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Online Transformation Program
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SkinnyFatTransformation.com SkinnyFatTransformation.com - The #1 Website For Skinny-Fat Guys
Table of Contents Introducing The Skinny-Fat Body-Type
3
Bodyweight Training for the Skinny-Fat Guy
10
The 3 Most Important Exercises For A Skinny-Fat Guy
21
Phase 1 Bodyweight Training Program For Skinny-Fat Guys
29
5 Common Training Mistakes I See Clients Make
42
How to Create the Right Training Environment For Maximum Results
51
The First 14 Days of Training Done Right
56
With Withou outt Pro Progr gres essi sive ve Over Overlo load ad You Won on’t ’t Bu Build ild Stre Streng ngth th an and d Mus Muscl cle e Mas Mass s
61
The Importance of Optimising Your Your Natural Testosterone Testosterone Production to Build Strength and Muscle Mass 74 High Testosterone Diet Foods
87
The Vicious Cycle of Being Skinny-Fat
107
Dist Distin ingu guis ishi hing ng Bet Betwe ween en the the Two Two Typ Types es of of Skinn Skinnyy-Fa Fatt Guys: Guys: ski skinn nnyy-F FAT vs. vs. SKINN SKINNY Y-fat -fat Daily Caloric Expenditure and Macronutrient Split
113
How to Put Together Your Meal Plan
126
110
How this type of meal plan works in practice and listening to your BioFeedback137 Weekly Refeed Meals for Fat Loss Dieting
150
Alcohol Will Ruin Your Fat Loss Progress
152
10 Things to Watch Out For When Implementing A Meal Plan
155
Sleep, Leptin, Stress and Hunger Levels
162
The Importance of Having a Clearly Defined Goal Physique
171
How to Track Body-Composition Progress
178
Realistic Expectations
190
How Lean Can You Get?
193
How Fast Can You Gain Muscle Mass?
196
Factors That Affect Your Progression Rate
202
Should You Set Goals?
208
Summing Up The Actionable Advice
211
Testimonials By Coaching Clients
227
Frequently Asked Questions
247
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Introducing The Skinny-Fat Body-Type
My name is Oskar Faarkrog, I’m a certified personal trainer from the International Sports Sciences Association and the founder of SKINNY-FAT TRANSFORMATION which has 100,000 monthly readers.
Growing up, I used to be weak, skinny-fat and I had puffy nipples (gynecomastia). (gynecomastia).
I wanted to transform my physique because being skinny-fat affected my confidence in all areas of life.
I got bullied because of my puffy nipples and I was embarrassed to take off my shirt at the beach.
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I didn’t have any girlfriends until I was almost 20 years old and stayed inside playing computer games all day long.
I got introduced to bodybuilding in February 2010 where I came across the bodybuilding.com forums.
I saw a guy transform from fat to fit and that’s when I realised it’s possible to transform your physique.
I read everything I could get my hands on and I was hooked.
I made my physique transformation my #1 goal in my life and spent all day long reading about fitness, training and nutrition.
Just like most people, I started out following the popular advice of eating a lot of protein and training with heavy weights.
When I started training in February 2010, I couldn’t do a single push up, I couldn’t shoulder press an unloaded 45
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pound barbell for ONE rep and I could barely hang on a chin up bar for a few seconds.
In other words, I was a tall 200 pound guy yet I had the upper body strength levels of an untrained 110 pound female.
I had never seen my abs and when I flexed my biceps in the mirror nothing happened.
At the time, my DREAM was to one day be able to do a set of 10 chin ups and I worked hard to achieve that dream.
I would pack tuna and eggs with me when going for classes, drink protein powder multiple times each day and do my heavy squats, bench presses and deadlifts.
I didn’t skip any training sessions and I prepared my meals in advance.
After 2 years of heavy weight training I had added over 500 pounds to my bench press, squat and deadlift total by using Online Transformation Program
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two heavy weight training programs: Starting Strength and MadCow 5x5.
Here’s my 1 year strength progress summarised (all 5 rep maxes):
• Deadlift: 105 pounds to 350 pounds (+245 pounds). • Squat: 66 pounds to 240 pounds (+174 pounds). • Bench Press: 66 pounds to 170 pounds (+104 pounds).
I was proud of my strength gains, but I didn’t see any physical progress.
Here’s my 2 years of training progress photo showing that I still looked the same:
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Compared to my friends, it seemed like my body just didn’t respond to training and diet.
I put in all this hard work and I saw my training partner get amazing results following the same routine as me.
Yet here I was without any results.
This is when I got frustrated and started researching different body-types.
During my research I discovered that 99% of fitness programs ARE NOT designed for skinny-fat guys. Online Transformation Program
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In the fitness industry, there are 3 main body-types:
• Ectomorph: Skinny guy with a small bone-structure who “can’t gain weight” and has a low appetite. Heavy weight training and a high Calorie diet will work for the skinny ectomorph. • Mesomorph: The naturally athletic and muscular guy. Any program will work for a mesomorph. • Endomorph: Big-boned fat guy who gains fat and muscle mass easily. (The thicker your bones are, the faster you gain strength and mass). Daily resistance training and cardio combined with a Caloric deficit will work for the Endomorph.
99% of fitness programs are made for the body-types above.
The problem is that skinny-fat guys are a combination of the ectomorph (skinny guy) and endomorph (fat guy).
Being skinny-fat means that you lack upper body muscle mass while having excess body-fat in the lower waist, chest and hips. Online Transformation Program
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Compared to big-boned fat guys, you gain muscle mass at a much slower rate and compared to skinny guys you gain fat just by “looking at food”.
In other words, you have all the disadvantages of the ectomorph (small-boned skinny guy with a fast metabolism) and endomorph (big-boned fat guy with a lot of strength and muscle mass), but you don’t have any of the advantages.
Here’s a graphic summing up why skinny-fat guys have terrible genetics for training:
As a result, it’s not uncommon for skinny-fat guys to train for months or even DECADES without anything to show for it.
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Bodyweight Training for the Skinny-Fat Guy
In my experience training over 100 skinny-fat men in my online coaching program, the skinny-fat body-type is BY FAR the hardest to transform and there’s a huge lack of quality training programs for our unique body-type.
However, there’s one way of training that has worked well for me and my Online Transformation Program clients: Bodyweight training.
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In late 2012, after 2 years of heavy weight training and cardio without any results, I switched my focus to doing a basic bodyweight training program that I could do for just 30 minutes per day at home.
The idea behind the switch was that I didn’t get any results from going to the gym anyways so why bother wasting my time biking to the gym in the cold Danish winter.
Instead of biking to the gym, I wanted to maintain some basic strength and fitness by training from home.
Therefore, I started training with my bodyweight for just 30 minutes per day at home.
To my surprise, I got better results with bodyweight training.
My muscles started filling out in all the right places (the shoulders, upper chest, arms and lats) and I got visible abs for the first time in my life.
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Bodyweight training gave me much better results than heavy weight training ever did and I didn’t have any of the nagging joint pain that I always got when doing heavy deadlifts and squats.
After 1 year of focusing on basic bodyweight training, I transformed into a lean 190-195 pounds at 6’2 height and I !
could do more than 15 chin ups with perfect form.
Here’s a photo showing my 1 year progress:
And here’s a link to my full transformation video on YouTube: SKINNY-FAT TRANSFORMATION (40 lbs muscle gain and 60 lbs fat loss)
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This was truly the first time in my life where I felt like I was in shape.
I felt strong, fast, light, energised and I always went into my training sessions fully recovered.
The question here then is whether bodyweight training just happened to work for me or if it also works for other skinny-fat guys?
Around
early
2014,
when
my
blog
SKINNY-FAT
TRANSFORMATION became popular and grew to 100,000 monthly visitors, I started taking on clients for my Online Transformation Program for Skinny-Fat Guys.
This included everything Senior Directors from Fortune 500 Companies who work 12-15 hours per day and have to do their bodyweight training from their office and young high school students who have an abundance of free time.
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Most of my clients had previously also followed heavy weight training programs but just like me, they didn’t get any visible physique results from them.
The story most often went like this: Skinny-fat client started doing a heavy weight training program, added a good amount strength (although at a much slower rate than the average guy), then realised after 6 months-2 years of hard training that he barely looked any different.
In other words, he became stronger but didn’t gain any visible muscle mass in the areas that improve your body-proportions from pear shaped to V-tapered: the shoulders, upper chest, biceps, triceps, lats and upper back.
If there were any muscle gains, they would mostly be in the thighs, glutes, traps, abs, lower back and forearms (i.e. the areas that make you appear more bulky instead of improving your skinny-fat proportions).
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However, once they joined my program and made the switch to bodyweight training they started seeing visible results.
They started gaining muscle mass in the shoulders, upper chest, arms and lats while simultaneously shedding body-fat around the hips, lower waist, and chest. (You can find over 100 success stories on the success stories page on my website).
This is when I realised that bodyweight training doesn’t just work for me.
It works for all other skinny-fat guys too.
So, why does bodyweight training work so well for us skinny-fat guys?
There are a variety of reasons.
The most important is SIGNALING.
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When you become better at moving your body through space, you SIGNAL to the body it has to change.
Exercises such as chin ups that move your body through a lot of space, have a much stronger signalling effect compared to their weight training equivalents where you’re moving a weight instead of your body.
Just imagine adding 1 rep to your chin up max for 15 weeks straight.
When you go from 0 to 15 chin ups, there’s no way your body will remain the same.
It has to adapt by adding muscle size and shedding fat.
Also, bodyweight exercises represent the opposite of being skinny-fat.
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The skinny-fat guy is soft, weak and under-muscled however to master bodyweight exercises you have to become the exact opposite: strong, lean and muscular.
In addition to the signalling effect, here are more benefits of starting off with bodyweight exercises:
• Bodyweight training is easy on your Central Nervous System. As a result, you can recover faster between training sessions and train more often. This is important for us skinnyfat guys since we have a smaller bone-structure and thereby a naturally slow recovery from hard training. • The main bodyweight exercises used in my programs emphasise the right muscles. The chin up works the lats and biceps and the diamond push up works the upper chest, shoulders and triceps. Together, they work all the important muscles that give you a V-tapered upper body with powerful arms. • The main bodyweight exercises are compound. This means they train several muscle groups at the same time so you get more bang-for-the-buck with each exercise. Online Transformation Program
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• Bodyweight training keeps you focused. When you train just a few basic compound exercises, you stay laster focused and get very strong on those key movements. • Bodyweight training can be done anywhere at anytime. You have no excuses to skip your training sessions when they can be done from the comfort of your home or while travelling. • You can build 80% of your muscle mass with bodyweight exercises alone – even if you’re old or you have bad genetics for muscle building. When you can perform 15 consecutive muscle ups and handstand push ups, you will have built up your physique to +80% of it’s muscle building potential. If you don’t believe me, just google for “calisthenics physiques” and see the kind of bodies that pure bodyweight training produces and then compare those with the guys who go to the gym.
In other words, there’s really no reason to go to the gym unless you’ve already built a solid foundation on the basic bodyweight exercises.
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Furthermore, if you take a step back and think about training logically, it makes sense to master your own bodyweight before adding external resistance.
Your body was designed to be moved through space and mastering bodyweight exercises will teach you just that.
Most guys at the gym lack a foundation on bodyweight exercises.
They may lift hundreds of pounds on the squat, bench press and deadlift but they can’t even do a set of 20 chin ups or 100 bodyweight squats.
As a result, they end up paying for it later by getting a shoulder, back or knee injury that puts them completely out of the gym.
By mastering basic bodyweight exercises, you will build a solid foundation of strength and muscle mass that sets you up to make faster gains with weight training, if you decide to take that up in the future.
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Your strength and muscle foundation is important because training is just like building a house.
When you build a strong foundation on bodyweight exercises, you master the fundamental
movement patterns (push, pull,
squat) and prepare your joints, ligaments and tendons for future training.
This means that when you start doing weight training exercises, you will be able to start off using more weight, you will find it much easier to use correct technique and you will make faster progress each training session.
And most importantly: You prevent debilitating injuries that can put you out of training.
Injury prevention is one of the most underrated aspects of training because it’s one of the main reasons to why a lot of guys lose their hard-earned gains.
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You always hear about that 30 or 40 year old guy who built up a respectable amount of muscle mass in his teens and early twenties but then got a shoulder injury and stopped training completely.
By building up your foundation with bodyweight exercises, you drastically reduce the risk of becoming that guy and you will more than likely be able to train your entire life injury free.
The 3 Most Important Exercises For A Skinny-Fat Guy There are 3 bodyweight exercise that I consider to be most important for skinny-fat guys:
• Chin up. • Diamond push up. • Squat.
The chin up is the most important exercise for building a wide, Vtapered upper body because it’s the best exercise for the lats.
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The lats are the wing muscles under your arm-pits and they’re the largest muscle on your entire upper body.
This means that they have the potential to grow much bigger than the beach muscles most of us focus on (the shoulders, arms and chest) and thereby do much more for your upper body proportions.
When you develop the lats to their full potential, you add several inches to your shoulder measurement and you appear very powerful form both the front and the back.
In addition to training the lats, the chin up is a phenomenal biceps exercise since you’re essentially curling your body over the bar.
I’ve personally added the vast majority of my lat and biceps size with chin ups, therefore it’s what I consider to be the most important exercise for skinny-fat guys.
The diamond push up is very different from the regular push up, because putting your hands close together in a diamond shape Online Transformation Program
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gives a much more powerful contraction and squeeze for the upper chest, inner chest and triceps.
This is also why diamond push ups are a lot harder than regular push ups.
The diamond push up has several benefits.
First and foremost, it emphasises the upper part of the chest which is the hardest to develop.
This is especially important for skinny-fat guys who have puffy nipples/gynecomastia or an overdeveloped lower chest. (About +80% of skinny-fat guys will fall into one of these categories).
When you have puffy nipples or an overdeveloped lower chest, you must fix your chest proportions by working the upper part of your chest.
By doing so, you create a more squared and masculine looking chest. Online Transformation Program
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The problem here is that a lot of skinny-fat guys try to improve their chest proportions by doing a big variety of classic chest exercises such as push ups, bench presses, dips and flyes.
When you do these classic chest exercises, you target the lower part of your chest and aggravate the issue.
By adding more size to the lower chest, you are pushing the puffiness out further and making your chest look even more feminine.
Therefore, the “trick” is to do the opposite and focus exclusively on training the upper chest.
By doing so you will improve your chest proportions greatly!
And the diamond push up is the perfect exercise for that.
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I cover upper chest training in more detail in my free training video How to Train Your Chest If You Have Puffy Nipples or Gynecomastia
Second, the diamond push up has the highest triceps activation of any exercise out there and contrary to popular belief of arms being all about biceps, the triceps actually make up 2/3 of your arm size.
So when you master diamond push ups you don’t only see a massive improvement in your chest, but also your arm size.
When you combine the diamond push up and chin up, you have the perfect combination of upper body exercises because you’re increasing your shoulder measurement, maximising arm size and sculpting the chest the right way.
These two exercises train all the most important muscle groups for skinny-fat guys:
• Chin Up: Lats, upper back, biceps. Online Transformation Program
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• Diamond Push Up: Upper chest, shoulders, triceps.
In addition to that, these two exercises represent the two fundamental upper body movement patterns: pushing (diamond push up) and pulling (chin up), therefore they have great carry over for any athletic endeavours.
Together, the diamond push up and chin up are what I consider to be the most powerful combination for building a muscular upper body.
So how about the bodyweight squat?
The bodyweight squat is extremely underrated because it’s seen as an “easy exercise”.
But if it’s that easy, try doing 100 bodyweight squats in a row with your ass nearly touching the ground on each rep.
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Chances are that you lack the mobility to go all the way down on each rep and you lack the conditioning to do over 50 good reps.
As a result, the bodyweight squat is a great mobility and conditioning exercise for the skinny-fat guy.
It achieves the triple purpose of giving you an effective conditioning workout,
improving your mobility and building just
the right amount of muscle mass on your lower body .
I emphasise building the right amount of muscle mass on your lower body, because as a skinny-fat guy who trains without performance enhancing drugs and with naturally low testosterone levels, your lower body will always grow at a much faster rate than your upper body.
When your lower body grows too much from heavy squats and heavy deadlifts, your upper body by default appears much smaller, therefore you have to keep lower body training to “just
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the right amount” instead of pounding it with high volume and heavy weights.
The starting goals I usually aim for with my Online Transformation Program Clients are 15 chin ups, 30 diamond push ups and 100 bodyweight squats - all done in one set.
When you reach these numbers you will no longer appear skinnyfat and you’ll have better fitness levels than +95% of the population.
As mentioned earlier, I have over 100 success stories on my success stories page for proof that bodyweight training does in fact work for the skinny-fat body-type.
Depending on your starting point, these goals are usually reached within 3-12 months of good training.
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Phase 1 Bodyweight Training Program For Skinny-Fat Guys Monday: Upper Body Training Tuesday: Lower Body and Abs Training Wednesday: Upper Body Training Thursday: Lower Body and Abs Training Friday: Upper Body Training Saturday: Lower Body and Abs Training Sunday: Rest
Phase 1 Training goals: The goals of Phase 1 are to build up your strength to perform 15 chin ups, 30 diamond push ups and 100 bodyweight squats (all consecutive reps in one set). The time-frame is not important since everyone has different starting points and progresses at different rates. Just take your time and don’t compare your progress to other people! The most important thing is that you increase your reps regularly, on a month-to-month basis.
If you experience any joint pain on an exercise, note it down somewhere and stop the exercise immediately because it’s a sign an injury is coming. It’s never worth it to push through pain since a serious injury can put you out of training for years to come. Instead, try an easier variation, work on your technique and if these fail find a replacement exercise.
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Click on each exercise to see videos or photos.
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“Why is there so few exercises?” Because one big reason to why skinny-fat guys don’t make progress is a lack of focus.
When you have 20 different exercises, you end up giving each exercise 70-80% instead of 90-10%.
This results in mediocre progress on 20 exercises instead of great progress on 3.
Just think about this: What would make the biggest impact on your physique over the next 6 months:
• Going from 0 to 15 chin ups, 30 diamond push ups and 100 bodyweight squats. • Adding 20-30% of strength to 20 different exercises.
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You already know the answer. Focusing on a few exercises, leads to much faster strength gains because you are focused each training session to hammer down these exercises.
Therefore, adding more exercises will detract from your ability to make progress on the exercises that matter.
In addition, when you get stronger on variations of the chin up, push up and squat, you train some of the most fundamental movement patterns in your body and you train all the big muscles.
This means that the strength you gain on these bodyweight exercises will transfer to most other exercises such as biceps curls, lat pulldowns, shoulder presses, bench presses and so on.
“Are you going to follow a minimalist training approach forever?” You will follow a minimalist training approach until you have build a solid strength base because strength is mostly a skill and skills
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are best learned through repetition (practicing the same exercises over and over again).
A solid strength base is when you can hit the numbers below:
• 60-80 pound weighted chin up for 5 reps or 150 pound barbell row for 5 reps. • 130-150 pound strict barbell overhead press for 1 rep. (The various push up variations are used to condition you for working with either weighted dips or barbell over head presses after).
Once you are close to the numbers above you will have gained most of the strength you can gain naturally and we will move on to a more complex pump training program with a bigger variety of exercises so you can sculpt your muscles from all angles. (Read about the 2 Phases of a Skinny-Fat Transformation here).
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“I’m not sweating during training sessions.” The goal of the bodyweight program is to build up your strength. When you follow a strength program, you’re doing sets that last anywhere from 10-40 seconds and you’re resting a lot between sets. As a result, you will most likely not sweat that much on a strength program. In addition, some people naturally sweat more than other people and factors such as how hot and humid it is and salt intake also affect how much you sweat. Therefore, sweat is not a reliable indicator of how effective a program is. The main benefit of sweating is that you sweat out toxins from your body. This will make you feel a lot better but it won't have a drastic effect on your body-composition progress.
The main indicators of progress are that you’re getting stronger and your body-composition is improving.
“Why is there no cardio training included?” Cardio is a great tool to improve your health, however it should always come second to strength training. Online Transformation Program
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Strength training builds muscle mass and the more muscle mass you have, the faster your metabolism becomes.
You always want to prioritise increases in metabolism over burning Calories.
By increasing your metabolism, you will be able to eat more food once you get lean.
So instead of having 4 meals per day, you may be able to get away with 5 or 6 meals per day while staying lean.
In addition to that, there are more reasons to why strength training is prioritised over cardio:
• Recovery: As a skinny-fat beginner to training your recovery capabilities are limited. By adding cardio we risk that you do too much too fast and that you don’t make optimal progress on the key exercises.
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• Body-composition: You can get lean through diet and strength training alone. It’s much easier to clean up your diet to create a Caloric deficit compared to doing a lot of cardio. One hour of running burns around 600 Calories. This is the equivalent of a few snickers bars.
