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Am I lifting hard enough or should I hit it some mo’?
‘Cuz I was benching 255 and I’m still not sore…
– Jay-Z (probably)
If you wish, you can grab the N.W.A. Newsletter Playlist on Spotify here, all of the songs that have been featured in the newsletter are on the playlist.
***If you’re the 1st person to hit reply and tell me (correctly) what song I’m parodying above, you’ll win a free Anyman Fitness t-shirt on the house!
Happy Friday, Coach J here from Anyman Fitness – and welcome to the latest edition of The N.W.A. Newsletter.
Each Friday’s N.W.A. Newsletter will have 3 parts:
- A Nutritional Tip to help make your diet healthier and easier to stick to.
- A Workout Tip to help make your training sessions more effective and fun.
- An Attitude/Mindset tip to help you strengthen your greatest asset – your mental toughness.
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I will also give you my single favorite piece of social media content from AF over the past week and link to it on either Instagram or Twitter.
Without any further ado… let’s get started, shall we?
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N.W.A. Nutrition Tip Of The Week
Automating your fat loss is the easiest way to get lean and stay lean.
Nearly everyone I know who has lost the weight and kept it off long term eats in a similar fashion throughout the course of the year.
The only thing that changes is the portion sizes, or the amount of snacking you do.
In the last 2 months, I’ve gotten summer ready – here’s my progress during those 8 weeks:
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Whenever I post my fat loss progress pictures online, I get questions.
People ask me “what did you do to get those results”?
They think I had to drastically slash calories, use fasting, go Keto, or even worse – turn to some fat loss supplement.
The truth of the matter is, I don’t do anything differently than I normally do.
I just eliminate snacking and the “extras” that come along with my meals.
Let me explain…
My breakfasts and lunches are standard.
On the weekdays, I have a protein shake for breakfast, and a piece of meat (chicken thighs, strip steak, etc) and some berries (blueberries or strawberries) for lunch.
Our dinners vary, but we eat roughly the same menu each week.
One night is Mexican night, one night is spaghetti, one night is burgers and fries, one night is chili dog night (seriously), etc.
On the weekends, I skip breakfast to save a bit of extra room – we usually dine out on Saturday and Sunday evenings, so I need a bit more of a buffer.
Lunch on the weekends is the same as on the weekdays – a piece of meat and some berries, usually.
Using this simple format, here’s what happens:
- If I eat exactly this, with no snacks or “extras”, I lose body fat.
- If I eat this, with a few “extras” (sour cream or chips with Mexican, garlic bread with spaghetti night, extra fries on burger night, etc), I maintain my weight.
- If I eat this, with a few “extras” and a snack or two per day, I gain weight slowly.
So, when it’s time to get “summer ready”, I just eliminate extra snacks, alcohol, and I stick to my dinners without any extras.
And boom, I lose the body fat easily, without any hunger, and without needing to change my diet in any significant way.
This concept is called “uniform eating”, and it’s extremely effective.
It’s also one of the lessons we teach all of our clients.
Trying to come up with a brand new menu every single week is tiring and exhausting.
Systemize things.
Aim for foods that are tasty, healthy, and repeatable – that you won’t get tired of.
It will take some time to figure out what works for you, but once you do, it makes EVERYTHING easier, and fat loss is a breeze.
N.W.A. Workout Tip Of The Week
The fastest way to “gain 10 pounds of muscle” is to lose 10 pounds of body fat.
While that might not make literal sense, it makes perfect sense if you look closely at what happens to your physique visually when you finally get lean.
Question – how much weight do you think Nick lost here between the first and the last pictures?
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To me, it appears Nick gained a substantial amount of muscle.
His shoulders are more robust.
His biceps are fuller.
His chest is showing striations and looks thicker and fuller.
It doesn’t look like there’s a huge amount of difference weight wise – it actually appears like he may weigh more in the picture on the right.
Would you agree?
Believe it or not, Nick lost THIRTY pounds between Picture 1 and Picture 4.
