal Stak, Animal M Stak and Animal Cuts for only £29.99.  So dont be surprised if next time you stop by to buy one of your favourite products, its just a little cheaper.

AST Sports Science UK/BSF Sponsored Athlete Jay Hollingsworth competed in the Northern England Powerlifting Championships this past weekend and placed first in his own class and overall for both Bench Press and Deadlift, breaking a few unnofficial world records along the way. This qualifies him for the British Finals later this year. Congratulations to him from us and we wish him the best of luck in the finals. Here’s a few pics from the contest:

Apologies for the lack of blog posting lately but we continue to be extremely busy and are still going from strength to strength. Our growth this past year has been pretty rapid, with us achieving in March and April approx four times the turnover we had in that period last year (and last year was a pretty damn good year itself!). Today I’ve been sent a copy of a catalogue for another sports nutriton retailer (one thats had a lot of very bad press recently) and they are claiming to be the UK’s biggest supplement store, with total market domination and a stated turnover (according to their own intro text) thats about a third of ours - so I guess we must be doing pretty well.

We’re currently recruiting for a new accounts and purchasing manager so anyone local who would like to apply for the position, please send us your CV. Experience with Sage Line 50 and with a purchasing role is preferential.

In June we will have quite a few new special offers and a few price reductions so we’ll keep you posted on those.

Just a quick blog post today to let you guys know we have the full range of Dorian Yates Supplements now back in stock.  We also have their new creatine, glutamine and multivitamin products in stock.  These three should be on the site in the next couple of days but if you’re eager to order them before we’ve had chance to upload them, please give us a call and we can tag them onto your order.

The Dorian Yates line has been so successful since its start, that I think the manufacturers got taken by surprise a little and supply has been pretty patchy the last few months.  We actually bought all the nox pump we could find in the country about a month ago when we knew it would be scarce, so for a while we’ve been fortunate to be pretty much the only well known supplement company to have any.  Hopefully the production will now be ramped up to meet the demand, but if not, we’ll continue to try and maintain our stock levels as best as we possibly can. 

For my money, Nutrex are one of the most underrated brands this side of the pond.  Massive in the States, they brought Vitargo (waxy maize starch) to the mainstream sports supplement market and have one of the worlds most popular fat burners in Lipo 6.  For some reason they’ve never really made that breakthrough over here, probably due to the lack of a proper importer/distributor to build the brand name.  This past month or two, they’ve released two brand new products Stateside and we’re pleased to have them available for you.

Mass XXPlosion replaces their Vitargo CGL product and is a powerful anabolic workout product featuring waxy maize starch, whey isolate, creatine ethyl ester, creatine monohydrate and nitric oxide boosters.

Anabol 5 is a non steroidal anabolic stack which boosts anabolism through non-hormonal channels, featuring a whole bunch of ingredients you’ll have never heard of but sound exciting anyway…   The main ingredient appears to be 6-keto diosgenin which is a saponin extracted from yam and is apparently similar to ecydysterone.  In early studies with rats, its been shown to be very anabolic but with no side effects so far.  Early reviews on Anabol 5 from the States are very promising.

While stock last, we have a very special deal on CNP Pro Flapjack Bars and Pro Bar XS.  Pro Flapjack bars are available at £15.99 (RRP £24.99) for a box of 24 whilst Pro Bar XS are only £14.99 (RRP £24.99) for a box of 12.

We finally moved over to our new premises over the March 29th/30th weekend.  Our new address is Unit 20, Hortonwood 33, Telford, Shropshire, TF1 7EX.

Moving was certainly a big job this time.  Our last move, which was only September 2006, now seems so much easier in comparison.  That time we just had myself, Michelle and a few friends and family with a couple of transit vans (albeit we had to do about 40 journeys back and forth!) and we quite easily completed the move in a weekend with time to spare.  This time we had 4 big removal trucks, a transit van, 10 removal guys, most of our own members of staff, family and friends and it took us not only the whole weekend to move everything over and unpack it, but we’re still getting everything in order a week and a half later.  Its been worth it though, with us now having twice the warehouse space, a little more office space and just generally a setup thats more conducive to our continued growth.  Hopefully this will be the first premises to last us more than 18 months as well, but then again, who knows?

