If you’re anything like me, you love movies. The things that always catches my attention and that amazes me is that my favorite actors always tend to stay in amazing shape year round. I’m talking about guys like Jason Statham, Henry Cavill and Brad Pitt.
The most logical explanation people quickly come up with is that celebrities have large budgets to spend on personal trainers and personal chefs that allow them to go about their lives without having to stress out about how to stay in shape.
While it may be true that highly paid actors hire personal trainers and chefs when they’re preparing for certain movie roles where they have to get in even more exceptional physical condition or are caught in the process of shooting itself for up to a year so that they can focus their entire attention on displaying their best possible performance on the big screen, most actors who stay in amazing shape year round don’t constantly live under the supervision of a personal trainer monitoring them all the time.
Most guys such as Jason Statham enjoy life and love taking time off to do what they like. If having to live under a strict regime all the time was obligatory for these guys, then they themselves wouldn’t be able to sustain their fantastic physiques.
Then what is the secret they know that you don’t know on how to stay in peak condition? How can they go about their lives doing what they do and look so good, while not making their lives revolve around their fitness?
The answer is to find a system that allows you to experience a sense of freedom in what you eat and how you train. We as humans don’t operate well in captivity, just as any other animal on the planet. This is even more so when you feel mentally imprisoned. Freedom, flexibility and enjoyment, paired with discipline and consistency, is what will deliver you the long term results you’ve been looking for.
Hold on tight because you’re about to discover the new era formula to get in and stay in peak conditioning year round for the rest of your life.
The magic of flexible dieting
One of the most important aspects of staying in amazing shape is what you put in your mouth. The old school way (and unfortunately wrong way) of thinking, is that there are good foods and bad foods for weight maintenance and that you always have to eat super clean in order to achieve your desired physical shape.
Clean eating traditionally translates into eating only unprocessed natural foods and preferably either low carb, low fat or a combination of both, while consuming enormously high amounts of protein.
Not only will this make you feel miserable and is this approach unsustainable in the long haul, unfortunately, this won’t lead to the athletic physique you have in mind. Many people have suffered mentally and physically through low calorie, low fat and low carb diets with sheer willpower, only to be disappointed at the end because they don’t see what they want to see when they look in the mirror.
What if I told you that you don’t have to suffer and that eating is meant to be an enjoyable thing. Would you call me crazy? Maybe you would at first, but not for long… after you see the results when you practice what I preach.
Melting off body fat all comes down to eating in a calorie deficit, no matter which foods you consume. There are no magical foods that will make you lose fat or gain fat. Fat loss all comes down to calories in vs calories out. If you consume less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. The opposite is true as well. No matter what kinds of food you eat, no matter how ‘clean’ you eat, if you eat too many calories, you will gain weight, even when you live on dry boiled chicken breast, boiled broccoli and brown rice.
So yes my friend, you heard that right. You can eat anything you want and lose body fat, as long as you eat in a calorie deficit. You can have your cake, ice cream, snickers bar, chips and cookies and get in amazing shape! It is exactly this freedom and flexibility that allows celebrities to get and stay in Hollywood celebrity conditioning.
Obviously, I don’t recommend that you live off of chips and cookies and making that the only thing you eat. It’s still of vital importance for your health and hormones to consume adequate vitamins, minerals and macronutrients from the right sources. Those can only be ingested primarily through a whole food diet and a couple of smart supplements.
Balance is the key word here. I always recommend that people focus on consuming about 80% of their daily calories from nutritious, whole foods that will do your body good and keep a bit of wiggle room for a treat each and every day. Personally, I’m a sucker for waffles, chocolate and ice cream, so I keep a bit of ‘calorie room’ for one of those each day. That way I enjoy food packed with nutrients to fuel my health and performance and I get to eat my daily treat. This balance and flexible way of eating allows me to feel free without any restrictions and in turn, allows me to stick to my calorie requirements. This in turn leads to me staying in shape effortlessly. This nutritional approach is known as flexible dieting and is how celebrities, fitness models and everyone who is in amazing shape, stays in amazing shape.