“What is “MAX REPETITIONS””? A question I often get from clients is related to the term “MAX repetitions” that you see under the prescribed amount of reps on each of the strength exercises in your program.
MAX repetitions means that you stop your set 1 repetition before positive muscular failure.
In other words, when you
know with 100% certainty that you won’t be able to complete another repetition with good form, STOP the set.
Stopping the set 1-2 reps short of failure has three massive benefits:
1. You put less stress on the Central Nervous System and thereby your recovery needs decrease dramatically. This Online Transformation Program
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essentially means that you will be able to train often and progress consistently on the exercises rather than burning out after a few weeks of hard training. 2. Your risk of getting injured decreases a lot. 3. You will experience tolerable levels of soreness going into your training sessions instead of being so sore that you can barely move your arms and legs.
As a beginner, you want to progress by using the “minimum required dosage” so you can sustain your progression for a longer time and minimise your risk of getting a serious injury. Stopping your sets 1-2 reps short of failure will help with all that.
“Can I skip the stretches?” Stretching is often neglected and that’s too bad because it provides massive benefits. I neglected stretching during the first 4 years of my training and it was one of my biggest training mistakes. When you’re “tight” like the average gym rat, you have a lot of stress inside your body which affects your inner well-being throughout the day. Once you “open up” your body and posture, Online Transformation Program
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you will start feeling a lot better, and that is after all why most of us start training.
The gold standard of lower body mobility is to be able to go into a full bodyweight squat position with heels planted on the floor, knees pushed out to the sides and a neutral spine, and to be able to hold this position for a minute while being comfortable.
This is a natural position that all of us can get effortlessly into when we are babies and it’s the exact position that humans have been using to get their business done on the toilet before society got toilets.
Being able to get into this position and hold it for a long time is essential to maintain a healthy spine, knee and hips. In addition, you will be able to move better, get optimal posture and as a result you will improve your overall well-being. When you have good posture and your body moves the way it’s supposed to be, you feel so much better on a daily basis. I would even go as far as saying, that achieving mobility will give you more well-being and confidence than any amount of muscle mass because it’s Online Transformation Program
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such as basic thing that your body NEEDS. Furthermore, having a dominant, open posture is a proven way to instantly boost your natural testosterone production and testosterone is the main muscle building hormone in your body. There’s a reason to why yoga involves both strength, stretching and meditation: They are all important to your health and well-being.
If you can’t maintain proper form on a bodyweight squat, it’s a terrible idea to do heavy barbell squats or leg presses because your lower body mobility, muscles and movement patterns are underdeveloped. You need to work on your mobility before you go into hard training for the legs.
For most people, it’s most important to do stretches that target the hip flexors and hamstrings and now I’ll outline why:
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Hamstrings and hip flexors: When you sit down for extended periods of time, your hamstrings shorten and your hip flexors get tighter. This causes your hips to tilt forwards and as a result, your spine will start to develop an S-shape. Over time, this will lead to problems with your posture (lordosis) and Online Transformation Program
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eventually lower back pain. In addition, having tight hamstrings and hip flexors limits your ability to squat deep, therefore stretching them out is not only great for your health but also your ability to squat deep.
Because of that, I’ve made sure to include stretches for your hip flexors and hamstrings in your training program. Do not neglect these stretches, because they aren’t just optional fluff at the end of your training session. They’re crucial to ensure you can squat and move properly.
When you perform the stretches, only stretch to the point where you can feel a gentle stretch. You also want to relax as much as possible and focus on your breathing during each stretch.
Stretching should never be painful.
Over time, as you get better at the stretches for your hamstrings and hip flexors, you will see that your squats become easier and easier. You will be able to go deeper while keeping your heels
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planted on the floor, maintaining a neutral spine and pushing your knees out to the sides so they track along with your foot.
5 Common Training Mistakes I See Clients Make After training a variety of clients, I’ve noticed 5 common training mistakes that my clients make.
These are mistakes that will either get you injured or reduce the effectiveness of your training program.
I’ll quickly cover them below:
1) Skipping warm up. I’ve trained hard for nearly 7 years and I’m 100% injury free.
This means that for 7 years, I’ve never been out of training for months because of a nagging shoulder or knee injury and because of that, I’ve been able to consistently improve my physique year after year. Online Transformation Program
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Preventing injuries is VERY important for your physique transformation, because each injury is a major set-back that adds to the time it takes to transform.
I attribute staying injury-free to two things: 1) Warming up every single time I train and 2) Never pushing through pain.
The big mistake I see is when people are in a rush, they often cut down on their warm-up and jump right into the strength training exercises. This is a huge mistake, because this is the most common way that people get serious injuries that put them out of training for months.
Neglecting warm up opens up your body to injuries, even when you aren’t pushing yourself that hard. Therefore, if you’re short on time, complete the whole warm up and do as much of the strength training as you can.
It’s better to cut down on your strength training sets than your warm-up. Online Transformation Program
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If you don’t have time to warm-up, you don’t have time to train.
2) Pushing through pain. The second big mistake I see is when people push through pain. When you start feeling any kind of pain during or after an exercise, it’s a sign that an injury is building up.
Therefore, stop the exercise immediately and stop doing any other exercises that cause the pain.
If needed, find a replacement
exercise that trains the same
body-part because the exercise that causes the pain might not be ideal for your unique body-type.
It’s never worth it to do an exercise if you risk getting a serious injury from it.
If you warm-up every single time and stop pushing through bad pain, you prevent nearly all training injuries!
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3) Not making videos of your exercises The training program has a minimal exercise selection, therefore it’s imperative that you use great technique on every exercise so you can get the most out of every rep.
Technique can be the difference between adding a bit of muscle size to all your lacking muscle groups each month or consistently being stuck at the same size.
I would go as far as saying that you won’t be able to build a truly muscular physique without good technique because your target muscles won’t get worked properly.
The problem here is that most skinny-fat guys have a naturally low kinaesthetic sense which means that you aren’t good at keeping track of how the different body-parts are positioned in relation to each other throughout the movement. (Usually high level athletes have a very high kinaesthetic sense while skinny-fat guys that aren’t athletic have a low one).
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The result is that the way you think you look when you perform the exercise is very different from the way you actually look. (I.e. your technique most likely needs some work).
In addition, the problem with using instructional videos to correct your technique is that they show how a certain exercise looks for ONE specific body-type.
Using the barbell squat as an example, there’s a huge difference in the way it’s performed by a tall lanky guy who has long femurs and a short torso and a stocky short guy because the torso length/femur length ratio changes the way the squat has to be performed for each body-type.
Therefore, knowing that you most likely have a poor kinaesthetic sense and that instructional videos aren’t optimal, it’s important that you have someone experienced correct your technique.
In this case, I want you to make videos of yourself performing the squat, push up and chin up variation you’re working on. Online Transformation Program
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To be specific, I would like a video from the front and side angle on every exercise.
If you’re a client on the Online Transformation Program client, you can upload the video to Dropbox, YouTube or any other site you like, then send the links to my private coaching email address and I’ll help you correct your technique.
4) Not resting enough between sets. Another issue I see in beginning clients is related to rest time between sets.
For each exercise, I prescribed a certain amount of seconds or minutes I want you to rest between sets.
For example, on the chin up and push up I prescribed 3 minutes.
The reason for the long rest time between sets is because I want your muscles to be fresh going into each set. Online Transformation Program
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This will enable you to do more repetitions and thereby make strength gains faster.
And strength gains are the #1 goal of this training program - not to complete the training session as fast as possible.
To gain strength, you need to be as fresh as possible for each set and that requires you rest enough to let your muscles recover.
What should you do in between sets?
I recommend you take the time between sets to:
1. Log the amount of reps you did on the set. (More about logging training sessions later). 2. Write notes about how the exercise made you feel or technique issues you need to work on. (BioFeedback). 3. Do some light stretching for the muscles you worked.
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5) Neglecting the Negative Phase of Each Rep One question I get asked often is: “How fast should I do my reps?”
I used to answer this question with a specific amount of seconds (usually 3 seconds for the negative part of the rep and 2 seconds for the positive).
However, it doesn’t actually matter how fast you do the reps.
It’s OK to do fast reps on an exercise — as long as you are in full control of the rep.
Being in full control of the rep means that you aren’t just letting your body fall down from the top of the chin up or to “drop” into the bottom position of the diamond push up.
The issue with letting your body drop is that you don’t use your muscles to lower yourself, and that means you are missing out on a lot of the muscle building benefits of each exercise.
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To be specific, your muscles are able to produce the most force during the eccentric phase of each rep. (E.g. when you lower yourself from a chin up, lower yourself in a push up or lower yourself in a squat).
When you neglect the eccentric phase and drop yourself into the bottom of an exercise, the following things happen:
1. You don’t get the benefit of working your muscles during the negative phase which is the phase where they do most of the work. 2. When you drop into the bottom, you make the positive phase of the exercise a lot easier because you “bounce” out of the bottom and then use that momentum to complete the positive phase. 3. You increase the risk of injury a lot because you’re doing more reps than your muscles and joints are ready for.
In other words, neglecting the eccentric phase of each rep is a huge mistake that only boosts your ego.
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Therefore, work the negative phase hard from the beginning and you will see that while your reps drop initially, you will get bigger and stronger in the long-term.
How to Create the Right Training Environment For Maximum Results There are essentially 2 training environments when it comes to training your body: 1) Gym and 2) Home.
The environment you train in is extremely important for your results because the right environment can enable you to push yourself that extra amount needed to see muscle gains.
The right environment for you depends on several factors:
• Motivation levels: Lack of motivation to train hard. “I simply can’t get motivated to train hard and complete my training sessions.” • Time: Lack of time to hit the gym. “I have so many things to do so hitting the gym is impossible.”
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• Confidence: Being embarrassed of performing exercises in front of others.
Confidence: If you’re embarrassed about exercising in front of others, your best bet is to train at home or in a secluded place because it enables you to practice by yourself and then you can start going to the gym later once you feel comfortable in your own skin.
Time: If you lack the time to hit the gym, then your only option is to train at home or at work.
Motivation: If you lack motivation to train hard when you’re by yourself and no-one is watching, I suggest the gym, especially a gym that is full of people that inspire you.
Music Improves Training Performance Whether you train at home or at the gym doesn’t matter as much as having some good headphones and music to train to.
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I personally never train without music that pumps me up because a training session with music vs. one without music is like the difference between night and day!
Music makes me “forget about the pain of exercise” and I can train a lot harder and longer.
Therefore, I suggest that you make a good music playlist every week for your workouts and put on your headphones because it will make a massive difference in your training.
The Ideal Time of the Day to Do Strength Training? (Ideal vs. Practical) For most people, the ideal time to strength train is the late afternoon or early evening.
The reasoning for this is two-fold:
1. You will have eaten more meals, so you will have more energy to train hard.
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2. You will have moved your body throughout the day so your muscles will be more awake and ready.
I personally found that I can always do more reps and more weight in the late afternoon and evening compared to the early morning or early afternoon. The same goes for my clients who have tested this.
With that said, the ideal time may be different from the most practical time.
If you’ve never stuck to ONE training program for 16 consecutive weeks and consistency is an issue for you, it’s much better if you get training out of the way in the morning.
This reduces the risk of you missing training sessions, and in the long-term, staying consistent will do more for your bodycomposition goals than squeezing out a 5% strength advantage in the evenings.
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Just imagine if you had been training consistently for the past 10 years. Even if your training program wasn’t ideal, you would still have achieved better results than most guys in the gym, simply because you stayed consistent.
Therefore, if consistency is an issue for you, here are my suggestions:
1. Get a home chin up bar so you can train at home and thereby reduce the risk of missing a training session. 2. Prepare your training clothes, water bottle, bag and some fruit for quick energy in the evening. 3. Wake up, have some fruit, warm-up, and do training first thing in the morning before anything else. Building the habit is more important than anything else at this point. I would even sacrifice 30 minutes of sleep just so you can wake up earlier and get the training in. You can always work on your sleep habits once the habit of training has been solidified and you are able to train in the evenings.
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4. When you warm-up, do twice as many warm-up sets as prescribed in the program because your body needs a bit extra in the morning to wake up.
The First 14 Days of Training Done Right To ensure that you can sustain progress and execute the exercises in the program correctly, follow the steps below in your first 14 days of training:
Step 1 - Find the right exercise variations for you: Before you start pushing yourself and training hard, experiment with the different exercise variations to find one that you can comfortably do for at least 5 reps. Some of my clients need to do knee push ups before they can move on to regular push ups and later the diamond push up and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s much better if you set the bar too low and start off with an easy variation, because if you start out too hard, you will have unbearable soreness going into each training session and you’re setting yourself up for a serious injury before even getting started. Therefore, drop your ego because you aren’t competing against anyone but yourself! Online Transformation Program
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Step 2 - Master exercise technique with video: Watch the exercise technique videos that are linked when you click on each exercise. Once you’ve studied the technique, it’s time to make a video of yourself doing each exercise and compare your own technique against the video you just looked at. This is by far the most effective way to correct your form on all exercises and it will pay off big time over your training career. Make sure to record yourself from different angles to get the most out of this.
Step 3 - Take written notes on your technique so you can improve: Nearly all my coaching clients find that they have a lot of room for improvement when they send over their exercise videos. And we aren’t just talking about advanced exercises such as low cable flies for the upper chest, but simple basics such as a regular push up! Therefore, when you compare your exercise videos, take written notes on what you can improve, and keep working on your form and making regular videos until you nail the technique! It won’t take that much extra time to do these things but the videos will pay off big time over the long-term and enable you to progress at a much faster rate. Online Transformation Program
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Step 4 - Track your BioFeedback: The way you feel going into each training session and during the training is critical, especially in the beginning. This is very important to track in the beginning because doing a training program and diet plan that doesn’t make you feel great isn’t sustainable long-term. This is why we want to first come up with a strategy that makes you feel your best and then later focus on progression.
Here are the things you want to note down before you go into each training session, during the session and after:
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Do you go into your training feeling recovered from the last training session?
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Do you have high energy levels before going into your training session?
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Do you feel the target muscles working on each exercise? If not, note this down during your training session so you can work more on your technique.
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Do any exercises cause sharp pain or discomfort in your
joints? If so, stop the exercise immediately, note it down and check if your technique is correct. !
On a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is each training session for you?
With my Online Transformation Program clients I have them fill out 14 BioFeedback related questions everyday and then I give them feedback/change up their plan based on their response to the plan.
Tracking these things is important because once you reach “the wall” (i.e. a time in your training where you can’t progress on an exercise), you will be able to look back at your notes and figure out how to adjust your training to break through your plateau.
In addition to that, positive BioFeedback ensures that you’re following a plan that optimises your natural testosterone production and metabolism. Both of these ensure that you get long-term results you can keep.
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And you can do most of this while taking rest between sets, so it’s not going to take up any additional time.
Once you settle in the the training program and achieve good technique, it’s time to get stronger by following the progression strategies in the sections coming up.
I want to emphasise that you need to push yourself to get stronger and to grow your muscles, but you don’t want to do this before you master the technique of each exercise, otherwise you will “pay” for it later by getting injured.
Rushing through your transformation never works out the way you want it to so don’t do it.
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Without Progressive Overload You Won’t Build Strength and Muscle Mass
I always find new ways to push myself in my training, even when I’m travelling. Here I’m strengthening my grip by changing up the way I do pull ups.
The key to build a physique with bodyweight training is to force your body to adapt to more stress.
Just imagine adding 1 rep to your diamond push up for 20 weeks straight.
There’s no way you will look the same when you can do 25 diamond push ups instead of 5. Online Transformation Program
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Your body has to adapt to the new demands, and it does so by adding muscle size.
Therefore, adding more stress as often as you can recover from it, is the most important part of your training!
If your training sessions are not designed with the aim of achieving more stress, they are not training sessions.
They are EXERCISE or WORKOUTS (what most people do).
Exercise and workouts are great for your heart and mood.
They will make you sweat and feel good after your training sessions, but they will not build a great physique.
Building a great physique requires STRATEGIC SWEAT.
Go into each training session with a plan of achieving progressive overload and you will transform over time! Online Transformation Program
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In this case, we focus on progressing on just 3 exercises: 1) Chin Up, 2) Diamond Push Up, 3) Bodyweight squat.
Those are the only 3 things you want to track, because tracking a lot of exercises will result in a lack of FOCUS.
The way you progress on all exercises is simple: You add reps as often as possible to your first set.
To be specific, you will focus on increasing the number of reps you can do on your first set because the first set is where you have the most energy and you can push yourself the most.
So if you did 2 chin ups during the first set of your Monday training you will try to do 3 chin ups or more on the first set during your Wednesday training.
In the case you can’t add reps to your first set, you try to add reps across the total of all your sets.
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For example, if you did 3 reps on the first set of chin ups, then 2 reps and 1 rep on the 2nd and 3rd set, you did a total of 5 reps that training session.
During the next training session, try to do 6 reps or more.
This progression strategy is used for the chin up and diamond push up in the program.
On the bodyweight squat, you want to use a slightly different progression strategy.
You want to do a total of 100 bodyweight squats each training session spread across as few sets as possible.
The goal is to eventually do all 100 reps in your first set.
To achieve this goal, you want to focus on adding reps to your first set as often as possible and then do the remaining reps spread the following sets to reach a total of 100 reps.
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Overall, the key is to try your hardest to get stronger on that first set because that will in the end lead to strength and muscle gains.
I emphasise try because you need to know that you won’t be able to make progress every single training session or even every week.
In fact, you will have more training sessions and weeks where you don’t make progress compared to training sessions and weeks where you make progress.
The stronger you become, the more true this becomes because strength gains are easiest to come by when you are new to training.
This is a fact of life otherwise everyone would be able to build up to do 1000 consecutive chin ups on their first set.
In addition, tall guys with long legs and arms will generally make much slower progress on bodyweight exercises compared to Online Transformation Program
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shorter guys with a stocky build because we do a lot more work on each rep.
We have more total body-mass to lift, less stability and balance due to our tall frame and we are moving our body through a much longer range-of-motion. (This is basically why you will never see a tall gymnast in the Olympics).
On the same token, the taller you are, the longer time it will take to fill out your frame with muscle mass because the muscle mass is spread on a bigger frame.
Therefore, the benefit of being short is that you will make faster progress and you have the potential to become great at bodyweight exercises while the benefit of being tall is that you will get more out of the basic bodyweight exercises you can do from home and once you do build up your muscles, they will look truly impressive.
Knowing this, it’s important that if you’re a coaching client on the Online Transformation Program, you update me on your progress Online Transformation Program
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every Sunday so I can go in and adjust your plan whenever it’s needed.
Generally speaking, when you have 2 consecutive weeks or more where you don’t make any progress, I will go in and help you make progress again.
The way I help you make progress again is by looking at your entire training history with me, your BioFeedback, exercise technique, training notes and asking you questions related to your unique situation.
By looking at your numbers, BioFeedback, exercise technique, training notes and our email correspondence, I get a very good idea of exactly what needs to be done to help you make progress again.
If I don’t have your updates every week, I don’t have any data to go by to adjust your plan so you can get your best results.
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Therefore, I want to emphasise again that it’s imperative that you update me on your progress every Sunday to get your best results.
In addition to updating your progress tracking sheet every Sunday, I want you to track every training session in a physical note book or on your smart phone.
Doing so has 2 benefits:
1. You can look back at your last training session to know exactly how many reps you need to do each training session to achieve progressive overload. This further reinforces your mind to beat your previous personal best. 2. You can take notes about your training session and later share these with me if you find they’re important. For example, if you feel joint pain on a certain exercise you can note it down and let me know through email so I can help you out.
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Here’s an old photo I took showing an example of progress tracking:
It doesn’t matter whether you use an old physical notepad, app on your phone such as SimpleNote or a Google Spreadsheet. The most important thing is that you get into the habit of tracking your training because this will pay off BIG TIME over the next 5 years.
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Eventually with diligent tracking and my guidance, you will achieve 15 chin ups, 30 diamond push ups and 100 bodyweight squats. All clean reps with perfect form done in one set.
These are the basic strength goals we will work towards.
Once you’ve reached those numbers, we will work with more advanced programming and over time add more exercises so you can stimulate all muscle fibres and thereby get more complete muscle development.
Chin Up Progression: Step 1 Negative Pull Ups: If you can’t do a real chin up yet, practice negative pull ups while shedding excess body-fat through diet. The amount of reps you do matters less than the way you do them. The key here is to work towards doing each rep slowly with full control and through a full range of motion, which means that you go all the way down on each rep. Doing
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this is a proven strategy that I and many of my clients followed to achieve our first real chin up.
