Building Muscle & Losing Body Fat
We are fiercely proud of our transformation programmes. Our team of nutritionists, sports therapists and one-to-one coaches (comprising Olympic athletes and award winning personal trainers) are in place to design and monitor every aspect of your programme and produce the best results. However, the best coaching in the world means little without a focused and determined client to work with. Joe did an incredible job of losing a lot of body fat, very fast.
Our client Joe impressed our entire team as he stripped away 13% body fat and gained 2kgs of muscle tissue in only 12-weeks. He trained hard three-times each week with his coach (Joey), performed additional cardiovascular work over the weekends and adhered to his nutritional programme perfectly. We are always keen to hear what our clients think are the best and most valuable aspects of their programme. We can learn from our clients this way! Joe, and his coach Joey, were kind enough to share Joe’s 12-week experience and offer advice for our blog readers.
Advice from Joey Brouwer
Q: How did you design Joe’s workout programme? What do you look for?
A: The most important thing is to know our starting point. What can the client do? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Are there errors in his/her movement chain? Joe came with various mobility issues that Sophie identified. So, we developed some strong mobility/flexibility drills to warm-up before his training-routine. Also, Joe was already fairly strong but with little ability to produce strength over a longer set, or the whole workout. We wanted to build his strength endurance and his ability to endure greater ‘time under tension’ across each workout.
Q: Were there any challenges to coaching Joe, or any particular techniques you found useful?
A: Joe wants to do everything fast and in a rush. Initially, he struggled to adhere to my ‘tempo’ prescriptions and the ‘control aspect’ we needed to help him add muscle tissue. This is not uncommon with our clients at Embody! Everyone is busy and clients typically rush to their workout from a busy day at work. As a coach, you quickly learn the cues that work best for each client.
Q: What do you look for in a client that makes you think; this person is cable of being in great shape?
A: Of course, “great shape” means something different for everyone. However, if a client is consistent, eager to workout and has a certain mindset that makes me think they are keen to work hard, then I understand. A combination of working intelligently and hard in the gym is the key. You only can get the best result when both your mind and body are in the right place to push for it.
An example of Joe’s workout programme.
Advice from Embody client, Joe Horsewill
Q: The most obvious question is; how did you find your programme? What were your thoughts after the first few weeks?
A: Having planned to initially invest a few months of time into the process, I made a conscious decision to not look for huge improvements straight away. I thought I had to be patient. However, after three or four weeks I saw pretty dramatic fat loss! I was even noticing a significant difference in my cardio fitness as a result of losing so much fat and the intense approach to my programme. This was new for me as we didn’t spent any time doing steady-state cardio.
Because the programme was very different, I was very unsure how I would respond to it. There’s a lot of misleading information out there and it’s difficult to know what’s right and wrong. Looking back, it’s clear that if you trust in the process and experience of your coach (and throw yourself into it) you’ll see the results you’re looking for!
Q: What do you think of our approach, having your nutrition, sports therapy and training looked after by a the team around you?
A: Having a dedicated staff member to look at your nutrition is great! Having several people working with me, each covering different things and being able to help in different ways was really different for me and worked well. Regular check-ups on how my nutrition was going, assessing how energized I felt in training sessions versus the speed of the fat loss allowed us to tweak things as necessary to meet my goals.
Q: If you could offer our blog readers the most useful tip/gem you learned over the last 12-weeks what would it be? Really specifically, what might help the reader?
A: Initially at least, tracking your nutrition intake is key! An accurate food diary will allow the experts at Embody to tailor it to boost fat loss (or muscle growth depending on your goal). When you have a coach, you are lucky in that you don’t have to worry about the details of working out. That is done for you and your coach is watching closely. With food however, tracking everything and reporting-back, you really learn how your body responds to certain types and amounts of food. This is information will impact the rest of your life and not just the 8 or 12-weeks you signed up for!
To read more, try Philipp’s Success Story.
