Forget Everything You Know About Fitness
Forget everything you know about fitness. If you want a body that looks incredible but is also mobile, strong, pain-free, then I’m about to give you the fastest route to get there in a way that actually works and will actually allow you to sustain the result.
Why Most Fitness Routines Fail
Most people who are trying to get in better shape find themselves with one of two problems: either their routine, their approach, doesn’t work, or it’s not sustainable.
It’s a very rare person who figures out how to get both right at once—an approach that’s effective at creating change and actually fits into their life so they can sustain it long term and have no reason to fall off or quit.
Those are the people that you see with insane physiques who don’t spend their entire lives in the gym or take a bunch of drugs, steroids, and sacrifice their health in order to get there, which isn’t many people. But they do exist, and it is possible if you implement the following that I’m about to take you through in order.
Nail these things sequentially, one by one. Get these things right, you will see tangible progress in your body within 3 months and literally be able to get to your goal physique within the next couple of years. This is a process we’ve tried and tested. It works. It’s brutally effective. It gets results about as fast as possible, but it’s also one that is so efficient in terms of time and effort required that I am yet to meet someone who can’t easily sustain this within the context of a normal, busy life.
The Three Steps to Achieving Your Dream Physique
Step 1: Nail Muscle Mass
First thing we want to get right is muscle mass. To be effective, your approach needs to get you stronger. The reason your body builds muscle tissue is to be stronger, and so the way you force it to build muscle is by forcing your strength to increase. For your routine to be sustainable, it needs to not take you 5 hours a week plus commute time at the gym in order to stimulate that growth.
So the solution here is maximum-intensity bodyweight strength training. If you do this right, it only needs to take you 40 minutes a week. You can train at home. So, if you do things efficiently, split it up into three sessions a week like most of our clients do. That’s literally going to your gymnastics rings, spending 10 minutes training two movements, and doing that three times a week. It’s less than 40 minutes total. That is all you need.
If you train at constant maximum intensity, learn to scale things, adjust your movements to match your maximum level of strength at all times, at every point during every rep, then it does not take long. A couple of minutes per movement per week is ample. It’s a very potent style of training. We’re basically cutting out all the waste, and so trying to do any more than that is going to only dilute the intensity of your training and make it impossible to sustain that level of output.
So, you basically train a movement until you’re not having fun. You stop, and that’s it. So, a couple of minutes per movement. If you train in this way, then you’re building strength across the entire range of motion as well, and so you only need about six movements.
So, all we use your go of time just to build up to a really high level of strength on each of those movement patterns. And so this 40 minutes a week of max-intensity training allows you to do that and see weekly progress with your strength. And as long as you’re getting stronger, you know you’re building muscle, which means this step is covered.
Forty minutes a week most people find very sustainable, and then your exercise, your training for the week, is covered.
So, that’s muscle mass. We got lots of videos covering this if you want to dive deeper. That’s the training protocol: make sure you’re getting stronger, make sure you’re not wasting any time with your training. Anything more than 40 minutes is getting unnecessary; there’s inefficiencies. So fix that, build up to these six movement goals, and you’re sweet.
Step 2: Master Your Diet
The next step is diet. So, for your diet to be effective, it just basically needs to do one thing, which is hit your basic daily protein target. For that to be sustainable, we need to not be sacrificing our social life, giving up the food we enjoy. Because once diet becomes a trade-off between hitting targets versus enjoying our life, eating food we like, spending time with friends and family, then it won’t be long before we’re losing consistency, falling off, and quitting entirely, which again is the reason many people do not succeed with their fitness approaches.
So, the solution here: you’ve got a daily protein target. 1.8 g per kilogram of goal body weight is plenty. We just want to hit that however is easiest. And I honestly mean whatever routine allows this to be in the most seamless, enjoyable way, that is what we want. Thinking we need to spread protein out evenly over the day or time it with our workouts and stuff, these things are all just unnecessary myths that get in the way of us doing this properly.
So, what I found to be easiest is eating 100 to 120 g of protein at lunch from delicious meats, dairy, eggs, and then I can literally eat whatever I want throughout the rest of the day. Do whatever is easiest for you. But if you’re preparing a meal for yourself for the day, if you can prioritize protein, then it means that when you want to go and eat out, eat with friends, do something relaxed, you can literally eat whatever you want and the essentials of your diet for the day are already covered.
So, that’s diet. You want to hit a daily protein target, but it does not matter how you do it. We want to avoid, as much as possible, restricting our eating day-to-day and eat food that tastes delicious, that we enjoy, that’s nutritious, so that we remove all downsides to hitting our protein target. And again, it’s effortlessly sustainable long term because it’s something we want to do.
Step 3: Get Lean
The final piece to this puzzle is getting lean. Low body fat is what makes us look ripped, makes our faces look good, basically gets us the overall look that we want from our fitness.
If you’re already lean, then just doing these first two steps will allow you to keep that, and your body composition will only keep improving as you build more muscle by getting stronger.
If you’re not already as lean as you want to be, then to get there, we just have to lose some body fat.
Now, for this step to be effective, we just need to hit a calorie deficit consistently, of the right size, for long enough that we lose the amount of fat we want to lose and get to our goal body composition.
For this to be sustainable, it needs to not be so extreme that it puts us in this state of hunger and craving and inevitably leads to binging and falling off the wagon. Like with the basics of our diet hitting protein, it also needs to not require sacrifice, not require us giving up the foods we like, drinking, social occasions.
It also needs to not be this constant headache where we constantly have to think about what we’re eating, weigh everything, track everything in and out, and have it be this constant, complicated headache.
Because even though fat loss is the piece of this whole equation that is finer, unlike the other two things, we still need to be able to sustain it for anywhere between 4 to 12 weeks and potentially multiple stints of 12 weeks, which is a significant amount of time and much more than you’ll be willing to sacrifice sanity and a social life and physical well-being to achieve a result for.
So, solution here is to firstly hit a calorie deficit that’s moderate—500 calories a day, losing about half a kilo of body weight a week or thereabouts. Doing this in a way that’s really simple, so just having a basic plan written on a note that you can run and repeat each day, including whatever foods you want, whatever meals you want to eat, drinks, etc.
Making it fit your life rather than trying to make your life fit your diet. And then simply tracking your weekly average body weight, seeing if it’s working, and if it’s not, just adjusting your plan until it is.
And again, once we remove the downsides and suddenly we’re getting away with eating out, eating dessert, drinking, and we start to see our body weight reducing consistently at our goal rate each week, then again, we’ve removed all downside and we’ll only need to stop once we get to the 12-week mark, and it’s been so long that we need a break, or our body fat gets so low that we’re lean enough and now our goal is no longer to lose any more body fat.
So, with fat loss, for it to be effective, we need to be in a calorie deficit. To be sustainable, we need to remove all the downsides of being in that deficit so that we can happily sit there and enjoy the process of getting leaner.
The Bottom Line: Focus on What Matters
Those are the three steps. Do not look for anything else to do in order to get in better shape. If you can nail these three things of getting stronger, hitting your daily protein target, and hitting a calorie deficit of the right level, you will progress as fast as possible. There is nothing else to this. Training does not need to take more than 40 minutes a week. Protein does not have to be harder than one high-protein meal a day. Your calorie deficit does not need to be anything other than a 20% overall reduction in your day’s energy.
If your progress is slow, then it means you’re just not doing one or more of these three things effectively or you’re not being consistent with it, which means you need to remove some of the barriers and make it more sustainable.
Either way, don’t look to do more work. Try and figure out instead how you can do less and just do it better.