I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight and share a huge congratulations to the progress of one of my clients, Charlie M. He’s a father, husband, engineer and avid fan/participant of cycling and endurance sports.

As you can see, he had remarkable results! Particularly notable is the fact that Charlie both clearly dropped body fat and saw his muscular development sky rocket during this time. This is largely attributable to both the style of training we did, combined with carefully calculated macronutrient intake, particularly on the protein side of the equation (more on that below).

Charlie has worked with me for many years, but particularly with a focus on increasing his performance in endurance sports, particularly cycling. His focus started to shift toward strength training about a year ago. Add to that, once the pandemic set in during 2020, he found himself a little heavier than he wanted to be. 

Training

Let’s start by discussing the training program, as that’s the fun part:

Charlie wasn’t new to strength training by any stretch of the imagination, but he was new to a hypertrophy (or muscle gaining) style of training along with a healthy dose of powerlifting. In a sense, we really combined the two in what’s sometimes called “power building.” This is notable because we only had two dedicated hard training sessions per week, with Charlie doing one more at his home gym that was merely focused on volume. This equated to Charlie training 3 days per week (sometimes missing a workout, and occasionally getting an additional one in).

His progress here was certainly earned over time. There were many instances where I had a designated number of sets I wanted to achieve with him in a given workout, but he had a difficult time getting to those later sets, as his capacity wasn’t initially all the way there. However, somewhere about 3 months in, he adapted really well to be able to withstand the ideal workload of the hour-long workouts. When this happened, we really saw his muscular development start to change drastically.

He saw a modest amount of linear progress: meaning we were generally able to add a few reps or more weight to the bar each week in any lift. However, like most people, eventually this slowed. I would even characterize his as having slowed on the lower end of average, so that meant we had to start getting creative sooner with our workouts and how we programmed for him. If you’ve found yourself perpetually blocked in the same weight range of a given exercise, you often need to work around the issue. Meaning, if you’re training in high rep ranges, you’ll probably want to kick it in the lower, more intense ranges for a bit. If you only train with a straight bar, you’ll want to use a variety of specialty bars to help give you some different looks at movements that may have gotten stale. This is exactly what we did with Charlie to keep him on the right track.

I attribute his great success to the synergy of both his lifting and diligence in dieting. He was counting his macronutrients, as I provided him with information from Renaissance Periodization, and checked in with him frequently about his compliance and strategies to succeed on a diet like that. 

Diet

I think the most encouraging thing about Charlie and his progress with his diet is that even though he worked VERY hard to take in adequate protein and to really account for all his macronutrients, he wasn’t perfect. I say that because for anyone reading this may have this idea in their head that they need to be absolutely perfect to find themselves making this sort of progress. The main thing I want to stress is that if you are able to take care of your protein intake and truly prioritize that, the rest will be much easier to manage. So that’s where Charlie spent the most focus in cleaning up his diet.

Using RP, we had Charlie carefully assemble his macros. The kicker here is that Charlie is a vegetarian, which inherently presented some problems with his protein intake. As you can see though, it ultimately was still a very workable diet that produced (and continues to produce) results.

Like anything, once he got things going here, he began to find newer and better ways to create new dishes for him and his family. What started with simple guidelines ended up being a big shift in how he evaluated the right foods for himself.

Mindset

What you’re looking at above is the results from April to August 2021, and as I write this a few months later, he not only kept the weight off, but recently decided to continue losing weight and working his way down slowly. This is ultimately the best way to approach this all: treat it like a long term project. Aim to be really diligent for 6-8 weeks and giving your best effort, and then slowly let off the gas to maintain the work you’ve put in. When you feel ready for more, it’s time to start the push again. That’s exactly what Charlie’s been doing and where he is now.

I anticipate continued success for Charlie and am already seeing it. Things move at the speed of life, and there’s always a way to make your own goals fit into the equation. Charlie is proof of this and I couldn’t be more proud.