It’s Boring, But It Builds An Athletic Physique

0:00 The strongest, fittest, most athletic women I know aren't necessarily the ones doing the most. They aren't the ones doing the most sessions per week, choosing the most complicated exercises, or spending more than 2 hours in the gym at a time. And to be honest, I noticed this in my own fitness journey, too. The things that actually transformed my physique and got me to where I am now weren't extreme, nor were they exciting. They were pretty boring on paper, but they worked better than anything else.

0:25 And today, I'm going to share them with you. Four boring things to implement in your training to actually start seeing real, tangible results. And trust me when I say these four things will get you way further than any 30-day ab challenge or HIIT workout ever did. When I first started going to the gym, I had no idea what a good workout looked like. What I had was a note on my phone with a big, long list of exercises that I had screenshotted off Instagram. And every time I went into the gym, I would just pick five or six of those exercises that I fancied doing that day. And it felt productive. I was going to the gym consistently. I was training hard. I was sweating. I was sore the next day. I was ticking all of the boxes that I thought needed to be ticked. But I did that for nearly 2 years, and my body never changed because I was never doing the same thing twice. I was always just chasing the next best exercise. Whatever exercise went viral that week is the exercise that I would do. So, I never did anything for long enough to actually get good at anything. And the fix wasn't a better list of exercises. It was realizing that I didn't need a list at all. How your body moves can be split into seven patterns. If you've watched my other videos, you will already know this, but if you're new here, let me fill you in. The seven movement patterns are squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, rotate, and carry. Almost every meaningful exercise in the gym is a version of one of those seven. A leg press is a squat pattern. A deadlift is a hinge. A row is a pull. And ultimately, making sure that you're covering these seven patterns matters more than the actual exercises that you pick. If you just have a list of different exercises to target different muscles, you will leave gaps in your training and you probably won't even notice it. Muscles with obvious exercise names get trained constantly and the movements that actually build an athletic body, the hinging, the carrying, the resisting rotation, fall off your program entirely. If you program by movement pattern, you physically can't leave a gap. There are seven boxes and they're either ticked or they're not. And the best part about this is that there will always be an exercise for where you're at in your journey right now. Whether you're a complete beginner or you've been training for over a decade like me. For the squat pattern, if you're completely new to training, you might start with a goblet squat, then move on to a leg press, then a barbell back squat and then eventually a Zottman squat. I'm not going to go through every pattern because we would be here for a while, but I'll put some examples on screen for you to screenshot. Now, the movement patterns will never change because the way your body moves doesn't change.

2:46 You'll just pick more advanced variations within each pattern as you progress and get stronger. And before someone comments it, no, the seven patterns don't cover literally every exercise ever in the gym. A calf raise doesn't neatly fit into a movement pattern and nor does a cable abduction, but those are isolated accessory movements, so they should be used in addition to the seven patterns, not instead. And you could build your whole program without them. You could pick accessory exercises that do neatly fit into the seven patterns and there wouldn't be any gaps in your training.

3:16 Whereas if you didn't hit all seven patterns and just did a load of random exercises, there would be gaps. Now, if you want the total body strength that comes with hitting all seven movement patterns, but you also want to bias a particular muscle, you would build the base of your program on the seven movement patterns and then you would add isolated accessories. If you want to bias your shoulders, you might do lateral raises. If you want to bias your glutes, you might add kickbacks or cable abductions. And if you want bigger arms, you might add curls or dips. But the order here is key. The seven movement patterns should always come first before the isolated accessories because if your body is built on the seven movement patterns and then you add glute work on top, you get an athletic body with a glute bias. Whereas, if your program is pretty much exclusively glute isolation work, you'll get glutes with nothing to attach them to. And this is why so many women train hard for so long and still don't look the way that they expected to. So, in practice, this is what a week could look like. And it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, whatever program you land on, you need to repeat that for weeks, ideally months. Okay, so two to four sessions per week, full body, 45 to 60 minutes.