Step 2 - Chin Ups: Once you can do your first chin up, progress to 15 chin ups by adding reps as often as possible to your sets (and in particular your first set where you are fresh). So if you did 8 chin ups during your Monday training, try to do 9 reps during your next training. In the case you can’t do a single rep on your 2nd or 3rd set, just do negative chin ups instead. Over time, you will be able to do 15 chin ups with perfect technique.
Diamond Push Up Progression: Step 1 - Knee Push Ups: If you can’t do a real push up yet, practice knee push ups while shredding excess body-fat through your diet. You want to add reps as often as possible to your sets (and in particular your first set aim for achieving 20 consecutive reps with perfect technique on you first set before proceeding to a real push up.
Step 2 - Regular Push Ups: Once you can do 20 consecutive reps on the knee push up, progress to regular push ups. After Online Transformation Program
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you get your first push up, progress to 20 regular push ups by adding reps to your sets as often as possible (and in particular your first set where you are fresh). So if you did 15 push ups during your Monday training, try to do 16 reps during your next training.
Step 3 - Diamond Push Ups: Once you can do 20 push ups, work on gradually putting your hands closer so you can achieve your first diamond push up. Then progress to 30 diamond push ups by adding reps to your sets as often as possible.
Bodyweight Squat Progression: Step 1 - Technique: The first step is to focus on achieving depth on your bodyweight squat rather than getting stronger. To do this, work within a rep-range where you feel that your legs are getting a nice pump but stay far away from muscular failure. Your goal is to try and go lower on each rep while keeping your spine straight, keeping your feet planted on the floor and pushing your knees out to the sides so they track your foot on each rep. The stretching program will help you achieve this goal very fast.
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Step 2 - Achieve 100 reps in several sets: Once you can do 10 reps with perfect form to parallel, you work on increasing your reps on each set until you can do a total of 100 reps on all 3 sets.
Step 3 - Achieve 100 reps in one set: Once you can do a total of 100 reps on all 3 sets, work towards doing more reps on the first and second set. You want to do a total of 100 reps each training session and eventually be able to do all 100 with perfect form in your first set.
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The Importance of Optimising Your Natural Testosterone Production to Build Strength and Muscle Mass
Diet is crucial because it provides the building blocks that enable you to build strength and muscle mass and regulates important hormones such as testosterone and cortisol and these hormones largely shape your body-composition.
You’ve probably heard the saying that your muscles grow when you sleep and it’s true.
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When you do diamond push ups and chin ups, you stimulate the muscles and place stress on your body.
However, to capitalise on the training stimulus, your muscles need to recover before you go into your next training session.
If you don’t recover properly, your body will spend all it’s time in a state of playing catch up, rather than building more muscle size.
That’s why recovery is equally important to training.
Poor recovery = No gains.
And recovery is one of the biggest challenges for us skinny-fat guys.
Most of us have a thin bone-structure with skinny wrists and a low natural production of the main muscle building hormone in your body, testosterone.
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A thin bone structure and a low natural testosterone production means that your body doesn’t handle training stress well.
Therefore, in order to get your best results, we need to make recovery a big priority.
The most important thing to speed up recovery is to follow a proper nutrition plan which provides your body with a lot of:
• Omega-3 fatty acids, extra virgin olive oil and nuts for an optimal hormonal balance (optimal hormones are required to change your body-composition). • Energy from high quality starches such as potatoes and rice. • Vitamins and minerals from a variety of fruits and vegetables. • Protein from lean protein sources so you can build and repair your muscles.
Your diet provides the building blocks for changing your body, so it’s a requirement that you educate yourself and follow a proper diet plan to get the most out of your training.
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In addition to speeding up training recovery, your diet will also help boost your natural testosterone production and now I’ll explain why this is crucial.
In this article I cover a 1996 study which shows that guys who inject testosterone gain 2 times as much muscle mass without doing any kind of training, compared to guys who train three times per week without injecting testosterone.
You read that right: A guy who injects testosterone but doesn’t workout, gains two times as much muscle mass as a guy who does regular workouts without injecting testosterone.
Testosterone is the male hormone of vitality and it’s responsible for functions such as your ability to build strength and muscle mass, your sex drive and aggression levels.
It’s the hormone which increases during puberty and gives guys broader shoulders, body-hair and more muscular physiques.
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Higher testosterone levels enable you to train harder, recover faster between training sessions and of course to build more muscle mass.
I personally also had a low natural testosterone production when I started training and after looking at dozens of lab tests from my clients, I found that most skinny-fat guys have low testosterone levels.
The biggest sign of having a low natural testosterone production is if you aren’t waking up with an erection nearly everyday (or something like 5-6 days a week).
Other signs are puffy nipples, under-muscled upper body, narrow shoulders, low energy levels, low motivation and difficulty maintaining hard erections.
(If you live in the United States, you can get a full hormonal panel done through PrivateMD Labs)
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If you train with low testosterone levels, you won’t get much out of it because you don’t have the hormonal balance to support bodycomposition changes.
Most guys find it incredibly hard to build a ripped physique so imagine how hard it is when you have the testosterone production of your grandfather and you follow a crappy diet that doesn’t support a higher testosterone production.
You guessed right… It’s nearly impossible.
Therefore I hope you understand by now that in order to benefit from my training program you need to follow a proper diet plan, which I will cover in the next section.
Clean Up Your Diet to Boost Testosterone I’ve spent years studying natural testosterone optimisation and I’ve boosted my own natural testosterone production with over 150%.
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The key to boost your testosterone levels is to first and foremost get on a sustainable diet plan that enables you to lose body-fat because excess body-fat is estrogenic and estrogen, the female hormone, binds to testosterone.
Excess Body-Fat -> High Estrogen -> Estrogen Binds To Testosterone -> Lower Testosterone Production
I emphasise sustainable because I want you to follow a diet plan that you can follow for the next 10 or 20 years.
If you can’t imagine yourself following a diet plan for the next decade or two, it’s not going to work long-term.
This one thing is crucial to understand because transforming your body is not a sprint — it’s a marathon.
You need TIME to make lasting changes to your bodycomposition so you better follow a diet and training strategy that is realistic to stick to.
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The first step I take with my clients is to troubleshoot their diet with a comprehensive Client Assessment Form.
One of the questions in the form is: “Do you often get bloated, gassy or constipated?”
I include this question because bloating, gassiness, constipation (and acne) are signs that you are eating foods that you don’t digest well.
When you eat foods you don’t digest well, you create chronic inflammation which leads to a higher production of the stress hormone cortisol, and high cortisol levels reduce your testosterone production.
Eat Foods You Don’t Digest Well -> Bloating, Gassiness and Constipation -> Chronic Inflammation -> Higher Cortisol Levels -> Lower Testosterone
It’s a well-known fact that your digestion is a great indicator of your overall health,
and according to board-certified
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neurosurgeon Dr. Brett Osborn, chronic inflammation is the underlying reason behind most modern diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's.
So you should never ignore symptoms such as bloating, gassiness and constipation because they’re signs of a much larger issue than “just” low testosterone levels.
And even if you don’t have these symptoms, it’s still a great idea to cut out foods that are known to create inflammation because in most cases, chronic inflammation is asymptomatic.
Therefore, the diet strategy I follow with most of my skinny-fat clients is that I initially have them limit their intake of foods and drinks that:
1.Create inflammation. 2.Provide a small amount of satiety per Calorie. 3.Increase the female hormone Estrogen.
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The foods and drinks I’m talking about are wheat, dairy, fried foods, soy, refined sugars and of course alcohol.
• Wheat: Bread, pasta, pizza, hotdogs, cereal. • Dairy: Whey protein powder, milk, cheese, milk chocolate, yoghurt. • Fried foods: McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, fried chicken, chips. • Soy: Soy milk, soy sauce and foods that contain soy (check food labels for this). • Refined sugars: Most juices (unless they’re 100% natural fruit), candy, gummy bear , a lot of cereals. • Alcohol: Beer, wine, spirits, cocktails.
Alcohol, wheat, refined sugars, soy and fried foods are obvious choices because we all know that these foods and drinks are junk that break down our bodies.
However, some of you may wonder about dairy which is known to provide your body with calcium and improve your bone health.
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“But studies say I need dairy for good bone health?” The issue with dairy products is that while they provide high amounts of calcium, they
also increase the female hormone,
estrogen.
According to Ganmaa Davaasambuu, a physician and scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, dairy products account for 60 to 80 percent of the estrogen consumed in the typical American diet.
And remember:
• Skinny-fat guys have a naturally high estrogen production, especially those of you who are soft around the lower waist and have puffy nipples. • Estrogen lowers your natural testosterone production so we don’t want more of it.
So if you’re a
guy with a skinny-fat physique or even puffy
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You can easily cover most of of your required calcium intake by eating 500 grams of green vegetables such as broccoli, spinach and kale daily.
In contrast to dairy, these foods are also known to reduce estrogen, boost testosterone and improve your blood flow because of their high nitric oxide contents so you should be eating a lot of them anyways.
And in the case you don’t get enough calcium from diet, just take a calcium supplement. It’s both affordable and easy so there’s no reason to believe the hype that you need dairy for optimal health.
The 4 Day Diet Experiment I could talk all day long about why the foods listed earlier are bad for you, however, instead of me convincing you, I suggest you convince yourself.
Get rid of the wheat, dairy, alcohol, fried foods, refined sugars and soy for just 4 days and see for yourself how you feel because Online Transformation Program
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that’s the ONLY real way to evaluate how diet changes work for YOU.
See for yourself how your body-composition, skin, digestion and overall well-being starts changing.
I’ve had countless readers and clients do the 4 day experiment and here are some of the benefits they’ve experienced:
• Clearing up acne. • Correcting digestive issues such as constipation and bloating. • Feeling lighter and more energised throughout the day.
And some of those who have stuck with it for months, have gotten rid of puffy nipples and lost over 20 pounds of fat.
So give it a shot for 4 days, take written notes on how you feel and then evaluate for yourself if you’ve been eating foods that are bad for you.
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High Testosterone Diet Foods Once you’ve cut out the “bad” foods, and experienced the benefits that come with that, it’s time to replace them with testosterone boosting foods.
The foods I want you to eat are satiating so you minimise the risk of overeating and they provide you with consistent energy levels so you feel your best throughout the day.
I want to point out that the next sections are going to be quite long and detailed, however in order to change your eating habits, you have to understand the why behind it. You have to understand why certain foods are bad for your health and why others provide amazing health benefits.
Once you know about the benefits of the various foods I recommend, you will be more likely to want to eat more of them, even if you don’t like them that much at first. (Trust me, I know because I used to eat white bread, butter, sausages, candy and chocolate while growing up. I barely knew the names of most vegetables). Online Transformation Program
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Fruits and Vegetables When I started training in February 2010, I got stuck in the whole “diet is a numbers game approach”. I believe that as long as I hit my daily calorie, protein, carb and fat goals, I will transform. This is the wrong way to go about dieting because it often means that you will neglect fruits and vegetables. These are very underrated for transforming your body because often when you feel hungry, you are just lacking in vitamins or minerals. And no, taking a multivitamin or eating a few bananas and apples a day won’t cut it.
The average adult needs 10-12 servings of fruits and vegetables per day to achieve peak performance and that’s A LOT. We’re talking about 70-84 servings per week and most people never get close to that number. That’s too bad because by eating fruits and vegetables you will prevent going on a big eating binge and messing up all your diet efforts.
Did you know that pineapple contains bromelain which helps you digest protein and thereby you can utilise more protein for Online Transformation Program
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repairing and building muscle mass? Introducing pineapple with my breakfast fixed digestive problems I had my entire life and it has worked wonders for my clients and readers too.
Did you know that spinach boosts natural testosterone production, increases blood flow and clears up acne because of its high vitamin A contents? (Vitamin A is what they put in the most powerful medicine for acne “Accutane”, but that medicine has a lot of side-effects and isn’t worth it considering you can get the same effect from eating a lot of spinach). Eating a lot of spinach everyday helped me clear up acne and improve my blood flow (I always suffered from cold hands and feet before).
Fruits and vegetables have countless benefits and understanding the benefits of them is the key to educate yourself about why you should eat more of them. I always hated eating fruits and vegetables and no one would ever have imagined that I would be snacking on a bowl of dry spinach every morning instead of a bar of chocolate, but I’m doing it because I understand the benefits that come with it. To get educated, I recommend you google for the benefits of various fruits and Online Transformation Program
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vegetables and take notes on how various vegetables benefit you. By doing so you will want to eat more fruits and vegetables and you won’t have to rely on will-power which is limited anyways. Finally, if you REALLY can’t stomach fruits and vegetables or don’t have time to prepare them, I recommend that you as a minimum take a high quality greens supplement.
Starches: Potatoes and Rice Potatoes and rice are two great starch sources and they make up the base of my clients’ lunch and dinners. The reasoning to why they work so well is first and foremost because they’re relatively easy on your digestion compared to other carb sources, and that’s important because most skinny-fat guys have poor nutrient partitioning. (I.e. your ability to use food for muscle gains isn’t all that great). Nutrient partitioning goes hand-in-hand with your body’s digestive abilities, so having poor nutrient partitioning means you have below average digestion and consistently eating foods that you don’t digest foods well. The signs of eating foods that you don’t digest well are: constipation and bloating after meals. If your stomach looks bloated and like it’s full of gas after
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eating a meal, and you have a hard time getting business done on the toilet, it’s because you eat foods you don’t digest well.
This is important to understand because when you consistently eat foods that you don’t digest well, you increase inflammation in your body and chronic inflammation leads to an increase in the hormone, cortisol, the stress hormone. When cortisol is high, your testosterone levels drop.
Poor nutrient partitioning -> Poor digestion -> Inflammation -> Higher Cortisol -> Lower Testosterone
In other words, we want to eat foods we digest well to maximise natural testosterone production. After having problems with starches my entire life, I found that rice (both brown and white) and potatoes (both sweet and white) work really well for me. I can eat these foods in very big amounts and digest them well. The same is the case for most of my clients who had issues digesting starches most of their life. They do really well with potatoes and rice, so I highly recommend that you make these your main carb
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sources, at leat initially, and then consider to re-add other starches later on and then see how your body responds to them.
Now, I know that some of you may wonder about why I include white rice when brown rice contains more fiber and thereby is more filling. The reasons for that are outlined below:
1. If you eat enough fruits and vegetables (as you should), then you will get more than enough fiber from that alone. Adding excessive fiber through brown rice will only put more stress on your digestive system and make you more bloated. 2. For the vast majority of people, white rice is more tasty, tasty, therefore it increases diet adherence to use that as a staple compared to brown rice.
The only reasons to why I would include brown rice are: 1) If it tastes better for you or 2) You aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables to get enough fiber.
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You Don’t Need to Eat That Much Protein To Support Muscle Gains If you met me in 2010-2011, you would meet a high school kid who fell for the fitness industry scam of eating a high protein diet. I believed that I need to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, otherwise I won’t be able to build muscle mass. At a bodyweight of 200 pounds, that meant I aimed to eat 200 grams of protein per day. To give you some perspective, 200 grams of protein is the equivalent of eating 1 pound of chicken breast, 6 eggs and 2 protein shakes everyday. Because of that, I spent all my money on buying tuna, chicken breast, eggs and protein shakes and prepared them each night in my lunch box so I could bring them for my school lunch in order to hit my daily protein targets of 200 grams. My class-mates would ask me about why I was doing all that, and I then lectured them on the minimum protein requirements to build muscle mass. I even wanted to skip vacations because I was scared I wouldn’t get enough protein! I was dedicated but uninformed.
Eating all that protein requires a lot of effort, makes your wallet lighter and pushes you into buying more protein powder. The only Online Transformation Program
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problem is that it’s very hard to digest all that protein and utilise it for your training. When I was following my high protein diet, I was always constipated and bloated because my body couldn’t use all that protein. I felt terrible eating all that protein and didn’t have much room for my protein-sparing nutrients: which are the vegetables, fruits and high quality starches such as rice and potatoes. This is similar to the experience my clients have. The reasoning for this is that most protein sources are hard to digest and as mentioned mentioned earlier, earlier, us skinny-fat guys have poor poor nutrient partitioning and digestion so there’s no point in pushing all that protein into our body. Remember, eating foods you don’t digest well leads to inflammation and chronic inflammation leads to higher cortisol which results in lower testosterone levels.
I learned all this the hard way, wasting 2 years lifting heavy and wasting a lot of time, money and headaches on a high protein diet. Then one day, I came across a book called “How Much Protein”. This book is written by Brad Pilon who is a natural bodybuilder and previously worked in the protein supplement industry. industry. While working in the supplement industry, industry, he questioned his company’s marketing, asking them why they recommend Online Transformation Program
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such a high protein intake when there are no well-designed studies supporting it. Reading between the lines, I understood that he was indirectly told by his superiors that there are no studies supporting very high protein intakes but that it’s necessary to push this argument to sell more protein supplements.
In the book he presents a bunch of studies and then advocated a moderate protein intake of 70-120 grams per day and this resonated a lot of with me at the time so I gave it a try. To my surprise, I felt a lot better when I replaced a lot of my proteins with high quality carbs such as potatoes and rice. This is also about the time where I saw a serious increase in my testosterone levels because the protein-sparing nutrients are more important for your hormonal balance. And most importantly, importantly, I gained muscle mass. Since increasing the carbs in my diet, I’ve gained several inches around my chest, arms and shoulders and I’m bigger than I ever was on a high protein diet. Carbs energise you to train hard and fill up your muscles with glycogen. Without enough carbs, you won’t grow.
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The outrageous claims of eating 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight can work for those who are genetically gifted and able to digest all that protein, but it won’t work for the average skinny-fat guy who has terrible nutrient partitioning.
Furthermore, it doesn’t really matter when you eat your protein so don’t worry about post-workout shakes or taking casein before going to bed. It’s all marketing. When you eat a big steak of chicken it stays in your body for many hours, so it won’t matter if you supplement with protein powder after your training sessions. Now this doesn’t mean you should never supplement with protein, but you need to understand that as long as you eat a balanced diet with decent amounts of meat at least two times per day and then focus the rest of your diet to get enough carbs you’re all set to get jacked. At this point it’s more about training the right way for your unique body-type and giving yourself enough time to grow rather than buying the right protein powder.
On an added note, I personally believe that the quality of your protein source is more important than the total amount you eat because many protein sources cause some inflammation in your Online Transformation Program
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body. For example grass fed lean beef is considered to be one of the highest quality protein sources, but it still causes some level of inflammation (although not that much if you eat it in moderation), so you should focus your diet on eating just the right amount of protein for your unique body-type and get the best quality protein you can get.
Healthy Fats To Support an Optimal Hormonal Balance For fats, I used to be an advocate of using a high amount of coconut oil, egg yolks and animal fat to boost testosterone.
These are all high in saturated fats and saturated fats can boost natural testosterone production.
The problem is that the boost isn’t that there’s a bigger downside to consuming a diet that is high in saturated fat. Over time, as you consume a lot of saturated fats, your veins get clogged so your blood doesn’t flow through the body the way it’s supposed to.
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And that leads to soft erections, poor focus and eventually a cardiovascular related event such as stroke and heart attack.
The only way to counter some of this effect is to supplement with high grade Omega-3 and exercise right after eating a meal high in saturated fat.
But even if you do these things you don’t prevent the side effect of clogged veins and who can exercise several times a day? It just isn’t realistic.
In other words, it’s not worth it to eat a diet very high in saturated fat, therefore foods that contain saturated fat should be kept in moderation.
Here’s a list of foods that are high in saturated fat: !
Egg yolks.
!
Fatty meats.
!
Butter.
!
Bacon.
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Coconut oil. Online Transformation Program
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Palm oil.
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Sausages.
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High fat milk.
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High fat cheese.
Low Saturated Fat Intake Doesn’t Mean Low Fat Intake Reducing saturated fat doesn’t mean that you should keep all fat to a minimum.
In fact, consuming enough fat is crucial to boost natural testosterone production.
The key is to eat foods that are high in healthy fats (monounsaturated and polyunsatured fats).
The foods that are high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats are:
• Omega-3 fatty acids (polyunsaturated). • Extra virgin olive oil (monounsaturated fats). Online Transformation Program
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• Dark chocolate (monounsaturated fats). • Hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, pistachios (depending on which nuts you get, they will either be high in monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats). • Avocados (monounsaturated fats).
Therefore, you should grill most of your meats in extra virgin olive oil, put extra virgin olive oil on your vegetables, snack on dark chocolate when you get sugar cravings, supplement with high grade Omega-3 fatty acids daily (more on that later) and eat a handful of nuts each day (mix these up for the most benefit). As you can see, it’s not that difficult to cover your daily fat requirements when you know which foods contain polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats.
Eat Dark Chocolate to Reduce Cravings For Sugar When I started my fat loss journey in February 2010, I had a massive appetite. I could eat a regular dinner consisting of chicken breast and mashed potatoes and still be hungry for more and binge on an entire jar of nutella followed by chocolate bars Online Transformation Program
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after. Or eat half a loaf of white bread with butter and deli meats and then be hungry 1 hour later. I was always craving starches and sugars and that’s very usual in guys who have high body-fat levels.
