I stumbled on a big lesson recently that underpins much of the success I’ve had with strength and fitness:
You need goals that are achievable.
By that I don’t mean modest and reasonable, mediocre bullshit goals that don’t motivate you enough to lift a finger.
I mean goals that are clear and objectively defined to the point that you will know when you have achieved them.
Setting the right goals is essential to achieving anything. They are the markers you set yourself so that you know
a) where to direct your efforts, over time, and
b) when you have successfully got what you wanted to get when you started.
Real life is messy, and attaining anything worthwhile takes time. So you need clear goals that can stand as a guiding light, a North Star, amidst the chaos, error and unpredictability that is the reality of pursuing anything.
Don’t get me wrong, this is an iterative process. You won’t know what to go after when you start out chasing anything.
Half of mastery is figuring out exactly what you mean when you tell yourself you want to “become successful” or “get in shape”. Because, while they’re great things to pursue, most people have no idea what they mean when they say these things. And that’s why they never get there—it’s hard enough to do these things when they are condensed down into a specific, tangible outcome, let alone left as an ambiguous concept somewhere in your imagination.
Here’s the issue I have with unclear goals: If you just try and “be healthy” (with the underlying assumption that that will lead to you maybe carrying a bit less fat on you, maybe looking a bit better at the beach), there is no actual guiding model with which to direct your actions. When a nice juicy burger is put on the table, where is the line in the sand that tells you whether you can eat it or not? When you feel lazy on Friday afternoon and don’t want to exercise, how do you know whether you’ve done enough and are on track or should get up and go for a run?
“Being healthy” might sound easier, and even more holistic and admirable than trying to set clear targets with your strength and body fat. Or you might just not even know what goals to set in the first place. But without something tangible that you’re working towards, you’re leaving your results to the whims of day-to-day emotions, which won’t lead anywhere in particular but homeostasis (maintaining the current status quo).
What I can offer right now is a definition of the specific goals I set myself, some 5-ish years ago, that have guided me through the madness of figuring out what really drives results with training and nutrition and gotten me to the point where I’m now ripped year round with under 40 minutes of training a week and the diet of a king (and more often than not just a hedonistic, normal bloke).
How to guarantee getting ripped even if you have no idea what you’re doing
1. Set your goals
This is by far the most important part of getting results with your “fitness” pursuits.
In my system, there are only two things I care about developing.
Goal 1: Strength
The first, and most important long-term goal, is very high level strength.
Now, if you’re a chance to ever achieve this ideal, it needs to be broken down into very few, very clear strength goals. For me, there are five. They cover all basic planes of motion and all represent roughly equivalent, impressively high yet achievable levels of strength. I know that in attaining these, I will have all the muscle mass I could possibly want, be able to maintain a very lean physique, and have elite levels of strength across all movement patterns. And I needn’t worry about anything else.
These strength goals are:
- straddle planche pushup
- front lever row
- handstand pushup
- one-arm chin-up
- 60kg loaded single leg squat (75% bodyweight)
Goal 2: Low body fat
The second goal, which is much sooner achievable and more of an ongoing concurrent condition of the pursuit of strength, is a body fat level. Getting low body fat allows you to see the muscles you are building, directly increases your relative strength (how strong you are for your bodyweight), and makes you look attractive (provided you have enough muscle to show).
For me, I aim to maintain somewhere around 10-12% body fat year round. I may get leaner for periods following a fat-loss phase, but there are diminishing returns to getting any lower than a certain level. The number itself is just an estimate—what I aim for is the balance point between looking great and feeling great. As soon as losing fat becomes difficult, I stop, and if it is hard to maintain, I let myself gain back up to the point where I am happy. After all, that’s why we do this—to have a better life, not to be on a magazine cover.
Having said that, the level you can get to while feeling great is very impressively lean by any normal human standards. And as you build muscle, maintaining lower body fat becomes easier and easier (you become leaner at the same body weight). So this keeps improving as you build more and more muscle (hence strength being the important long-term goal).
Achieve these two things, and you never have to step foot in a gym a again, choose a “healthy” meal option in favour of good food, buy a supplement, or do a round of cardio in your life… and you can have the body of a fitness model or athlete that almost every single person doing these things aspires towards (consciously or otherwise).
It took me some time to figure out an effective means of getting there, but eventually I did.
And when I did, I had the body I’d always wanted.
These goals work. There’s no way you can have this sort of strength without a stack of muscle tissue. There’s no way you can have that level of muscle, be 10% body fat, and not have an amazing looking physique.
2. Choose a process to get there
If you haven’t achieved these goals already, or aren’t on a direct path there, then you won’t know how to achieve them when you start out. That does NOT mean you should wait until you have the perfect formula to start.
This tendency is what stops most people getting results before they’ve even given themselves a chance, in fitness and in life. When we’re being bombarded from all sides by so much conflicting information, it’s a natural mistake to make.
Realise this: you will never have the perfect formula. It doesn’t exist. What I use now is the closest thing to a perfect formula that I know of, but it’s been evolving for over 6 years. It will keep evolving. And the only reason I have that process and the results you see now is because I started.
Choose a process to start with. Define exactly what you are going to do each week to start working towards those goals, and begin.
It just needs to be something that you think can work, or at least get you some sort of result.
Anything that falls outside of your process—don’t worry about it. You’ve chosen in advance what you’re going to do for this period of time, so as long as you’re doing that, you’re good. Don’t stress anything else.
If something pops up that you think should be in your process, write it down and include that in the next iteration.
My process now boils down to this:
- Train each of the above movement patterns once per week, at my maximum strength threshold, for one continuous set, until I’ve had enough and can’t keep putting in 100% of my energy and focus. (Usually this takes a few minutes per movement, for 5 movements, totalling <40 minutes per week including rest time.)
- Hit a daily protein target of 140g (roughly my bodyweight in kg x 1.8)
- Eat to appetite, aiming to fuel strength and muscle gain. For no more than 12 weeks per year, hit a 20% calorie deficit to lose some body fat at ~0.5kg per week, when and as desired (basically continuing to the point where it becomes difficult, then I stop)
3. Run the process, see what happens, and iterate
No process is going to be perfect. Even if it were, it wouldn’t be perfect forever. Exactly what you need to get to your goal is going to change as you progress towards it. And at the start, you know it’s not going to be perfect, because it’s all still very much an experiment. So you might as well plan for that, and build updates into your plan.
The way I do this is by using 12-week blocks. Twelve weeks is an arbitrary length of time, but it’s long enough to see tangible results (including visible muscle gain and/or fat loss) while remaining short enough to keep you focused on the mission, with a finish line constantly in sight.
Use 12-week blocks to design, run, and review your process, and update it as you go based on your own experiences in terms of what gets the results you’re after, and what just doesn’t matter (which, as you’ll continually find, is most things).
If you want to guarantee getting ripped, it all starts with knowing exactly where you’re going. Although it might feel limiting to set such minimal and distinct outcomes for yourself, having them clear means you can actually make them happen. And it’s a much better feeling to achieve something than to want to pursue everything and achieve none of it. You can always go after other things later.
If you need a starting point, take my goals (above) and start figuring out how to make them happen for yourself. When you’re busting out one-arm chin-ups and walking around shredded in a few years, you’ll know something worked.