30 pounds!
He also lost 5 inches off his waist.
In the picture on the left, Nick weighed 185.
In the picture on the right, Nick weighs 155.
And yet he appears way more muscular, even though he’s 30 pounds lighter.
Did Nick gain muscle during this transformation?
He most certainly did.
But in reality, he was in a calorie deficit the entire time, so the muscle he gained was modest – a few pounds at the most.
And yet it appears that he gained a bunch, simply because he got lean enough for the muscle to shine through.
This is a universal concept in fitness.
Take a look at my recent progress picture again (I promise, I’m not peacocking here…)
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I lost 6-7 pounds between these 2 pictures.
And I’m not a beginner to strength training, so I’m positive I didn’t gain any muscle at all.
But it sure looks like I did, right?
If you want to see your gains, and the muscle you’ve built, you need to get lean.
That’s under 15% body fat for men and 20% body fat for women.
You’ll never be able to see your hard work if it’s stuck under a layer of body fat.
Think of your muscle like small rocks.
If you put a huge comforter over them, you’ll never see them.
BUT, if you lose body fat and the “comforter” becomes a “thin bed sheet”… you’ll see them just fine.
N.W.A. Mindset Tip Of The Week
If you’re not taking weekly body measurements, you have no idea what’s happening to your body.
This is especially true if you’re lifting weights…
This is a Progress Tracker – this is the documentation we use with our 1:1 clients to gauge their progress:
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This is a 1:1 client of mine – we’ll call him *Bryan*.
Bryan didn’t lose any weight in the first 2 weeks of his 1:1 program.
He was a bit frustrated by his lack of weight loss progress, and told me so.
But when we looked at the data… what did it tell us?
I want you to look closely at a few data points – the upper waist and wast measurement, as well as the chest and quad measurement.
Do you see how the waist is being whittled away quickly?
Bryan has lost 3.6 centimeters off of his belly button mark – that’s about 1.5 inches.
What about his chest and quads?
Do you see how both of those data points are INCREASING, even while Bryan’s waist is shrinking?
This is actually what we WANT to see.
Not only is Bryan’s waistline getting smaller, which indicates fat loss, but his chest and quads are getting bigger, which indicates muscle gain.
This is the “Holy Grail” of fitness – when this is happening, we smile bigly, because it means everything is working beautifully.
IF I had 2 choices for a client:
- Lose 20 pounds of “weight”, 10 pounds of muscle and 10 pounds of fat
- Lose only 10 pounds of weight, but have it be pure muscle
I would choose #2 every single time, without fail.
Muscle is “hard earned” – you never want to sacrifice muscle just to see a smaller number on the scale.
This goes for women as well as men (even moreso, frankly)…
I assured Bryan he WAS losing fat, it was just being masked because he was building some modest muscle at the start of his new program.
I also told him to be patient – usually muscle gain “pops” at the start of a program, and it would likely calm down a bit and he would see more rapid scale weight losses.
Bryan relaxed his mindset, realized I was correct, and had faith he was crushing it (which he was!).
Everyone says “the scale isn’t a good tool for progress, take body measurements” but for some reason, very few people do.
It’s far and away to truly see what’s happening to you, so I suggest you begin pronto.
Oh, and by the way, Bryan lost 6 pounds on the scale in the 3 weeks after we had this chat.
And he’s much more relaxed now… 🙂
One Favorite Social Media Post Of The Week:
Monday: -500 deficit
Tuesday: -500 deficit
Wednesday: -500 deficit
Thursday: -500 deficit
Friday: +500 surplus
Saturday: +750 surplus
Sunday: +750 surplus
“Dieting doesn’t work for me!”
Don’t let this happen to you.
Many such cases…
I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Anyman Fitness N.W.A. Newsletter.
I’ll be back next week.
Hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Best,
Coach J
Anyman Fitness
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It blows my mind the way Jay-Z never wrote anything down when he was recording tracks. That kind of talent is just mind-boggling. (NSFW – language)