I know quite a few of our local customers have been confused/concerned to turn up at our old premises and find us no longer there.  We had a few ‘have you closed down?’ calls (although presumably if we’d closed down we wouldnt answer the phone…).  In our defence we were handing out flyers for 3 months in advance with directions to the new place on but we understand that you guys have a lot to think about and many of you will have forgotten.  For directions from the old warehouse, please click here.  We havent yet got a shop set up, so you wont be able to browse as normal just yet.  If you bring a list with you of what you want though, one of us will go pick it from the warehouse for you.

Apart from that all is running fairly smoothly at the moment.  There’s a few manufacturer supply issues at the moment, with items from AST, Dorian Yates and a couple of other brands that have a bit of a waiting time on getting them back in stock.  Dorian Yates just seems to be near impossible to get hold of right now.  Every time they release a new batch its all bought up within days, and they only seem to produce two  flavours at a time.  So we have to take it when we can.  AST is on order but has been held up by health certificates.  ETA is 1-2 weeks on Beta-X and Multi-Pro, 3 weeks on everything else.  We’re up to date on all orders shipped though and had no major order delays following the move.

We have quite a lot of special offers that we’re ready to unleash on you guys as well, we’ve had them ready to go for weeks now but the fact is we’ve just not had the time to put them in action.  Now the workload of moving is nearly over, you should start to see them come available in the next week or so.  Maybe we’ll start releasing one a day or something like that.  Keep an eye on the site anyhow.

We will be closed from Friday 21st March to Monday 24th March for the Easter Bank Holiday.  All orders placed over the holiday weekend will be processed on Tuesday.  Happy Easter from the BSF Team.

We have about a dozen new products being added to the site at the moment.  The three big releases are:

Muscletech Halo - Muscletech’s new post-workout product with seemingly 100s of ingredients in, including creatine, beta-alanine and a whole bunch of other stuff it would take me about a week to type out….

Gaspari Plasmajet - A very impressive looking nitric oxide booster.

Reflex NOS Fusion - Reflex’s stab at an energy/no2 pre workout supplement.  Again this includes beta-alanine which as y’all may know is my favourite supplement ingredient at the moment.

We’re also making some changes to the functionality of the website.  You’ll notice now that on checkout there is a new series of boxes for entering shipping instructions (e.g. please leave next door if out, take to post office if out, etc..).  In the case of orders going by Parcelforce, what you write on here will go directly onto the parcelforce label.  In fact, the whole form you fill in with your details now links directly to Parcelforce - so everything will go onto Parcelforce exactly as you write it.  So a) please make sure you check you have the right address and postcode otherwise your delivery may be delayed (we have put a link to royal mail’s address checker on there to help) and b) dont write anything you dont want your friendly neighbourhood parcelforce driver to see.  Sounds silly, but we had one customer put down a made-up business name that could have landed him in trouble with the law had we not spotted it and re-done his label.  Eventually we will be incorporating a new auto-address feature where you just enter your postcode and then select your address from a drop down menu, which should completely eliminate any address problems.

This change to the site was pretty important to do, because previously we were manually entering the shipping details for each order into Parcelforce’s WDM system and on a monday it was taking until nearly 1 o’clock to get all the shipping labels done.  Now we’ve integrated with Parcelorce we do it in around 30 mins maximum.  Its just a shame we cant do the same with our ebay orders…..

Our final bit of news this week is of some coming and going here at BSF.  Sadly our accounts and purchasing manager Ben Humphries has now left us after finding the daily commute a bit too much.  He’ll be missed and the place is certainly quieter without him.  We wish him luck with his new job.  Coming in the opposite way, we have Tony Bushnall having started last week as our new warehouse manager, bringing over 30 years of warehousing experience to the company.  We’re confident that his appointment will help us maintain our high standards in the warehouse as we continue to grow exponentially.

