How to get an athletic body fast (40 minutes a week)

I’m going to show you right now how you can transform your body into your dream athletic physique, not only fast, but about as fast as physically possible. By training for under 40 minutes a week and just eating one specific meal each day, you’re probably thinking this sounds a bit too good to be true, which I have heard before, believe me. But this is how I’ve gone all my own results. I went from this to this over a short couple of years. It’s how I taught all my students to get their results, which have been even faster people, 60 plus years old men, women, weak people, overweight people, and in this video I’m going to explain what it looks like and exactly why it works just so well despite taking what seems like a ludicrously small amount of time and effort to implement. Lemme ask you a question.
How many times have you put your foot down and said, fuck it, I’m going to get in shape. I’m hitting the gym three, four or five days a week. I’m drinking my protein shakes, I’m eating clean, I’m doing cardio. I’m going to get myself on track, putting the work, be consistent and get a great rig as a result. How many times have you then got frustratingly slow results despite putting in all this effort, working as hard as possible, and then found yourself six months later back where you started work commitments jack up, your social life gets busy, things get in the way, and all of a sudden it’s very difficult to sustain this commitment. You’ve set yourself for your physical fitness and it’s hard. Once you’ve missed a few gym sessions, your routine’s off, it’s very easy to then throw in the towel and give up completely and the cycle repeats itself.
What if I told you that 90% of all that time and effort you were putting in when you go on these spurts of effort, getting in shape is completely wasted? What if you then knew the 10% that does drive results and you could just put all your focus and energy into nailing that 10%. If all you had to do each week was squeeze in 40 minutes of training, make sure you got one high protein meal each day. What do you think that would do for your consistency and for your ability to get those things right? Because this isn’t hypothetical, this is actually very real and honestly, it’s the reason I have the results you see today because by removing everything else, everything that doesn’t matter. Not only have I and my students been able to be very consistent with implementing these things week after week after week, regardless of what life throws at us, but we’re able to put all our focus in truly nailing the stuff that matters, that drives results.
And as counterintuitive as it might seem, that removal of everything else that’s a distraction I think is the key to getting results that you’re truly happy with. So here’s how we do it. When you want to get an athletic physique that looks awesome and is really functional, there’s only two things that drive that look and that is increasing your muscle mass and decreasing your body fat. They’re the only two visible things that you can do to your physique. And so we just want to achieve both of those things as fast as possible, put as much muscle on our bodies as we can and drop our body fat down to a lean body composition where we have definition, we look fantastic as soon as possible. The key thing to understand here that will put you ahead of 99% of people trying to get shape is understanding what the limit is to the rate of that progress.
It’s not how much work you can put in, but your body’s physiological limit on how fast it can adapt to stimulus With our approach. As long as what we are doing with our training and nutrition, as long as it is effective, then the best thing that you can do to speed up results is literally just to make sure that there is no reason whatsoever that could stop you from being consistent so that your body can just continue making those changes. Traditional approach to fitness, because they’re so inefficient, take loads of time, they don’t fit with your social life and your normal routine, and so they make it extremely difficult to stay consistent with. And so even though most of what you’re doing is wasted effort, if you can’t do any of it at all, you’re missing out on that 10% that does drive results and therefore you don’t change.
And that’s if they’re effective. A lot of approaches just don’t even include the 10% that does work, which is insane because then you’re putting in all this effort that doesn’t get you anywhere, which is a recipe for seriously low self-esteem and defeat. So let me explain this a bit better. The physiological upper limit, so let’s say in a week there’s a certain amount of muscle that your body can physically gain if it’s optimally stimulated by strength training and we eat enough protein, give it enough fuel to go and actually take the stimulus and build muscle tissue. So I want to talk about muscle gain first because it’s by far the hardest slowest part of this whole process. We can apply the same principles over to fat loss, which is much easier and simpler, and once you get muscle gain, right, fat loss is a much easier game.
