Fat loss training plan

There is an important distinction between weight loss and fat loss.

While scale weight is one important measure of progress, it can only tell us how much we have lost, not where we have lost this weight from.

Weight loss means losing not just fat, but also water, glycogen and muscle tissue too – whereas fat loss is just that losing fat (while retaining all-important lean muscle tissue.)

When losing weight, if we don’t ensure we are resistance training (which signals to the body to preserve muscle tissue) and eating adequate protein, then we risk losing muscle.

So why do we want to focus purely on fat loss and preserving muscle tissue?

The answer lies in what is referred to as ‘lean body mass’, which is everything in your body that is not fat (muscle, organs, connective tissues, bones, etc).

There are several important reasons why we want to retain as much lean body mass as possible, especially during a diet:

• Fewer metabolic adaptations as a result of dieting, e.g., reduced number of calories burned at rest.
• Improved insulin sensitivity (which can positively impact disease states such as type II diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome, etc).
• Reduced systemic inflammation.
• Improved body aesthetic – think “toned” rather than “skinny fat”.
• Improved strength and proprioception, reducing the risk of conditions such as sarcopenia and osteoporosis in later life.

When we focus on fat loss, rather than pure weight loss, we use tools to maintain and increase lean body mass, while decreasing body fat levels.

You don’t need to cut out whole food groups – fat loss ultimately comes down to energy balance. So if you create a consistent energy deficit, you will lose fat.

I don’t ask clients to completely cut out major food groups (unless this has been recommended by your doctor or other medical professional).

You don’t need an all-or-nothing mindset to achieve a great transformation.

However, the majority of our clients will often experience huge benefits from taking a lower-carb approach initially, for a short period. Some of the benefits include:

• Easy to adhere to and remember.
• Improves insulin sensitivity.
• Reduces inflammation.
• Removes calorie-dense ‘junk’ foods from the diet.
• Sets up healthy habits for your transformation and beyond.

Once this initial phase is complete, we reintroduce carbohydrates intelligently to maximise training performance and dietary enjoyment.

Ultimately, however, we recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the best diet plan is one that you can stick to most of the time.

So, I'll work with you, your preferences, commitments and needs to establish a plan that works for your goal and fits seamlessly into your lifestyle.

Creating an effective nutrition plan for clients means finding a dietary approach that they enjoy, that they can stick to and that helps support their fat loss goals while enabling them to perform their best in the gym.

But the key to any successful diet comes down to adherence – so it is important to keep you feeling as full, satiated and energised as possible throughout the day.

Our nutrition principles focus on high-volume, nutrient-dense foods, such as high-quality proteins, healthy fats, and a rainbow of fruit and vegetables. Not only does this bring a whole host of health and performance benefits, but it will also leave you feeling ready to take on whatever new challenges life holds!

Yes, there may be times when hunger can creep in. But we help you to build healthy habits into your lifestyle to mitigate hunger and give you proven strategies to deal with cravings if they arise.

It is important to preface this with the fact that you cannot ‘spot reduce’ body fat.

So, sit-ups will not burn fat on your abs and dips will not burn fat on your arms, specifically.

Sadly, you cannot choose where you lose fat from, rather it is lost incrementally from across your body.

Some areas may be more ‘stubborn’ than others.

For the vast majority of people, whether it’s the lower abs, ‘love handles’, or thighs that are stubborn, it is simply a case of extending the fat loss process and the period you are maintaining a calorie deficit.

Depending on your hormonal profile and genetics, you will mobilise fat from different sites on your body at varying rates. However, this fat will mobilise if you create the right conditions to do so through sustained exercise and diet protocols.

In some people, hormonal imbalances may cause body fat distribution to shift. For example, women post-menopause often experience a shift from fat in their lower body to the trunk. Similarly, some men may find themselves developing gynecomastia or ‘man boobs’ in response to elevated oestrogen levels.

The good news is that these changes can be improved significantly or even resolved by reducing inflammation, losing body fat, resistance training and dietary improvements which are central to 'The Physique Protocol' methodology.

Most people fail in their fat loss attempts because they don’t have the right combination of effective goal setting, accountability and flexibility.

These three factors are the cornerstones of what makes our model so effective in delivering results.

We never impose goals on you; we listen to your goals and learn about your lifestyle. Then we work with you to develop a personalised plan that you can feel confident will help you to achieve the results you want.

We keep you accountable to your commitments and help you build strategies into your life that make them easier, not harder to stick to.

We help you plan for times when you need to be flexible, such as meals out, travel, and socialising.

And we work tirelessly with you around the clock, both inside and outside the gym, to not only help you achieve results, but learn the tools and skills to maintain them for life.

What sets 'The Physique Protocol' apart from any other personal training business In Ireland or abroad is that everything we do, both inside and outside of the gym, is laser-focused on giving you tangible results and measurable outcomes.