Thats it for now.  We are looking forward to moving to the new premises at the end of the month and continuing to process all your orders to the best of our abilities.

AST UK sponsored athlete John Heaton had quite a challenge last month, with a short notice invitation to be a Spartan warrior at the 2008 BAFTAs.  This required him to get back in shape in only two weeks.  Here is his story:

The Spartan Plan
By John Heaton

After my hectic 2007 Natural Bodybuilding season culminating in my 3rd place finish at the UIBBN World Championships in Madrid, I decided that 2008 would be a year of growth. This meant for the first time since 2004 I could have a good 12 months eating and training without the strain of contest dieting.  As usual, without any urgent competition agenda, I ate more than usual over Christmas and New Year and put over 1 stone on of water and fat.

I then received an interesting email from an extra’s agency asking for ‘Big Muscular Men’ to appear at the 2008 BAFTA awards at the Royal Opera House in London.
I returned the mail and after a week of waiting, I was told that I was in.

This gave me 2 weeks in which to try and get into Spartan shape. I immediately called my supplement sponsors, AST UK and Udo’s Oil and asked for help. I had devised my diet and training plan and just needed their support to add the finishing touches.

They supplied me with the following, Beta X, VP2, Muscle XGF, CLA, Metabolic Prescription RX and of course Udo’s Oil blend. I incorporated these superb supplements in my diet plan and the results surprised even me.

For two weeks I followed my contest prep plan which was as follows,

Meal 1 Oats, AST VP2, Udo’s Oil
Meal 2 AST Nytro Pro 40
Meal 3 Tuna, Cottage Cheese, Sweet Potato, Udo’s Oil and Salad
Meal 4 Nytro Pro 40
Meal 5 Chicken breast, steamed veg, Udo’s Oil
Meal 6 Muscle XGF

On top of my meals I had VP2 (Whey Isolate) pre and post workout and also my multi vitamins, Beta X, CLA and Metabolic Prescription RX.

On top of my dietary regime, I trained 6 days per week instead of my off season 3 sessions per week.

I started Max OT Cardio 2 x per week. My routine was simple. Recumbent cycle, 16 minutes, level 12, random programme. My first attempt ended with me getting just over 8km. By the end of the 2nd week I was getting 9km easily. I am continuing this little regime 2 x per week now trying to build to 10km in 16 mins. I added ab work to these cardio workouts also.

On top of this I did 3 x Max OT weights sessions. (See www.astss.co.uk for Max OT principles)

Session 1 – Back and Biceps
Pulldowns to front 3 x 6 reps
Bent over row 2 x 6 reps
Seated narrow row 2 x 6 reps
Partial Deadlifts 2 x 6 reps
Dumbbell Curls 3 x 6 reps
Cable Curls 2 x 6 reps

Session 2 – Chest, delts and triceps
Dumbbell Flat press 3 x 6 reps
Incline Barbell press 2 x 6 reps
Plyometric dips 3 x 10 reps
Push press 3 x 6 reps
Lateral raises 2 x 6 reps
Single tricep extensions 2 x 6 reps
Rope pushdowns 2 x 6 reps

Session 3 – Legs
Squats 3 x 6 reps
Leg press 2 x 6 reps
Lying leg curls 1 x drop set
Reverse smith machine lunge 2 x 8 reps
Calf raises 1 x drop set

On the 6th session of the week, I did the Spartan 300 plan:

Wide pull ups – 25 reps
Deadlifts – 60kg x 50 reps
Push ups – 50 reps
Single dumbbell snatch – 15kg x 25 reps each arm
Floor wipers – 60kg x 50 reps
Box jumps – 50 reps
Wide pull ups – 25 reps

This proved to be the most gruelling session of the week. Lactic acid built up and I couldn’t manage to complete all the exercises in 1 set each. Again, I am continuing the plan and will conquer it soon.

This little project really helped me regain my focus and I feel like my off season has good balance now. I work hard and eat well 6 days per week and still enjoy my cheat meal and ½ bottle of wine on Saturday night.

Here are Johns before and after photos: