How to actually get lean, step by step (40min/week)

In this video, I’m going to show you exactly how you can get lean and stay there forever whilst feeling great and doing less than 40 minutes a week of structured exercise. So basically you can get this done and walk around with a six pack for the rest of your life. And the reason I want to make this is because I spent a lot of time in the early days confused on how to get lean and how to achieve ultimately the physique that I wanted. Do you need to bulk? Do you need to cut? Do you need to do heavy training or lighter training with higher reps? Do you need to do cardio and if so, do you need to do intervals or slow steady state zone two, should you fast do intermittent fasting or some other form or should you eat frequent small meals to soak metabolism?
What macro ratio should you’re hitting? Some people say low carb ketosis, others say low fat. Do you need lots of training or do you want to do as little as possible? And I didn’t really want to be a bulky bodybuilder, just lean and define. So is the approach for that somehow different too if you want a bulk up and be really big as well? And how do I avoid getting bulky in the process? Should you give up drinking? Is there just a simple diet I can stick to that will get me the results? What do you actually need to do? Thankfully, nearly a decade on I can safely say I have the answers to all these questions and while yeah, the process takes time, like anything, it’s a whole lot simpler than what the fitness world makes it out to be. So with the right method, any healthy male can gets it 10, 12% body fat and keep a six pack year round.
And same goes for the equivalent for any healthy female. And the good news is once you do achieve this, not only does the result maintain itself effortlessly, but you can actually just keep improving long term with the same method that you took to get there. Because if you do it right, it is very easy and very time efficient and so there’s really no reason to stop to the whiteboard. So one way or another, regardless of the amount of fat and muscle on your body, you basically have a range within which your body is comfortable sitting. So for you, being on the slimmer end might look like the bottom of your range and being on the slightly beefier end might look like in the top of your range. You go beyond this, you getting into the overweight range where your body’s not happy, you have downsides and the same for below it.
You start feel the effects of being underweight. And so in theory, at any point in time you can be sitting anywhere within your healthy weight range and be happy functioning. Well look like a normal person if you want to change your body composition. So get leaner, which is the point of this video. That means you need basically less of a proportion of this weight coming from body fat than you currently have, which means you need to reduce your overall body fat, but it also means you then need to replace that body fat weight with something and that’s something the only thing it can be is muscle mass. And the reason we don’t really have a choice here is because say you’re here somewhere in the middle of your body’s happy weight range and you just lost a bunch of body fat, you didn’t lose any muscle mass, you just lost body fat.
You just kept your muscle mass where it is. Now realistically, that wouldn’t happen if you just hit a calorie deficit. You’d lose both, but I’m just going to keep the point simple here. You lose body fat, you get leaner by definition, and now you’re here. What’s going to happen is your body’s quickly going to kick into gear and say, Hey, we’re underweight. We need to do something about this. It’s going to increase your appetite, decrease your natural energy output, and it’s going to fight against you basically until you eat enough, hit enough of an energy surplus over time to get back into that range. It doesn’t care if that weight comes from fat or muscle and if it’s a quick turn around, then it’s likely it’s going to be fat that you gain back anyway. And this is the cycle a lot of people get caught into.
In reality, they’ll be losing both body fat and muscle because they’re not doing anything to prevent muscle growth. They’ll just exercise more, eat less and they’ll drop weight. But they find that there’s this limit to how much weight they can lose and sustain and it’s like their body’s doing everything it can to work against them to maintain that weight loss. People think they’re the problem, what’s going on? Here’s the thing. Fat loss can be quick and easy, but if you don’t replace the fat with muscle, you’re never going to be able to sustain that weight loss at any reasonably lean level. And the thing is, muscle takes a lot longer to gain. It’s a much lower process Fat loss. You can knock off half a kilo a week, drop six kilos very comfortably within a 12 week period. Muscle gain is much slower and harder and the more you build, the more advanced you get, the longer it takes.