So we can talk about how it applies to both, but let’s take muscle gain. For instance. Let’s say on a weekly basis, there’s a certain amount of muscle mass that you can build theoretically that you body can physiologically grow. That is the upper limit here, okay, muscle. So if we get everything right, if we train optimally to signal as much muscle gain as training can signal and we give our bodies the right amount of protein, the fuel it needs to actually take that signal and go and build muscle mass, then this is the limit for you based on your genetics of how much muscle you can build in a week. The limit is placed, it’s inherent in your body. Now, as I said, if we get everything right, we’ll build that much muscle tissue for the week. As you build more muscle tissue, this will increase.
But the idea is that wherever you are at the moment, that’s your max amount of muscle possible to build. We can increase this bar not by training more, not by eating more. The only way that we can increase this bar is basically by using drugs so we can take steroids that will help us pass our physiological limit. It makes us kind of superhuman, not something that I’m interested in, not something I teach and not something I recommend for anyone who wants to do fitness for the sake of health and wellbeing. So there’s other places you can go to learn about that. For our purposes, there’s no possibility of this increasing. We’ve got a physiological limit. The best thing that we can do is max out those two things. The signal that tells our body, Hey, we want to get to here, and then the building blocks in terms of protein and calories to an extent that it needs to be able to max out its response to that signal.
Now, you’ll be very surprised about what it takes to signal and then supply the fuel necessary for that growth. You can get this signal maxed out if you train constantly in maximum intensity. So only at the limit of your strength across full range motion of the strength movements that you train, you can get that done in about 20 minutes of weekly work and that work if you add in rest time, set up time, all the things that go with that, you can get that done in less than 40 minutes a week. So maximal signal sending to say, Hey, build as much muscle as possible across my entire body 40 minutes a week in terms of fuel to allow that to happen, you start to see diminishing returns after 1.8 grammes of protein per kilogramme of body weight per day or goal body weight, lean body weight.
And so for me at around 7 5 80 kilos, that’s 140 grammes a day. And then after that, I’m getting basically no benefit because again, that’s as much as my body can really use to build that muscle. That’s a very moderate amount. It’s more than a lot of people eat by default, but it’s very, very easy to hit and you can do that by basically hitting one meal a day that has about a hundred grammes of protein in it. That’s what I do at lunch. And then you can literally just eat a normal diet for the rest of the day and you’re done. So that’s it. 40 minutes of training, maximum intensity strength training, build up on six basic movements and a high protein meal at lunch getting a hundred grammes and you have maximised the signal that your body can respond to and then the fuel needed to respond to the signal and build as much muscle as possible for the week.
So that’s very simple. What we want to do is avoid detracting in any way from this. And so the main thing that happens, which is very common, is training in a way that’s not constant. Maximal intensity, doing a lot of maximal distracting work that takes your energy away without sending the same potent signal to your body to grow or trying to train so much that you end up then not being able to sustain it and then not training either at all or consistently enough to get in amongst all the distracting filler work, the sub maxim work enough maximum work to signal as much muscle gain as possible. As I said, if that’s all you do, it only takes 40 minutes, but almost no one does constant maximum intensity work. Most people get a few seconds per set max, which means maybe a minute per hour of time spent working out.
I’ve got other videos you can watch on that, but that is the risk. It’s not doing these two things. And this is the problem I see with almost everyone that comes to me not getting results. It’s that this isn’t in place or this isn’t in place. It’s pretty much it. And so in terms of making sure these things do happen, how can we best avoid missing them? Well, it’s pretty obvious is make sure these essentials get done and then getting them done as easy as possible so that we actually do them consistently by default without having any reason to not be unwaveringly consistent. You can think about this whole model as being like boiling a potato. If the potato is your physique, the muscle mass that you want to build, then getting the environment right for muscle growth is like having the water boiling. If you want to grow as fast as possible, have your potato cook, then the best you can do is boiling water.
