How I built my dream body in 40 minutes a week

In the past 4 years I:

• canceled my gym membership
• cut my training down to 40 minutes a week
• stopped restricting my diet and started eating whatever I wanted, as I wanted
• did zero structured cardio or any other training

…and I transformed from this to this:

I unlocked my lifetime strength goals and my dream physique beyond what I even thought was realistic.

Along the way I started teaching this method to others and got them even crazier faster results than me.

I’m going to show you right now the exact path I took to do this.

In descending order of importance I want to show you why:

• less training,
• simpler nutrition, and
• an easier transformation

are the fastest and most effective way to get a truly astonishing result.

1. Training: Less Is More

The first step to all of this is training specifically towards the big six strength goals. The only purpose of my training is to get me to these six goals. Eventually, the closer I get to these strength goals, the closer I am to having all the muscle mass I could want, full range of motion, strength, and mobility. And that is strength that carries over to everything else, every other movement and skill that you want to do, and finally, the ability to be lean effortlessly as a result of that muscle mass.

• Planche pushup
• Front lever row
• Handstand pushup
• One-arm chinup
• Single leg squat + 75% bodyweight
• Nordic curl

I train each of these six movements once a week, constantly at my maximum effort, my maximum strength capacity. I stop as soon as I get gassed, as soon as the training is no longer fun, and I can no longer give it 100%. And that’s essentially it. The power of doing less with your training—of having less movements to work, less training to do each week for those movements—comes down to clarity. It allows you to put all your energy into pushing strength gain on those six goals, and this is what actually gets results: strength gain, progressive overload, getting tangibly stronger on this handful of basic movement patterns.

2. Nutrition: Simpler Is better

The second part to this is nutrition. All I worry about day to day is getting enough protein. It’s the only thing I make sure I get right with my diet every single day as much as possible. Getting sufficient protein maximises training progress, it means my body can gain muscles as fast as possible in response to my strength training, it stops unnecessary hunger (which makes leaning out really easy, and almost happen by default).

All I aim for is 1.8g per kg of goal body weight. So for me at roughly 80kg, that’s about 140 g a day. I get the bulk of this from one meal, usually at lunch. So that might look like 100-120 g of protein from meat, cheese, and eggs. The rest of the day I just eat to appetite. I’ll have some dairy, some fruit, and then literally whatever other meals and desserts I want to eat. Having just one target to hit each day—that I get basically from one meal—means that I’m actually able to get it done every day. And then the rest just falls into place.

3. Strategy: Easier Is Faster

The third part of this was using nutrition strategically to transform as easily as possible. What this looks like is using calorie deficits to speed up the fat loss process, and get lean quicker than would happen naturally just by training and eating protein. A calorie deficit is the only way to force your body to lose fat. When I had excess body fat to lose, doing this allowed me to look good faster, increase my relative strength by reducing my body weight while maintaining muscle mass, and most importantly, once I was lean and happy with how I was looking, it allowed me to go all in on strength and muscle gain—the essential thing long term to looking really good and (obviously) getting really strong.

But for this fat loss process to work, it needed to be easy. Extreme dieting didn’t allow me to sustain it for long enough to actually lose a substantial amount of fat. I got off to a good start, but then I was forced to quit because it was too hard. This process wasn’t fun, it disrupted my training progress, and I still didn’t get lean as a result.

What finally ended up working for me was

a) Limiting calorie deficits to short bursts of 4 to 12 weeks.

If you’re someone with more fat to lose you can just break this up with a diet break of a couple of weeks.

b) Stopping once it’s hard

If fat loss is beneficial it will be physically easy. I learned from many experiences doing this to go until it started to get physically difficult, and then stop. Once hitting a calorie deficit is hard your body is telling you you’re lean enough.

c) Going straight back to eating to appetite

And at that point, the most productive thing to do is gain muscle. Once I was lean I would just go back to eating to appetite. You don’t just spontaneously gain body fat back if you’ve done the fat loss phase right. What actually happens is your muscles start to fill out, you start to gain more size and you feel amazing, and you start actually consistently getting stronger while looking better. and this is the most fun part of the entire process.

d) Coming back to it in 9 months if I wanted to get leaner

I’d then spend a good 9 months focused all in on strength and muscle gain eating to appetite training properly just hitting my protein and enjoying life at my new lean level of body fat, before coming back to do another 4-12 week cut and drop down further.

The Two Paths

That is it. That’s the entire process. At this point in my training career being nearly 10 years into strength training I only really need to do steps one and two, which are very automatic parts of my life at this point: just training for 40 minutes a week and eating high protein lunch; things that I enjoy and make me feel amazing, so there’s no reason to not do them.

With fitness, with body transformation, regardless of your method, if you do everything exactly right, it’s going to take you years. No one to this day has found a shortcut other than just doing these basics effectively and consistently. So considering that, if you want to get in amazing shape you basically have two options:

1. First. you can do what most people do make yourself do hours of exercise each week make your training and nutrition complicated and confusing and make it suck to do requiring increasingly large amounts of willpower just to get it done each week.
2. Or you make it quick simple and easy so that there’s literally no reason not to repeat it every single week for the rest of your life.

What I have found to be fundamentally true is that if you can win that long game, all the results of your dreams are literally yours for the taking.

Anyway, this is the path that has worked for me. I hope there is something in here that’s useful for you! If there is, please drop me a comment or send me a message letting me know what questions you have and what you’d like to learn more about.