Here’s how you can easily maintain 8-12% body fat year round without constant dieting, without food restriction, without using any supplements, without doing cardio, and without needing more than 40 minutes a week to train.
The Ideal Body Composition
Before I’d gotten into fitness and figured all this stuff out, just the idea of having a six-pack seemed like the coolest thing ever. Having that lean 8 to 12% body fat composition as a guy just looks so good. All the best athlete and movie star physiques that you see tend to be somewhere in that range, but a lot of people don’t even know whether getting there and staying there is even feasible long term.
The Reality of Maintaining 8-12% Body Fat
At this point, now I have had a six-pack for years, I’ve stayed in the 8 to 12% body fat range, and it has not been a difficult grind to do. If it was, I wouldn’t bother, because at some point you realize that life is more important than punishing yourself to achieve some arbitrary fitness goals. So many people get lean in a way that’s not sustainable, and they may end up somewhere close, but then quickly rebound back and never get to keep the results of their efforts at losing fat and getting lean. In my mind, if you can’t even keep the results that you’ve gotten for your efforts, then what’s the point?
What I want is to be able to walk around year-round, look fantastic, feel good, be able to be progressing with my training, and eat and drink the things I want without worrying about it. That is what I’ve managed to achieve—that is my reality now and has been for a number of years. In the context of a life where you feel good, you can eat what you want, your training’s fantastic, and on top of all of that, you have a six-pack, you’re lean, you look in the mirror and love your physique—that is absolutely 100% worth it.
That’s what I want to share with you today—how I sustain this lean body composition year-round, year after year, and how you can do the same thing. I was not born with lean, ripped genetics. This has been a decade-long process to get to where I am now, but it’s all replicable. My students implement the same process and get the same results, so you can do it too.
A Note On Sex Differences In Body Composition
Bear in mind, if you’re a guy, this 8 to 12% body fat range ultimately is, in my experience, a healthy, achievable place to get to. If you’re a woman, this would look more like 16 to 20%. You’re not going to have a six-pack because male and female physiques are different, but you’re going to look equally good—toned, slim, lean, and athletic—the feminine equivalent of what we want as guys. Either way, it’s the same process; the numbers will just differ.
How to easily maintain 8-12% body fat year-round
Principle #1: Muscle Mass
The first most fundamental thing you need to understand when you’re looking at getting to a lean body composition and one that you can maintain is that to get lean, you need to build a lot of muscle mass. This is counterintuitive because a lot of people I speak to just want to get ripped. They want to be lean and athletic—they don’t want to be big bodybuilders. But to get lean, you are going to need to build as much muscle as physically possible. Without building a lot of muscle, getting to 10% body fat is not cool, it’s not fun, and it’s not sustainable—you just look skinny.
If you’re going to remove a lot of weight from your body by dropping body fat (and most people have much more body fat than they realize they need to lose to get to their goal body composition), then you are going to need to replace that weight with something else, and the only thing that can be is muscle mass. Fundamentally, your body is always trying to keep you at a healthy weight range, so if you’re a normal figure but don’t have the body composition that you want, then recomping is going to require you replacing a bunch of your current fat mass with muscle mass. While this fat loss process can be quick, easy, and quite simple, the muscle mass building does take time. Your first priority, if you want to make that shift, should be building muscle as fast as possible.
Until you start to build some serious amounts of muscle, you’re not going to be able to get down to around 10% body fat without looking very skinny and emaciated. It’s not going to feel good, it’s not going to look good, and it’s not going to be something you can sustain or want to sustain at all. So just that first step of building muscle mass is going to make sustaining a lower body fat percentage much easier, because at a given percentage, you’re now at a much higher, healthier weight, so your body’s going to be much happier staying there.
Principle #2: Adequate Nutrition
Assuming we’ve built that muscle and now we’ve gotten to that body fat percentage we’re sitting where we want to sit, the next thing you want to do is keep building muscle, of course, because it’s going to keep improving this whole process and lowering the comfortable level of body composition. The most important thing for making staying there effortless (again, it’s kind of counterintuitive, but it makes this whole process literally happen by default) is fuelling yourself adequately. If you do not provide your body with the proper nutrients that it needs, your appetite does not work properly. A lot of people have the feeling that their appetite is working against them and it’s really hard to lose weight because their hunger is always up. If you don’t give your body the right nutrients, your hunger will always be in overdrive because it’s always trying to get you to eat more to nourish it.
If you lead with nutrient-dense, proper food, it means that as soon as you’ve got enough calories to maintain your weight, your appetite is going to downregulate and work with you to stay lean. It’s not that your body doesn’t want to be lean—if you’ve got enough muscle mass, it’s very happy being around this 10% mark—but it wants you to fuel it properly. The only way it can tell you to go get more nutrients is by increasing hunger. So what does that look like? It’s actually extremely simple, and people overcomplicate nutrition so much. But it’s not hard.
Hit A Protein Target
The first thing you want to do is get enough protein in. I say this all the time—1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. I just eat 140 grams of protein a day, and that’s it. If you just start with that, you will realize your appetite crashes and you feel the need to eat so much less food because it’s an essential nutrient for maintaining that muscle mass, and it’s just going to make getting lean and staying lean easier instantly, before you change anything else.
Prioritise Nutrient Density
The next thing you can do, which is again extremely simple, is just eat whole foods. Prioritize eating nutrient-dense foods as your main source of energy, and you will find that you need so much fewer calories to feel satisfied, and you just won’t want to overeat. For me, this looks very much like meat, seafood, eggs, dairy, and fruit as the main parts of my diet. The basic principle is just whole foods, single ingredients, prioritize nutrient density, and you’ll make this whole process so effortless.
So there are the two basic things: get as much muscle mass on you as possible, and fuel yourself as well as you can. On a long-term timeline, that is all I do to stay at this 8 to 12% body fat range. My appetite works with me. If I start to gain body fat, I will feel worse, and I will feel less hungry. At the level of muscle mass that I’m at now, over time my appetite just auto-regulates and keeps me lean, which is a pretty awesome reality to be living because it means you don’t have to be worrying about it—your six-pack is just part of your life.
How Do You Get Low Body Fat In The First Place?
But then the question comes up: how do you get there in the first place? Because if you’re currently sitting at 20% body fat, it’s all well and good to say build muscle and protein, but if you’re not where you want to be now, how do you actually make that change rapidly? That is an excellent question, and that is where at this point we can talk about calorie deficits and about intentionally manipulating energy to make changes to body composition.
The basic principle here is that you just need to get lean once, and then you’re good. So, only once you have nailed the first two points—you’re training to build strength, and you’re gaining muscle consistently as a result of that, and you’re fueling your body with enough protein and with whole foods so your appetite’s working properly—then, if you have body fat to lose, what you can do is implement a calorie deficit, track your body weight, and actually intentionally drop fat until you get to that range that you’re happy with. I can talk more about the specifics of that in another video, but just know that you really only have to get lean once. That process may take 4 to 12 weeks, or it might take multiple 12-week blocks of running a calorie deficit and losing weight intentionally. But once you get there (and we’re just talking a handful of months), once you get to that end-goal range of body fat, you literally only have to do these two things, and you get to keep the results for the rest of your life. The only caveat is that you do the fat loss properly and sustainably. But assuming you do that right, get there in a healthy way, and don’t rush it, it is then yours to enjoy.
A Leaner You
I can honestly say staying lean and looking fantastic can be the most simple, easy, enjoyable process ever. So I hope this gives you some insight into how possible that is and what the important things for that process actually look like. If you’re interested in this process and want to learn how you can start building that muscle to get this whole process underway, read this next.