How many months of progress do your photos represent? What are your stats for each photo?
5 months and 1 week. At week 0 I weighed 196 pounds and 25% body fat, and at week 21 I was 158 pounds and 10.8% body fat. I weighed every weekend using the same BIA scales in my gym.
I made sure I was silent and empty. I also used leather calipers to get a “second opinion” on my body fat. The caliper gave me a reading that was 2% lower than the BIA scales and stayed consistent at that throughout the entire cut.
What happened so far in the program?
Cut for 5 months and a week. The plan was 6 months (just a rough number I picked) but by week 21 I had lost 38 pounds and had reduced my body fat by 14%. The scales were telling me 10%, 9%, and even 8% body fat around this time which is amazing. I know the scales aren’t 100% accurate, but I can be sure they were pretty close.
I’m also starting to feel a little tired from dieting, so for the past 3 weeks I’ve taken a break and eaten a steady calorie. During the process, my strength (relatively) increased, my veins grew and popped, and my abdominals, chest, shoulders, and arms muscles grew.
I remember a really happy moment when I realized I could see my anterior ceratopsian muscles for the first time, working through my oblique abdominal muscles. This was a pure joy because they are my favorite muscles and I had a doubt I would never get them.
My strength keeps going up every week. I settled for a 187-pound bench press, 110-pound deadlift and a 77-pound deadlift, but I was able to tackle most of this by unloading as Mike suggests in the book.
The only thing that didn’t budge too much was the overhead pressure, but this was due to a small shoulder issue I had from cycling. Here are my starting and current numbers for the Big Five exercises (I count chin raises as one of these):
Seat 132 lbs x5 – 220 lbs x5
Deadlift 176 lbs x 4 – 374 lbs x 5
Head Press 66lbs x 5 – 121 x 4
squat 176 lbs x 4 – 276 lbs x 5 (I was squatting 320 lbs but didn’t get deep. I dropped the weight to fix that)
Chin BWx4 – 55 lbs x 4
What is the exercise separate from the book you used?
I use split for 5 days and get some cardio on my rest days. Luckily, I absolutely love working out, so it’s not hard for me to get up early and do it while everyone else is in bed.
What roughly prevented you from buying the book or starting the program, if any?
Nothing is really stopping me from reading the book. My brother had much more experience than me and I was hungry for answers. Even if he says read Bigger smaller and stronger Then I read well Bigger smaller and stronger .
I guess I’d say it’s a bit comprehensive. If you cancel out all the scientific studies Mike cites to support the points he makes in the book, you’ll have a much shorter book that’s just as effective as a beginner’s guide.
This may appeal to people who have less patience than me. Although it is still important to know that you can trust what the book recommends. So I enjoyed reading the studies.
What do you like the most about the programme?
Everything was simpler than I thought. I used to train for two hours or more at a time as a martial arts student and thought this would be the same. Little did I know that you can even make an impact in just 45 minutes of training. The best thing about this program is that it does not leave any puzzle unsolved.
When you go to the gym, you know what you’re doing and you know why you’re doing it. There’s a strategy that doesn’t involve torturing yourself with long, boring, sweaty cardio sessions.
Week after week, you watch your strength increase and your love handles decrease, and the numbers on the scale steadily decrease. And in no time you have a tapering waist and the silhouette of someone who really takes care of themselves.
Mike is terribly generous in the book and doesn’t forbid anything. It gives you everything you need to know about beginner-level dieting and training and you’ll really get bigger, leaner and stronger by following it.
I imagine a lot of personal trainers will give you this kind of information for a premium, so that you’ll be forever dependent on them.
How does this program compare to others you have tried?
I practiced quite a bit when I was in university. But I really had no idea what I was doing. I followed some lessons from the internet (mostly isolation exercises) and did the same movements with the same weights every week.
I didn’t make any progress, I didn’t even know what the progress was, and I think this made it easier for me to quit. I know exactly how to track my progress, and most importantly, how to make progress thanks to Bigger smaller and stronger .
In terms of diet, I thought if I were to eat less I would lose fat. And then I thought if I ate more greens I would lose weight. I tried these changes between May and November 2018 and didn’t find much difference until I read the book and started tracking calories and macros.
Then it wasn’t a mystery to dieting anymore, and I knew I was low on calories and getting enough protein to maintain my muscles every day. Something small, Bigger smaller and stronger Help me get lean as hell while eating chocolate almost every day and pizza every weekend. (Obviously, these weren’t the only things I was on XD.)
How has what you achieved in your body changed other areas of your life?
I have a lot of energy and am definitely more confident. It’s not really about what other people think of you. If you look in the mirror and hate what you see, no matter how receptive the people around you are, you won’t be happy.
My physical appearance was causing me distress, and as a result I was suffering from depression. When I started seeing what my body looked like I started to respect myself a little bit more, and I think other people did too.
People started commenting on how good I looked, I even got a lot of people asking me for fitness tips. I realized that all these people get up every morning and look at themselves in the mirror, and they don’t like what they’ve seen, just like me.
A number of my colleagues and friends joined my gym for the event as well. Now I feel like the work I’ve done is inspiring others and I really like that feeling. I want to keep helping others along the way Bigger smaller and stronger He helped me.
Who would you recommend this program to and why?
I’ve actually recommended it to pretty much everyone I’ve had a conversation about fitness with and have successfully recruited a number of people into the program. I can see their progress taking off just as you did mine.
I think people struggle with diet and fitness because they lack information like I used to. Nobody really knows how to follow a healthy diet or progressive training. It’s not that complicated and there are no major unsolved mysteries when it comes to fat loss.
Bigger smaller and stronger It teaches you everything you need to transform your body quickly without torturing yourself with the exercises you hate and food your stomach can’t. These are the two things everyone dreads and that’s why I recommend them Bigger smaller and stronger And the Thinner, smaller and stronger.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
One of the things I’ve noticed now that I’m looking at myself under a microscope is that hunger is something you’ll experience no matter how much food you eat. On days when I ate tons of food and exceeded my calories, I still felt hungry a few hours after those calorie-dense meals.
So I would say that when you do the cutting, you will get hungry and worry that if you don’t eat your body will fail. But it doesn’t have everything you need as long as you’re cutting responsibly. Just know that extra calories won’t quench hunger for long, so just deal with it, have a glass of water.
Have you used any Legion supplements?
Yes I have some peanuts protein bars In the past. They are very tasty and the macros fit perfectly with the “high protein, low fat” recommendation. Bigger smaller and stronger. The ingredient list is definitely a lot less chemical storm than any other protein bar I’ve tried.
And it’s physically big, so you feel like you’ve eaten something afterwards. With other protein bars, one is usually not enough, and the potential for bingeing increases. not a problem with Legion bars. But I live in Ireland so its way too expensive for me to ship all the time.
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