So you have decided to take matters into your own hands and that you want to become a better version of yourself. First of all, congratulations. It is the first step to success in your life. Part of becoming the best version of yourself is getting into great shape. Or even getting into amazing shape. A physique that checks all the checkmarks of looking fantastic, performing amazing and a symbol of being in great health. You probably want to go hardcore right from the get go and have decided that you are going to drag yourself to the gym each and every day because you want to transform your physique as fast as possible and get in Greek God shape in no time. The first few weeks things are going amazing. You are consistent and you notice some progress on the scale. Heck, people even compliment you and say they can already see a visible difference! However, you are feeling a bit fatigued after going to the gym 5 to 7 days a week for a couple of weeks, performing 3 hour grueling workouts given to you by your favorite bodybuilder or fitness influencer.
It’s a rainy day and you just came home from work, a little tired, but you still need to go to the gym that day. Your friend John calls you and says he’s going to that new fancy bar downtown and asks you to join him. Skipping one day of going to the gym isn’t going to hinder your progress, it is? So you accept his invitation and join him to that new fancy place. You told yourself 2 to 3 drinks was going to be all you were going to have that night… well cowboy, it ended up being a wild night where you had more drinks than you can count with both hands… as confirmed by your credit card. Waking up hungover, starting off the day with a breakfast of aspirins and completely silence, you decide to skip the gym again and instead choose a comfortable set up in the couch watching football and destroying a bag of doritos that you’ve emptied faster than Usain Bolt’s 100m world record time. The next day you had to work over and skip the gym again, since you’re too tired and immediately want to go home. What started as a one time thing has now become a habit. You’ve been paying your gym membership for 8 months now and have been consistently skipping the gym for 7. You’re heavier than you used to be before and are in a worse place. Sounds familiar?
If you think you have to live your life in the gym to get and stay in amazing shape, then let me tell you this: you’re dead wrong! If you want to rock a muscular, athletic, lean physique, you don’t have to go to the gym 6 or 7 days per week like and dread the process! Insinuating that you are a normal person who wants to achieve the look of an athlete, the body similar to that of a statue of a Greek God, then you don’t have to live your life between barbells and dumbbells. If going to the gym feels like a job and another punishment in life, you’ll never be able to stick to a gym routine in the long term. The key to getting and being in shape for life is consistency. However, nobody can be consistent if you go over your limits all the time. It’s okay and normal to overreach for certain amounts of time in life when we want to peak at something. However, we can’t peak all the time and have to catch our breath at some point. The smart approach is to adopt a training and diet approach that is well balanced and that allows you to make consistent progress without getting burned. This way you will make consistent progress and you will be able to maintain the results. If you do things right and are consistent, you can keep improving till the end of your days!
Consistency is key
Believe it or not but getting and staying in amazing shape like a Greek God actually doesn’t require a life dedicated to spending more time in the gym than time spent at work. The key to being athletic, lean and strong forever is to be consistent. To be even more precise: you have to be consistently following a training routine and nutritional principles that work and that you are able to continue doing for the rest of your life. Both training and nutrition go hand in hand when trying to transform your physique and to maintain your results for the rest of your life. If you can’t stick to it, you will not achieve it or you will lose it if you’ve achieved it earlier but don’t keep working out and eating right. The biggest mistake I see when it comes to people failing to be consistent in not only fitness, but anything in life, is that they want to go too extreme and too hardcore in everything they attempt to achieve all the time. They try to follow an approach that even the most gifted, disciplined person isn’t able to stick to without getting burned out. As a result of trying to maintain the intensity of a nuclear explosion, you will inevitably lose your drive and as your motor shuts down, you will eventually quit altogether.
A much better approach to go after your fitness goals or any goal in your life for that matter, is to adopt an approach that is sustainable for the long haul and that respects the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule implies that 80 percent of the results people get in whatever they attempt comes from 20 percent of the things they do. A lot of businesses find that 80 percent of their total revenue comes from only 20 products of the products they have. In fitness, this is no different. 80 percent of your results will come from only 20 percent of all the things you can possibly do in the gym (it’s even less to be honest). There are so many exercises you can do, but only a handful of exercises will be responsible for the large majority of the results you will ever achieve. There are so many (fad) diets out there, yet there are only a handful of nutritional principles you should respect to shred fat effectively and maintain a low body fat percentage forever. A moderate, yet sustainable approach where you are able to take consistent action over a long period of time and that delivers steady results is far superior to an approach of extremities that might lead into faster results in the short term, but isn’t sustainable in the long term and makes you quit altogether. When you quit, nothing is going to happen. When you take consistent action and make small improvements on a consistent basis, you will realize big goals eventually. This is especially true when most of your time is spent on doing the 20% (or less) crucial elements that will deliver 80% (or more) of the results.
