If you ask anyone what their body goals are they’ll be able to tell you in great detail exactly how they want to look. A lot of the time they’ll even have photos and examples of exactly who they want to look like.
The problem is these examples are always of people who have been training and dieting hard for a very long time. Years in most cases.
The strange thing is people seem to expect to get to where these people are within a couple of months. How is that ever going to be possible. These people do EVERYTHING right and it’s still taken them years to achieve what they have how are you going to do it in a couple of month with no knowledge of training or nutrition.
I can’t think of another example where people expect to get the results of years of work in a few weeks it just doesn’t happen because it’s entirely illogical.
So, can you get any results in a short period of time? Absolutely, however they will be short term results and they will reflect the amount of time you’ve put into them.
If you are serious about getting awesome result you need to commit to it long term and accept its not going to happen overnight. Only when you have done this will you start the journey to where you want to be.
I’m going to break down for you what the average first year of training will look like and hopefully that will help you understand why these things take time.
The first 4 weeks. The period in which most people expect to see decent results if they are short term minded.
In reality the first four weeks are pretty much an introduction. You’ll spend most of the time doing pretty much everything wrong.
You’ll probably be learning new exercise and with that comes inevitable mistakes. It’s going to take at least a month for you to really get to grips with the exercises your doing and for you to get the most out of them.
Your food is going to be far from perfect especially when most people switch whatever fad diet they are going to use every time they decide they want to get into fitness. These changes almost always take time to get used to and until you do your not going to get great results. By the time that first month rolls by your probably getting there. Providing you haven’t given up on it already.
Finally if you haven’t exercised in a long time your going to spend much of the first few weeks waddling like a duck and struggling to get to the toilet never mind sit on it. Because of this your NEAT (non exercise activity time) is going to be pretty low.
To put it simply the fact it hurts to move will mean you probably won’t. You’ll be even more sedentary outside of the gym than you were before you started. This will probably mean your overall energy expenditure has actually decreased since you started training. This will make it even more difficult to lose weight in the first 4 weeks.
Obviously any good coach will aim to minimise the amount of DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) you experience. It should never be our aim to ‘beast’ you that’s just irresponsible and counter productive. However your still going to experience it to some degree unfortunately.
By the time week 8 rolls around you’ll be starting to get the hang of things. You’ll have a relatively good knowledge of most the exercise your performing and you’ll have a platform to build on with regards increasing weight and intensity. Which are going to be the catalysts to any change or progress.
As for your diet it’s probably still a work in progress. You’ll have greatly increases your awareness of what foods contain what and how much of them you need to be eating. However, your probably still not being as accurate or consistent as you could be even if you don’t realise it.
This isn’t you doing anything wrong it’s simply that it’s difficult and it takes time. You will be making good progress even by being only maybe 60% on top of it. Now your starting to get somewhere and you’ll start to see some results. Even if they are minor.
Fast forward all the way to the 6 month mark.
That platform I talked about regarding upping your weights and intensity? Well you’ve built on it!
Following on from that 8th week when your form was finally good enough to start adding weight you’ve been able to consistently increase the weight your lifting most weeks to the point where your getting pretty damn strong!
The fact your now lifting more weight means your going to get more from each and every session. Your going to see greater changes in your body now you have a bigger stimulus.
The same applies to intensity if your doing more cardio vascular focused training. Your at a point now where you can train hard enough and for long enough to start seeing the great results you expect. You’ll start to use more energy every session which in turn will help with weight loss.
This is the point when your finally starting to nail your nutrition. It takes on average 6 month of doing something for it to become habit. This means your going to start doing everything you’ve learned over the past 6 month without having to think about it too much. Eating better will now be the norm, it’s just what your used to doing. Ever tried to break a habit? Not easy!
Even at this point it’s probably not perfect. Quick secret! It never will be! Nobody is ever going to be perfect, the good thing is you don’t need to be. If at this point your doing the majority of things right about 80% of the time that’s going to be enough to get most people the results they want. Especially now your being consistent with it.
Now your training is in an awesome place and your diet is probably as good as it’s going to get you can start to push in towards the big 12 months milestone. In this 6 month period between month 6 and month 12 is where your going to start to get the awesome results you wanted in 4 weeks.
You’ve developed an above average base and that’s going to help you get above average results. Those already heavy weights are going to get even heavier. That high intensity cardio is going to get more intense and you’re slowly going to evolve from a novice into an intermediate trainee. At this point you’ll also look like an intermediate trainee.
You know those people you see in the gym who don’t quite look like Instagram models yet but they still look damn good and it’s obvious they train. 1 year a go you would have been delighted to look like them. Well now you do!
This is how long it actually takes to start getting results.
So what next? That’s entirely up to you. How motivated are you? I’ve just demonstrated that with the right amount of time you can achieve pretty much anything you want. You may be happy to continue what your doing and maintain where your at or you may decide to push on and see where you are in another year or 3 or 5.
Learn to think long term and eventually you’ll get the results you want but nothing will happen overnight.
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