When you have excess body-fat, you also likely have a deficiency in the
satiety hormone, leptin. Leptin is the hormone which
regulates your appetite and guys who are skinny-fat or fat have low levels of leptin. This essentially means that you have a harder time feeling satiated after eating a meal and you have bigger cravings for food (and especially carbs and sugars). In other words, being fat or skinny-fat is a vicious cycle. You have low testosterone levels, high estrogen levels, low leptin levels, a slow metabolism (and other issues I haven’t covered here).
The only way to correct these hormonal issues long-term is to diet off your body-fat in a sustainable way.
When I talk bout dieting off the body-fat in a sustainable way, I’m not talking about going on a fad diet such as the ketogenic diet where you cut out carbs and replace them with fat. This will work Online Transformation Program
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for you, and you will lose fat but that’s the easy way and the easy way is most often the wrong one. Only a small minority of the population benefit from low carb diets because most of us need carbs to stay energised throughout the day and to feel our best. Therefore, the best solution isn’t to cut out carbs, but to eat the right kind.
Dark chocolate (70% cocoa or more): At a first glance dark chocolate might not look like a great choice because it contains about the same amount of Calories as milk chocolate, however, calories are just a number and are largely useless. Dark chocolate is great because the taste of it is earthy so it’s very hard to overeat on dark chocolate. It also contains more fat and less sugar so you prevent your blood sugar from spiking too much and you maintain steady energy levels.
Most of my clients will eat 30-60 grams of dark chocolate and then their cravings for sugar will be gone and they will be satiated. 30-60 grams may sound like a lot considering the calorie contents of dark chocolate, but you want to keep in mind that dieting is a long-term game. If you can eat 30-60 grams of Online Transformation Program
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dark chocolate now and then prevent binging of 200 grams of milk chocolate bars and candy later in the day, that’s a WIN for you. When you make dietary decisions, always think about the satiety level of the food and how it impacts your energy levels throughout the day rather than just the calorie count on a label. You want to get away from obsessing about calorie count because most labels aren’t that accurate and your body doesn’t work like a machine that only accounts for the calorie count of food.
High Grade Omega-3 Supplementation For Higher Testosterone Levels and Faster Metabolism Supplementing with Omega-3 is essential for those of you who want to get the most out of your training and now I’ll explain the scientific research behind it all.
First and foremost, an optimal Omega-3 Index reduces SHBG (Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin Hormone) while increasing the hormone LH (Lutenizing Hormone).
This is very important because: Online Transformation Program
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3. LH triggers testosterone production and an optimal Omega-3 Index increases LH. 4. SHBG binds to your testosterone and an Optimal Omega-3 Index reduces SHBG.
In other words, Omega-3 is amazing for increasing your natural testosterone production and my own blood work proves that my highest testosterone reading ever was after I corrected my Omega-3 Index.
In addition to boosting your natural testosterone production, a diet high in Omega-3 speeds up cell repair and helps recover muscle tears 3 times faster. This means that you will be able to train harder and more often.
And it doesn’t stop here… An optimal Omega-3 Index also helps lower insulin resistance and speed up your metabolism.1
1 Jyrki
K. Virtanen, Jaakko Mursu, et al. "Serum Omega-3 Polysaturated Fatty Acids and Risk of Incident Type 2 Diabetes in Men: The Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study." Diabetes care. Volume 37, Number 1, Pages 189-196, doi: 10.2337/dc 13-1504
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Because of that, I recommend HIGH GRADE Omega-3 supplementation to every skinny-fat guy. There are simply too many benefits not to take it.
I did my own test of countless Omega-3 products and discovered improvements in my Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio, gains in strength on compound exercises, more muscle mass on the upper body and an increase in energy levels only when I used high grade Omega-3 supplements… my conclusion? Do not buy the first Omega-3 you come across. Instead, go for a high grade Omega-3 that is highly dosed, contains all Omega-3s (not just EPA and DHA) and is purified. You can check the best Omega-3 brands on my recommended supplements page.
Full List of High Testosterone Diet Foods Below, I will summarise a full list of High Testosterone Diet foods I use as staples in most of my clients’ diet plans:
• Starches: Sweet potatoes, White potatoes, White Rice, Brown Rice, Quinoa, Oatmeal.
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• Protein: Turkey Breast, Chicken Breast, Lean Cuts of Beef Steak, Lean Ground Beef, Wild Caught Salmon, Egg Whites. • Fat: Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Avocadoes, Dark Chocolate, Almonds, Pistachios or Hazelnuts. • Variety of fruits and vegetables • Dietary supplements: High Grade Omega-3 fish oil and Athletic Greens Superfood Cocktail.
These foods are convenient to prepare and keep you full for a long time so you won’t even feel like you’re on a diet.
For example, a typical lunch could be 300 grams of potatoes and 250 grams of turkey breast with vegetables on the side and sugar-free ketchup. This meal has roughly 500-600 calories which is the equivalent of a few chocolate bars.
That’s a lot of food volume that fills you up, but not that many Calories.
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Now consider if you ate a similar amount of food volume with pasta, bread and more fatty meat choices. Your calories would suddenly double but you wouldn’t feel twice as satiated.
The point here is that making the right food choices will make your fat loss diet a whole lot easier to stick to, so make sure you keep that in mind when you design your diet plan.
The Vicious Cycle of Being Skinny-Fat The first step you have to take when designing your diet plan is to set up a healthy goal to aim for.
If you don’t have a great goal to reach for, you won’t be able to develop the ideal strategy to reach that goal.
When it comes to creating a diet plan, the two biggest mistakes skinny-fat guys make are:
1. Trying to gain muscle mass fast by eating way too many Calories. 2. Trying to lose weight fast by eating too few Calories. Online Transformation Program
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This eventually leads to a vicious cycle where the skinny-fat guy bounces back and forth between gaining body-fat and losing body-fat, while adding close to no strength and muscle mass.
First he eats a high Calorie bulking diet and gains a combination of fat and muscle mass. The vast majority of those gains are of course body-fat and not muscle.
Then he get’s discouraged and tries to lose the body-fat fast on a low Calorie diet and loses weight fast. As a result, he loses the small amount of muscle mass he had previously gained and basically goes back to where he started.
This cycle of bulking up and cutting is repeated a few times without any results and eventually the skinny-fat guy gives up on his fitness goals.
This is essentially similar to what happened to me in my first 2 years of training where I first bulked up from 200 pounds of bodyweight to 235 pounds, then followed that up with going back Online Transformation Program
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to 200 pounds. I looked exactly the same as when I started and it was discouraging to say the least.
The right way to transform is to go for slow and gradual changes in body-composition.
This means that your diet should not be extreme in ANY way.
If you have excess body-fat or you can’t do 15 chin ups yet, the worst strategy you can follow is to bulk up to try and gain mass.
It’s a waste to “bulk” when you have low strength levels and high body-fat levels because you won’t be able to capitalise on those Calories and build muscle mass. Instead, you will gain a lot of body-fat.
The reasons for this are outlined below:
1. Your natural testosterone production is low so your body’s overall ability to gain muscle mass is limited.
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2. When you have excess body-fat, your nutrient partitioning is poor. This means that your body isn’t good at utilising food for muscle gains. 3. When you have very low strength levels, you aren’t able to train with the volume required on a proper muscle building program.
Therefore, the conclusion is that in order to gain a lot of muscle mass, you need to first build up your strength levels and lose excess body-fat.
Distinguishing Between the Two Types of Skinny-Fat Guys: skinny-FAT vs. SKINNYfat After working with over 100 skinny-fat clients in my online coaching program, I’ve identified two types of skinny-fat guys, each requiring a different diet strategy:
1. skinny-FAT: You have a lot of body-fat to lose, your bodymass index is high and you have a pear-shaped body. If
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that’s you, you want to be in a small Caloric deficit until you get lean. 2. SKINNY-fat: You have a small amount of body-fat on your lower waist, lower chest and/or hips, your body-mass index is low and you have narrow shoulders. If that’s you, you want to either be in a Caloric maintenance or slight Caloric surplus to build strength and muscle mass while staying lean.
I’ve avoided to show example pictures of skinny-FAT guys and SKINNY-fat guys because I know from experience that skinny-fat guys are very bad at judging their starting body-composition.
I’ve coached guys who are underweight and have close to no body-fat to lose, yet they believe they’re fat.
I’ve also coached many guys who think they have a small amount of body-fat to lose, yet when they look at their starting photos, they’re surprised to see that there’s a lot of body-fat to lose.
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Therefore, the simplest and most convenient way to find out whether you’re skinny-FAT or SKINNY-fat is to look at your BMI (Body-Mass-Index).
Bodyweight in Kilograms / (Height in Meters x Height in Meters) = BMI
A healthy BMI is between 18.5-24.9. I emphasise healthy, because BMI is an oversimplified way of evaluating whether you’re overweight or not. It doesn’t account for body-composition (muscle mass, bones, body-fat), therefore you can have guys with large bone structures and high levels of muscle mass who have a BMI over 24.9, yet they aren’t overweight.
For example, I have a BMI of over 25 but that isn’t because I’m fat. It’s because I have a large amount of muscle mass after 7 years of hard training.
With that said, after going through a lot of my client data, I found that BMI works well for evaluating whether you’re skinny-FAT or SKINNY-fat. Online Transformation Program
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skinny-FAT guys most often have a BMI over 23 while SKINNYfat guys have a BMI below 23 therefore, I suggest that you put your numbers into the BMI formula above to check where you’re at.
If your BMI is under 23 and you’re SKINNY-fat, I recommend you start with a Caloric intake where you can maintain your bodyweight. (Maintenance).
If your BMI is over 23 and you’re skinny-FAT, I recommend you aim for a healthy Caloric deficit so you can lose excess body-fat.
Keep in mind that these are just great starting points. You can always adjust your Calories later, based on your BioFeedback and response to diet. (More about that later).
Daily Caloric Expenditure and Macronutrient Split Before I get this section started, I want to point out 4 important things:
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1. There will be a lot of boring calculations. These calculations are important to help you develop your baseline diet plan and teach you about how much food you can eat on daily basis to get a lean physique and which foods are very high in Calories. 2. Once you have a diet plan that works well for your unique body-type, you will have higher energy levels, more mental focus and you will be able to get lean and stay lean without putting in much effort. 3. I don’t want you to count Calories and macros for the rest of your life, unless you personally like to do it that way. The end goal is to move away from tracking food intake and weight your meals, and instead implement your base-line diet into your daily lifestyle so it doesn’t feel like you’re on a diet. I will of course show you examples of how to do that.
Now, let’s get started…
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To figure out how many Calories you should be eating on a daily basis, you
need to use a formula for estimating your “Daily
Caloric Expenditure” (DCE).
I emphasise estimating because regardless of what formula you use, there’s
a good chance it won’t be accurate. (Especially if
you use one of the formulas that doesn’t account for your bodyfat levels).
Most DCE formulas do not account for body-fat percentage which makes them off by 500-1000 Calories for certain individuals who have a body-composition that is far from average (i.e. very under muscled or jacked).
It’s important to include an estimate of your body-fat percentage because
the amount of lean mass you carry determines your
metabolic rate.
Yes, this means that guys who are jacked burn way more Calories at rest because their muscles use up a lot of fuel (food).
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In addition to body-fat percentage, it’s also crucial to account for your daily activity levels because guys who train for 2 hours per day and work a manual labor job, burn way more Calories compared to guys who sit in their office all day then go home and watch TV all night.
This essentially means that you can have two guys at the exact same bodyweight, yet one will be burning a lot more Calories each day.
To give you some perspective of how much these two factors make, I estimated the DCE for two different guys who both weigh the same — 200 pounds.
The first an athletic and active guy who is 200 pounds at 14% body-fat and who works a manual labor job. Because of his large amount of lean mass and high activity levels, he has an estimated DCE of +3900 calories per day.
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of lean mass and low activity levels, he has a DCE of just 3000 calories per day.
These two guys weigh the exact same and may not look THAT different at first glance. With a shirt on you might not even see a difference, however, their caloric expenditure differs with almost 1000 and one guy can eat 30% more Calories than the other.
This example shows why you need to give an honest estimate of your body-fat percentage and activity levels when estimating your DCE with the 3-step formula below.
The 3-Step ISSA formula for Estimating Your Daily Caloric Expenditure For my clients, I use a 3-step formula from the International Sports Sciences Association.
This formula is as comprehensive as it can get because it accounts for your height, bodyweight, body-composition and activity levels.
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• Bodyweight. • Body-fat percentage. (If you’re unsure about this, just estimate). • Activity levels.
STEP 1: Bodyweight For Men: 1 x body weight (kg) x 24 = _________ For Women: .9 x body weight (kg) x 24 = _________
* to convert pounds to kg, divide weight in pounds by 2.2
STEP 2: Body-Fat Percentage Multiply your result from step 1 by the multiplier that corresponds to your body-fat percentage. T
o
estimate your body-fat percentage, I recommend that you:
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1)Have someone take a full body photo in natural lighting of you from the front, side and back. 2)Google “Body-Fat Percentage” and compare your photos to the various photos with examples of people with different body-fat levels. 3)Estimate your body-fat percentage and keep in mind that most people underestimate how much body-fat they have.
STEP 3 - Daily Activity Levels Multiply your result from step 2 with your Daily Activity Levels.
THE AVERAGE COUCH POTATO RANGE: 1.30 (130%) = Very Light: Sitting, studying, talking, little walking or other activities through out the day 1.55 (155%) = Light: Typing, teaching, lab/shop work, some walking throughout the day
THE AVERAGE FITNESS BUFF RANGE: 1.55 (155%) = Light: Typing, teaching, lab/shop work, some walking throughout the day Online Transformation Program
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1.65 (165%) = Moderate: Walking, jogging, gardening type job with activities such as cycling, tennis, dancing, skiing or weight training 1-2 hours per day
THE AVERAGE ATHLETE OR HARD DAILY TRAINING RANGE: 1.80 (180%) = Heavy: Heavy manual labor such as digging, tree felling, climbing, with activities such as football, soccer or body building 2-4 hours per day 2.00 (200%) = Very Heavy: A combination of moderate and heavy activity 8 or more hours per day, plus 2-4 hours of intense training per day
How Many Calories Should You Eat Per Day Once you’ve estimated your DCE you’re in a great position to design your diet plan.
Below, I will outline how many Calories per day you should aim for, depending on whether you’re a SKINNY-fat or skinny-FAT guy.
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skinny-FAT guy: I recommend that you aim for a healthy Caloric deficit that enables you to lose 0.5-1.5 CM around your waist or hips per week. (Or 1-3 pounds of fat).
The more fat you have to lose, the more size you can lose, so a guy who has say 60 pounds of fat to lose can aim for losing 2-3 pounds per week in the initial stages and later on the fat loss will slow down to roughly 1-2 pounds per week.
In my experience, a caloric deficit of roughly ~300 calories is a great place to start so if your DCE is 2500, you start off with 2200 calories and then you can adjust from there based on your response.
Remember, the job of the DCE formula is to estimate your Daily Caloric Expenditure.
YOUR job is to stick to your diet, measure your waist and hips each week and then adjust your Calories based on the measurable progress you see. (I will show you exactly how to track and evaluate your progress later). Online Transformation Program
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SKINNY-fat guy: You want to stay at your Daily Caloric Expenditure so you can change your body-composition while maintaining the same weight.
In your case, tracking body-composition progress will be more difficult in terms of numbers, so you will have to rely on a combination of monthly progression photos and your training stats. (If you're getting stronger each month and your photos show that you’re getting more muscle tone, you’re on the right track).
The Ideal Protein, Fat and Carb Intake For SkinnyFat Guys Once you know your daily Calories, it’s time to structure your macronutrient split. The macronutrient split is the amount of protein, fats and carbs in your diet.
As a beginner, the exact macronutrient split you follow won’t make a huge difference unless you’re following an extreme
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approach such as a diet that has no starches, fruits and vegetables or a diet that is very low in fat or protein.
With that said, it’s good to have specific numbers to aim for so you know whether the diet you’re designing is balanced or not.
Here are my recommended macronutrient numbers that I base most of my diet plans on (I’ve put my comments under each macro):
Protein: 100-160 grams per day. • Protein is responsible for rebuilding your muscles bigger and stronger after you break them down with hard training. • The bigger you are, the more protein you eat. • Anything above 130 grams is just “preference” and not “need”. • You don’t need protein supplements to meet your daily protein requirements.
Fat: 20-30% of total Calories. • Fat helps maintain an optimal hormonal balance and boosts your recovery between training sessions. A fat intake of roughly Online Transformation Program
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20-30% of total Calorie is optimal for maximising your natural testosterone production and ensuring proper recovery. • Remember that fat has 9 calories per gram while protein and carbs have just 4 grams. • You want to get most of your fat from polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats while keeping saturated fat intake in moderation.
Carbs: Remaining Calories. • Carbs energise your body and brain, fill up your muscles with glycogen and ensure an optimal testosterone production. For the vast majority of the population, they’re essential to maintain high energy levels, train hard and to build muscle mass. • Finding the types of carbs you digest well is crucial to maintain high energy levels and feel your best. • The remaining calories should come from carbs: mainly starches and fruits. Vegetables usually have so few calories they aren’t worth counting.
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How to Calculate Your Macronutrient Split Below, I will show you how to calculate your macronutrient split when you’re a skinny-fat guy who is: 1) Structuring a 2200 Calorie diet plan, 2) Aiming for a protein intake of 130 grams per day and 3) Aiming for a fat intake of 25% of total Calories.
Step 1: Calculate the Amount of Calories You Get From Protein and Fat. Protein: 130 grams x 4 Calories = 520 Calories. Fat: 2200 Calories * 0.25% = 550 Calories.
Step 2: Calculate the Amount of Calories that Remain for Carbs Calories Remaining For Carbs: 2200 Total Calories - 520 Calories for Protein - 550 Calories for Fat = 1130 Calories Remaining For Carbs.
Step 3: Put It All Together Protein: 520 Calories / 4 = 130.00 grams. (~24% of total Calories). Online Transformation Program
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Fat: 550 Calories / 9 = 61.11 grams. (~25% of total Calories). Carbs: 1130 Calories/4 = 282.50 grams. (~51% of total Calories).
How to Put Together Your Meal Plan Once you have your Daily caloric intake and macros, it’s time to put together your meal plan by using foods from the High Testosterone Food List:
• Starches: Sweet potatoes, White potatoes, White Rice, Brown Rice, Quinoa, Oatmeal. • Protein: Turkey Breast, Chicken Breast, Lean Cuts of Beef Steak, Lean Ground Beef, Wild Caught Salmon, Egg Whites • Fat: Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Avocadoes, Dark Chocolate, Almonds, Pistachios and Hazelnuts. • Variety of fruits and vegetables. • Dietary supplements: High Grade Omega-3 fish oil and Athletic Greens Superfood Cocktail.
I want to emphasise that when you put together your diet plan, you don't want to obsess about getting everything right to the smallest details. Online Transformation Program
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Most food labels are off by up to 30% anyways, so don’t sweat the details too much and make sure you get the “big picture” right.
I also recommend that you factor in about ~100 Calories for low Calorie sauces and if you tend to get sugar cravings, factor in ~300 Calories so you can have a small chocolate bar everyday.
The sauces will add flavour to your meals and the chocolate bar will prevent big binges.
Remember, dietary adherence is much more important than dietary perfection!
Sample Meal Plan Below, I will show you a sample meal plan to give you an idea of how a good day of eating can look like.
7:30 AM - Breakfast: • 250 ML egg whites with 50 grams of oatmeal and cinnamon. Online Transformation Program
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• 2 slices pineapple and 2 slices watermelon. • 2 grams of Omega-3.
12:30 PM - Lunch: • 250 grams skinless turkey breast grilled in 1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil. • 100 grams long-grain boiled white rice. (Raw weight before cooking). • Sugar-free ketchup on the rice and turkey breast to add flavour. • 30 grams of dark chocolate.
7 PM - Dinner: • 150 grams lean cut of beef steak grilled in 1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil. • 500 grams boiled white potatoes with skin. • Salsa sauce to add flavour. • 2 oranges or a small piece of dark chocolate if you get sugar cravings.
9 PM - Before bed meal: • 30 grams of walnuts. Online Transformation Program
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• Big bowl of spinach.
I recommend that you set up a similar type of diet plan for yourself and of course, make sure to include different food options since that will increase your dietary adherence.
Once you have set up your base-line diet plan, I highly recommend that you stick to it for at least 30 days.
By doing so, you will achieve the following the benefits:
1. You will get an idea of how much food you can eat to maintain your weight or to lose body-fat. 2. You will get an idea of how big your portion sizes should be. 3. You will get a rough idea of how many Calories different types of meals have so you will be able to look at a meal and estimate how many Calories it has.