The 10 fitness commandments to get and stay in amazing shape forever
Now that you are aware of the fact that extremes aren’t good for long term progress and that there are only a handful of crucial factors to focus on to get the majority of the results in anything you want to do, you’ve already won half the battle. Fitness is no exception to this fact. Therefore I will now make your life easier and share with you the most crucial factors to focus on when it comes to training and nutrition. These core principles will be your ‘Ten Commandments’. I promise you that if you apply these correctly into your own fitness quest, you will look like you’ve been carved out of granite when you take your shirt off. The beauty of these Ten Commandments are that they are easy to implement into your daily life and will quickly become habits you don’t have to break your head over. They allow you to embrace moderation, they allow for steady growth and therefore, are sustainable in the long haul. This means that armed with this knowledge, you are able to easily get your dream physique and stay in shape for the rest of your life.
COMMANDMENT I: THOU SHALT GO TO THE GYM 2 – 4 TIMES PER WEEK
I can’t stress this enough: you don’t have to spend your life in the gym to look amazing! To achieve an optimal amount of muscle growth is has been scientifically proven that it requires 9 to 20 sets close to failure per muscle group per week. The majority of people will do just fine of a workout routine that lets them perform 9 to 15 challenging sets per muscle group per week, depending on their training level. These should be spread of 2 or more sessions for optimal results. For people who don’t wish to spend their life in the gym I highly suggest performing full body workouts or upper lower workouts. These require you to be in the gym 2 to 4 days per week depending on which one you choose. I have been following full body routines for years now and go to the gym 2 – 3 times per week depending on which training phase I’m in. The takeaway is that I have never spent more than 3 days per week in the gym for the last 10 years and the results aren’t disappointing. Since I’m having plenty of days off from the gym and never get burned out, I always look forward to my training sessions and actually enjoy my time in the gym.
COMMANDMENT II: THOU SHALT FOCUS YOUR WORKOUTS AROUND BIG COMPOUND EXERCISES
Respecting the 80/20 principle in the gym will require you to focus your training routine around big compound exercises. These are multi joint exercises that target a lot of muscle mass at once and therefore give you the biggest bang for your buck from both a time perspective, strength progression perspective and a muscle building perspective. The most important compound exercises you need to focus on are the bench press, the overhead press, the chin up (or lat pulldown), the row, the squat and the deadlift. These exercises allow for easy strength progression and will be responsible for 80 percent of the mass you’ll ever pack on your frame. If you really want to maximize your physique you can supplement your big compound lifts with isolation lifts to bring up lagging areas.
COMMANDMENT III: THOU SHALT APPLY PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD
Progressive overload is simply aiming to become stronger over time. If you aren’t able to add weight to the bar or perform more repetitions with the same weight, your physique won’t change. In the beginning stages of your training journey it will be easy to make strength progress and you’ll be able to add weight to the bar every session once your technique is on point. If you focus on progressive overload with proper technique and you take care of your nutrition, you truly see a massive transformation after a year of lifting. The biggest reason why people don’t notice any significant difference in the mirror after going to the gym for months or even years, is because they fail to focus on progressive overload and lift the same weights for the same amount of reps day in day out. If you don’t force your body to adapt by giving it a a reason to grow (using heavier weights), it won’t adapt. For more in depth information about progressive overload and how to progress efficiently and effectively, click here.
COMMANDMENT IV: THOU SHALT USE THE 5 TO 15 REP RANGE THE MAJORITY OF THE TIME
There’s a lot of debate on whether low reps or high reps are superior for muscular growth. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter as long as you train within the 5 to 30 rep range and end your sets close to failure. The reason I recommend the 5 to 15 rep range is because it is the most efficient rep range to apply progressive overload to. Grinding out a set of 30 on the bench press or the squat will make you scream like a little girl and simply isn’t an efficient way to train. For compound lifts I recommend that you perform the majority of your work in the 5 to 10 rep range and for isolation work I advise you to stick to the 8 to 15 rep range. Following these recommendations will allow you to execute your lifts with proper technique, manage fatigue well and allow for efficient and effective progression. For more information on the ideal rep range to build muscle, click here.
COMMANDMENT V: THOU SHALT TRAIN EACH MUSCLE GROUP AT LEAST TWICE PER WEEK
The majority of gym goers lift in the exact opposite way as they should train to maximize their progress. They train each muscle group once per week and bombard it with an extreme amount of volume per session. The smarter way to train is to divide your weekly volume per muscle group over multiple sessions. Studies have proven that training a muscle group twice per week was more effective for muscle growth and to gain strength compared to training once per week, even though volume remained the same. When you divide your weekly volume in two or more sessions, the quality of your lifts will be better. After performing a couple of heavy sets, your muscles fatigue and the quality of the sets you still need to perform will suffer. When you split your volume up over multiple sessions you will be able to perform your sets in a fresh state and therefore perform better, which will lead to more muscle growth. For this exact reason I recommend training with full body or upper/lower workouts where you divide your weekly volume over 2 to 3 sessions. I can testify the benefits of a higher training frequency and have seen massive improvements in moth size and strength the day I went from a typical bro split to a full body workout and I’ll never look back.