The good thing about that is that muscle mass, it doesn’t go anywhere faster either. It is much more permanent. If you have a process in place to be building muscle over time, then even if you take long periods off training and doing nothing, it’s very quick to regain once you gain it the first time. And so if we want to be able to drop this amount of body fat, then basically we need build this much muscle mass and the sooner we can get to doing that, the sooner we can actually get the fat off and keep it off and be at our goal level of leanness. And so that would look like over time our weight going like this and either as we go dropping body fat or at the end of a big cycle, dropping body fat. The body fat part is quite easy, but the thing that determines our ultimate end result is the amount of muscle we can build and people underestimate just how much muscle they need to build to be able to lose the amount of fat necessary to be at their goal level of leanness within their healthy weight range.
Muscle building is hard. No one accidentally blows up and looks like a bodybuilder from building too much muscle. It takes years and years of diligence with the right method knowing what you’re doing to build significant amounts of it. Believe me, I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’ve experienced all this when I was much earlier in my training career and within my healthy weight range, I just wanted to be lean. I didn’t really care about being a big bodybuilder and so I was like, cool, I’ll just cut and get leaner what they say. And then I dropped down and I got lean. I got to kind of a goal of 10% body fat, but I just hadn’t built the muscle necessary, so I felt like shit and basically had to at some point turn around and gain pretty much all of fat back and some so that I could just get back to my weight range and start building muscle mass.
And it wasn’t until I’d done that for a few years with these cycles of cutting back down that I finally got to this goal level I was at here within this range and not only obviously did I feel a lot better and actually was able to sustain that, but I looked rather than just scrawny actually strong and athletic and lean. My second lesson of learning this was into those years when I had trained a lot of my upper body and still had to developed the musculature of my legs that much due to not really caring about it, but there was still this kind of cap on where I could get to, I would cut down, but I couldn’t get that lean. I didn’t look that impressive. And it was like months into just training legs, consistently doing squats, Nordics, and actually building up some strength on them and we’re talking bear in mind one rep a week, but doing something to actually promote the growth of those muscles.
Suddenly I got shredded and I wasn’t even putting much effort into my diet compared to before. Again, thinking about dipping below here, it takes a lot of diligence and work and fighting against your body, but once I sort of built up the remaining half of my body’s muscles, it meant that cutting to that same level of leanness was doing this. And so it took no effort. It almost happened by default. And so one of the weirdest things and a way that I tell people, you need to train your entire body. You need to train legs even if you just want callisthenics movements and a six pack, the way that you get lean is by developing all the muscles of your body, building up my quads and glutes literally got me ripped. Think of this like this being you. And on the inside you’ve got sort of this hard outline, right?
That’s your muscle mass. Most people don’t have nearly as much of this as they think and what’s covering it and making up for a large majority of their size is this wobbly jelly layer, which is their body fat. And so most people who are walking around and haven’t developed their strength to really high levels have a bit of muscle mass underneath, but the majority of their shape comes from this jelly layer. Their body fat, which is why they have no definition. And the shape looks very different to someone who is lean at the same weight. But if we remove all that jelly and just are left with a small cladding of muscle around our bones, we’re left with a stick figure and it’s not the goal. We don’t want to just go from being soft to being a twig. We want to recomp. And so if we focus on building up this inner layer and reinforcing it, adding more, yeah, the outside also expands, but then we can cut that down.
We can suck some of that jelly out and suddenly we’ve replaced body fat with muscle mass and we have more definition, more shape, obviously more physical ability, and we look better. As I said before, most people have so much more fat to lose than they realise, which means they also have so much more muscle to build than they realise. If you’re sitting at 85 kilos at 25% body fat, that means without building any muscle, you’re going to need to cut down to 71 to be 10% body fat, which is a massive reduction in body weight. And if you’re thinking you look kind of normal around here, then this is going to look skinny. But if you built just five kilos of lean muscle, then you could be that same body composition at closer to 77 kilos, which is a huge difference much closer to your original weight.