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establish a base-line food intake that enables you to maintain or lose bodyweight.
The worst thing you can do as a skinny-fat guy is to just “wing it” and hope that things work out because you have the odds stacked against you.
Remember, even average guys struggle building a ripped physique, and for us skinny-fat guys it’s even harder so you can’t afford to skimp on your diet.
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Once you have that base-line food intake, you can start developing diet guidelines that will help you stick to a diet without weighing everything and spending hours in the kitchen.
I’ll show you how this can look in the next section.
Diet Guidelines to Follow After You’ve Followed a Structured Meal Plan For 4 Weeks No one wants to be on a diet and track progress their whole life because it takes a lot of enjoyment out of eating.
The good news are that you don’t have to do this forever. I haven’t followed a structured diet plan for a long time because I’ve already put in the work and I know exactly what works for my body.
If you follow through with a base-line diet plan for 30 days, track your BioFeedback and body-measurements and follow through with the diet advice in this eBook, you will be able to do the same.
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Now, I’ll show you how you can implement a structured meal plan into your lifestyle and make it almost effortless to stick to.
Breakfast is easy. You can have an easy staple to go to like oatmeal with egg whites and cinnamon and some fruits on the side and of course, Omega-3.
Your meal before bed is easy. You can do something simple like a handful of nuts and a big bowl of vegetables.
The main challenges for most people are lunch and dinner. It’s the terrible choices you make for lunch when you’re out and about doing work, studying or doing meetings for your business.
And the terrible choices you make when you go home after a long day at work and you’re too tired or too busy to prepare a healthy dinner.
If that’s you, I’ll do my best to help you out below:
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Lunch: For lunch, you want to have a meal that is as similar as possible to the one I provided in the sample meal plan.
Again, here’s how the sample meal looked: • 250 grams skinless turkey breast grilled in 1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil. • 100 grams long-grain boiled white rice. (Raw weight before cooking). • Sugar-free ketchup on the rice and turkey breast to add flavour. • 30 grams of dark chocolate.
If you eat in a good restaurant, having this kind of meal is simple: you order grilled turkey breast or chicken breast (or another lean protein source they offer) and have boiled rice with it and some fruit on the side.
Because you’ve been weighing and measuring your meals for 30 days, you will have a good idea of how much meat and rice you can have with your meal. Online Transformation Program
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If you eat in a college cafeteria, your options may be limited and you may have to accept that you can’t get lean protein sources such as boiled chicken breast or turkey breast. In most cases, you will have cheaper and more fatty meats available such as 20% fat ground beef or pork. If that’s the case, you will have to compensate for the increased Calories from fat by eating just half of the amount you would eat if it was a lean protein source. (So 125 grams instead of 250 grams). Again, weighing your portions for 4 weeks will help you estimate how much food you can eat and thereby decide your portions on the go. And for carbs, you will most often find that potatoes, rice or pasta will be available in nearly every cafeteria. The issue is if there’s a lot of sauce in the potatoes, rice or pasta — if that’s the case, you use your own judgement to estimate how many Calories that adds. If it’s a fatty sauce, cut your starch serving in half. If it’s a lighter sauce such as salsa sauce, just reduce the carb serving slightly or keep it the same.
Dinner:
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For most people, dinner will be eaten at home, either with your family or by yourself.
If you’re too busy to cook your dinner, the easiest solution is to find a healthy food delivery option in your city. Most major cities offer healthy food deliveries where you can get meals based on lean protein, rice or potatoes and vegetables. These meals are ideal for you, and you can order these to avoid having to cook food yourself.
And if you aren’t too busy to cook your dinner, I suggest you cook up a lot of food in advance and store it in your fridge. For example, you can cook up the amount of chicken breast and potatoes you need for 3 dinners, then have that for the next 3 dinners. Then the next time you mix it up a bit and use salmon and brown rice or other foods you like. This will keep your mealpreparation to a minimum, while still allowing you to control your food intake.
The conclusion so far:
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So far, I’ve avoided giving you a specific diet plan that you have to follow because I know it’s completely unrealistic to expect someone follows a cookie cutter diet plan you make for them, unless you’ve customised it to their individual needs.
The key take-away so far is that you want to develop your own structured base-line diet plan by using the calculations and food list in the diet section and stick to it for 30 days. If you create a diet plan yourself, you will be much more likely to stick to it because it contains the foods you like to eat.
Once those 30 days are over, you want to learn how to make dieting part of your lifestyle and basically learn how to be able to eat out in restaurants or in your work-place while still being able to get great results. In the section above, I did my best to show you some examples of how this can be done, and now it’s up to you to think about how YOU can apply this to your daily life.
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choices but also your food intake on a daily basis. I will tell you about why this is so important and how to do it in the section below.
How this type of meal plan works in practice and listening to your BioFeedback In this section, I’ll explain the difference between those of you who have a starch vs. fat-based metabolism and then I’ll go on to explain how you should feel throughout the day while on an effective fat loss diet plan. This section is by far the most valuable diet advice you will find anywhere, so make sure you don’t skip it.
Starch vs. fat-based metabolism: The types of foods to include in your diet plan depend on the kind of metabolism you have.
This depends largely on your ethnicity and what your father, grandfather and so on have been eating for the past many generations.
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In most cases, I see that my clients metabolise starches better than fats, so they need starches frequently to ensure that their metabolism and energy levels stay high.
This enables them to lose body-fat while feeling great.
Because of that, I’ve included frequent servings of starches in the sample meal plan.
For breakfast, you have oatmeal. For lunch, white rice and for dinner, potatoes.
I want to emphasise that it’s important that you use starches that you digest well and in the right amounts.
For example, I cannot digest oatmeal. When I eat it, I look pregnant after and I get constipated for days. I get the same issue with pasta, bread and most other starches.
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However, rice and potatoes are no problem and I can eat these in almost unlimited amounts without any digestive issues. Therefore, these starches work well for me.
The key is to include the right types of starches that YOU digest well and in the right amount so you can lose excess body-fat if that’s your goal.
Now, on the other hand, there is a minority of people that respond better to a higher fat and protein intake and lower starch intake.
If that’s you, you want to get most of your carbs from fruits and vegetables and include more fatty meats in your diet while reducing the starches.
And then there are people who are somewhere in-between.
Figuring out what type of metabolism you have requires experimentation and tracking your BioFeedback (i.e. the way your diet makes you feel). In the next section, I will outline how an effective fat loss diet plan is supposed to make you feel. This will Online Transformation Program
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help you evaluate whether your diet strategy is working well for you, or if it’s completely off.
Meal Structure and How You Should Feel on Your Fat Loss Diet The meal structure in the sample meal plan is similar to what I would use for a skinny-FAT skinny-FAT fat loss client.
The idea is to start off the day with a light breakfast which contains a moderate amount of protein, starches and fruits to get your metabolism going and a small amount of high quality Omega-3 fatty acids to keep you satiated for a longer time.
This breakfast will energise you for the morning and fill up your muscles with glycogen after sleeping the whole night and ensure that you keep muscle loss to a minimum throughout your fat loss diet.
After breakfast, you have about 5 hours where you go without any snacks or foods and drink a lot of water.
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Around 3.5 hours after breakfast, you want to start feeling a slight, but not unbearable level of hunger.
This level hunger of is good and it means your body is shredding fat. Keep this going for 1.5 hour, then have your lunch.
Your lunch should be light and contain a lean protein source such as turkey breast or chicken breast combined with an easy-todigest starch such as white rice. You can add flavour to it by using a sauce - e.g. sugar-free ketchup.
The key here is to drink a lot of water between meal to stay hydrated and thereby keep your appetite down. Once you eat, you want to eat slowly and avoid drinking any water while eating. Once you start getting thirsty, it’s a sign that you’re full and that you shouldn’t have more food. You can use this BioFeedback to avoid overeating and thereby keep your energy levels high after lunch to avoid the “lunch slump” and of course, to support fat loss.
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Once you start feeling thirsty and you’re done eating your lunch consisting of lean protein and starch, you will either feel somewhat satiated or have a small sugar craving.
If you have a small sugar craving, do not fight it. Instead, wait 15-20 minutes to let the meal digest and then have a few apples or a small 30 gram piece of dark chocolate. This small portion of fruits or dark chocolate will prevent you from binging on a big meal later in the afternoon and thereby enable you to stay on track with your fat loss diet!
After lunch and small desert, you have about 5-6 hours until dinner. Similarly to the time after breakfast, you will most likely start getting a slight, yet tolerable level of hunger about 2 hours before your dinner. dinner.
And this is fine, because again, it means that you’re losing bodyfat. A slight level of hunger is key to enable you to lose body-fat, but you don’t want to feel unbearable levels of hunger — it’s all about degree.
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When you start feeling a slight level of hunger, the time will most likely be around 4 PM and if you work a regular office job, that means you will be off soon.
As soon as you’re off from work around 4-6 PM, you want to do your strength training.
The key here is to ensure that you don’t go into your training while low on blood-sugar. If you feel low on sugar going into your training, have a few pieces of fruit or a small piece of dark chocolate and drink a lot of water, then go in and crush your training session.
The fruit or dark chocolate will provide you just enough energy to complete the short 30 minute bodyweight training session and if you are able to, add 30 minutes of light cardio after the bodyweight training to boost your fat loss.
Going into your strength training session right after work, around 5 PM, without eating a big dinner before is ideal because:
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1. Your strength levels will be the highest in the late afternoon and early evening because you’ve (hopefully) supplied your muscles with a large amount of quality nutrition throughout the day. day. 2. After being sedentary most of the day, your body will crave to move so do this as soon as possible. Don’t stop your momentum by having a big dinner that takes a long time to digest. 3. If you eat a big dinner, you will need time to digest it. By the time you finish eating and digesting the food, it will be late in the evening and you will feel tired or something will come up and you will either have an unproductive training session or skip training altogether. altogether. 4. Going into strength strength training training slightly slightly hungry is ideal for losing body-fat and staying lean. I’ve personally never had good training sessions after eating a big meal that makes me feel “slow”.
Again, I want to emphasise that the key to make this work is to ensure that you have a small serving of fruit or dark chocolate
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before you go into your training session. This will prevent low blood-sugar and boost your training performance a lot!
Once you’re done with your training, it’s time to have a solid dinner.
Your dinner can contain a higher fat protein option such as beef steak or ground beef and be a bit heavier. Having red meat with dinner right after training at least a few times per week is ideal because red meat contains connective tissue and thereby helps you add muscle mass. (Red meat is also much harder on the digestion and contains saturated fat so having it just a few times per week and after training is best to get its muscle building benefits).
Similarly to lunch, use a low Calorie sauce to add flavour and rotate your protein and starch options to keep your meals interesting.
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Finally, at the end of the day, after dinner, you will most likely feel a slight level of hunger. At this time, you want to have a handful of nuts for their high quality fats and a big bowl of vegetables.
This last meal of the day will be very low in Calories and ensure that:
1. The high quality fats from nuts and the vitamins and minerals from vegetables will improve your blood flow and speed up training recovery while sleeping. 2. You will be able to sleep on time because you aren’t dealing with unbearable levels of hunger when going to bed. 3. Since the meal is low in Calories you will still be able to lose body-fat while sleeping.
To sum it up: When you’re on a fat loss diet, you want to:
1. Start off your day with a starch based breakfast to fill up your muscles with glycogen and get your metabolism going. Online Transformation Program
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2. Have about 2 hours before lunch and 2 hours before dinner where you’re feeling slight, yet not unbearable levels of hunger. 3. Go to bed satiated, but not very full. 4. Prevent binge eating by eating regular meals throughout the day and treating sugar cravings with small amounts of fruits and dark chocolate. 5. Don’t have just 1 or 2 big meals per day because they slow you down and if you’ve been skinny-fat while growing up, you have a lot of fat cells that are ready to be filled up. These fat cells can get filled up very fast within ONE meal, so make sure to keep the portions moderate if fat loss is your goal!
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You will have to make adjustments The sample diet template and advice above are meant to give you an idea of how a good starting diet plan looks like and how you’re supposed to feel on an effective fat loss diet plan.
If your goal is to maintain your weight or to gain weight, you simply adjust your food intake to match that goal. You don’t need a completely different diet plan when you want to bulk up or do a body-recomp.
You just adjust your food intake to match your goal.
Furthermore, if you find that you don’t do well with a diet based on starches, you go in and try to raise your fat intake or replace some of the starches with fruits.
Regardless of what you do, don’t go to extremes because while they may work short-term, they will not be sustainable over the long-term.
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Making adjustments to your diet is about doing the small things better.
E.g. eating a bit more fruit instead of starches because your body responds better to that.
Don’t go from eating a balanced diet like the one I outlined above to following a KETOGENIC diet without any carbs because you think you don’t do well with carbs.
Make small, gradual adjustments and figure out exactly what works for you.
After a while you will get depleted After a while of being on an effective fat loss diet, you will find that you’re feeling depleted and low on energy.
You will also find that your muscles start looking small and flat and you will most likely start freaking out that you’re losing muscle size.
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If that’s you, don’t worry. This is completely normal because you’re after all in a negative energy balance so your body will eventually show that.
The key here is to act on it when it happens by having a refeed meal which I will cover in the section below.
Weekly Refeed Meals for Fat Loss Dieting When you’re in a Caloric deficit for extended periods of time, your testosterone levels decrease temporarily.
When this happens, you start losing strength, energy, mental clarity, libido and eventually, muscle mass.
This is even the case if you follow the healthiest diet with the “perfect caloric deficit” and calculate everything to the smallest detail.
The solution to that decrease is to have one big meal a week where you refeed your body.
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This meal will put you in a temporary Caloric surplus and thereby reset your natural testosterone production and of course improve dietary adherence.
Your weekly refeed meal is the ideal time to have all your favourite foods. Eat all the foods you crave in whatever quantities you want and make it a weekly treat that you look forward to.
This will help you adhere to your diet long-term and ensure that your natural testosterone production doesn’t decrease.
I want to emphasise that you shouldn’t implement any refeed meals in your first 7-14 days of training and dieting.
Your body needs time to get into a state where it’s depleted and actually needs a refeed meal. You want to get to the point where you feel hungry, your muscles are depleted and you’re thinking about having a big unhealthy meal.
If you diet for 3 days then do a refeed, you ruin the entire purpose of being a Caloric deficit. Online Transformation Program
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Alcohol Will Ruin Your Fat Loss Progress If there’s one thing you can do to mess up your fat loss progress, it’s to drink alcohol.
Not only does alcohol have empty Calories, but when you drink alcohol, your body uses all of its energy to get it out of the system.
So when you drink, your body basically STOPS losing fat during the time it needs to clean the alcohol out of your system.
Furthermore, if you eat food while drinking, your body is much more likely to store that food as fat.
And your sleep quality and recovery between training sessions will decrease and you might lose some of the hard-earned muscle mass you have.
So alcohol is detrimental to your goals, regardless of how you put it. Online Transformation Program
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To give you some perspective, one shot of hard liquor or one beer has over 100 Calories, so 6 shots or 6 beers have over 600 Calories. That’s the equivalent of an entire meal.
Also, consider that when you drink alcohol you tend to get more hungry after drinking and make terrible food choices.
Now, I’m not saying you can’t drink alcohol at all, and some people can get away with more than others, especially if they’re going through a bulking phase. (Alcohol is worst when you’re trying to lose fat).
I’m just telling you that in the case you can’t lose fat, one of the first things you should cut out is alcohol. It will make a big difference.
And if you struggle cutting it out because you’re a student with a lot of social life revolving around alcohol, at least follow the guidelines below:
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• Drink clean spirits without mixers, dry white wine or light beer. These drinks have the least amount of Calories. If you drink clean spirits, mix them with water. • Limit drinking to once per week and have maximum 5-7 units depending on how big you are. This should give you a decent buzz without too much of a negative effect. • Drink a lot of water while drinking alcohol and after you go home, drink a lot of water before bed. • Go home at latest 2 AM to at least get some decent sleep and ensure you recover for your next training. Nothing good happens after 2 AM anyways. • Don’t eat big meals before or after drinking and eat high protein/low fat/moderate carb meals when drinking to prevent fat gains. • Don’t use any mixers (juices and sodas) and avoid cocktails since they contain a lot of Calories. Also, don’t use diet sodas as mixers since diet soda contains ingredients that will make you crave more sugar later.
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10 Things to Watch Out For When Implementing A Meal Plan I have provided you with a lot of information so far about dieting, and unless you re-read the sections and take notes, it might be easy to forget important details.
Because of that, I want to tell you about the 10 biggest mistakes I see my clients make when implementing their diet plan. If you want to ensure you get optimal results from your diet or to troubleshoot why you aren’t getting results, this is the place to start:
1. Carbs: When rice and quinoa, the Calories on the label are usually provided in raw weight. However, I see many people use cooked weight instead of raw weight when weighing their rice. This is a big mistake because rice and quinoa increases a lot in size after cooking. The cooked weight is about 2.5 times higher compared to raw weight, so you will end up under-eating if you weigh the food after cooking and the food label provides the Calories in raw weight.
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2. Fat: You You want to be very precise about the way you measure your dietary fat intake. Each table spoon of extra virgin olive oil contains roughly 120 Calories. For the average American diet of 2000 Calories, that’s 6% of your Daily Caloric Intake. So having 3 tablespoons instead of 1 means you will consume 18% of your Daily Calories instead of 6%. That’s a big difference, therefore take my advice and be diligent about the way you weigh and measure the big fat sources in your diet (nuts and oils). 3. Protein: Similarly to fat sources, you want to be precise about selecting your protein sources. For example, a client asked me if he can replace chicken breast with chicken thighs because it’s more tasty and the answer was yes, however I instructed him that he will have to reduce his portion size a lot because there’s a big difference between eating a lean chicken breast and a more fatty cut of chicken thigh. Chicken thigh contains more than 500 Calories for each 250 grams while chicken breast contains just 225 Calories for each 100 grams. Eating lean protein vs. more fatty cuts of meat makes a big difference in your Daily Caloric Intake, therefore make sure to track this precisely. precisely. Online Transformation Program
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4. Soft Drinks: In your local grocery store you will find a variety of juices, sodas, teas and energy drinks. Before you buy any of these, check the label on the back and see how many Calories are inside the whole bottle. Most of these drinks will contain a lot of sugar, even the ones that are branded as “healthy”. I highly recommend you stay far away from these during the initial stages of your diet because drinks provide a very small amount of satiety for the amount of Calories in them. Most of them will have 150-200 Calories, and provide close to no satiety. You can have a piece of chicken breast and a small serving of potatoes instead of drinking that 200 Calorie drink! 5. Diet sodas: sodas: It It might might be temptin tempting g to have have diet sodas because because they don't contain Calories, however the issue is that the ingredients inside diet drinks are known to increase your appetite. So you might have a 0 Calorie drink, but then end up binging on more food later in the day. In addition, the ingredients are very dangerous for your health, so my advice is to stay far away from diet sodas and just factor in the Calories you need to have a “non-diet soft-drink” if you really crave it. Online Transformation Program
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6. Taking a multivitamin instead of eating fruits and vegetables: If you followed the guidelines in this eBook yet you still feel hungry or low energy on your diet, it’s most often because you are neglecting your fruit and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are essential to control your appetite and energy levels in a Caloric deficit because they provide a variety of vitamins and minerals. When you’re deficient, your energy levels will decrease and you will get hungry. And no, a multivitamin cannot replace real fruits and vegetables. If you don’t believe me, try having a week with a high fruit and vegetable intake and a week where you just have multivitamins. The difference in energy levels and satiety is tremendous. 7. Neglecting Neglecting sleep: sleep: Another Another issue I see is a lack lack of sleep. sleep. Most people today are going to bed late and waking up tired. Being in a sleep deficit week after week is as bad for your health as smoking one pack of cigarettes everyday. When you sleep, your body regulates nearly all functions in your body, including your appetite, therefore those of you who go to sleep late and wake up tired, will crave sugar and junk food a lot more on a daily basis. (More about sleep later). Online Transformation Program
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8. Eating less Calories to speed up results: Another mistake I see people make quite often is to have the “more is better” mentality. They will start off their fat loss and lose fat every week while feeling satiated and energised. Then they get greedy and reduce Calories to speed up fat loss. Initially, they lose more body-fat, however after a few weeks they get very hungry and end up losing binging on junk food and candy. Then they lose half of their progress and suddenly their fat loss stops because their metabolism slows down and they hit a plateau. Don’t make this mistake and stick to a plan that enables you to get results while feeling great in the process. The best advice I can give you is to “not get greedy”. If you’re losing size without starving yourself, you’re in an ideal position. Don’t try to mess with your diet so you can lose 1.5 pounds a week instead of 0.8 pounds. It’s much better to lose the size slowly while eating a nutritious diet, having good workouts, being energised and feeling good about yourself, rather than starving yourself, being weak and depressed just so you can lose the weight a bit faster. 90% of the people who take the second route (starving to lose weight fast), regain all their lost weight within 2 years! Does Online Transformation Program
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that mean you should eat more just because you lost 10 pounds in 3 weeks? That depends on how YOU feel. If you were starving yourself, consider eating a bit more (adjust your diet up), and slow-cook the progress… If you weren’t starving and felt great, keep it up. Starving yourself is never the answer to sustainable fat loss. 9. Taking prescription drugs that affect your appetite and hormones: Prescription drugs for anxiety, depression and balding are known to increase appetite and lower your natural testosterone production. If you’re on any prescription drugs, you should check with your doctor if they can affect your appetite, hormones and other fitness related sideeffects. It’s very hard to lose body-fat when you’re taking a drug that makes you twice as hungry as you should be and messes up your hormones. 10.Continuing with a diet that makes you feel bad: Let’s say you followed all the instructions so far and got all your bases covered. Despite that, you still feel like crap on the diet. In that case, it’s time to play around with your macronutrient split of the protein sparing nutrients (carbs and fats). So if you’ve been on a diet that has 50% of Calories from carbs Online Transformation Program
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and 25% from fat, try to adjust the diet so you get 50% from fat and 25% from carbs. If this doesn’t work, try to replace most of your starches with fresh fruits. Keep playing around until you find the diet strategy that works for your unique body-type. Remember, no diet is worth sticking to if it makes you feel like crap. Now, let’s get to the training parts that I know you’ve been waiting for…
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Sleep, Leptin, Stress and Hunger Levels Assuming that you follow my advice above and clean up your diet, you still need to know that regardless of how clean your diet is, it’s still possible to overeat.
