Get your summer body started with a “Functionally Aesthetic” Program

If you’ve tried fad diets and fad workouts but still happen to yoyo in and out of feeling and looking your best, I suggest looking more long term and following some of these simple tips to make the changes real and long lasting: If you start now there is plenty of time to be ready for this summer.

Create a metabolic machine:

Calories are your bodies fuel. So create a machine which churns them over constantly.

The result= you’ll either be able to eat more and not store it as fat because your body will be using it as fuel, or even better, you’ll start using and dropping the stored fat that your body was hiding away for this exact moment.

Which ultimately results in you having less body fat and looking more “toned”.

The how= by building denser muscle fibres.

We aren’t talking about bulking up. We mean creating density within the muscle fibres and carving that lean and toned look. There is

Our muscle mass and density is directly correlated with our metabolism. The more we have, the more calories we utilise on a daily basis. Referring back to the point above, means we either can eat more and stay the same weight, or we can drop back a couple units of stored fat and look a lot thinner.

Being sore might be an outcome, but it’s not the necessarily the goal:

Being sore is often a good indicator that you did some hard yards in the previous days, but by no means should you be using this as your only measure of training. In theory, your muscles feel sore a day or 2 later through a process known as DOMS, which means that you’ve applied enough force production and training volume through a targeted muscle in order to create a metabolic response.

If you’ve created a metabolic response, your muscles will have to repair themselves through utilising stored energy, which will eventually result in leaner muscles and lower fat.

If you combine the correct % of macronutrients whilst hitting your calorie goals, you’ll definitely make sure that your body is growing and repairing with maximum efficiency.

Faster is not always better: You need both

HIIT training is good, but it can’t be your only modality. The best way to achieve the results you want is by using a number of modalities and intensities.

My ultimate best tip is to train weights slowly and allow the muscles to have “time under tension”. Slow weight training is the ultimate way to make sure your body undergoes a stimulus and metabolises due to having to repair all the hard work you’ve done.

Train the powerhouses:

If you’re looking to create the biggest metabolic process in the hope of burning more fat, you need to target the muscle groups which will give you the biggest bang for your buck. I.e. your legs and bum. Trying to target your abs and expecting a result, is like driving a Prius and expecting it to burn more fuel than a truck.

The 2 C’s: Calories and Carbs. They aren’t the enemy: You just have to know when to eat them.

Rather than restricting your body of the elements it needs to survive, start thinking about using them as fuel for the body. After all of that high volume, slow tempo work that we have just done, our body won’t like us very much if we don’t give it something to repair the breakdown of muscle and allow us to become a metabolizing machine.

Restricting your body to minimal calories, forces the body into freak out mode. It will do whatever it can to survive, which usually involves finding other ways of saving energy, with the end result being that you end up with the same “net” calorie expenditure across the length of a week.

Your muscles need to repair in order for them to become metabolic machines. If they don’t get a chance to repair, they actually have the opposite effect and breakdown (catabolism) and will ultimately slow your metabolism down.

The best approach is to make sure that your biggest meals are directed around your large volume workouts so that the nutrients can be transported across the membranes while your body is trying to metabolise them, so they get used for energy and not stored as fat.

If you want to download the PDF version of a perfect 3 day program for beginner-intermediate athletes, follow the button.