What do you believe in as an exercise professional?
What do you believe in in general?
Do you take a cynical view of the world and what’s possible or do you take an optimistic and ambitious view of what’s possible based on what human beings have achieved throughout history? Because for my money, if I believe something, I believe this. Fitness professionals around the world, the vast majority of them, hold self-limiting beliefs of what’s possible to achieve with their clients in 12 weeks or regardless, in any period of time. They firmly believe that there’s limits to what can be done realistically, and why those limits may exist. The ceiling for what is possible is often infinitely higher than what most people impose upon themselves and by extension, impose upon their clients, and it’s hurting the results. That’s 100% true.
Everybody’s underachieving, the vast majority anyway, are underachieving in terms of results, not just aesthetically, but also in terms of performance, par, strength, speed, muscle gain, fat loss, aerobic and anaerobic endurance, flexibility, mobility, you name it. Everything. You’re under achieving because your general global holistic view is inhibited. Inhibited or socialized into believing that you should accept less, that less is possible in the first place so you should be more realistic. And the fact of the matter is that most fitness programs don’t work and the people who are stuck on them end up wasting hours of their life and hours of their time in the gym with very little to show for their wasted efforts at the end of the day.
But the personal trainers who are taking them through these suboptimal programs can’t be fully to blame for this because the certifications that put them in that position only really taught them theory on how to be good at certain things. Things that may or may not actually apply to anything that’s going to benefit them in their career or the clients they serve. As a matter of fact, one of the things that they fail to provide quite spectacularly, which is startling, because it’s possibly the most important thing that they could provide the personal trainer embarking on a career in the fitness industry, is a clear and direct path towards creating significant transformational change in their clients. Because that’s what everybody wants. That’s what everybody truly wants, and there’s no clear path to it.
So as a knock on effect, with all these personal training certifications, there’s also no clear path to establishing a full time career and a professional income in the fitness industry. But for me, all this is a product of the wrong perspective on what’s possible. Well, how is that the case? Well, because when the bar is set low from day one, even before you’ve become professionally certified, when you’ve been brainwashed by magazines and brainwashed by general popular physical culture dogma, into believing that there are quite severe limitations on your genetic potential and what you can do in certain time periods and what your body’s capable of, then everything after that has a knock on effect. You’re conditioning yourself slowly over the years to be in a prime position to accept less as more.
Therefore, these certifications shouldn’t be providing more either, and that’s OK because what I’m asking them to provide here isn’t really possible anyway. It’s not really possible to create significant transformational change in a really short space of time, with every single client, every single time. By significant change, I mean building significant amounts of muscle and losing significant amounts of fat simultaneously, while also simultaneously getting significantly stronger, and cardiovascularly fitter, both aerobically and anaerobically, simultaneously. You’re taught from day one that all this is impossible to achieve to any significant degree simultaneously. Therefore, you’re willing to accept less.
Where does all this start? Well, for me, it starts with the bodybuilding magazine. Which is where most people come into the physical pop culture ladder, they come in right at that insertion point with fitness and bodybuilding magazines, usually in their adolescence. These magazines have a pattern. Once you start seeing that pattern, you can’t unsee it, because they just repeat it over and over and over again, it becomes very obvious and start to jump out at you. Once you step out of the matrix, you start to see the code where you used to see the buildings and there’s no going back to the way you once viewed things through before.
And that pattern can look something like this. For a start, they’re targeting specific demographics. And usually if that demographic has some sort of personal insecurity based problem, it’s a bonus point. They find what problem you have, they drive a spear through it, and then they present themselves as a solution. And the solution that they present is usually in the form of some arbitrary random training program with the face of a star bodybuilder attached to it. Oftentimes this isn’t even a routine that this bodybuilder uses regularly or has ever used. But the purpose of this is to catch beginners and intermediates at certain levels, because the thing about changing your training frequently is you’re going to get a bit of a hit, and a bit of a result immediately from doing something that’s just variety based. You’ll make a bit of progress, but that progress will inevitably stall, and stall quickly, because there’s no better idea than variety for the sake of variety.
So then the next trick that you’ll see in the magazine after the novelty based routine is convincing the person, the reader themselves, that it’s their fault that they’re not progressing any further. It’s you. It’s your genetics. It’s even your ancestors fault, “Choose your parents wisely”, “There’s things that are outside of your control”, “there’s things that are outside of our control”, “You can’t be one of the genetic superhumans like the bodybuilders in this book”.
Nobody ever talks about the huge amounts of chemical enhancement and the decades worth of consistent chemical enhancement, intelligent training and diet that’s went into making those super physiques. Yes, it’s a product of incredible genetics that maybe the reader doesn’t have, but there’s more to it than that.
Setting the bar so low for them and giving them variety based routines is all part of the sting. It’s about creating a constant loop of catching beginners, giving them a variety based routine that gets them a small amount of progress for a short period of time, and then when the progress inevitably stops because there’s no better idea, tell them it’s their fault and then present them with a third party solution. And that’s the third thing that happens that you’ll spot in all these magazines over and over again, re-occurring over the course of months and years. They cycle the same old routine.