I personally have a “never-ending” appetite where I can eat an entire day’s worth of calories in one single meal.
To give you an example, when I used to be skinny-fat, I would eat a regular-sized dinner with steak, potatoes and vegetables and then after that empty an entire jar of Nutella and eat half a loaf of bread.
Then 2 hours later, I would be hungry again and eat more sandwiches.
My case is extreme, but it’s not far from some of my clients who join my online coaching program.
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From what I’ve seen so far, most skinny-fat guys have a very high natural appetite and there’s a scientific explanation to this.
When you have high body-fat levels, your body decreases the production of the satiety hormone, leptin.
When leptin levels are low, it’s harder to feel full so you can eat a big meal, yet still feel like you need more food to get satiated.
Luckily, there’s one simple thing you can do to improve your leptin levels and that is to sleep a lot.
When you sleep, your body regulates your leptin levels so you crave less food throughout the day.
In addition, high quality sleep is proven to boost your natural testosterone production.
So when you are thinking about why you aren’t getting much out of your training, one of the first things you should look into is your sleep. Online Transformation Program
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Are you getting 8-10 hours of sleep daily?2 Are you going to bed at regular times? Are you waking up refreshed without needing an alarm clock?
If you can’t answer yes to these questions, you have a lot of room for improvement.
“I don’t have time to sleep 8-10 hours per day.” For some of you it’s not realistic to get enough sleep.
I’m talking mostly about those of you who have children, run a start-up or work an extremely demanding career.
If that’s you, all you can do is your best, but you also need to know that every good thing in life comes with a price.
If you have other priorities in life that take away from your ability to sleep, you can’t expect to build a world-class physique like a fitness model or to do a bodybuilding program for 2 hours daily. 2 There
are some people who can maintain good health and high energy levels with 4-6 hours of sleep per day, but they are a small minority consisting of those with top genetics.
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It’s unrealistic to think that you can work 14 hours per day on a start-up, go home to spend time with your children, hit the gym hard for 2 hours and sleep for just 4 hours and recover from it all.
So get your priorities and expectations straight.
If you have bad genetics for training and you can’t get good sleep, you need to know that:
1.You won’t be able to recover from as much training. 2.You won’t get results as fast as you could with more sleep.
This doesn’t mean you can’t get results, but it means that it’s even more important to follow a well-structured training program and diet plan.
You need a well-structured training program that has the right amount of intensity and frequency because as mentioned earlier:
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And to those of you who don’t get enough sleep because you’re bad at time-management: It’s time to step up your game and plan your days better if you want to maximise your gains.
Meditation Will Help You Sleep Better, Reduce Stress and Improve Training Recovery Whether you have difficulty sleeping at night or not, I recommend a daily minimum of 10 minutes meditation.
Meditation relieves stress, clears your mind, increases feel good hormones and speeds up recovery between training sessions because training is a stress imposed on your body so the less stress you have the faster you can recover.
Now, the optimal way to meditate varies with each person, but a good way to get started is my simple meditation routine:
1. Put on headphones. 2. Listen to meditation sounds. Click here for a great tune.
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3. Lie down in bed and get comfortable. Spread out your legs, arms and make sure your palms are facing up towards the ceiling and your fingers are spread out. 4. Close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Don't move any of your body-parts.
Just lie there for 10-30 minutes while listening to a meditation sound, and you should feel GREAT after.
Reduce Stress to Maximise Free Testosterone One thing a lot of people forget is that training is a stress and to keep making gains in your training, your body has to recover from the stress you placed on it during your last training sessions.
If you keep showing up to your training sessions for months on end without being recovered, you will either be stuck doing the same amount of volume and intensity, burn out mentally or get injured.
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Now, it’s no issue if you’re an advanced trainee and you put a massive amount of stress on your body for a few weeks and you keep showing up under recovered for each training session.
A few weeks of overreaching won’t hurt, as long as you cycle off the hard training regularly and introduce bodyweight only training weeks or complete rest weeks right after. (This is typically what happens when I put some of my Phase 2 clients on a High Intensity Program).
However, whether you do these hard training cycles or you’re still in Phase 1, it’s essential that you take recovery seriously because proper recovery won’t only make you feel better on a daily basis, but also enable you to get training results a lot of faster.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, binds to Testosterone which is the male hormone of vitality, therefore elevated Cortisol levels will leave you with less Free Testosterone.
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The best ways to reduce stress and thereby maximise free testosterone and training recovery are ranked below:
1. Sufficient high quality sleep. (Most people need about 8-9 hours. If you’re below 25 it’s most likely closest to 9 hours.) 2. Daily meditation of minimum 10 minutes. 3. Physical touch. Human beings have a natural need for physical touch on a regular basis to feel calm and relaxed. If you don’t have a partner to get physical touch from, a good replacement is to get a massage regularly. 4. Stretching tight areas of your body. Tension inside your body elevates cortisol. 5. Eating foods that you digest well (minimum bloating and constipation from diet). Foods that you digest well make you feel light and energised and take out tension from your body. 6. Get fresh air and sun as much as possible and spend time in nature. 7. Maximise the amount of time you spend with people who provide positive value to your life and minimise the time spent with the ones that provide negative value. Reward the people who make you happy without expecting much in return by Online Transformation Program
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giving them your time. Don’t give your time to those who argue more than they make you happy or only chat you up for favours.
If you do these you should start seeing an increase in the feel good hormones in your body and get into a positive feedback loop where you start focusing on all the positive things in your life rather than the negative stuff.
On another note, I’ve found that skinny-fat guys I coach tend to get stressed very easily.
If you find yourself thinking about “whether you’re going to make it” or “why you can’t look like your favourite fitness model” it’s time to reduce stress and start thinking more positive thoughts. (When your mind has negative thoughts it cannot have positive thoughts at the same time so you’re essentially stopping personal growth.)
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The Importance of Having a Clearly Defined Goal Physique If you’re following my training program to the letter, you’re tracking your training sessions, but it’s also crucial to make it a habit to: 1) Have clear body-composition goals to work towards and 2) Track your body-composition progress.
If you do these things you will know whether the training and diet you’re following are working for you, and if they aren’t, you will have the data needed to evaluate and adjust.
I want to emphasise that it’s better to aim for specific goal measurements than a look you see in a photo because of the reasons listed below:
1. Everyone has different genetics so it’s completely unrealistic to say you want to look like someone in a photo. You will never achieve the look someone else has and it will mess you up psychologically to chase something that cannot be achieved. You’re better off creating YOUR OWN LOOK and owning that look 100%. Online Transformation Program
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2. Tracking your measurements and having goal measurements to work towards is a lot more motivating for a skinny-fat guy with poor genetics because progress is very slow when looking at photos, however you will see changes in measurements faster. 3. The goal measurements I will provide you with are more realistic than photos. Most fitness models you see in photos are enhanced and on drugs. And those who aren’t, use very flattering lighting and angles and they take their photos with a training pump.
If you aren’t sure about what kind of numbers and measurements you should aim for, I will provide some guidelines below.
The Golden Ratio of Bodybuilding Creating an athletic and proportional looking physique is largely a science.
According to countless studies on male attraction, females are mostly attracted to men who have a big shoulder-to-waist-ratio of
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roughly 1.6 so your shoulder circumference should ideally measure ~1.6 times bigger than your waist circumference.
This ratio is also called the Golden Ratio and it’s not only used for sculpting the perfect physique, but also in countless designs and architecture.
When you achieve the golden ratio, you have that athletic looking V-taper physique and women like that because a healthy waist size signals that you’re at a lower risk of catching cardiovascular events such a stroke or heart attack and wide shoulders mean that you’re strong and powerful.
In other words, a big shoulder-to-waist-ratio is a signal of health and fitness in a man, both traits which are crucial when women look for a mate.
This is essentially the opposite of a skinny-fat guy who has narrow shoulders and a large waist.
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When I started out training, I had something like 117 CM shoulder circumference and a 97 CM waist. This means my ratio was just 1.21.
After about 4 years of training, I managed to build my shoulders all the way up to 135 CM (+18 CM) and bring my waist down to 86 CM (-11 CM).
This brought my shoulder-to-waist-ratio all the way up to 1.56 which is close to the ideal.
Since achieving the 1.56 ratio around April 2014, I have been doing a study abroad program, travelling a lot and spent a lot of time building my coaching business so that meant my own training and diet became a low priority and I’ve therefore had times where my waist increased in size and my shoulder to waist ratio dropped all the way from 1.56 to 1.4.
When this happened, I noticed a HUGE change in the way I look and the way people perceive my physique.
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And worst of all, the change can happen very fast when you skimp on your diet and gain a lot of body-fat. For me it’s just a matter of a week or two when, and that’s why tracking progress and measurements is so important!
Goal Measurements I’ve once come across a list of measurements that I believe are both realistic and motivating to work towards.
Here they go:
Waist = 45-47% of height. Shoulders = 1.618 x Waist. Arms = Size of neck circumference. Chest = 25-30 CM greater than waist.
Most skinny-fat guys will be able to achieve these measurements or come close to them within 5-10 years of hard training.
Feel free to use these measurements as your guidelines, or come up with your own. I’m just trying to show you realistic numbers to Online Transformation Program
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aim towards so you know what you can realistically achieve without using performance-enhancing drugs.
The Muscles You Don’t Want to Overdevelop There are certain muscles that you want to avoid overdeveloping when you’re training because they take away from your aesthetics.
Here they are:
• Traps: Big traps take away from the width of your shoulders since they grow vertically (up). • Lower chest: A big lower chest makes your chest look feminine and “saggy” rather than square and masculine. I recommend you develop the upper and inner chest to get a square-looking and masculine chest. • Legs: Big legs don’t look great and make it difficult to buy jeans. Getting to 100 bodyweight squats will ensure that most of you will have enough size and definition on your legs without making them look too bulky.
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• Abs: Just like any other muscle, abs can grow too. When you have big abs you thicken your waist and take away from the Vtaper look that is a result of a small waist and wide shoulders. This is why we limit ab training to planks and focus on keeping the abs tight while doing the plank.
These are the muscles that tend to grow a lot when you do your typical Starting Strength or 5x5 program.
For skinny guys with tiny waists, good bone structures (narrow waist and wide shoulders) and decent genetics, it is fine to grow these muscles, but it’s not optimal for skinny-fat men because we already have a very difficult time creating an aesthetic physique.
When you have naturally bad proportions, the last thing you want to do is to add mass in the wrong places, since that detracts from the hard work you put into sculpting the arms, shoulders, upper chest and lats.
This is also why we don’t include traditional strength exercises such as heavy deadlifts, barbell squats and the flat bench press: Online Transformation Program
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• Heavy deadlifts and squats thicken the waist and make your traps and legs big. • Flat bench presses grow the lower chest.
How to Track Body-Composition Progress Tracking and tracking and tracking. Are you trying to make us go crazy?
Yes, I understand that there’s a lot of advice for tracking here, but here’s the thing: The more things you track, the more consistent you will be with your training and diet and the better results you will get.
Furthermore, tracking doesn’t take much time at all.
You can track your training sessions while doing them.
You can track your BioFeedback in a few minutes while eating.
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You can do the body-measurements and photos I’m about to write about, in less than 5 minutes per week.
So really, tracking isn’t that difficult once you get into the habit of doing it.
In this section, I will show you how to track body-composition progress.
It’s crucial to track body-composition progress through measurements and photos because if you don’t track your measurements and take photos, how will you know if your physique is changing?
The mirror does not show a 1 CM increase in the size of your chest and biceps, but measurements do.
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Each Sunday morning, I have my clients take out a measurement tape and measure their bodyparts: • Flexed bicep circumference (put the tape around the peak of your flexed biceps). • Relaxed shoulder circumference (put the tape all the way around the shoulders, chest and back). • Relaxed chest circumference (put the tape under your arm-pits and around your chest and back). • Relaxed waist circumference at the widest point (put the tape around the widest point of your waist). • Relaxed waist circumference at the belly-button (put the tape around the belly-button). • Relaxed hip circumference (put the around the widest point of your hips).
In addition, I also have them check their bodyweight just to have as much data as possible. (The measurements are far more important though since they show changes in body-composition while bodyweight doesn’t show much without the measurements to go with it). Online Transformation Program
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The measurements are all done in the morning on an empty stomach, before doing any kind of training and preferably after a visit to the toilet.
If you have a lot of food in your stomach that can skew the waist measurement and if you do a training session before doing the chest, shoulder and biceps measurements, your measurements will be bigger because of the training pump.
Once you have your measurements and bodyweight, put them into a table and keep track of them every week.
It’s important that you do the measurements honestly and consistently. Don’t hang the tape loose around your biceps to get a bigger biceps measurement or squeeze it tight around the waist to get a lower waist measurement.
You are only cheating yourself by doing that.
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Furthermore, don’t stress about whether you’re doing them perfectly.
The most important part is consistency.
Do your best to measure around the same spot each time, and if you’re unsure, do 3 measurements and take the average for better accuracy.
Tracking Progress For skinny-FAT vs. SKINNY-fat Guys The measurements are especially great for skinny-FAT guys because they enable you to evaluate how your diet and training are working for you.
For example, if you’re skinny-FAT and your goal is fat loss, but your waist and hip size aren’t dropping and your bodyweight is the same or increasing, it means you might need to reduce your food intake. (More about making adjustments later).
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If you’re SKINNY-fat and your goal is to stay at the same weight while adding muscle tone, the measurements and bodyweight are not as useful (initially), because you will be losing fat and gaining muscle mass at the same time.
The issue is that a lot of skinny-fat guys are under muscled so when they start training, they start gaining muscle mass while losing fat at the same time. This means that they stay at roughly the same bodyweight and measurements, but their bodycomposition is changing for the better each week.
What happens in these cases is often that the skinny-fat guy thinks that he isn’t losing body-fat, so he reduces calories further to the point where he’s in an unhealthy caloric deficit and then he starts losing muscle mass instead of fat.
Therefore, for SKINNY-fat guys, a combination of biofeedback, monthly progression photos (shirtless photos from the side, back and front) and training progress will provide a better evaluation of progress.
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(I want to emphasise that SKINNY-fat guys should still do the measurements and check bodyweight every Sunday because it takes less than 5 minutes per week and it gives you great data to make diet and training adjustments).
Thing to do right now: Set a reminder in your calendar for every Sunday morning in your calendar with the title “Take measurements”.
Take Monthly Progression Photos, Starting From TODAY In addition to tracking daily BioFeedback, weekly bodymeasurements and your training sessions,I recommend that you take monthly progression photos.
Monthly progression photos are equally important to measurements and now I’ll list the 2 most important reasons to why they’re so important.
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(1) The Mirror Lies. Photos Don’t. A lot of people make the mistake to evaluate their progress based on what they see in the mirror.
This is a huge mistake because the mirror is an inaccurate way of evaluating progress.
You see yourself in the mirror everyday however visible physique progress takes a long time.
If you look at yourself in the mirror, you will most likely see the same image every time because the changes are so gradual and you will be the last person to see you’re getting in shape.
To give you some perspective, when I had trained for nearly 3 years I still saw myself as skinny-fat when I looked in the mirror.
However, I was clearly not skinny-fat anymore.
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I could do 15 perfect form pull ups at 200 pounds bodyweight and other people started calling me “big guy” and commenting on the size of my arms and lats.
It was only when I put two photos side-by-side that I realised I had made huge progress the last 3 years.
Photos are much better than because you can put them side-byside and see your actual progress.
(2) Photos Will Motivate When You’re About to Give Up. Throughout my transformation, I had many “dark moments” where I thought “screw it, I’m not making progress so I’m gonna quit”.
Then I would look at my progress photos and see that while my progress was slow, I was making actual progress.
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This gave me hope because seeing that I was able to make even a small amount of progress, meant that if I continued I would eventually come closer to achieving my goal.
I can safely say that if I had not taken progress photos every month, I would have given up and my transformation wouldn’t have happened. (And the Skinny-Fat Transformation blog would not exist if I didn’t have my photos and now I make my living from helping others achieve the same transformation).
6 Photos to Take Each Month You want to take a shirtless photo from the front, side and back.
You will have one photo in each angle where you’re relaxing and one where you’re flexing.
This means you want to take 6 photos each month:
• Front relaxed. • Front double biceps flexed. • Side relaxed. Online Transformation Program
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• Side triceps flexed. • Back relaxed. • Back double biceps flexed.
It’s important to take photos from a variety of angles because sometimes you won’t see much muscular development from a certain angle, but then when you look from another angle it will be a completely different story.
Instructions for taking progression photos: 1. Take the photos in the morning on an empty stomach and before working out. 2. Use a decent camera. 3. Stand in an uncluttered environment, e.g. by an empty wall. 4. Take a portrait full body photo (not horizontal) where you can see your whole physique. (Make sure your body fills out most of the photo). 5. Do not suck in your gut or flex, unless it’s a flexed photo. 6. Take photos from different angles (front, back, side - both flexed and relaxed). 7. Always take the photos in the same place for consistency. Online Transformation Program
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It’s best if you have someone to take the photos, e.g. parents, wife or siblings.
I know that you may feel weird about having someone take your photos when you aren’t in good shape.
I still remember when I asked my mom to do it and she was laughing at me when I was doing my front double biceps pose.
But it doesn’t matter if someone laughs.
Just smile and ignore and get the photos out of the way once per month so you can move closer towards your goal.
The goal matters more than what someone thinks about you working hard to achieve your goal.
If someone laughs at you because you want to track your physique progress, use it as motivation to progress so you can SHOW them later. Online Transformation Program
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Things to do right now: Have someone take your starting progression photos RIGHT NOW. Once you have your photos, put them in a folder with today’s date and set a reminder in your calendar for once every 4 Sunday’s to take progress photos. You will be happy in 4 weeks when you compare your current photos with next month’s photos. Please do not skip this step before continuing.
Realistic Expectations I often hear from readers that they’re scared to get too big and bulky.
A lot of people don’t want to become as big as me or other guys who’ve been training for years, and that’s fine.
However, you need to keep in mind that getting big takes many years of consistent effort. It doesn’t happen over night, so you can easily stop once you have enough size.
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And should it happen that you get too big, just stop training for a few weeks and you will start losing size very fast.
Getting too big should never be a concern for you if you’re not using performance-enhancing-drugs.
It simply won’t happen.
The other thing I hear is that people want to achieve a toned physique with shaped muscles.
This sounds great in theory, however you have to keep in mind that the shape and the way your muscles insert are 100% genetic.
What you can do is to grow the size of the muscle fibres to their potential and then it will look the way it does.
I personally have a poor muscle shape on nearly every body-part and a bad bone structure.
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This means that I will never be able to have those round, ripped and full muscles you see on certain guys who seem to have been “born with muscle”.
The only way I can achieve that look is by taking performanceenhancing-drugs, and this is the case for most guys who train hard.
If you want to look like a professional fitness model, yet you have poor genetics, it’s completely unrealistic to chase that look.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t look great. You can still look better than 90% of guys out there if you put in the work.
You just have to adjust your expectations a bit and remember that genetics play a HUGE role in the physique you can achieve.
So what exactly is realistic? Let’s talk about that now.
