Day 15: The Real Work Begins by Nick Mitchell
After the first week of miraculous progress Joe’s progress has slowed down to an impressive, but slower, pace.
You too should expect a similar pattern when you follow the fat loss focused programs in The Ultimate Transformation Guide (muscle building progress is usually slower, although I’ll get into the specifics of that a bit more in a later entry). Joe has been losing about 1 mm a day of skin fold thickness from his supra iliac (love handles) and that continued for about the first 12 days of the plan.
To put it into perspective that’s not 1mm a day of his waist circumference, it is the sort of progress that could take an obese man to be cover model ready in a matter of weeks. Which is clearly impossible.
What you need to get your head around, because so many times with UP transformations people just do not get it, is that progress is not ever going to be linear. What I am doing with Joe, and what you will do if you properly follow all the workouts, lifestyle advice, and diets / meal plans, is to make some radical improvements in all the areas necessary for improving your body composition, be it fat loss, muscle building or as we are aiming for with Joe a combination of both factors.
Rapid and calculated changes to what controls your body composition will almost always result in rapid changes to your actual body. I know that this sounds a bit obvious but based on my social media feed every time we post one of our results up it does seem that a lot of people don’t get that fact (or choose to disbelieve it because it sheds a harsh light on their own inconsistent / uncommitted / misguided efforts).
We have taken Joe who has been failing to tick many of the boxes necessary for optimal health and physical appearance:
Diet – inconsistent feeding such as skipping breakfast and even lunch, too low in protein, alcohol, minimal fibre.
Lifestyle – he doesn’t party but he does work too much. And his sleep is horrible and has been an issue for all his adult life.
Exercise – a gym session anywhere between once a week, to once a month.
Do any of these problems sound familiar to any of you?
If we were to add up all the possible things that Joe has been doing wrong we might have 100 boxes to tick. Embarking on the UTG program means that right away we are ticking a huge number of boxes, and if Joe is prepared to go all in and radically change his habits, then by ticking ALL the boxes he is going to make stellar progress.
But eventually that rate of progress will always slow down as his fat cells shrink his cardiovascular system becomes fitter and more efficient, and his muscles grow stronger. This is because out bodies adapt (positively or negatively) to (good or bad) stress, and over time we get used to that stress and the adaptations slow down.
That adaptation and the preventing of newbie muscle gains slowing down too painfully is one of the fundamental premises of this new program, as we incorporate specialization and maintenance programs into the workouts in order for you to keep on progressing as fast as possible.
Watch out over the coming weeks as we crank things up with some extra special routines to help Joe become cover model ready, and learn how to implement them when the book comes out at the end of this year.
If you’re impatient for more info / workouts to try out check the free download section of this site for some giveaways and please don’t forget to leave your email address in the sign-in box on the right of this screen. We sold out at pre-order stage for my last print book and registering your (no strings attached) interest is the best way to ensure that you get the book in time to kick off your 2016 with a bang!
Isn’t that Joe Warner who did the 12 week Transformation book a few years back? Would his muscle memory therefore not play a part in his transformation? Not really a transformation seeing as he looked like this by the end of the last challenge. http://upfitness.co.uk/real-results/joe-warner-from-out-of-shape-to-literally-cover-model-in-12-weeks/
Muscle memory isn’t going to be too much of a factor in a guy who trained properly for just 12 weeks and then had nigh on 3 years with minimal training.
Could you squeeze a 4 day training plan like the orig 12wbp into 3 days to fit in current lifestyle ?
at a push yes, although it would not some creativity as the programs in the book is based around 4 days a week of resistance training.
Thanks nick. Or could I do 3 per week and stretch to 16 weeks instead of 12?
You could but it does change the plan. One thing about the UTG workouts though are that they are fluid. You could easily run them for a year without over replication. It is not the same as a 12 week plan to just slavishly follow, there’s a lot more ways to add specific variety.
Hi Nick
the ‘register your interest’ to download some of the content doesn’t seem to accept my email addresses (home/work), is there an issue?
Cheers
Hi Steve,
Hopefully it was a temporary issue – I just signed you up with the email address you used to comment here with no problems.
Joe
Thanks nick. 1 last question. When doing your “circuits of death “workouts, once you complete a circuit do you start at the beginning again and do another circuit and another etc? Thinking of starting today as a 3 week fat/conditioning blast before 12WBP
yes, another and another…