Here we are midway through a fat loss transformation…
We addressed blood sugar management (we will address carb cycling for fat loss in a later tip) and attitude in the first fat loss transformation tip, and in many cases those are the primary drivers one needs to make the huge leap from the photo on the left to the photo on the right. In the case of this example, these changes were made in a little under 6 weeks, which is great going, but it isn’t a race and if it takes you 12 or even 18 weeks then so be it. One aspect of successful physique transformation is practicing what I call being “impatiently patient”. You want to hit your goals as quickly as possible, and will leave no stone unturned to do so, but you also have to be mature and smart enough to appreciate that what took you years to accumulate (a fat, out of shape, unfit, and unhealthy body) can’t be changed entirely overnight. The key mindset that you need to practice is to be as impatient as hell to keep hitting your small weekly goals, whilst exercising patience and wisdom as to the longer term, and therefore by necessity slightly more flexible, target.
In terms of exercise and fat loss transformations, to achieve this kind of change you don’t need an overly complicated exercise regime, so pass the excuses back to the pregnant nuns because I’ll not be hearing any from you. It is eminently achievable to radically transform your physique with just three times a week weight training (NOT cardio by the way!) – the photo above is testament to that, and we have many other much more striking transformations that bear out this statement. Here is how things really work – if I wanted to get in my best possible shape in the shortest time frame possible, then I’d weight train twice a day for about four days a week. That’s a pretty simplistic explanation, but accurate as a general guideline. But I am a very well trained guy with 25 years experience, who also has the luxury of owning a couple of gyms to train at! In the real world, where people have very limited time and budgetary constraints, and where the starting point of fitness and work tolerance is lower, three times a week training is optimal. There are coaches whose views I hold in the highest regard who disagree with me here and say that 4 times is better, but I’ll stick to my guns and say that three times a week of HARD training is all that most regular Joes can deal with for at least the first 6 weeks of a training program. Moreover, there are many stressed out men and women who no matter how long they have been training for, or how perfect their nutrition and supplementation, would still be infinitely better off training on non-consecutive days and never ever having two sessions back to back. All my experience of overseeing a business that does 3000 plus PT sessions a month bears this out time after time.
This is at the HALFWAY stage – not the finished product. As we progress through a fat loss transformation we add and take away protocols depending progress, tolerance, and even (sometimes) enjoyment!
So if three times a week can get great results and achieve a genuine fat loss transformation, what do you do in the gym for those actual sessions? I’m not here to write a full program, so I’ll just set out the broad approach – you don’t do a bodybuilder split, you need more frequency of application than that; you pair big movements with smaller movements (hardly radical I know) and/or you do big move/activation or rehab move/big move/rest; whereas there will be crossover between workouts you don’t do full body workouts with similar movements at every session (if you do and if you train hard, you will overtrain – the reason why some trainers can get away with these type of workouts is because they don’t have the work ethic/confidence/ability to push their clients hard); and you push yourself/your client to their limit (remember this is an extremely individual thing and my “hard” may be your “easy”) so that they make progress at each and every workout. I’ll finish todays piece with a reiteration of that last sentence. One key to a successful transformation is to ensure that you do set a personal best at each and every workout. If you’re a trainer and you think this isn’t possible with a new client over the first 3 months, then hand your PT badge in. And if we get some naysayers who say progress every workout would mean a guy was pushing world records in 3 months, think again. Progress cannot ever be linear, therefore the training stimulus should also not be linear, so different factors can be manipulated for new Personal Bests – weight, reps, rest intervals, tempo, mechanical advantage.
If you have any questions on the subject of this fat loss transformation tip please fire away in the comments section below. And if you don’t live near a UP Personal Training gym and want to work with our team, maybe you should check out our very popular, one-to-one coaching, online personal training service.