COMMANDMENT VI: THOU SHALT USE THE LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
Training is one part of sculpting an athletic physique, nutrition is the other. They go hand in hand and therefore should be treated with equal importance. People always search for a magic pill that will deliver overnight success. Just like there is no magic pill, there is no magic diet. There is however the law of thermodynamics or in other words, calories in vs calories out. Weight management is all about a mathematical game of energy balance. Calculate how many calories you need per day to maintain your weight and manipulate that number to lose fat or to gain muscle. It’s as simple as that. It will require some discipline in the beginning to keep track of your calories, but after a couple of weeks it will become a habit. There are plenty of calorie tracking apps that can make this task a breeze. If you don’t get your calories in order, you’ll never maximize your results.
COMMANDMENT VII: THOU SHALT EAT 0.8G OF PROTEIN PER POUND OF BODYWEIGHT
Forget about old school bodybuilder recommendations for protein. You don’t have to eat an entire cow or 20 chickens per day. Research has clearly proven that there isn’t any benefit in eating more than 0.8g of protein per pound of body weight. This is true for both gaining muscle on a bulk and maintaining muscle on a cut. Eating more protein may help some people to feel more satiated and full when dieting down, but there’s no additional benefit from a muscle gaining or maintaining standpoint. If calories are fixed, it’s actually very important to leave room for carbs and fats to feel good and perform good.
COMMANDMENT VIII: THOU SHALT EAT CARBS AND FATS
Over the past decades both carbs and fats have gotten a bad reputation. Lucky for us more and more people are starting to see through the unnecessary hysteria of carbs and fats. There is no reason to avoid any group of macronutrients. On the contrary, both carbs and fats are actually extremely important to maintain optimal health. The right types of carbs and fats are actually very important to nourish our bodies with essential sources of vitamins and minerals. Carbs and fats play an important role in hormone regulation as well and will make you feel better much better when you include them in your diet. Your workouts will be way better as well when you eat a sufficient amount of carbs and fats and as a consequence, you will get great results out of your workouts.
COMMANDMENT IX: THOU SHALT APPLY A MODERATE CALORIE DEFICIT OR SURPLUS
As mentioned earlier, changing your body composition with nutrition is all about calculating how many calories you need. There’s no point in going too extreme though. People who crash diet won’t be able to sustain what they are doing since hunger will be overwhelming at one point and your body will be screaming for food. After a while of crash dieting, you’ll feel like you’re dead already and won’t be very enjoyable company for other people. At one point you will give in any way and you will start binge eating. This happens to a lot of people and in a couple of days of binging, they succeed in undoing all the progress they’ve made in weeks. The other side of the spectrum are people who dirty bulk and eat everything in sight. Often times when young men do this, I see them going from having an actually pretty good physique to someone who looks like the perfect candidate for The Biggest Loser. They ruin their physique by eating way too much above maintenance and look way worse than they did before. The solution for long term success and consistency is moderation. Eating in a moderate calorie deficit will make sure that you will still be able to eat a significant amount of food while on a diet so that your results will be lasting. The same goes for trying to gain muscle. You have to eat in a calorie surplus to gain muscle. I strongly advise you though to eat in a moderate calorie surplus of 200 to 300 calories above maintenance. By doing this you will allow muscle growth to happens and will minimize fat gain. Using this approach to lean bulk will result in you still being decently lean while having packed on a good amount of muscle mass.
COMMANDMENT X: THOU SHALT BE CONSISTENT WITH THESE COMMANDMENTS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
Consistency is key. The art of staying in shape forever is to find an effective approach that you can fit into your lifestyle. By adopting a training and nutrition approach that embraces balance and moderation, you will be able to make long term progress and keep that progress forever. Once you stop lifting heavy and keeping track of what you put into your mouth, you will lose everything you’ve built up. Lifting and having an amazing body is a life long commitment. It’s your job to make that commitment as enjoyable as possible and to focus on the core principles of being in shape. I can’t stress it enough times: Consistency is key! This is true in fitness and in everything else you do in life. The secret to succeeding in anything you do in life is to find a way to make consistent progress over a long period of time where you keep making small steps in the right direction and I promise you that over time the results will speak for themselves.
Kevin Mahjoubi