What about eating out you may ask? A lot of restaurants have calorie and macronutrient charts displayed next to their menus. This aids in managing your calorie intake for the day and allows you to eat out and have a social life. When you’ve been tracking your nutrition for a while and have gotten familiar with eyeballing portion sizes of regularly consumed foods, you will be able to fairly accurately estimate the number of calories that each dish contains. This skill of eyeballing your food will come in handy when you face social situations where you eat out, which will allow you to enjoy your life and stay lean.
The caveat of this is that you have to make sure to eat enough protein to support muscle maintenance and/or muscle growth and that you have to perform a form of resistance training regularly. Protein intake should be set to about 0.8 – 1g per pound of body weight. More than that won’t give you much more benefit in regards of body composition.
So basically what you should have learned about nutrition is that you can eat whatever you want and still lose weight, as long as you eat the right amount of calories for your goal, regardless of where those calories come from. To maximize body composition though, you have the make sure that you get in about 0.8g – 1g of protein per pound of body weight. Consume about 80% of your daily calories from nutritious sources to fuel your health, hormones and immune system and save up about 20% for a nice treat that will satisfy your sweet tooth.
Training hard and smart
Next to nutrition, the other major part of getting and staying in exceptional physical shape is training.
Most people envision that they have to live some kind of hardcore lifestyle like Rocky Balboa or Jean Claude Vandamme in the old school 80’s movies where they have to wake up at 4 am to do their morning cardio at 5 am and supplement that with a grueling hardcore weight training routine that lasts for 3 hours and makes them puke their guts out… and that 6 days per week.
Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. While resistance training is the way to go and training with proper intensity is required in order to maximize your results and get into phenomenal shape, it’s as important to train smart.
By training smart I’m referring to focusing on the fundamental elements of training that will give you the most bang for your buck with the least amount of time and effort. This will allow you to maximize your results in the gym, while not having to spend a whole lot of time there and having plenty of days off to focus on other important things in life.
How do you do that? Well, there are two phases. The first phase is the hardest one and is the one that will require a bit more discipline. This is the phase where you are in the process of sculpting your dream physique, let’s call it the buildup phase. During the buildup phase you will have to be the most consistent in order to maximize your progress. You will have to focus your training around progressive overload on big compound movements.
Big compound movements involve multiple joints and therefore stimulate a lot of muscle mass at once, making them extremely time efficient. Getting stronger at big compound lifts such as the bench press, chin up and squat will be the main factor of your physique transformation when it comes to training and should always form the basis of your resistance training workouts.
In order to make maximal progress, you need to perform a certain amount of hard sets close to failure per week. For most people, that amount of volume will fall between 9 – 15 sets per week depending on where they are in their training career and what their life circumstances are. Beginners will lean more to the lower side and more advanced lifters will lean more to the higher side. Most people will be able to achieve those volume goals with only hitting the gym 3 times per week, which is very manageable.
The great thing about all of this is that once you’ve built up your physique and have reached your goal, it doesn’t take that much to maintain it. In fact, it only takes up 1/3rd of the training volume used to build up your physique, to maintain your results. What I like to do when I’m in maintenance mode is eliminate one training session per week, which will only require me to go to the gym twice per week. Whereas I would otherwise train on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the building phase, I’m only training on Monday and Thursday while I’m in a maintenance phase.
Again, training this way gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to live your life to the fullest without being chained to the gym. Since you have so much time off from the gym, you actually look forward to training and to hitting PR’s in the gym, whereas if you’d be tied, to the gym 6 days a week, it would become another job that you would dread.
What about cardio you may ask? You don’t need cardio to get into great shape. Resistance training and calorie manipulation are all you need to focus on. Of course, getting enough movements is important for your heart and blood circulation. Therefore I recommend walking. Walking is and easy activity that does your body good, makes you feel good and doesn’t compromise the recovery of your resistance training workouts.
Balance and moderation is key. This is exactly what flexible dieting and a balanced workout approach offer. This the way Hollywood celebrities get and stay in shape year round. They focus their attention on what matters the most and make their training time efficient.
Balance and moderation offer freedom and flexibility, which is the key to long term success when it comes to fitness and staying in amazing shape.
Kevin Mahjoubi