I don’t believe in “good luck”. One man is no more lucky than the next. If someone appears to be more fortunate than you, it is not chance, for that person has exactly the same probability of success as you do.

What is more likely is that he works harder to seize each opportunity that comes his way.

Which is better: one success in two, or two in four? I can only say for certain which one takes more effort.

Thousands of motorists are at risk of being fined up to £1,000 because they are unwittingly driving without a valid licence.

They risk prosecution after failing to spot the extremely small print on their photocard licence which says it automatically expires after 10 years and has to be renewed – even though drivers are licensed to drive until the age of 70. The fiasco has come to light a decade after the first batch of photo licences was issued in July 1998, just as they start to expire.

Motoring organisations blamed the Government for the fiasco and said ‘most’ drivers believed their licences were for life. A mock-up driving licence from 1998 when the photocards were launched shows the imminent expiry date as item ’4b’ They said officials had failed to publicise sufficiently the fact that new-style licences – unlike the old paper ones – expire after a set period and have to be renewed.

To rub salt into wounds, drivers will have to pay £17.50 to renew their card – a charge which critics have condemned as a ‘stealth tax’ and which will earn the Treasury an estimated £437million over 25 years. Official DVLA figures reveal that while 16,136 expired last summer, so far only 11,566 drivers have renewed, leaving 4,570 outstanding. With another 300,000 photocard licences due to expire over the coming year, experts fear the number of invalid licences will soar, putting thousands more drivers in breach of the law and at risk of a fine.

At the heart of the confusion is the small print on the tiny credit-card-size photo licence, which is used in conjunction with the paper version.

4b: The small print on the back of the driving licence is easy to miss. Just below the driver name on the front of the photocard licence is a series of dates and details – each one numbered. Number 4b features a date in tiny writing, but no explicit explanation as to what it means. The date’s significance is only explained if the driver turns over the card and reads the key on the back which states that ’4b’ means ‘licence valid to’.

Even more confusingly, an adjacent table on the rear of the card sets out how long the driver is registered to hold a licence – that is until his or her 70th birthday. A total of 25million new-style licences have been issued but – motoring experts say – drivers were never sufficiently warned they would expire after 10 years.

The DVLA said failure to update the photocard after 10 years fell into the same category as failing to inform them of a change of address.

CHECK YOUR LICENCE EXPIRY DATE!!!

Over the past few years, I’ve started and stopped training at the gym several times.

I start because I’ve look at my body and think: “God, Pete, you could do a little better, couldn’t you?” And I stop… out of frustration usually. I get annoyed that, despite all the effort I put in, I don’t seem to change much. It looks like exactly the same person staring back in the mirror. I reckon that the lack of a ‘visual yardstick’ to reassure the gym-goer that he’s making progress has got to be one of the major reasons for quitting. It was certainly behind the many false-starts I’ve had at the gym. If only I’d known this then, I might have hung in a bit longer.

I don’t know about you but I need feedback. Even if it’s just to tell me just how well I’m doing, and to make me feel good. If I’m training on my own, I have to provide this all by myself.

The best feedback is to be able to look in the mirror and go: “Bloody hell – where did those muscles come from?” But the harsh reality is that this almost certainly will not happen for the first few months of any training program. For some, even longer.

So anyone who starts training must tough it out for quite a while, almost blindly, trusting that they’ll start to see results three months down the line.

Why is this so? I’ll try to explain in a moment.

Many people don’t have the patience to wait all this time to get visible results. They will stop and say simply that the gym just doesn’t work for them. Usually around the start of February! Well, if they knew just why it was taking so long to show, maybe they’d be a little more persistent. It all happens soon enough, I realised.

I’ve seen the reasons explained in books before but it didn’t really register. It was probably presented in geek-speak and didn’t stick in my mind. I only understood it after a little study and so I will try to render what I learned more simply and more digestibly….

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Everyone’s body is different, so all times and measures will vary according to your own body. But not as massively as you might think.

FACT: The number and types of fibres inside your muscles are predetermined and fixed.
Before you were even born, your genes had already decided just how many fibres you were going to get in  your muscles, and what types they would be. No amount of training or good diet will ever change this, whatever people may tell you.

But bloody good training and diet will improve the size and strength of these muscle fibres.

I’m not going to go into the whole training thing – you can find this out for yourself using a whole host of information available in books and on the net if you really want to – but I will explain why you don’t get immediate results.

When you train hard, you are putting your body under stress. And your body’s response to having to being made to lift heavy weights is to try to adapt itself quickly so that it can do this more effectively.

“Great! So why am I not getting bigger? Cos I’ve been lifting heavier and heavier weights for two months now and I can’t see any difference.”

This statement hits the nail square on the head. You are lifting heavier weights, and so your body is getting stronger. It is just that your body gets stronger by two separate mechanisms. You are observing just the first one at work. The first mechanism is not visible, as it is only the second that results in muscle growth.

Your body is only really interested in the bottom line: performance. It needs to be strong above everything else. Survival of the fittest and all that. Muscle bulk is just a fortunate side-effect of this increase in performance. You want it, but your body sees it as hard bloody work – especially when there’s an easier and less energy-costly way to make you stronger. This is the invisible first mechanism which I was talking about.

When you’ve never trained seriously before,  your body is pretty poorly prepared for serious muscular exercise. It simply isn’t fully wired. The infrastructure is all there but, a bit like the phone lines in new-build apartment, the sockets are all there but you’ve got to get it all connected up properly before it works at full throttle.

For example, to flex your biceps your nervous system triggers the nerves attached to millions of individual fibres inside the muscle strands causing the whole muscle to contract powerfully. What you may not realise is that, in an untrained state, your body uses only a small fraction of its available muscle fibres because only a limited amount of “wires” (nerves cells) are actually connected. When your brain says “flex” – this limited number of nerve cells go ping and those muscle fibres that are plugged in contract.

In the first couple of months of training, your body seeks first to improve it’s internal wiring. This doesn’t cost much from a biological point of view, so improving your nerve-muscle connections means that your muscles can work harder without getting bigger.

Only when your muscles are fully wired in, and there is no further scope for improvement here, does your body start to properly put muscle mass on.

So – the bottom line? Stick at it and don’t give up after just two months. You’re probably nearly there by that stage!