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How Lean Can You Get? When you see guys in magazines with ripped 6-pack abs you may get tempted yourself to chase the exact same look.
The thing I hear most often from skinny-fat guys is that they want to get completely rid of the body-fat in their lower stomach.
However, this is a big mistake and now I’ll explain why.
First and foremost, it’s only a small minority of the population of men who can sustain a level of leanness where they don’t have that pinch of fat in their lower waist.
Having a pinch of fat on the lower waist, especially when you sit down, is completely normal and you shouldn’t worry about it.
The vast majority of us, including me, always have a small pinch of body-fat on the lower waist and I can recall that even when I cut down to 77 KG (177 lbs.) at a height of 188 CM (6’2”), I still had it and I looked super skinny while being able to deadlift 400 pounds. Online Transformation Program
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Does this mean that it’s impossible to lose it? No it doesn’t.
If you stay in a Caloric deficit for a long time, you will eventually lose it, but you will also lose A LOT of size and muscle mass. This is the true reality for natural bodybuilders: When we want to get super lean, we have to reduce food intake a lot and go hungry for big parts of the day, drink energy drinks or take stimulants to keep appetite low, our testosterone production drops, our sex-drive becomes non-existent and we aren’t able to sustain hard training and muscular fullness when we’ve been in a Caloric deficit for many months.
In addition, even if you were to lose that last amount of lower belly fat, you might still have some loose skin there from when your waist was bigger, so when you sit down you will still have that pinch of skin.
As mentioned earlier, it’s only a small minority of the population who can remove that last layer of body-fat and sustain that level of leanness long-term. Online Transformation Program
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It’s mostly guys who have always been very lean or guys who are naturally lean and got fat later in life. (When you get fat late in life, you don’t have the fat cells that are developed in overweight people during puberty, so you may still be able to get very lean without having to make a lot of sacrifices).
By the time you’ve lost that lower ab fat, it simply won’t be worth all those months of extra effort where you’ve only been eating 100% clean boiled food, had low energy levels throughout the day and went into each training session feeling weak.
You’re
taking months away from building muscle mass just to have your waist look slightly better.
Unless you’ve built more muscle mass than you want to have, it’s simply not worth it. Once you start bulking again, you will re-gain your bodyweight very quickly and lose that progress anyways.
You’re much better off dieting down to a sustainable level of leanness where you have definition on the upper abs and
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possibly the middle abs, then maintain that level of leanness while gaining muscle mass in the right places.
Over time, you will develop very aesthetic proportions and you’ll forget everything about that small amount of body-fat in the lower waist.
And should it happen that you still want to lose that lower waist fat, you can always do a long fat loss diet once you’ve built 20 pounds more muscle mass than you’d like to have — if you are ever able to reach that point. This is a much better way of doing it because you will lose a lot of muscle mass during your diet anyways, so you will have some spare size that you can “afford” to lose.
How Fast Can You Gain Muscle Mass? You can gain at most 20-25 pounds of muscle mass in your first year of serious training, provided that you’re following a diet that supports muscle gains.
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In this case, you’re focusing mostly on fat loss, so you’re unlikely to achieve the 20-25 pound target, however you may come close at 15 pounds or so.
That’s just slightly over 1 pound per month.
Now, 15 pounds isn’t that much, especially if you’re over 6 feet tall and have long arms and legs. And on a monthly basis, it will be hard to see a 1 pound difference. (This is also why we take body-measurements and photos regularly).
After the first year, gains slow down and you will be gaining less than 1 pound per month.
Besides that, if you’re under muscled and fat (skinny-fat), you will not see much of a visual difference in the mirror in the first months, because:
1. In many cases, the initial strength gains you make in strength training are a result of adaptations in your Central Nervous
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System. (I.e. you become better at activating the muscles you already have). 2. Once you get stronger and start working the muscles instead of the Central Nervous System, you will gain some muscle mass, however, if you have excess body-fat, the gains you make will be hidden under the fat. 3. The first 10-15-20 pounds of muscle mass you gain basically make you go from under muscled to toned therefore you won’t look big after gaining those initial 15-20 pounds.
In other words, the biggest visual differences you can make in the initial stages of your training are a result of losing body-fat and not gaining muscle mass.
But here’s the thing you need to know… Once you build your foundation of muscle mass and strength, the additional gains you make become MUCH more visible. You can just look at the photo below: Up until November 2012, I spent almost 3 years training hard, and while my gains weren’t optimal, I did gain some muscle Online Transformation Program
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mass. I mean, I could deadlift 400 pounds at 177 pound bodyweight and bench press 220 pounds, so I had clearly gained some strength and mass.
The thing is that my gains weren’t visible because I was still building my foundation. The muscle mass I had, was basically the amount of muscle mass that made me look “not undermuscled”.
Then, after November 2012, I added 1 inch to my arms and my arms suddenly blew up and became big.
The same goes for my shoulders, upper chest and lats where I gained an inch or two.
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When I looked at my measurements, nothing big had happened, but the visual difference was astounding.
So what you need to know is that once you have a foundation, even small gains become visible so don’t get discouraged if you don’t become muscular in your first 6 months of training.
When you get that foundation, the gains and changes in your physical appearance will be much faster than you imagine.
Now, when it comes to fat loss, the story is very different.
If you start out with a lot of body-fat, you will see drastic differences in your physique in just 8-12 weeks.
You can lose up to 10 pounds of fat per month, but you can only gain 1-2 pounds of muscle mass.
Fat loss is a lot easier than gaining muscle mass therefore those of you who are skinny-FAT with a lot of body-fat to lose will see Online Transformation Program
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the fastest changes in your visual appearance, while those of you who are SKINNY-fat with less body-fat to lose will see less changes in your visual appearance, however you will be able to progress faster on the bodyweight exercises because you have less “dead-weight” to move.
To sum it up so far: Muscle gains follow the 80/20 rule where 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions.
You will gain 80% of your muscle mass in your first 3 years of training and then spend 12 years gaining the remaining 20%.
Similarly with fat loss, you will lose your excess body-fat while putting in moderate effort and feeling great throughout the process, then when you want to go from lean to ripped, you’ll have to go hungry for big parts of the day and make a lot more sacrifices to lose that last 5-10%.
The conclusion is that unless you’re getting paid to be a fitness model, pro athlete or actor, it’s not worth it to make all these
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sacrifices to get that small amount of added benefit. Stick to the 20% of actions that get you 80% of results.
Factors That Affect Your Progression Rate So far, I’ve made it sound like I have the secret answer for any skinny-fat guy to transform, but the truth is that the concept skinny-fat is broad.
To be specific, we have skinny-FAT and SKINNY-fat guys. Some of you are more on the skinny side, while some of you are more on the fat side.
Regardless of what type you are, you will have to cut the excess chub first.
The main difference lies in the amount of time you will have to cut for.
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The skinny-FAT guys may have a harder time cutting and staying lean when bulking since the fat cells you have created will never go away and are always ready to fill up.
Besides that, there’s also a big difference between taller guys and shorter guys.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that taller guys are anyone 6 feet or above while shorter guys are below 6 feet.
Taller guys will generally have a harder time “filling out their frame”, simply because they have more to fill out.
A 10 pound muscle gain is not that noticeable on a 6’5” guy, but it’s quite noticeable on a 5’7” guy.
The same goes for strength gains… Shorter guys tend to make more rapid gains on pressing movements and bodyweight exercises and start off with higher lifts.
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The reasoning is that shorter arms decrease the distance you have to press or pull a weight, and a shorter body usually weighs less thus making calisthenics exercises easier. (This is also why you never see tall gymnasts).
With that said, the big benefit of being tall lies in potential… I’m 6’2” and it took me half a decade to fill out my frame, but now it looks extremely impressive.
It’s a rare sight to see a tall guy with wide shoulders, big arms and a tight waist so keep at it if you’re tall. You will eventually see results.
Also, there’s also a huge difference in bone structure.
Most skinny-fat men have relatively wide hips and narrow shoulders and a narrow rib cage.
Generally speaking, the wider your hip structure and the narrower your natural shoulder and rib cage structure, the Online Transformation Program
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more difficult it will be for you to create that ideal and proportional physique.
And then we have age… As much as I wanna say that being young is better, I’ve found the opposite to be true with skinnyfat guys.
I most often see my older +50 aged clients make much faster progress compared to my teenage clients and those in their early because the older guys are more disciplined and have a better work ethic.
With that said, from a hormonal and metabolic perspective, the best age for building a physique is from the time you’re in late puberty until your mid-late twenties.
The further away you are from 25-30 years old, the harder it will be to stay lean and build muscle.
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Similarly, it may be very hard to gain lean mass if you’re a young 13-15 year old guy who’s a later bloomer going through early puberty.
If you’re a late bloomer, you may not see good gains until your testosterone levels develop enough to take advantage of your training. If that’s you, I can’t emphasise the importance of diet enough. Get those healthy diet habits squared out now, so you set up your hormonal and metabolic foundation properly from an early age! It will pay off big time in the future.
And finally, we have mental health/environment/resources. If you’re depressed, anxious, stressed, surrounded by an unsupportive family, have low quality friends, a nagging wife/ girlfriend and lack the money to pay for healthy foods, then you will have a difficult time changing your physique.
Many of these things you can change, but they will take time to fix depending on how bad they are and how many issues you have to deal with. Online Transformation Program
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To sum it up, you have the following factors to keep in mind:
- Response to training and diet: Certain guys progress extremely fast in their training, regardless of what training program they do and how they eat. Other guys need more time. (I've seen this over and over again in my online coaching program). Your individual response to training and diet matters a lot.
- Starting body-fat percentage: The more body-fat you have to lose, the longer time it will take to get lean.
- Height: Taller guys (6ft and over) make slower strength gains on bodyweight exercises because we have to move more weight through a longer distance on each repetition.
- Age: Your training recovery and metabolism are faster it in your late teens and early-mid twenties. As a result, older guys will need to be more committed to their nutrition plan and sleep to get optimal results.
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- Mental health/Environment/Resources: Poor mental health, a negative social environment and a lack of money for healthy foods will make this process much more difficult.
Regardless of how your situation is, you shouldn’t compare yourself with ANYONE, not even other skinny-fat guys.
You are unique. You have your own challenges, so you should take any kind of muscle gains or fat loss you can get, and keep up with the program as long as you make even the smallest changes!
Over time, these small changes will add up to BIG CHANGES.
Should You Set Goals? One thing you often hear is about the importance of setting goals and having a time-frame to achieve them.
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I’m all about setting goals in fitness, however I’m against setting a time-frame to achieve them because as I mentioned earlier, each skinny-fat guy is different and progresses at different rates, regardless of how hard they train and diet. Genetics and your individual response to training and diet make a bigger difference than ANYTHING else.
Even within the subset of skinny-fat guys, I see guys with almost identical bodies and starting strength levels progress at very different rates.
And it’s not because one guy is training 3 times harder than the other. It’s mostly because of the way each of them responds to training and diet.
You can’t predict how fast you progress, so it’s not a good idea to set goals with a time-frame.
As long as you’re feeling you’re working hard on a daily basis and making progress, you should accept that progress and just keep at it because eventually, you will reach your goal. Online Transformation Program
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Second, it takes a long time to build a truly muscular physique and the exact training program you do matters much less than doing the type of training you enjoy and doing it progressively.
The training program matters less because in the long-term, you can gain muscle mass with nearly any weight, exercise and reprange, as long as you do it progressively (i.e. always training to do “one more rep” or “one more set” or “one more workout per week”).
Countless studies show that both low rep training with heavy compound weights build muscle mass and high rep training with bodyweight exercises build muscle mass. (High rep training is a lot safer though and builds more mass).
This is why finding a way of training that you truly enjoy and keeping at it for years while progressing is the key to build a muscular physique.
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Of course, I hope that you will enjoy bodyweight training like I do and keep at it since it’s one of the safest way of training and the best way to get started, however, if you find that once you can do 15 chin ups and 30 diamond push ups bodyweight training is not for you, that’s 100% OK. Just make the switch to another type of training and the strength you’ve built with bodyweight exercises will help you get strong faster with your new training.
Summing Up The Actionable Advice Training: • You’re doing strength training at home for 30 minutes, 6 days per week and if you have the time, you also do light cardio for 30 minutes per day. • You’re tracking the way you feel before going into each training session, during each training session and after each training session so you can use your notes to make adjustments to your training later. • You spend the first 14 days on mastering your exercise technique. • Once you master the technique on each exercise, you start tracking your sets and reps on each exercise and Online Transformation Program
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going into each training session with a clear goal of doing at least “one more rep” on each exercise. • If you hit a plateau, you look back at your BioFeedback notes and follow the adjustments outlined earlier to regain progression. • The overall goal is to get into a routine where you’re looking forward to each training session and going into it with high energy levels, executing each exercise with perfect form and seeing strength progress on the exercises on a regular basis. Once you get to that point, there’s no way you will want to stop.
Diet: • The first 30 days you’re following a structured diet plan where you’re eating 4 healthy and balanced meals per day. During this time, it’s crucial that you get rid from all junk food and candy from your house to reduce the chance of binge eating and that you prepare your meals in advance so they’re always ready when you need them. • If you’re skinny-FAT, you’re following a Calorie deficit diet plan that supports fat loss and have one cheat meal per Online Transformation Program
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week to reset your testosterone production and metabolism. If you’re SKINNY-fat you’re following a Caloric maintenance diet plan that enables you to stay at around the same bodyweight. • You track your BioFeedback and body-measurements so you can adjust your diet depending on how you feel and how your body responds to it. The goal is to follow a diet plan that support • Once you’ve established a base-line diet plan that works for you, find ways to make dieting an easy and enjoyable thing to implement into your daily life so you don’t have to weigh foods and cook all your meals at home. • The overall goal is to find a way of eating that provides
you with high energy levels, clear mental focus, makes you feel light and satiated and which supports your training and body-composition goals. Once you find the way of eating that works for you, it won’t be a “diet plan” anymore but just the way you eat to feel your best.
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Body-Composition Progress: • You have defined exact body measurements that you want to work towards the next many years. You can always change these later, however it’s good to have something to aim towards. • You’re tracking your body-measurements and bodyweight once every Sunday. This takes 5 minutes and will enable you to evaluate whether your training program and diet plan are moving you towards these measurements. • Once per month, you have someone take photos of your physique from various angles. This will enable you to evaluate your progress in case your measurements aren’t changing and the progress you see each month when you compare photos will motivate you to keep going when you’re about to give up.
Expectations !
Losing excess body-fat is a lot faster compared to gaining muscle mass. You can lose up to 10 pounds of
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body-fat per month and only gain 1-2 pounds of muscle mass. !
You can lose most of your body-fat in 3-10 months depending on how much you have to lose, and after that, to lose that last fat around the lower waist, you will have to put in significantly more effort with a small reward.
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You will gain more than 80% of the muscle mass you’re able to build naturally within the first 3 years of consistent and progressive training and eating.
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It’s a terrible idea to want to look like someone else in a picture because you will never look like someone else. It’s better if you visualise your own look and own it 100%.
!
As a natural bodybuilder, it’s almost impossible to get too muscular and should it happen that you have too much muscle mass in a certain area, you just stop training it for a few weeks and it will start shrinking. (I know because I had issues with my lats getting so wide I couldn’t keep my arms straight. Within 10 days they shrunk with more than an inch.) Online Transformation Program
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I know what you’re thinking now: Transforming requires a lot of hard work over a long period of time.
It takes a lot of hard work to:
• Set up your base-line diet plan. • Find all the groceries you need. • Set aside time to prepare clean food, or even to learn how to cook basic meals. • Limit junkfood and candy to once per week. • Track your food intake and the way you feel on your diet throughout the day. • Do your training sessions when your strength and mobility is very low and you get tired fast. • Make videos of yourself doing very basic exercises such as knee push ups or squats so you can work on your technique. • Track your body-measurements and take progress photos when you aren’t proud of the way you look.
And then you still have to spend several years just to look great. Online Transformation Program
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I can relate to all of this, however you need to know that the start is the hardest and that you’ll soon grow to enjoy the actual process of getting stronger and building new muscle mass you’ve never seen before.
Just imagine when you get to the point where you look forward to your training session because you just got your first chin up and now you want to get the 2nd one.
Once you make dieting a natural part of your lifestyle, you start seeing progress in your bodyweight training and your bodymeasurements and photos start showing changes, you will be happy that you took out a few weeks or a month to do the hard work and set up all these life-changing habits.
Just think about this: The average skinny-fat guy I train has had unhealthy lifestyle habits for years or decades, so is it really that bad to dedicate a month to change the direction of the ship and make sure that you get your transformation started properly? I think not. Online Transformation Program
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And you need to know that looking for an easy strategy that doesn’t require consistent effort over a long period of time won’t work. When is the last time in your life where you’ve put in a small amount of effort for a short amount of time, yet achieved amazing results? It doesn’t work like that.
There’s a certain degree of effort that you’ll have to put into fitness if you want to completely transform your physique, so it’s better if you accept that and work towards making your transformation happen. Following my training, diet and progression tracking strategy doesn’t require any unnecessary effort. I’m just telling you the 20% of actions you’ll have to take to get 80% of results.
You know already that in order to achieve a good physique, you need to train intelligently to stay injury free, execute the exercises correctly, push yourself and train in a progressive way. My program helps you with all these things while putting in just 3 hours per week into your training.
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You know that in order to support training recovery, lose body-fat and gain muscle mass, you need to eat a nutritious diet plan that works for you unique body-type and supports your bodycomposition goals. My diet strategy will help you do all of that while feeling satiated and energised and eventually making healthy eating a natural part of your lifestyle.
You also know that progress is very slow for skinny-fat guys, regardless of what program we follow. Therefore, it’s more important to do a great job tracking body-measurements and taking photos to stay motivated and consistent with our training and diet goals, rather than always looking for a new magic pill.
Fitness Is Not A Sprint. It’s A Marathon A lot of guys who get into fitness want it fast. They want results in 3 weeks, not 3 years. I can relate a lot to this mindset.
Now, I’ll explain why this mindset is toxic. It’s toxic because it’s extremely difficult to put on muscle mass and lose fat for the average person. When you’re skinny-fat, it’s even more difficult, since you most likely have below average genetics. Online Transformation Program
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Because of that, it will take a long time to see progress no matter what workout and diet you follow. There’s no magic pill out there.
If you go into fitness with the mindset of getting fast results, you will want to train more, eat like a bodybuilder and base your whole life around fitness. After a while, you get disappointed because you put in so much work, and don’t get the results you want. I’ve been there myself, and I was close to quitting training at that point. This is unfortunately what happens to most people; they want results fast, base their life around fitness, and end up disappointed and eventually quit. Then you hear them saying: “I don’t have the genetics for this, or my body doesn’t respond to training.”
I don’t want you to be one of those guys.
So, what’s the right mindset Oskar? The right mindset is to think about fitness as a marathon. During a marathon, you have to pace yourself to complete it. You can’t just sprint, because then you will burn out fast and quit. The same applies Online Transformation Program
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to changing your body. Slow changes are better, because you can sustain them over a long period of time. This is also why I don’t give you some crazy low calorie diet where you eat apples all day and lose 50lbs in 2 months. Yeah, it’s nice to be able to say that my program enables you to lose 50lbs in 2 months, but how about in the years after those 2 months? Will you be able to keep eating apples all day, everyday for the rest of your life? I surely couldn’t.
I know this example is extreme, but it illustrates a very good point; the vast majority of people want to look like a fitness model, but they will never be able to stick to the regime of a fitness model.
Be honest with yourself… Do you see yourself counting calories, protein intake, carb intake, fat intake, doing intense cardio several times a week and weight training 4-6 days a week for the next 5 years? Do you see yourself skipping out on social occasions, nice foods, alcohol and even trips to other countries because you want to stick to your diet and training?
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Those are the sacrifices that it takes if you want to look like one of the guys in the magazines. And, to add to that, MANY if not MOST of them take hormones/steroids etc. When you do a very low calorie diet or you sustain a shredded physique year around, your body’s natural production of testosterone decreases significantly, so you may have to inject testosterone to keep it up and thereby retain muscle mass, or even build some.
All I’m trying to say here is that it may look “cool” to be a fitness model, but I would personally never choose that line of career. It requires a lot of sacrifice and I hate to say it, but also the right genetics, which most skinny-fat guys do not possess.
So, my point is that you should enjoy fitness, and only implement lifestyle changes that you know you can stick to over the long term. Every time you decrease calories, or start doing a training routine, ask yourself: Can I see myself doing this for the next 5 years? If you can’t, chances are that it will all catch up to you, and you will burn out. And additionally, I want to make it clear that you can still build a great physique that is Online Transformation Program
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in the top 5% without starving yourself or training for 2 hours a day. It will just take longer than you would like, no matter how good your routine or diet is.