Okay, so hopefully this is driving home the point that muscle is important, probably a lot more important than you’ve realised if you’re not close to your goal level of leanness. So what do we do about it? Well, basically there’s two factors at play here. The first, and by far the most important is training because training is like the signal that you send to your body to work on that skeletal muscle and build it as fast as it can. And then the building blocks the actual physical materials you provide to do that. Building is your protein intake. And I talk a lot about this, but don’t overcomplicate it. Once that signal is sent, once you’ve done effective training for the week, the body gets to work. If the building blocks are there in terms of your daily protein target, your body will use them. If not, you’re limiting your rate of growth.
It’s like you’ve got a sculptor going to work on your frame, adding muscle where he can based on your instructions every week. If the materials are there for him to sculpt with, he’ll use them. If they’re not, then that becomes the limiting factor and there’s just no building that he can do. And if you do all that right, then ultimately the limiting factor on your rate of muscle growth, it’s the sculptor himself. It’s your body because you can send the signals effectively as possible, give clear instructions every week on how to grow. You can provide all the protein, all the building blocks possible for that growth to occur. And the limit comes down to your body’s own internal processes, how quickly it can build muscle. And so if you get your training dialled in and super efficient, 40 minutes a week is plenty. Got other videos you can go watch diving deep on this for protein intake, 1.8 grammes per kilogramme of gold body weight somewhere around this ideal range per day is ample.
You won’t get benefits beyond that. And so that is simple. The first thing we want to nail when we’re trying to get lean is to make sure those two factors for muscle growth are there and that they’re dialled so that we know our body’s growing muscles as quickly as we can because that is long-term going to be the limiting factor for how fast we can get to a really, really lean body composition within our ideal weight range. Once you’ve dialled in those two factors, training and protein, you’re gaining muscles as quickly as possible. We’re seeing our weight climb up within the bounds of our healthy weight range. The muscular structure underneath our figure here is getting bigger and more shapes being added. We can then look at speeding up this whole process and sucking some of that fat out. And all this looks like talk about energy balance.
The one dial you have control over for determining body fat is your calorie intake. If we hit an overall calorie deficit consistently on a weekly basis, it’s like sucking out this jelly layer, the body fat surrounding our muscle so that we can sooner rather than later see the shape that we’re building underneath. Similar to muscle growth, you can do a certain amount per week after which things become unproductive. But what we’re looking at is as a general rule, half a kilo a week, you can quite comfortably drop while still continuing to build muscle, still continuing to function while still being happy, and of course making sure all that weight is body fat, not muscle. And so what that looks like is roughly a 500 calorie deficit per day, and that’s on average over the week. So you sum up seven days, you look at the total energy intake and you compare that to what you would’ve needed to stay at your current weight.
If you can be on average in a daily 500 calorie deficit, then you’re going to drop this weight. That’s just how the thermodynamics works. And bit by bit, as you build the muscle, you’ll see the fat reduce at the same time. And this is the fastest way to recomp bear in mind that this is going to work if you are somewhere within this range, if you’re below, it’s going to be harder and the focus should just be really on building muscle to get up to here. And if you’re up here, then you can really go hard on this and get down quicker. But for most people, if you’ve got some body fat to lose, then this is a very valid strategy. As soon as you’ve got those other things in place and you’re building the muscle, this is a very sensible way to speed up the whole recomposition process and get to somewhere that you’re happy with and like the look of faster.
And so you can do this for about 12 weeks before things start to get difficult. And so that means a six kilo drop. Again, these are average numbers. This is all what you can expect to do pretty reasonably. Again, if you’re lighter and smaller, it’ll probably be a bit slower. If you’re bigger, have more weight to lose, it’ll be quicker. But it gives you ballpark figures to aim for. So you drop that weight and there’s this outer layer now gone, and we’re now closer to being at the level of leanness that we want to be. If six kilos isn’t enough, you can have two weeks off, eat to maintenance, reset, enjoy food again, and then you can get back into doing this. And you can do as many of these 12 week cycles as you need to. Basically you reach the lower bounds of your healthy weight range, and at that point you may as well wait until you’ve built enough muscle to have more fat to lose while staying in your healthy weight range because there’s just no point dipping below here because it just makes everything harder.