4:22 One big lower movement, one big upper movement. Then your accessories, which can either be more pattern work or isolated movements for the areas that you want to bias. And then finish with a carry, rotation, or both. Spread those sessions throughout the week however your life allows. And that's the other thing about training this way, it actually survives real life. Because you will miss sessions, you'll get ill, you'll get busy, you'll have holidays. When you're following a rigid list or a body part split where you're doing glutes one day and chest the next, a missed session can feel like a failure, which is usually the reason a lot of people end up quitting. When you're following the patterns, you can just look at the week and go, "Right, I haven't hinged and I haven't pulled this week, so that's what I'm going to do in my next session." And then the week is completely fine. So, that's your framework sorted. No random exercises and no throwing stuff at the wall and just hoping that something sticks. But you could have the perfect framework on paper and still get nowhere because that isn't the only thing that people get wrong. Let me describe something to you and you can tell me if it sounds familiar. It's Sunday, you get out of the shower and you stand in front of the mirror. You turn to the side, suck in a bit, have a little look, and decide whether the last few weeks have been worth it. I did that for years, every single week, and I want to be really clear, I'm not telling you to just not care about how you look. I started going to the gym at 16 because I wanted to change my body. Most of us start there and there's nothing wrong with that. But when every decision that you make around your training is aimed at achieving a certain look. You end up choosing exercises based on what burns the most and what makes you the most sore. The problem is that burn and soreness are not the things that get you your progress. And also, I'm just a big believer in the fact that if you're doing something from a negative place, i.e. hating your body and solely exercising just to change that, it's going to be a lot harder to be consistent than if you're doing it from a more positive place. And that's where the next boring thing comes in. It's flipping your perspective on your intention behind your training. Stop training solely for what your body looks like and start training for what your body can do. It's not easy at first and I know that you can't just switch off those physique goals, but the more that you focus on your performance, the easier all of this will be. And then I promise you, the shape will show up as a byproduct anyway. Now, when I say athletic training or training for performance, I know that sounds scary, but it's not. It does not mean that you have to be an athlete. You don't need to be training until you're sick and you definitely don't need to be training to compete in an event. It just means that you are training for what your body can do. Total body strength, coordination, mobility, stability, balance, how well your whole body works together rather than just how much a muscle can sting on a Tuesday. And the reason that this changes everything is the mirror is the slowest feedback loop that you've got.

7:08 Body composition changes slowly and you, the person that sees yourself in the mirror every single day, will always be the last one to notice it. So, when you give a program eight weeks, look in the mirror and see the exact same person staring back at you, you conclude that it isn't working. When actually, it was working. You just used the least reliable measure of progress. Now, capability and training for performance doesn't do that. It gives you feedback every single week that you simply can't ignore. Your first unassisted pull-up, deadlifting your own body weight, squatting your own body weight, full range push-ups from your toes, Carrying half your bodyweight for 40 m without putting it down. Every one of those things is a line that you cross on a certain day. You can't argue with it.

7:50 You can't talk yourself out of it, and no amount of bad lighting can take it away from you. And and this is where the physique comes in as a byproduct, you physically can't go from not being able to hold your own bodyweight to doing unassisted pull-ups without your back changing shape. So, like I said, the physique still arrives, it just arrives as a side effect from something that you were already enjoying. Not something you were doing as a chore to fix how you look. You start training because you want to. You want to see how capable you really are, which means that you stay motivated, which means you stay consistent, which is the only reason anyone has ever got results from anything. And that's exactly why I build my training programs the way I do.

8:29 They're about learning to enjoy the process of training and then getting the aesthetic results as a byproduct instead of solely focusing on aesthetics, hating the process, and then never truly becoming consistent. I mean, there's a reason that so many of you have emailed me specifically to tell you that these programs are the thing that got you your love for the gym back. But anyway, let's keep going because there are a couple more boring things that you need to be doing in your training. The next one is the one I'd bet most people are doing wrong right now, and it's the difference between people who look like they train and people who don't. If I stood behind you during your last set on any exercise, I could probably tell you exactly what's going to happen. You'll get to your last few reps, it'll start to feel properly hard, your breathing will change, and then you'll put the weights down. If that's what you do, you're not training hard enough. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you that you're intentionally putting in less effort than you should be. I did this for years. Most of us learned to train in a culture of light weights and high reps, so we've never actually been taught what a hard set should look like.

9:27 So, when you finish your set, your muscles feel warm, and it feels like you've put a good amount of effort in, you think you're training hard enough. In reality, you're probably finishing most sets with another six or seven reps in you until you reach true failure. So, how do you figure out how hard you should be training? The way we measure this properly is called reps in reserve, which is a fancy way of saying how many more reps could you have done if you were going to complete failure. For most of your working sets, you want to be finishing with anywhere between one and three reps left in the tank. But, you can't accurately estimate reps in reserve if you've never truly gone to failure. So, you need a reference point and there is only one way to get one.

10:05 Take a single set to genuine failure. Now, you want to pick something safe where the rest of your body is supported and nothing could land on you. And ideally, if you can, have someone there to help you as well. A leg press is a perfect example. Of course, make sure you warm up properly before this, but then take one set to genuine failure where you could not do another rep even if you wanted to. It's horrible, but you only have to do it once. From that day on, every set you do, you can ask yourself the question, "How far was I from that feeling?" Remember, you want to be one to three reps away from that.

10:37 Now, when you know you're training hard enough, you also need to make sure that you're training harder over time. Because a body that isn't being asked for more has no reason to change. I'm sure you've heard people saying that you need to be progressively overloading, but I know that can feel confusing. So, I'm going to give you two methods that you can choose between depending on how you train. If you're writing your own sessions, use double progression. This is where you pick a rep range, usually between six and 12, and then pick a weight where you can hit six reps with two left in the tank. Then every week you try to add a rep. So, six becomes seven, seven becomes eight, and so on.