And you need to know that even though it’s hard, many skinny-fat guys just like you have done these things. Countless skinny-fat guys who have trained for years or even decades, have followed the blueprint above and gotten amazing results.
Many guys just like you and me, have followed these strategies and gotten amazing results.
And when I say amazing results, I’m not talking about getting ripped 6 pack abs and being on the cover of a magazine.
I’m talking about going from always being fatigued and having a body that looks decades older than it should to having high energy levels on a daily basis and being able to do simple fitness feats such as 15 chin ups and 30 diamond push ups without getting tired.
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These simple things that most young guys take for granted seem like an almost impossible dream to skinny-fat guys who have never seen any ab-definition on their body or never been able to do a single chin up or push up.
But they’re possible. I and countless other SFT-readers are proof of that. If we can do it, so can YOU!
No matter if it takes you 6 months or 5 years, it’s still going to be worth it.
I can safely say that transforming my body changed all areas of my life and enabled me to create the lifestyle I always wanted.
It’s invaluable to be able to take off your shirt and be proud of what you have.
It’s also invaluable to know that you’ve pushed your body to the limit and built up your body’s strength close to its genetic potential.
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You have only one body to go through your life with, so build it up and become the strongest version of yourself.
There’s no way you will regret it.
Furthermore, when you get started with this plan, don’t make the mistake of relying on motivation, because motivation comes and goes so you can’t rely on motivation to make a lasting change in your life.
Instead, rely on daily action and commitment.
Clean out your home from bad foods because if they aren’t there, you won’t eat them.
Stock up on healthy foods and prepare them the night before so they’re ready whenever you get hungry. hungry.
Schedule your training sessions in your calendar and prepare your workout clothes the night before.
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Get a chin up bar if you need one for your home, or find a place to do chin ups.
You need to take massive action to experience massive change and I hope this eBook has inspired you to do so. And of course, let me know what you think of the eBook by sending me an email to
[email protected] I can’t reply to all emails however I promise that I read through all of them.
And if you’re interested in checking out some of my coaching success stories you can do so on the next pages and at the end I’ve included a FAQ section with some of your most popular questions answered.
Be proud but stay hungry! Oskar Faarkrog Facebook / Instagram / Coaching / Success Stories / Articles
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Testimonials By Coaching Clients
Steve Chavez, Peru 1a) Why did you hire me as your body transformation coach? I watched your transformation pictures and video and it amazed me, I didn't thought anyone that was skinny fat could be in that shape and I could relate to all the problems you had been through. Also I read all your blog articles and they all made sense to me.They were to the point and filled with your experience, they were exempt of any motivational bullshit and completely logical, also by reading your replies to comments I noticed that you were honest since you never claimed to have all
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the answers. I never considered online coaching at that time but by seeing all the trial and error you went through for years, I thought of all the valuable knowledge you had to offer me if I got you as a coach so I'm glad I found you offered that service.
1b) Was it an easy decision? I never did online coaching before. And I didn't thought I would ever do it since I've always heard that it was easy to get scammed, but after reading your honest advice and doing the application form for your coaching it was clear to me that that risk didn't exist, so that made the decision easier for me, it was the best decision I made for my personal health.
2) How has my coaching helped you with your body transformation? More than just helping I'd say it was the root cause. Without your coaching I wouldn't been able to improve my physique.
3) Did your body transformation help you overcome other issues in life?
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Many, the clothes now fit me better, I haven't just improved my physical health but also my mental health. Also there's another perhaps not planned consequence of the body transformation. It used to be impossible for me to go out of my house after eating lunch or any other significant meal, I felt bloated and overall irritable and also avoided eating on the street. This caused me a lot of social issues. Thanks to the constant exercise and the customized diet plan, nowadays I can go out after lunch and eat on the street normally.
4) What kind of results have you gotten since you started following my coaching program? Results have being the best I've got in my entire life. I'm in the best shape I've been. I think the pictures say all of this. Before I followed intermitent fasting, HIIT and a routine that was designed for me in a gym, I didn't get any noticeable results.Yours were the best results by far.
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5) How do you feel about the structure of my diet plan? Do you feel strong and energized on it? Is it easy to prepare the meals and stick to the diet throughout the week? Is the best diet I've followed. Since you customized according to my needs it was simple and easy to maintain and I never felt it was hard to follow it. The pinneaple does magic to my stomach, I never feel bloated now and I feel energized over the day. I'm plannig to stick with this diet for the rest of my life.
6) How do you feel about the structure of my training program? Do you feel your muscles get worked well in a time efficient manner? Is the best workout I've had, I've never did a single pull up, managing to do pull up reps was a breakthrough for me. I really like the bodyweight exercises, I feel accomplished when I progress on them and also I feel stronger and more agile after doing them. With weights exercises I feel I somehow get clumsier. It's really fulfilling seen I'm getting closer to that v-taper form.
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7) What makes my training programs and diet plans better than those you tried before? They take into account the skinny-fat body type, since it comes from your own experience being skinny fat and overcoming it.
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8) How did you like the weekly progression check ins and monthly progression photos? Did they help you stay focused and stick to your plan? They showed me how to train. Before the only way of tracking progress I had was by watching myself. They made me visualize progress and served me to be motivated and to stick with the plan.
9) During my coaching you had access to my private email address and you could ask any questions that came up. Do you feel I gave you timely and clear replies to your questions? All of your replies were clear and on time.
10) How clear are the exercise and diet instructions in my documents? Were they easy to follow? They were simple, short and with the neccesary detail. I followed them easily.
11) What does a typical day in your life look like? Before it was a sedentary life. Now I workout usually first hour morning and work on my computer until late night. If for some Online Transformation Program
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reason I cannot workout in the morning I do it late at night. If I miss a workout now I feel bad and uncomfortable, like I'm losing shape.
12) Is there anything you would like to add? If so, please do it here. Your program has improved my physical and and mental health. It was the best investment I've ever made. Also a life lesson I got by reading your blog that can be applied to accomplish other long term goals as well was that one must not rely on motivation but on habit. I'm going to maintain your training program and diet as a lifestyle.
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Gordon Martin, US
1a) Why did you hire me as your body transformation coach? I hired you because you struggled with your weight growing up. You know what it feels like to struggle with body image in a world that tells men that they are not allowed to have body image issues. Most of all, you were able to overcome all of these obstacles and build an amazing physique! I knew you were the real thing before I hired you!
1b) Was it an easy decision?
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Yes! You were incredibly supportive from the time we first chatted on Skype.
2) How has my coaching helped you with your body transformation? I have lost over 25 pounds and about 4.5 inches since we started. I still have a long way to go, but I am so much happier with my body.
3) Did your body transformation help you overcome other issues in life? The combination of support, healthy food, and exercise have made me feel less stressed out and more capable of handling daily challenges. When I get in a bad mood, it’s time to work out!
4a) What kind of results have you gotten since you started following my coaching program? For the first time in 36 years, I am losing fat rather than gaining it! I already look better than most of my friends who are out of shape and overweight.
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4b) How do these results compare to the results you got on other programs you followed prior to my blog advice and coaching? The results are slow but steady. Other programs always offer a quick fix… the quick fixes sometimes work. Then you stop, and you gain everything back again. Your coaching is more like running a marathon rather than sprinting a short distance. I now realize that it will take another year or so before I reach my goals, but you have given me the tools to reach them slowly but surely. You helped me build new, healthy habits!
5) How do you feel about the structure of my diet plan? Do you feel strong and energized on it? Is it easy to prepare the meals and stick to the diet throughout the week? I have never eaten so much on a diet! There were many times I simply felt that I couldn’t stuff another bite in my mouth. I shop and cook once a week. Right now, my fridge is stocked for the week… salmon, chicken breast, ground turkey meat, grilled vegetables, rice, sweet potatoes… I have the most delicious meals that only require 3 minutes in the microwave. No more endless snacking on garbage that never fills me up. The food
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always makes me feel full and happy and never bloated or slowed down or gassy.
6) How do you feel about the structure of my training program? Do you feel your muscles get worked well in a time efficient manner? I loved the customized bodyweight workouts. For those of us who travel a lot, there are no more problems with finding a gym. Also, the workouts are short and to the point. I like working out now, but I still want to be done in an hour or less. Your workouts were perfectly timed and easy for an out-of-shape beginner to follow and work on.
7) What makes my training programs and diet plans better than those you tried before? The personal interaction and accountability. When I first started, I often found myself choosing healthier food options because I did not want to have a bad weekly check-in with you. I knew that if I did bad, you would question my commitment, and I would feel like a lazy fool.
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8) How did you like the weekly progression check ins and monthly progression photos? Did they help you stay focused and stick to your plan? I will probably do weekly check ins and monthly progress photos for the rest of my life. This is the ONLY thing that consistently works for me. It’s Monday morning, and I am already thinking about what I need to do to have a great week and lose some more inches off of my mid-section. Making photos of yourself is a great way to critique your physique. It’s totally different than simply looking in a mirror.
9) During my coaching you had access to my private email address and you could ask any questions that came up. Do you feel I gave you timely and clear replies to your questions? You were always easy to reach and gave me thoughtful, educated answers to my questions.
10) How clear are the exercise and diet instructions in my documents? Were they easy to follow? Very clear and easy to follow. I would tell future clients to turn off their brains, listen to Oskar, and get ready to lose some weight. Online Transformation Program
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11) Is there anything you would like to add? If so, please do it here. You are one of the few people on the Internet involved with men’s health topics that actually cares and can get results for clients. The money I spent on your coaching services are the best money I ever spent!
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Logan Rando, US
Hi,
my
name
is
Logan
Rando
and
I’ve
been
a
skinnyfattransformation reader for one year and two months.
I began my fitness transformation in December of 2014 and I stumbled across Oskar’s website while reading through some fitness forums.
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For several months I had been killing myself in the gym, lifting heavy weights five days a week. My results were lacklustre and I constantly felt lethargic and irritable.
I was putting in very hard work at the gym yet wasn’t gaining the muscle I felt I deserved. Even worse, I felt that I was retaining fat in all the wrong places. I still had a visible belly and very little definition. I had friends that put in half the effort I did yet were receiving stellar results? I thought to myself… what am I doing wrong?!
When I discovered Oskar’s website, skinnyfattransformation.com I had a moment of clarity.
For the first time in my life, someone was specifically addressing my build and my genetics. The “skinny-fat” physique perfectly described my body type.
When I read about Oskar’s personal transformation from skinnyfat to ripped, I knew I had to try his body-weight regimen for
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myself. My mind raced with excitement as I drove to the gym from work that day.
I was so eager to try out his back-to-basics routine that I drove so fast and actually got a speeding ticket on the way over to the gym.
After 6 months of doing the beginner body weight routine I found myself 30 pounds lighter, with visible abs and a lean build.
I took a vacation to the Dominican Republic and was constantly complimented on my physique. Friends who hadn’t seen me in months were astonished and inspired by my transformation.
My progress inspired one of my friends, who also had a skinny-fat body type, to join me at the gym.
I knew this program worked for more than just me when I saw him lose his love handles and chest fat while gaining a toned masculine build in a few months’ time.
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After making the best progress I ever had, I felt amazing but was hungry for more. I knew I was ready to take my fitness to the next level, so it was a no-brainer when I made the decision to work with Oskar in the online coaching program.
After skyping with Oskar he made note of my personal fitness goals and designed an exercise routine and diet plan tailored to my goals and lifestyle.
Following the fitness regimen could not have been simpler. Oskar laid out each exercise with the prescribed rep range, number of sets, and rest periods.
The diet plan included nutritious foods that I like to eat and was incredibly easy to follow.
I was never tempted to fall off the wagon because Oskar built into the plan two cheat meals per week. I constantly looked forward to my meals, felt satiated, and was energized for my intense workouts.
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In the past, workout routines I found online had me lifting so heavy that I was quickly drained of energy and struggled to complete the remaining exercises. The results I received from these efforts were nonexistent! The routine that Oskar designed challenged me to work every muscle group in my body in a timely, effective manner. I always left the gym feeling satisfied that I put in a hard day’s work while hitting each muscle groups effectively.
Simply put, the return on investment that Oskar’s plan yielded far exceeded that of any workout I had previously used.
The most important part of the training process for me was the constant line of communication I had with Oskar. On a weekly basis I input body measurements into a google spreadsheet. With this data, Oskar could monitor exactly how my body was changing and could adapt the plan to minimize fat loss while maximizing muscle gains.
Within 24 hours of updating my stats, Oskar would provide valuable feedback and adjust the plan if needed. Online Transformation Program
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Whenever I needed clarification or had a question, I could count on Oskar getting back to me very quickly. I felt that I received a lot of value and personal attention from the program.
After completing a 12 week coaching program with Oskar, I’m pleased to say that gained significant size to my biceps, shoulders, and back all while maintaining a lean figure.
Oskar and I skyped at the conclusion of the program and he provided me with the tools and knowledge to continue into the future. I’m absolutely confident that I’m prepared to continue to make muscle gains on my own!
If anyone is unsure about whether or not this coaching program is for you, I urge you to try Oskar’s body-weight routine, see the results you get, and then ask yourself if you want more. Oskar is determined to help you reach your fitness goals and will be along with you every step of the way.
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Frequently Asked Questions “I don’t really understand how the process of getting ripped works. What steps do I have to take to go from skinny-fat to ripped and how does your training fit in that context?” To understand the process of getting ripped, I recommend you read through my page about the 2 Phases of a Skinny-Fat Transformation... It will show you the exact steps I took to lose 60 pounds of fat and gain more than 40 pounds of muscle mass and my full transformation video with monthly progress photos.
“As I did the stretches after the work outs I found that I couldn't complete the leg stretches to their fullest without feeling a lot of pain. Should I modify the stretches to feel less pain?”
The stretches shown in the photos are the ideal you should strive for, not necessarily start with. For example, I can’t do the lizard stretch as shown in the photo, but each training I do my best to Online Transformation Program
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get as close to it as possible, without feeling pain. The idea is that you stretch to the point where you feel a gentle stretch and then gradually build up your flexibility. By doing so, you get all the benefits from stretching without injuring yourself.
“I won’t have access to a pull up bar while being on holiday. What should I do?” Do your best to find a pull up bar in a nearby park, beach or a pipe somewhere on a building. If you can’t find one, just do the other exercises until you return from your holiday.
“How many calories should I eat to lose fat and what should my macros be?” Following a fat loss diet isn’t all about using using a calorie calculator and then following through with it. With my clients I start out with some kind of base-line, and then based on how they feel and respond, we make regular adjustments to their portions, food choices and macros. These adjustments are crucial to their long-term success because often the first diet I design for my clients isn’t all that great for them. It’s once we
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make adjustments that they start seeing real results while feeling great in the process. This process of making adjustments is timeconsuming and requires on-going coaching, and that’s why I’m not able to simply tell you what your calories and macros should be. I hope you understand.
“I’m a tall guy (over 6 feet). Should I make adjustments to the training?”
Taller guy will require a longer time to see results from training because of increased work done on each rep and a bigger frame that the muscle mass is spread on. For example, when a 6’4” guy with long arms does 5 reps on a chin up, he does a lot more work than the 5’9” guy because he has a longer distance to lift on each rep and more weight to lift. Because of that, taller guys progress slower on nearly all exercises so that’s something you should keep in mind if you’re tall. Also, when it comes to gaining muscle mass, a 10 pound muscle gain is not as visible on a tall guy as it is on a shorter guy because it’s spread on a bigger frame. In other words, tall guys progress slower on exercises and it takes us a longer time to see muscle gains because of our long limbs. Online Transformation Program
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With that said, I found that my taller clients benefit a lot from adding some dumbbell isolation exercises to strengthen the 3 shoulder heads and exercises for the biceps and triceps. By adding these assistance exercises, they’re able to build up their shoulders and arms faster (and boost their progress on chin ups and diamond push ups). Read more: 4 Challenges for the Tall Bodybuilder
“Do I need to eat a good diet and should I supplement with Omega-3?” You can get results from following my training program alone, however the results will be slower and mainly be in the way you perform (i.e. strength gains). To achieve body-composition changes (fat loss and muscle gains), you need a nutrition plan that supports these goals. In other words, you will see some results from doing the training alone, but they will be far from optimal. To make a complete transformation you need both TRAINING and DIET and SLEEP.
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“I don’t want to get as big as you. I just want to get lean and defined.” Gaining muscle mass takes a long time so you won’t wake up big one day. It took me years of hard work to gain 40 pounds of muscle mass, and I could stop at any time. The reason to why I didn’t stop was because I fell in love with training, so instead of training to get bigger muscles, I was training because it was the one thing I looked forward to everyday. And surprisingly, I got better results when I started enjoying my training rather than doing it just to get something out of it.
“I’ve been trying to transform for years, but I didn’t get results. Why would your training program work for me?” I was in the same situation as you. During the first 2 years of training, I followed the popular advice of lifting heavy weights and eating a high protein diet but I didn’t get any visible results. The same goes for many of my clients and readers who made great transformations. Here’s a testimonial from my reader Emilio who was skinny-fat for 15 years prior to finding my website: “Hi Oskar, Online Transformation Program
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my name is Emilio, I´m 29 years old and I’m from Argentina. I came across your site and felt identified with you almost instantly. As a skinny fat guy, I have been struggling for a long time to improve my appearance with a lot of effort and poor results, following the same bad advices as you in your beginning. It’s been 7 weeks since I started applying your ideas and so far I’ve had the best progress in my life after years of intermittent weight training. Having been a skinny fat for 15 years (I’m almost 30 now), I’m still surprised and enjoying not being it anymore. From being about 1m85 / 87 kg with 20-25% BF, right now I’m about 77 kg, with about 12-14% bodyfat, and I love the way I look. I still sometimes look at me in the mirror and I can’t believe I am now between slim and toned, having been flaccid all my life, ashamed of taking off my t-shirt. I really appreciate having found your website and I want to thank you for sharing all your experiences!”
“Should I take protein powder?” Protein powder isn’t necessary. You can get all the protein you need (and more) by eating 150-250 grams of lean meat or fish twice per day. I’ve built most of my muscle mass while eating just 100-120 grams of protein per day (at a bodyweight of 200 Online Transformation Program
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pounds) and my clients are building muscle mass while eating similar amounts.
Besides that, most protein powders out there are made from whey which is a byproduct of cheese production. This essentially means that whey is dairy, and I mentioned earlier that dairy products tend to spike your estrogen levels - we don't want that! This means that most protein powders out there are a bad idea.
With that said, protein powder does have some practical uses. Some of my clients take protein powder with breakfast and some clients use it as a snack when they get hungry along with some fruits. If you believe you need protein powder to fill a gap, I recommend you look into egg white protein powder and if that isn’t available, find a good vegan protein powder.
“Should I do hormonal blood work?”
Regardless of whether you’re young, middle-aged or old, you should get hormonal blood work done now and after that, once per year as part of your health check up. Most of my clients who Online Transformation Program
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do blood work find out they either have thyroid problems, low testosterone levels or other deficiencies that need to be addressed. And even if you don’t have any problems right now, it’s good to have your current numbers do you have a base-line. You can use this base-line later when you eventually get problems (this happens as you age), to get your numbers back to their base-line.
In the case you decide to do blood work, you can get it done privately through Private MD Labs.
“Do I have wide hips, narrow shoulders or a skinnyfat physique because of my hormones?” There most certainly is a hormonal component to it, however hormones and body-composition follow each other, so as your body-composition improves through diet and training, so do your hormones. The only things we can’t change are your height and your bone structure.
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“I won’t get stronger on bodyweight exercises while cutting so I should avoid training?”
You should do resistance training regardless of whether you’re cutting for fat loss or bulking for muscle gains. Resistance training ensures that you maintain the muscle mass and strength you already have, and if you haven’t consistently followed a proper training program and nutrition plan, you will be able to build strength and muscle mass while cutting. Let me say this again: Resistance training is 100% CRUCIAL for your bodytransformation goals at ALL TIMES.
“Did you really get to your goal without using the gym? I saw a video in your main transformation youtube video where it shows you working out in the gym.” My “2013 park photo” where I’m flexing shirtless in long pants was taken after 16 weeks of focusing on bodyweight training and playing sports. This is the photo that is considered my best ever and the physique in that photo is 100% achievable with Online Transformation Program
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bodyweight training. Does that mean I’ve only done bodyweight training? No, I currently train in a gym and my first 2 years of training were done in a gym. I’m not going to sit here and say that bodyweight training is the only way to train because that’s a lie. Like I mentioned earlier, there’s nothing magical about my bodyweight training program. It just happened to work extremely well for me after 2 years of getting no results in the gym and it worked very well for my readers and clients too, so give it a shot and build your foundation with it, then think about the next step later.
“I have been thinking about applying for your coaching program, but I’m not sure if it’s the right fit for me?” If you’re in doubt, try my free training for a few months first, see what results you get and then decide if you want to take your transformation to the next level.
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