Being in here makes muscle gain slower and more difficult, makes you feel worse, and it’s basically just not sustainable. And so within the bounds of being in this healthy weight range, feeling good, we can do this as much as we want, but once we reach the bottom, we may as well stop and wait until we’ve got some more room to move. And so in terms of tangible numbers here, there’s a few ways to know that you’re actually at the bottom of this line, but it essentially comes down to how you’re feeling. You’ll be able to tell if your hunger’s jacked up and you feel lethargic and you’re not enjoying training as much. These are all indicators that you might be getting too low within this range. And the best thing you can do is just allow yourself to eat more focus on training and protein intake and that will allow your body to build.
And the sooner you do that, the sooner you build more muscle and gain weight, the sooner you’re going to then be in a position to come back to a deficit, drop down further and get leaner. And honestly, knowing this sooner would’ve saved me so much time. I spent a lot of time down here trying to stay lean and then not focus as much on building muscle. And then that slowed me down from just getting to the work which I eventually got to of just building as much muscle as possible, allowing myself to gain a bit of fat in the process, get bigger gain weight because then when I did come down to lean out, I could actually get way lean, way easier and didn’t ever have to experience the negativity of being too small. And then just finally in terms of hitting this calorie deficit, you don’t have to overcomplicate this and the best way to make this sort of thing happen is by tracking results.
And so I used to go hard on tracking everything and trying to be super anal on the intake side of things, which is tempting because it gives you this sense of control and awareness. But in reality, energy intake food as well as energy output are also complicated that any sense of accuracy you really have is essentially an illusion and it’s much more reliable to just track your body weight daily and look at weekly averages and just see what happens. What I’ve eventually switched to over the years is just making a plan that I know is a rough daily structure that I’m going to hit, and then I very loosely implement that, making a lot of guesses, but being reasonably consistent in how I approach it. And then I can see if after a week or two of cutting, if my weight’s coming down half kilowatt week, I know cool, whatever I’m doing is working and there’s no need to complicate things or make it harder.
If it’s not coming down quite at that rate, I can know I can either reduce the total intake on my plan, I can just be a bit stricter with implementation. And if it’s going too fast, I know, okay, I can back off. I can either add more food in or I can just be looser and listen to my appetite a bit more. But the numbers ultimately don’t lie, even though they’ll fluctuate a lot. If you look at weekly averages, you can very quickly get a sense of whether what you’re doing is working or not. And then it’s just a matter of writing it for long enough that you reach your goal, as I said, in as many 12 week cycles as it takes. And when I say goal, I mean the point where it’s no longer fun and it’s time to stop cutting and go back to focusing purely on muscle gain.
So in light of this explanation, hopefully all the questions I brought up at the start of this video have been answered, but just to clarify a couple of things, do you need to do cardio to get lean? No cardio will expand energy, but the way we approach dialling in diet to hit a calorie deficit means that all of that’s going to work out in the wash anyway. Once you’re consistent with your food intake, you have a plan, you execute and you watch what happens to your weight, all the various lifestyle factors that go into how much energy you burn on a daily basis are going to get figured out by watching what happens to your weekly average body weight. So you want to approach cardio as a thing you do to make yourself feel good for health and wellbeing for your mentals rather than something that you need to do and then calculate into your overall energy balance and user’s weight you deficit.
So a healthy way of using exercise training makes you stronger, gives you muscle mass, cardio makes you feel good. So literally just do whatever you like, do what you enjoy. It’s not going to determine whether you hit a calorie deficit or not. And so while it has a place for getting lean, it’s not part of our equation. And then there’s a million questions that pop up about diet and what you need to be eating, but there is no special diet that you need to eat. The one you want to eat is again, the one that makes you feel good because our goal within the constraints of the things I’ve already outlined is to enjoy the process as much as possible so that our life is bettered by all of this effort rather than fitness detracting from our enjoyment of the day-to-day. Because stimulating our body to grow stronger, fueling it with the nutrients it needs to function well, that should be a positive experience.