Once it reaches past a hundred degrees, then the water evaporates the extra energy, the extra effort is just floating off into the biss. It’s not actually driving any more results. And so after this, you could do whatever you want, but it’s just wasted effort. It’s just scattered energy that’s not actually getting you any more outcome, and often it stops you from actually keeping the water at a hundred. And so if our water is only 98 degrees or 90 degrees or 70 degrees, we start to see slower and slower cooking of the potato, slower rate of muscle gain, and most people’s pot is just stove turn off at room temperature. No changes are happening whatsoever. So when you think about what’s the easiest way to keep the water at a hundred degrees, it would be once we get it there, to have as little heat on the stove as possible to just keep it simmer and keep it bubbling, keep it a hundred degrees.
And that is our goal with our training and our nutrition practise. We want it to be as minimal as possible while still maximising this signal and fuel that is honestly the fastest way to get results and have your physique transform because it’s physiologically as fast as possible. But we’re also then being consistent, which once you are transforming as fast as possible, the only way you speed things up is by not slowing them down. I’ve had friends who were skinny wanted to gain muscle and went down the whole traditional route of going to the gym six days a week, smashing mass gainer, absolutely killing themselves in this big grinding effort to build muscle mass. And what inevitably happens was they get two, three months in, hate the routine, not be a meathead, not want to be drinking these disgusting massive shakes and obviously fall off the waggon.
I couldn’t sustain that. And those same people have then seen what we do on the rings come and done 40 minutes a week of strength training and just try to get a bit more protein in their lunch prep. And utterly transformed not only much quicker than what they were doing at the gym because they were missing the point, but because they got hooked, addicted, didn’t stop and nine, 12 months down the road looked like other different people, they then look back and cannot believe they were ever approaching things the other way. So as I said, the same applies to fat loss. Once you have that in place, that’s the most thing. If you want to then lose fat, the maxing out, let’s say that there’s an amount of fat that you can lose before you start cutting into muscle tissue and feeling like shit, that’s your physiological fat loss limit.
And the way that you can do that is by, that’s just a calorie deficit. And so you get that to the right amount where more deficit will actually get you more weight loss, but it won’t get you more fat loss. You’ll start cutting to muscle. And so that’s our limit. If we want to max out fat loss, then we just want to be again in a weekly calorie deficit of the right amount. And once we’re there, the only way we speed it up is by not slowing down, by having weeks where we’re not in deficit or we’re in less of a deficit. We could do everything we wanted with our diet under the sun, but if we’re down here at a lukewarm temperature of our water, IE, we’re hardly in a calorie deficit at all, then we’re not going to see any changes in our body composition.
We’re not going to lose fat, we’re just going to be frustrated. So again, that’s the driver of fat loss. We get it right and we stay there. That’s all we can do. And so the best way to achieve that with diet is generally keeping your diet really easy, eating the same foods as normally eating the same meals and doing the same social things as normal drinking, keeping your lifestyle the same, but just reducing overall energy intake so that again, there’s no reason to stop and that weekly process just becomes a rhythm until you get to your fellow score. So this might still seem quite theoretical. How do we know that we’re actually at the limit of our physiology’s ability to change? Well, that’s an excellent question. As I said before, we know from research there’s plenty of science back in this now that protein benefits max out at about 1.8 grammes per kilogramme of goal lean body weight per day.
And as I said, that doesn’t need to be spread out over the day or anything. It can just be consumed at some point during the day and you’re good on that. Science has done that for us in terms of strength training. There isn’t really research on this constantly load adjusted max intensity technique that I talk about, but there’s a really easy way to know that you’re maxing out and thankfully your body’s way smarter than you could ever be. And so listening to emotions and intuition, autoregulation your body’s feedback allows you to nail this really easily and as a result, have a great time training and making gains. And the rule of thumb is this, you train at constant max intensity only at your limit. You start you rep as hard as possible, as heavy as possible. You force your way down the negatives, you constantly adjust things so there’s always at your limit as soon as that’s no longer fun.
