Having literally tens of thousands of personal training hours under my belt, I know how to get people leaner, more muscular, stronger, or fitter. This pretty much covers 99% of the population that come to the gym. My point is that I know what works and what doesn’t. The repeated problem that I see with my clients is that they have a different view. Convincing someone to do something they don’t want to do is my continual daily battle, even though I know what works, getting someone to buy into it is more problematic. One of the biggest difficulties I face is that most people don’t know or understand why they are the way they are, or even if they say they do, they aren’t willing to do anything about it. Often, the clients’ thought process is something like ‘I want to be thinner and more muscular so I’ll, eat less, remove carbs, and go to the gym, this will work right?’
Unfortunately, it’s not always as easy as that. Fat loss is the most basic of notions to grasp, in that, you must create a calorie deficit by reducing your intake or increasing your output. So why doesn’t it work for you? You tried that and you dropped a few Lb’s, then nothing. Your problem is you’re not seeing the bigger picture, your body doesn’t work as it should, and therefore it won’t allow you to change.
Forget the body for a minute and think of yourself like a car. A ripped up, shredded muscle model is the equivalent to a fully race ready Ferrari. It looks amazing, the engine is powerful, and the handling and brakes are out of this world. In short, everything about this car is optimised and works beautifully. Our Ferrari needs, the best fuels, constant attention, and carful maintenance.
Now consider the lower end of the spectrum, the average body is like a 20-year-old rusty ford Mondeo with 149,000 miles on the clock. It has a few leaks, a Smokey exhaust, poor performance, terrible handling, and bad fuel economy. It once was a reasonable car but it has been neglected and left to deteriorate. It never was a sports car, but it was good for what it was. Hopefully you’re starting to get the gist.
You can’t enter your car into a race and expect it to look or perform like the Ferrari. The car needs to be fixed and improved for it to perform. The first thing is sort the engine out. When your engine is running well it gets better fuel usage and performance. This equates to learning to eat more quality foods, improve your blood sugar management, increase metabolism, and improve fitness levels. This is the first stage to getting your body back on track. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see a visible change but you should feel better. The next stage is to fix the suspension and brakes. This means we work or your flexibility and range of movement, if you can’t move properly you can’t push your body to work harder. As your range improves your performance will improve as your body is no longer fighting back against trying to move the way it should. Then we look at modification. Let’s make the engine bigger and more powerful. That means, with our now functioning body we can increase muscle mass. Increasing muscle mass needs more fuel and more attention to timings of meals and consistency in training. It needs a higher volume of work and intensity. With a bigger more powerful engine you need to upgrade your suspension to handle the new loads. This equates to needing to work harder with correct technique and range of movement. You’ll now see definite physical changes and aesthetic improvements. Your body is more highly tuned which means it needs better rest and maintenance but can be pushed harder. Finally, we can fix the bodywork and give it a new paint job. This means you’re now ready to lower your body fat percentage, so not only do you and perform brilliantly, you’ll look the part too, you have reached your goal. The body work was the final stage as it couldn’t be done until the car was running better. This is simply achieved by increasing your workload and gradually decreasing your food intake. The difference is that this time the process works.
The point of this analogy is to help you understand that there is much more going on behind the scenes that needs dealing with before you can make your body look better. It will never look good as it should if it’s not running well, you’ll never drop fat effectively if you ignore the problems that caused fat gain in the first place. You cannot force or trick your body into being thinner long term, it will inherently regain any fat lost and then add some more for good measure.
If you’d like some help with your health goals contact me via the website or Ali@fatalsgym.co.uk
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