We don’t just put you through mindless exercise just to make you feel tired and sweaty. Every single movement and exercise in your workout has a specific purpose to help you achieve your specific goal – whether that is losing fat, improving your blood pressure or enhancing your general health.

Our training methodology is focused, controlled and executed to the highest possible standard.

It’s not uncommon for many clients to discover a new-found love for fitness when they see and feel the myriad benefits that weight training and optimal nutrition can elicit.

This completely depends on your starting point and how hard you are willing or able to go. The heavier you are to begin with, the higher your initial weight loss is likely to be, compared to someone starting at a relatively low level of body fat.  

How much fat you lose also depends on the size of the calorie deficit you create, which depends on your lifestyle, preferences and time frame. For instance, if you have a very busy lifestyle that means you can’t perform much additional activity outside of your gym training sessions, there is a limit to how far you can cut calories without sacrificing health.

Therefore, you may need to accept a slower rate of change than someone who has a lot of free time to perform extra activity such as steps. However, based on our extensive data, statistically, the majority of our clients lose at least 10% of their total body weight in their first three months. 

Yes, it’s more than possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, achieving what is often referred to as ‘body recomposition’. 

This change is due to the combination of a calorie deficit to reduce fat stores alongside a training plan that signals to the body to retain muscle.

Because most clients are new to resistance training or have not trained to the same intensity as our programs, many increase their level of muscle mass alongside losing fat. 

It’s an inevitable fact of life that if you want a different outcome when it comes to successful fat loss, you need to change what you put into the equation. This means that, for nearly all clients, some degree of lifestyle change is a necessary element of achieving a transformation. After all, the habits that you have developed thus far have brought you to your current situation.

However, that’s not to say that you need to completely uproot your life either. And beyond simply being impractical, this would not be reasonable or conducive to long-term adherence. The changes that are going to get you in great shape – and keep you there – are going to be ones that work best with your unique circumstances.

That’s why we focus on habit changes rather than prescriptive, rigid plans that only work on paper. While there may be some golden rules that we encourage our clients to follow, we won’t try and force you to follow something you just don’t want to do. From the very outset, we work with you to create your nutrition plan; no egg whites and white fish being forced on you here.

Most of the time I'll ask you to hit a daily step goal. This is because it’s very hard to achieve a consistent calorie deficit necessary for fat loss through diet alone. Remember – it is your energy balance that makes the difference to whether you gain, maintain or lose weight – how active you are consistently throughout your daily life plays a part in this.

After all, the plan that best fits your life is the plan that you can stick to for life.

This depends on your goal, preferences and lifestyle. In most cases, we encourage clients to obtain most of their food intake from high-quality, single-ingredient sources, such as lean meats and sources of protein, lots of green fibrous vegetables and healthy fats, like nuts, avocado or olive oil. 

This is because such foods not only improve multiple health markers, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, and insulin sensitivity, they also enhance satiety, energy levels, hormonal health and nearly every other physiological process.

However, we also appreciate that our clients are not robots and that they have lives. This is why our trainers work with each client as an individual with unique commitments. While some sacrifice may be necessary to achieve your goal, your trainer will work with you to find solutions and strategies that work for you. 

We don’t necessarily prioritise weight training over cardio, but they do play different roles within a transformation.

In order to improve body composition, we nearly always need some level of fat loss and to do that we need to create a calorie deficit. It is very hard to do this through diet alone without being very restrictive, which can only be effective for so long. It’s also very hard to do this through exercise alone and one high-calorie meal can easily offset several hours’ work. That’s why we use a combination of reduced calorie intake and increased general activity levels to increase our deficit.

It’s important to remember that cardio is simply one option in the fat loss toolbox. There’s nothing magic about cardio; it simply increases the number of calories you burn in general (as well as making you better at that form of exercise).

However, it can also place competing demands on the body when it comes to adaptation and recovery from resistance training, which is why we tend to recommend low-impact forms of activity, such as walking, for the most part, and minimal or even no cardio in many cases.

Once we have created the demand for our body to tap into its stored energy, we need to make sure this comes from tissue we don’t want to keep (body fat) rather than tissue we do (muscle). Rather than simply to burn huge numbers of calories, resistance training functions to retain and build lean tissue during times of caloric restriction. This has numerous important implications for physical appearance as well as wellbeing:

• Improved aesthetic – think looking good naked as well as in clothes.
• Improved nutrient partitioning – you make the most out of the foods you eat and reduce the risk of conditions such as type II diabetes.
• Improved strength and reduced risk of age-related sarcopenia and osteoporosis.  Reduced risk of all-cause mortality.
• And the most important one… being able to eat more!

In summary, we create a calorie deficit through increased activity and nutrition changes. The level of this deficit determines whether we lose weight and how fast. We can then encourage the body to tap into body fat by resistance training, eating adequate protein and optimising recovery.