How Did She Do It?

How did she do what you ask? I'm referring to a client of mine who over an eight week period dropped her body fat percentage by just under five percent. That five percent was about nine pounds of body fat gone over that eight week period. Anytime you're looking at a loss of one pound of body fat per week you're looking at some pretty remarkable results.

I'll be the first to say that her remarkable results were not achieved by any special type of diet, extreme workout program or spending an extra 6-8 hours in the gym each week. What she did was actually pretty simple. But she applied this simplicity on a consistent basis. And every time she was faced with a situation that may have comprised her progress she asked herself, "What is more important?"

So what was it that she did exactly? Just a few tweaks to her training and nutrition:

• Adding an extra hour of training each week. She went from training around 2-3 hours per week to 3-4 hours of training each week. That extra hour was an hour of strength training, not slow steady state cardio.
• Spending more time foam rolling and stretching to enhance recovery and deal with the increased training volume. You can't train consistently if you are consistently sore or injured.
• Sticking to the basics as far as exercise selection: split squats, inverted rows, DB incline presses, push ups, half kneeling cable chops and lifts, etc. No circus act exercises. No wacky Bosu ball madness. Exercises that are hard. Exercises that give you the biggest bang for your buck. Trying to hit the basic movement patterns every workout: some pushing, some pulling, a hip dominant exercise, a quad dominant exercise and some core stability work.
• Stopped worrying about calories and started worrying about foods. Calories will take care of themselves when the focus is on nutrient dense foods. Plus calorie counting is an inexact science unless you are weighing every single food item. Or unless you're eating everything out of a box or a bag that has a nutritional label.
• Increased protein intake with the goal of getting her around 100 grams of protein a day. Prior to that she was around 50-75 grams of protein per day which was not nearly enough. To get her up to this 100 gram level I emphasized the importance of including some source of protein whenever it came time to eat. My next goal with her is to get that protein intake even up a little bit more.
• Cut back on carbohydrate intake which kind of goes hand in hand with increased protein intake. In a lot of cases increasing protein intake displaces carbohydrate intake. The carbs that were part of her nutritional intake were consumed at breakfast or when they came during the day the majority of them came from fruits and vegetables. Carb intake from grains was reduced dramatically. When it comes to dropping body fat carbs need to be dropped.
• And here is the the one a lot of people are not willing to do: cut back on the alcohol which was mostly red wine. Less red wine meant less calorie containing beverages which meant less calories taken in overall. More than anything, cutting back on the alcohol showed me what was important to her. She wasn't done in by any social pressure that could have sabotaged her progress.

The changes to her training and nutrition were the easy part. The adherence to each change was the hard part. The greater the adherence, the greater the change which is what we ended up seeing. The funny thing is that now that this transformation challenge has ended she has a desire to keep up with it. What initially started out as a challenge has turned into a new lifestyle.