As soon as you can’t willingly put in a hundred percent effort anymore, as soon as you basically don’t want to keep doing the set, you stop and that’s it. So you have six movements and you train each of them at one point during the week at that constant maximum intensity. That’s your one set for the week. You just keep going and as soon as it’s no longer an enjoyable experience, you call it and that’s it for the week, and you come back a week later and you go again. So it sounds deceptively simple, but it’s so important because if you try and push past this, remember we don’t see more gains once we supersede this threshold, we’ve already maxed out what we can do. And so once you go past that level where it’s fun, you’re not getting any extra benefit from that training because your body just can’t respond to it.
It’s telling you when it’s no longer fun. Cool, I get the picture chill. I can now go away and do as much building and growth as I could possibly do because I’ve received the message that it’s time to grow. And so there’s a host of downsides. If you go past this, you’re not getting any extra benefit. Your body can’t do any more muscle growth, so you’re not getting any incremental gains from going past that, but you are making it harder for your body to recover. You’re exposing yourself to more risk of injury and it’s just extra time and effort and hard work. So it’s not only diminishing returns, but you start to get negative effects from going beyond that tipping point of where your body sends you that emotional signal that cool, this is no longer an actively enjoyable thing, but now a grind. Some of the other downsides to this is that by trying to go beyond that level of max recoverable work, max effective signal, your body fights back to try and balance out what you’re doing.
And so all the work that you do before starts to decrease in difficulty if you try and stack on more because you can’t just sustain the maximum intensity work forever. If you start trying to overtrain it, then everything gets reduced in quality and then we send less effective signal while still getting those downsides of doing more work. You also then have a worse time for good reason. Your body’s trying to tell you, Hey, do less. This is too much. It’s not productive. But we interpret that because of conditioning to be like, oh, I’m not working hard enough. I don’t have enough discipline. I’ve just got to grip my teeth and work harder. And then lo and behold, we either get hurt or we quit because it sucks. If you can learn to listen to the signal, you can literally have your cake and eat it too.
Get all the effective signals sent to your body to grow and it’s easy, it’s fun. It’s by definition an enjoyable experience because we stop when it’s not. That’s to our potato metaphor. You’re kind of just looking for the bubbles. As soon as the water’s boiled, that’s when our body starts to say, Hey, this isn’t so chill anymore. I’d rather rest. And then we turn the heat down and we let it simmer there. We let our body do its thing, build its muscle. We know it’s doing it as fast as possible because every time we train, we’re reaching that point where we just get a simmer and then we chill. Remember cranking the heat up and getting lots and lots of bubbles, the water’s still at a hundred degrees. So even if you ignored all the very real tangible benefits to not overdoing things, if you just looked at this from a sustainability point of view, an experience point of view, we want to make it as easy as possible, get to a simmer and then chill because you’re going to be able to keep that at week after week and you’re going to get the results in the early days of training.
And when we’re developing this method, I used to do what I thought based on all the research based, what everyone online said was a good amount of volume. And as I was trying to do more intense, better quality training, I was trying to still do three sets of 10 reps, squats and all this work that just ultimately sucked. It killed me. I couldn’t recover from it. I felt terrible doing it. I would get anxiety going into sets because I was just trying to stretch my body over more than it was happy or capable of doing, and it was kind of luck and sheer realisation that I wouldn’t be able to sustain doing that for my squats, my legs when I just went and said, okay, I’m not training these because it’s too hard, so I’m better off doing something than nothing. And I started doing one rep per leg of squats each week, just one.