- Give a variety based program,
- Blame you and your parents and your genetics
- Then present a third party solution
That third one is where they make most of their money in these magazines, because every other page is an advert. An advert for what? Supplements. An advert for supplements, an advert for personal training certifications, you name it.
So now they’ve managed to pass the buck to a third party, because you can take these supplements and maybe get some small ergogenic aid from it or a placebo effect, and there’s a small amount of progress, and then THAT stops working. Well that wasn’t their fault anyway because it was a third party. It was the supplement company who sold you this product, it’s their fault right?
It’s just this cycle that keeps going round and round, being propagated over and over again. This then becomes etched in the psyche of all these young people coming up in the fitness industry. By the time they get to the certification stage or they’re wanting to move professionally into this industry going forward, they have been mentally conditioned to accept less.
You should never accept less. Boundaries are constantly being broken. In strength and fitness and otherwise. We don’t have to look any further than sport. If the human being has proven one thing, it’s that records are made to be broken and that while there logically should be a limit to human performance, we haven’t found it yet and we keep edging the boundaries upward and upward and upward. Who knows where that can stop. Who knows what the absolute capacity for the fastest 100 meters or the fastest mile ever will be.
But one thing’s for certain, without men like Roger Bannister who was a medical student and flew in the face of the then commonly accepted fact, that to run faster than four minutes for a mile would potentially cause death or severe injury to the individual doing it. It was physiologically impossible according to the experts at the time. Bannister knew this wasn’t the case, so he put together an intelligent training program based on maths and progression to be able to get there, and was able to do it. And once he did that, the floodgates opened. And before too long ten men had done it, then 20 men, and so on and so forth, and the four minute mile count now is over a hundred men who’ve done it.
So don’t let anybody else put a limit on what you can achieve with your clients in 12 weeks, because I’m here to tell you that one does not exist, at least as THEY believe it to. Can you build muscle and lose fat at the same time and can you do it in 12 weeks? That’s a good question. You absolutely can. Can you build huge amounts of strength and create significant change in cardiovascular performance? You absolutely can. Can you do this all in 12 weeks? You absolutely can. And you don’t have to take my word for it. You don’t even have to do the A12 certification or the A12 program either. All you have to do is keep an open mind. Look at the thousands of transformations, and look at their bodies. Look at their bodies with your educated eye, that’s been around the fitness industry, that’s trained in gyms, that’s built muscle and lost fat yourself, and helped your clients to the same. Look at their bodies. Have they built significant muscle? Have they lost significant fat? And then wrap your head around the fact that this happened in 12 weeks.
So there was no time for a building cycle and a cutting cycle and an extended period of training. This was a concurrent training program that was achieving several things at once. It HAD to be. The only way to achieve those two things at once (i.e. significant muscle building and significant fat loss), is to create significant and quite profound numeric improvements in strength for reps, and cardiovascular performance, both aerobically and anaerobically. Fact. There is no other way to achieve that physiologically. Simply by using your eyes, keeping an open mind, and being objective, you can look at these pictures and see the pattern.
Don’t be brainwashed, open your mind and actually look at the results. You can’t help but see bigger muscles. And by the way, if you’re seeing bigger muscles AND less fat, then the muscles have gotten even bigger than they look like they have. You see, if someone has body fat covering their musculature, the musculature appears bigger because it’s wearing a fat coat, if you know what I mean. It’s like putting layers of clothing on and appearing bigger. It’s not actually the muscle underneath it, it just supports the outward shape of the fat that’s covering it. If you remove that fat, you should look SMALLER, not bigger. If you look bigger AND leaner, then how much muscle has been built, while fat has obviously been lost at the same time? This has happened thousands of times with the A12 Program.
Can significant muscle and fat be lost at the same time? Yes. Can you make significant strength gains and significant improvement in cardiovascular fitness simultaneously? Yes. Because you couldn’t do the first thing without achieving it through doing the second thing. Can you build more muscle and more strength from a program that focuses only on that, without the fat loss element? Yes. Can you build more cardiovascular fitness without a program that focuses on creating muscular hypertrophy simultaneously? Yes. But, most of the specialization programs designed to specialise in either size, strength, fitness or fat loss are far from optimal at instigating any of those outcomes.
What you may not know right now, is that it IS achievable to configure the mathematics around that situation in such a way that you can create more muscle growth in less time, and more fat loss in less time, with a higher increase in cardiovascular performance in less time, simultaneously, than most of those specialization programs can do in singularity and isolation. That’s a big statement. It’s also a hundred percent accurate, because if it wasn’t then the A12 wouldn’t be able to produce the results that it does, but it does. And it has done for nearly 15 years, all around the world for thousands of people at this point.
I can say this with great confidence because I know it like I know gravity exists, and I know Tuesday follows Monday. Muscle can be built and fat can be lost in significant amounts simultaneously.