It was December 2019, and Paul was fed up, tired of carrying excess weight, and constantly being reminded of his tummy roles every time he looked in the mirror. 

Frustrated but motivated, he typed ‘personal training Sheffield‘ into Google and found LEP Fitness. Paul got in touch straight away and booked in for a consultation just before Xmas. 

We agreed that it would be best to start working together in January, after all, who wants to start a training regime during Xmas? 

Paul (like 99% of the UK) gained weight over Xmas and was raring to go when he started in January. 

Fast forward five months, and he’s 40lbs down and in the best shape of his life. In this article, I’m going to share some of our key secrets.

#1 Starting Slow

To begin with, like with most of my clients, I focused on the exercise part. Too many personal trainers make changes quickly i.e., placing their clients on a strict diet, lowering calories, and doing vast amounts of exercise. This gets results (for about two weeks), then the client burns out and becomes miserable and then falls off their diet and ends up back to square one. This yo-yo dieting is what you want to avoid. 

Instead, with Paul, I got him training with me 2x per week and then got him to do 2x gym sessions per week. Alongside his training, I asked him to keep me a food diary, but it wasn’t until week three that I needed to make any changes to his diet. The exercise sessions were enough to see Paul lose nearly half a stone in three weeks.

#2 Weight Training

If you want rapid results, weight loss and want to transform your body shape in the shortest amount of time possible, lift weights. I say it all the time in my fitness blog posts, and I’ll repeat it, “weight training is the most effective way to change your body shape.”

During our sessions, I taught Paul how to execute exercises correctly. I showed Paul how to contract and feel specific muscles. 

Alongside exercise execution, I also introduced Paul to tempo training – this is something not many people know about (only personal trainers and fitness pros). Tempo training is where you control the weight using a specific time per rep. For example, take the bench press, rather than just pressing up and down quickly, instead, you take 4s lowering the weight, and 2s pushing the weight. This type of training is the most effective when it comes to burning calories and building lean muscle. 

In our personal training sessions, I got Paul to do compound lifts, such as:

• Chin Ups
• Wide Pull-Ups
• Bench Press (flat, incline, decline)
• Military Barbell Press
• Squats
• Lunges
• Bent Over Rows

I also created a gym program for him to follow in his spare time. The gym program involved a combination of weights (70%) and cardio (30%).

#3 Nutrition 

Throughout working together, I set Paul a calorie target and asked him to log his food into MyFitnessPal. When you join LEP Fitness you also receive 8 amazing recipe books, with 30 recipes in each book (240 recipes) these books include:

• Breakfasts
• Lunches
• Dinners
• Snacks
• Desserts (yes desserts, no typo) 

There are low carb recipes, smoothies, quick meals, fancier meals (if you like your cooking), vegan options, a keto recipe book, and much more.

Paul loves the recipe books, and they’ve enabled him to eat tasty food and still lose weight, without spending hours in the kitchen.

If you’d like me to send you one free LEP recipe book, please fill out the form below, and I’ll send a recipe book straight to your inbox: 

Back to Pauls’ nutrition…

As a general rule of thumb if you want to lose weight here’s the calorie equation that works 90% of the time:

Your weight in lbs x 10 cals

Say you weigh 200lbs…

200lbs x 10 cals = 2,000 calories per day. 

Once Paul got used to the calorie target (after a few weeks), the weight fell off him, losing, on average 2lbs per week. 

I encouraged Paul to consume over 125g of protein per day, which he achieved most of the time. Protein helps you stay fuller for longer and is harder for your body to break down; therefore, your body burns calories breaking it down. Not bad hey? It will also help to curb cravings and build lean muscle. The more muscle you have, the easier it is to lose fat. 

Challenges:

Like with all body transformations, there were challenges along the way. The biggest one was going into Lockdown. That said, we moved Pauls one to one personal training to virtual personal training sessions – doing Zoom calls… 

Summary:

Of course, the above is just a snapshot into Paul’s body transformation, but I wanted to give you some of the key areas that have enabled him to successfully lose nearly three stone in 20 weeks. 

If you’d like to be the next LEP Fitness success story, please get in touch today to reserve your place. 

Thanks for reading,

Nick