11:10 Then, when you're hitting 12 reps on all of your sets with a couple of reps left in the tank, that's when you'll increase the weight and drop back down to six reps. You'll then repeat that process of adding a rep every week until you get to 12, add the weight, and drop the reps, and repeat. I know dropping the reps back down makes it sound like you're going backwards, but you're actually going forwards because you're lifting heavier than you were four weeks ago.

11:31 Now, if you're following a program where the sets and reps are done for you, like in my programs, this is what you're going to do. Let's say you've got three sets of eight programmed and you can do 40 kilos with two reps left in the tank. Week one, do all three sets at 40 kilos. Week two, do sets one and two at 40 kilos and then increase your final set to 42.5. Week three, do set one at 40 kilos, set two at 42.5, and set three at 42.5. And then week four, do all three sets at 42.5 kilos. So, your reps stay the same, but over the weeks you're gradually increasing the weight. Now, this is not going to be perfectly linear, so I don't want you to panic when it isn't. This is just a general guide. If you're doing the same number of reps, how you can slowly increase your weights without it being too much.

12:16 Sometimes though, you'll be able to increase your weights way more substantially or way faster. Other times, you might be stuck on the same weight for a few weeks and that is fine, especially on your bigger lifts or if you've been training for a long time. The point isn't necessarily that the weight goes up every single week. It's that you are actively training hard enough and you know what you're trying to beat. Now, for the fourth boring thing that you need to be doing to get an athletic physique, and if this one's off, everything else we've spoken about in the video so far is kind of redundant. And it is your nutrition. And I know it's annoying to hear. I know you know this, but it's really, really important. And you've probably already tried the extreme approach to nutrition.

12:58 I feel like most of us have. The plain chicken and broccoli, the cutting out carbs completely, the eating like a bird Monday to Thursday and then wanting to eat everything in sight by midday on Friday. I feel like we've all been there. But your nutrition is exactly the same story as your training. The extreme version isn't failing you because you don't have willpower. It's failing you because it is simply just not sustainable. Changes to your nutrition will only work if you can actually stick to them for years, not days, not weeks, not even months. So, here's a rapid-fire lesson on the boring but effective version of nutrition for an athletic physique. The first is the 80/20 rule.

13:34 80% of your food is whole, mostly unprocessed, and ideally cooked at home. The other 20% is the meal out, the glass of wine, the birthday cake. That 20% isn't you being naughty or falling off track. It is there for a reason. You need to have foods that you enjoy so that you can stick to the other 80%. The second is protein. You need this if you're training hard. It's going to help you with your recovery and actually building the muscle that you want to for the toned look that you're after. You want a decent source of protein at every single meal. And you can tell if something is a significant source of protein by looking at the protein to calories ratio. If the amount of protein in grams is 10% or more of the number of calories, it is a significant source of protein. So, for example, if something is 400 calories and 40 plus grams of protein, it would be considered high protein. Protein is what your body actually uses to rebuild after you've trained. And as a bonus, it's the most filling thing on your plate, so the hunger side of things gets a lot easier, too. Third, and please hear me out on this one, stop skipping carbs. Carbs are what fuel the sessions that we've just spent this whole video talking about.

14:40 So, you need to make sure that you are having them. If you've ever wondered why your energy dips halfway through a workout or one week you can lift really heavy and the next you can't, carbs might be the answer. If you're skipping carbs, you cannot expect to have the energy to train hard enough. And as you now know, training hard is an essential factor to making the progress that you want to make. And the last thing you need to do with your nutrition, which is the thing most people aren't having enough of, is simply just having more fruit and veg. Almost everyone I speak to is under eating on this, and so many people consider buying a greens powder before they consider just buying some broccoli. So, before you spend 40 quid on a tub of green dust, just make sure that you are having a substantial portion of fruit or veg with every single meal. And if the bit you find hardest is knowing what to actually cook, I have a recipe ebook. It's all the meals I actually eat. They're all high protein and they're all enormous, which is perfect if you've got a big appetite like me. There's also a build your own meals guide if you'd rather learn the formula and stop needing recipes at all. Both are linked in the description. So, those are the four boring things that will actually get you an athletic physique. Follow a program around the seven movement patterns instead of body parts, train for what your body can do, not just what it looks like, actually push your sets and progress them properly, and fuel yourself like someone who trains. None of that is exciting, none of it will go viral, and it certainly isn't going to change every 6 weeks. And that is exactly why it works. If you want the training mapped out for you, 12 weeks, every session written, a video demo for every exercise, and three progressive blocks, that's exactly what my training programs are. There's a home version and a gym version. The links are in the description, and if you want both, you get 75% off your second program. That's it from me, and I'll see you in the next one.