An Exact Training Plan to Build Muscle, Lose Fat, and Boost Your Energy Levels

Build a lean, strong, and healthy body with this simple program.

There’s a good chance your current training program is sabotaging your progress and your health.

I imagine you can relate to the feeling of sticking with an exercise program, only to feel like you’re not making any progress, and maybe you’re even feeling achier and less energetic the longer you stick to it.

I’m here to tell you there’s a better way.

The Problem

As a society, we are more fatigued than ever before.

And standard gym and cardio routines are sabotaging your efforts — leading to more pain and injuries, less energy, and suboptimal overall health.

So many people don’t realize that their training method is actually hindering their progress.

It’s making you more tired, less able to move, and is not setting you up for long-term health. Your standard gym program is not the most effective way to train if you want to feel better, look better, increase your strength, and move well for a long time.

To quickly illustrate this further, I’ll give you an example:

How often do humans need to pick 500lbs off the floor?

Yet how often do people train to be able to do this?

People will spend their whole lives trying to add a few more pounds to their deadlift.

But, how often do we as humans need to rotate, jump, lift something over our heads, or pick something moderately heavy off the floor 20 times (e.g. when you’re moving into a new house). Yet we hardly ever train for this sort of movement.

“If the aim of your training is to feel and perform better, why would you pick just one narrow aspect of your performance and focus purely on that? A person might dedicate years of training to being able to lift a few kilograms more in a particular movement pattern, despite being extremely weak in others. This makes sense if you’re a professional competitive weightlifter. But if you’re simply training for self-betterment, it isn’t the best strategy. There comes a point of diminishing returns: 5 kg more won’t benefit you all that much outside of the gym. Especially when there are so many other aspects of fitness you may have overlooked.” — Adam Sinicki

Being healthy is about so much more than lifting weights, going for a run, and trying to build a bodybuilder-style body. Lifting weights often leads to or exacerbates muscular imbalances. These programs largely focus on the mirror muscles — the muscles you can see in the mirror — and neglect the whole posterior chain (the back of the body that you can’t see).

As humans in modern-day society, we experience a lot of muscular imbalances due to the huge amounts of sitting we do, as well as other repetitive movements such as typing and looking down at our phone or laptop. Our modern lifestyles are working against us.

Furthermore, doing isolation exercises (things like bicep curls) teaches your muscles to move in isolation — which is definitely not how humans were designed to move, and not how we move in real life. We need to learn how to use our muscles in unison.

If you truly want to improve your physical fitness and health, you should instead follow a plan that will help you build muscle, increase your strength, improve your cardiovascular health, and optimize your body composition, all while increasing your energy levels and leaving you feeling better and healthier in your body.

You want to build a body and a lifestyle that leaves you feeling energized and pain-free when you wake up in the morning.

You need to be able to lift heavy things, rotate, stand on one leg, put your arms over your head, move intensely for short periods of time, and be able to move your joints through their full range of motion.

The Solution

I’m here to argue that training like an athlete is the best approach to training.

You don’t need to be an athlete (i.e., competing in some form of sport) to reap the benefits of this method of training. Training like an athlete is going to leave you looking better, feeling better, and being a whole lot more functional into old age.

Training like an athlete will address every single aspect of your health and will effectively improve how you look and feel, and your health in general.

You should be aiming to train in a way that leaves you feeling better than before you started, with optimal energy all day long, and no aches and pains.

For years I trained with the standard bodybuilder style routine — lifting weights 4–5 times a week, and maybe doing the occasional HIIT session.

When I shifted my approach to training to be a better athlete, even though my muscle and strength-building specific work decreased, I actually gained a lot of strength and physically look the best that I ever have.

Your goals will come if you follow the process.

Your exercise program should prioritize:

• Improving stability, imbalances
• Targeting a full range of motion
• Real-world movement patterns
• Building strength holistically
• Injury prevention

Here’s your blueprint:

The Program

Muscle

Do 3 resistance training sessions per week, in the range of 8–12 reps.

Strength

After 6–8 weeks of hypertrophy training, keep up with your 3 sessions per week but increase the weight used and decrease your sets to 3–6 reps per exercise.

Mobility

Bookend your day with mobility work — 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes before bed.

Do a longer session on your active recovery days.

Here is a routine you can use:

Explosiveness

1–2 times per week, include some sprinting, medicine ball throws/slams, and/or plyometric work such as box jumps in your routine.

Power

Once per week, reduce the weight you’re using for your resistance training and do sets of 3 as quickly and explosively as you can. This works best with your big, compound movements such as squats, deadlifts, bench press, and overhead press.

Anaerobic

This is the amount of work your muscles can withstand while keeping a high power output.

We improve this with:

2–3 Tabata sets a week

A Tabata set is 8 rounds of 20 seconds as hard as possible, followed by 10 seconds of rest, for a total of 4 minutes.

There are myriad ways to do this, but some good examples are bike, run, row, kettlebell swings, jumping rope, battle ropes. Anything that allows you to go all out for 20 seconds. You want to be exhausted after each round.

Aerobic

Protocol 1:

150–180 minutes per week of zone 2 cardio (60–70% of your maximum heart rate).

Or, simply aim for any steady-state exercise that gets you to a point where you’re breathing heavily but can still hold a conversation.

Protocol 2:

We also want to target your VO2 max — the maximum oxygen consumption of your body. This reflects how long you can sustain activity.

And we do this with:

Five 4-minute intense intervals once every two weeks (2x a month). Go hard for 4 minutes, rest for 4 minutes, and repeat 5 times.

Body composition

To optimize your body composition, you need to:

1. Nail your nutrition

2. Get adequate sleep

3. Manage stress

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