I quickly realised that I was making the same gains as before, but I was also recovering better. I was training way harder and for the first time in my life, enjoying it and sticking with it because it was so easy to just get in there and do one rep each week. I almost looked forward to it, something that had killed me before. What had happened is I’d been unknowingly overstretching or trying to overstretch past this max out point past the point of productivity, and it had just led me to absolutely not be able to sustain it and also train way less effectively. And when I just removed the need to try and be doing all that, suddenly I found it so much easier to make progress. The moral of the story here is when you’re looking for this limit, listen to your body. Maxing out likely takes a whole lot less than you think, and the more you can get out of your own way, the more you’re likely going to be able to lean into proper maximum intensity strength training, push strength gains, and if you can simply support that with one high protein meal a day that gets you up around this daily target, then you are going to progress your body, your physique towards the goal as fast as humanly possible, and once you get in that slot, you can remove all the barriers to sticking with it and you’re going to get there as fast as possible.
How does that apply to fat loss? So with this, we kind of have both ends of the spectrum. We one, have the science and the numbers that we know works, and we also have the physiological side to tell us. And with these two things, we can kind of figure out where the boiling point is for water and how to keep it there. So what we are running in terms of general guidelines, what we can do with fat loss is actually monitor our weekly average body weight and know exactly what’s happening in terms of our weight. And so what we look for there is roughly half a kilo of weight per week, half kilo of body weight dropping each week means that we know we’re roughly in deficit. That’s somewhere around 20%, somewhere around what is sustainable. Now, this would be a bigger number if you’ve got more weight to lose.
It’d be a smaller number if you’re leaner, but that’s our vague guideline to know that we’re roughly somewhere around this maximum amount of fat loss before going too extreme and cutting into muscle, et cetera. The other thing we can do is listen to our body. And so if we’re getting signals, again, the negative signals of the useful ones because they tell us where the boundaries are. And so if we’re getting to the point with losing fat where hunger starts to really increase, we start to feel lethargic or low mood irritable, we to get these negative symptoms of calorie restriction, then we know we’re probably peaking past this. And just like with training, we can then drop back down to get to a sweet spot where we’re getting the results but not overdoing the stimulus. And so in this case, that would look like eating more food, getting our calories up to the point where we’re losing fat, but we’re not overdoing the deficit.
And so we’re not trying to push our bodies to lose more weight than is productive. So we keep the weight loss to fat loss, we keep happy and enjoying the process, and we get maximum results again, because that will just like with training, not only get a better result in terms of the physiological change, we’ll get leaner rather than smaller, but we’ll also be able to keep that up with no dramas and get all the way down to a level of body composition that we’re happy with because we can sustain the process happily for long enough to get there. So that’s what that looks like. Boiling water is when you start to feel the symptoms of caloric restriction and when that gets too extreme, you to back off the heat, bring things down to just that minimal simmer so that we can keep it simmering and get our potato nicely cooked.
IE get you shredded and really happy with your level of leanness. I’ve made that mistake so many times in the past as well, diving into a deficit, smashing it, but then getting all these red alert signals from my body of going too fast, feeling like shit, and then just having to stop because it’s not fun or you just look skinny and it took me a long time to learn that. The sweet spot, you barely feel it. You barely know you’re there, and that’s what actually works because then you actually just lose fat and you get really good at keeping it right there. Then the limit becomes how lean you actually like the look of, which means you can get, again, all the results you possibly want. If you want to dive deeper into this training protocol and what that maximum intensity training looks like, check out this video and if you’ve made it this far, thanks so much watching. I’ll talk to you in the next one.

• The method for transforming one’s body into an athletic physique through minimal time and effort involves only 40 minutes of maximum-intensity strength training per week, and consuming one high-protein meal per day. [07:42]
• This approach is designed to maximise muscle growth and fat loss by working at the physiological limits of the body’s adaptation. [03:14] Anything beyond this is considered wasted effort.
• The training involves a single set of 6 key exercises performed at the absolute limit of the user’s strength each week. [14:32] The nutrition involves consuming 1.8g of protein per kg of body weight per day, typically through a single high-protein meal. [07:23]
• This minimalist approach allows the user to be highly consistent with the program, which is key to achieving results as rapidly as possible. [01:52]
• The same principles apply to fat loss, where the goal is to achieve a moderate calorie deficit that maximises fat loss without compromising muscle mass. [12:15]