That’s the whole point. So no, it doesn’t matter what diet you eat as long as you’re hitting your protein intake and hitting your calorie target and seeing that result with your weight loss. If you are trying to lose body fat deliberately eat whatever diet works for you. And if you’re in doubt, generally less processed whole foods is the way to go for the majority of what you eat. And we can go on through this list fasting, know you don’t need to do it if it’s the way you enjoy eating throughout the day, eat like that. If you want to have breakfast, have breakfast. It’s all about total intake. It doesn’t matter. And the last one I’ll touch on is macro ratios. Obviously we’ve got a protein target, but it doesn’t matter how many carbs and fats we eat, again, no, but generally a balance is best.
And so I think if you eat what’s most tasty and enjoyable, again, it’s a pretty good indicator that you’re doing things right. We need fats to function and carbs are generally very useful for intense training. And so if you hit your protein and then eat whatever you want for the rest of the day while hitting your energy target, you’re usually going to be on the right track. If there’s other questions I haven’t addressed or that you don’t know how they’re answered by this framework, then please drop them in the comments below so I can address them. So let’s how you really get lean. I know it’s not a quick fix. Doing this is all going to take probably a lot longer than you’d hoped because you probably have a whole lot less muscle on you than you might’ve thought. The good news is once you build the muscle and then cut the body fat off the top, you really don’t have to do anything else and you get to keep that forever.
With the amount of muscle that I’ve built, I mean now this 10, 12% body fat range where I’ve got a six pack is just comfortable for me. And if I gain more, it’s almost like gaining any more fat than that. I go beyond this comfortable range and my body naturally reduces my appetite so that I cut back down. So being lean, once you’ve built enough muscle, being in your healthy weight range that your body sustains automatically is actually shredded, which is a pretty cool reality considering a lot of people say it’s impossible to maintain forever. Getting super lean is really hard and unsustainable. It’s like, well, maybe getting super lean is yes, but for the look that looks fantastic, beach lean and still healthy without looking like a bodybuilder who’s on stage prep, it’s only unsustainable if you don’t have enough muscle and you’re down here if you’re in this region, then once you’re there, you don’t have to do anything, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful truth.
And so please don’t ever think that this is not an achievable thing. Just realise the thing that stands between you and that reality, and it will probably take a lot of years to build that muscle. But the good thing is that 40 minutes a week, some gymnastics rings and a few wait firsts, and you’ve got everything you need and you don’t have to have some crazy diet, just hit that protein target in one meal a day and you’re good. So action points. Step one, go get a training process in place that’s going to get your body building muscle as quickly as possible. If you want to implement my method, do that in 40 minutes a week with some home equipment. Then you can start here. Step two, dial in your protein intake to support that training and maximise the response your body can make. 1.8 grammes per kilogramme of go of body weight per day. And then step three, once you’ve sorted the above, you can go and start implementing calorie deficit to speed up that recomposition process and get as lean as possible as soon as possible. Do 12 weeks, knock off six kilos and see where you’re at. If you want to start learning more about this process in general, watch this and not chat to you soon.

This video outlines a comprehensive approach to achieving and maintaining a lean, muscular physique without excessive exercise or restrictive dieting. [00:08] The key points are:

• There is no need for extreme dieting or extensive cardio. [16:36] The focus should be on developing an enjoyable, sustainable lifestyle that supports muscle growth and fat loss. [17:22]
• Once the desired body composition is achieved, it can be easily maintained within a healthy weight range with minimal ongoing effort. [01:28]
• Building muscle mass is the foundation for long-term leanness. This requires an effective training program (just 40 minutes per week) and sufficient protein intake.
• Once muscle growth is established, a moderate calorie deficit (500 calories per day) can be used to lose fat while preserving muscle. [11:24] This can be repeated in 12-week cycles until the desired level of leanness is reached. [13:05]