A lot of people make the mistake to join a personal fitness coaching program with the idea that they have to impress their coach.
This means that when they have a good training and diet streak, they do their weekly progress check-ins.
Once they have a bad week or two, they stop reporting on their progress and “wait” with replying to emails until they can show positive results.
As a coach, it’s frustrating to have a client who doesn’t check-in when results are bad because in many cases it’s not the client’s fault.
It could just be that training and diet strategy I designed for you isn’t right for YOU.
There can be many reasons to why a plan isn’t right for you:
- The diet is unrealistic to stick to because you’re going through a busy time in your life so you don’t have the time to prepare meals.
- You feel intolerable cravings for sugar and starches.
- The training is too difficult for you.
- The diet is too low in Calories and you have intolerable levels of hunger, low energy levels and a low sex drive.
- You don’t respond well to the overall training and diet strategy.
Knowing that everyone responds differently to training and diet and that life often get’s in the way, I never judge my clients for “not working hard enough” or “being weak”.
This kind of coaching mentality only works on professional athletes who want to reach goal Y in X amount of time. Not for regular people with full-time jobs, studies and families.
This is why I want you to check in with me every week, regardless of whether the results are good or bad.
When results are good, I can tell you that you’re on the right track.
When results are bad, I can go in and help you get better results.
By making a few tweaks to your training and diet, I can help you come up with a plan that works MUCH better for you.
A good example of this is Francis that I shared on the SKINNY-FAT TRANSFORMATION blog.
He always thought that he had to cut Calories to lose more body-fat, but the opposite was true. He dieted so hard that his metabolism slowed down.
When we increased his food intake, his metabolism increased and he was able to lose body-fat while gaining strength and muscle mass at the same time… and feeling great on a daily basis rather than being hungry, weak and low on energy.
The end result is the photo below:
Francis got amazing results while feeling great throughout the process because we tweaked his plan until it was just right for him.
The tweaks weren’t huge, but they ended up making a BIG difference.
If he tried to grind out results by himself and didn’t track progress or check in with me every Sunday and give me his biofeedback, I wouldn’t be able to help him move in the right direction.
My hands would be tied because I wouldn’t have any good data or information to make good adjustments.
As a coach, I need you to track your biofeedback when it happens because you won’t be able to remember how you felt after a certain meal or training session in 2 or 3 weeks.
As a coaching client, I want you to be mindful of the following issues in the first 3-4 weeks of following the program:
- Digestive problems (especially if they happen after certain meals).
- Any kind of pain after or during workouts.
- Sleep problems and day time fatigue.
- Intolerable levels of hunger on the diet plan.
Here are examples of biofeedback notes I got from clients:
- “I felt hungry before bed so I couldn’t sleep well.”
- “I felt tired and bloated after eating brown rice and turkey breast for lunch.”
- “Chin ups gave me elbow pain.”
- “I felt unbearable cravings for sugar so I ended up binging on gummy bears yesterday.”
The goal is to come up with a plan that makes you feel good while getting your best results because that’s the only way you can stick to the plan long-term.
Why is feeling great long-term so important?
Because you can only stick to a training program and diet plan long-term if it makes you feel good on a daily basis.
If you’re on a diet plan that gives you intolerable levels of hunger on a daily basis, there’s no way you will stick to that diet plan for the next 5 or 10 years – regardless of how much science and success stories there are behind that diet!
We live in a sedentary world of food abundance.
When a diet makes you feel hungry, it’s just a matter of time before you give in to your cravings because our will-power is limited.
As a result, you won’t be able to stick to a diet plan that makes you feel hungry on a daily basis for 5 or even 10 years.
And when you eventually break the diet that got you the results, you lose your results.
Similarly with training, you won’t be able to maintain a training regimen that takes up too much of your free time, constantly leaves you drained and in “recovery mode”.
Sure, you can do it from time to time, but this is not the type of training that you will do year around.
This is why having a coach evaluate your BioFeedback (how you feel on a daily basis) is the key to find a plan that works for you long-term.
To get results you can keep long-term, you need to learn how to get results while working with your body instead of against it.
Usually, it takes around 4 weeks to dial in the plan so that you feel good, but it will take 8-12 weeks for the training and diet to kick in and for you to start seeing visible results.
The first 8-12 weeks on your training and diet plan are spent on:
- Maximising your neural adaptations: I.e. making you better at using your existing muscle mass to get stronger instead of building new muscle mass. It’s important to milk your neurological gains before focusing on growing muscle mass because you won’t build much muscle mass while going through your neural adaptations.
- Speeding up your metabolism so you can eat more food while still burning body-fat. This will make your diet more sustainable.
- Maximising your natural testosterone production so you can build muscle mass at a faster rate and recover faster.
All these things are essential because you are resetting your body after years of bad training, diet and lifestyle habits.
By going through this 8-12 week “reset phase” you set yourself up to make much faster gains over the next 1-2 years.
The end goal is to be able to:
- Lose body-fat without being on a restrictive diet that leads to intolerable levels of hunger, low energy levels and fatigue. This is done by speeding up your metabolism through strength training and proper dieting.
- Build a lot of muscle mass while staying injury free. This is done by building a solid foundation of strength and maximising your natural testosterone production.
You can see those 8-12 weeks as the foundation phase because building a physique is similar to building a house.
If you build a solid foundation, building muscle mass and losing body-fat will both become easier and you will be able to keep your results long-term.
A good example of a realistic transformation time-line is Harshit Godha who took 1 year to get into his best shape:
Harshit’s changes were slow and gradual.
He didn’t see massive changes on a monthly basis or in the first 8-12 weeks on the program.
But he did see slight changes every 3-4 months and eventually ended up making a great change over 1 year.
Therefore, if you’re a client on my Online Transformation Program I’d like you to make a commitment right now to:
- If you have any problems with sticking to the training or diet plan, tell me upfront what is the problem so I can work with you and help you adjust things.
- Let me know if you have any issues with digestion, sleep, pain or hunger so we can dial things in.
- Check in with me every Sunday in the google sheet, filling out all the measurements, bodyweight and strength stats.
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Record videos of all your exercises in the first few weeks of training so I can help you correct technique and intensity.
Be proud but stay hungry!
Oskar Faarkrog, ISSA Certified Trainer
Read my free 50 page guide "The 2 Phases of a Skinny-Fat Transformation"