The EXACT Plan To Lose Fat and Build Muscle

You can lose fat and build muscle at the same time, despite what other trainers may have told you. I helped our client Victor do just that, and our client Chelsea do that in under 12 weeks following the exact plan I'll give you today. By the end of this video, you'll have a weekly plug-and-play template that you can implement for both nutrition and exercise to start seeing the same kind of progress. as them immediately. No more confusion, overwhelm, or frustration because you're not making the progress you want. Your new pal Eric has your back. Before I get into the exact plan, I want to clarify who this plan is going to work for, and that's people who are new or intermediate to following a strength training program. And I'm not talking about Beachbody or Orangetheory or HIIT boot camp classes. I mean following a structured program versus just working out. So even if you've been working out for a while, but you've never really followed a program, you would still fall under the new to intermediate lifter. And this plan is for somebody who has a higher body fat percentage. I would say above 15 to 20% for men and above 20 to 30% for women. Also, for this plan to work, There's going to be a few prerequisites. Number one, you have to be willing to track and count your calories for at least seven days. Number two, you have to be willing to work out three to four times a week for thirty to sixty minutes. And number three, you have to be willing to not be fat anymore. And what I mean by that is you have to be willing to change. If you keep doing the same things you've been doing, you are going to keep getting the same results. So if you're cool with that, let's dive into the first part of the plan. Step one: track your. Your waist measurement. Most people when they're trying to lose fat and build muscle obsess over the number on the scale. But your waist measurement is actually the most accurate indicator of fat loss and muscle building progress. And here's why. If you look at 1 pound of fat, this is actually 1 pound of fat on your body. So the next time you think, I only lost a pound this week, that's pretty significant. 1 pound of fat and 1 pound of muscle weigh the exact same. They're both a pound. The composition is different. Muscle is more dense than fat, and fat is more squishy. Fat also takes up more space, and you can see muscle takes up less space. So the composition is different, and it will look different on your body. But if you lose a pound of fat and you gain a pound of muscle, the scale wouldn't change at all, but your body would look different. And this is why tracking your waist measurement is the best indicator of fat loss and muscle building progress, because even if the scale stays the same but your waist measurement is going down, that means you're losing fat and building muscle at the same time. This actually happened to one of our clients, Emily. Her waist went down a ton, as you can see, but her scale only dropped a couple of pounds. If she was only tracking her body weight, she would have thought she was failing when in reality she was making great progress. And the same goes for you. Now, to be clear, your waist measurements, just like your body weight, can fluctuate for many reasons. Maybe you are a woman on her menstrual cycle, on her period. Maybe you ate out and had a lot more sodium than usual. Maybe you just had a bad night's sleep or you ate something that made you a little bit bloated. So what I recommend for tracking your waist measurement is make sure to do it at the same time in the same spot every time you take it. And that's going to be first thing in the morning when you wake up, after you use the restroom and before you eat or drink anything. Because if you have to take a big poop, then your waist measurement might go down after that. And vice versa, if you eat or drink a lot and then you go and take your waist measurement, there's more food in your stomach. So that's when you would take it, the time of day. And I recommend taking it every 2 weeks. So once every 2 weeks, because throughout the week you're going to have fluctuations with it. But if you take it once every 2 weeks, you'll be able to see the trends over time. And then you'll be able to look at the trend and say, 2 weeks ago I was 40-inch waist, now I'm a 39.5, now I'm a 38. And you'll see the trends either up, down, or staying the same. And we'll talk about later If the trend isn't going down and it is staying the same, what to adjust. But that'll be later. And then where should you take your waist measurement? I always recommend, just for the easiest, I would do right below your belly button. Now you can still track your body weight, and if you are going to do it, I recommend tracking your body weight every single day. Because again, although it will fluctuate every day, if you get the data, you can look at the trends of if it's trending down or not. But between your waist and your body weight. That will let you know if you're making great fat loss and muscle building progress. All right, so now that you know what to measure, let's go ahead and talk about step 2 of the plan: setting your daily calories. To lose fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. Probably heard this before, but you also may have heard if you're in a calorie deficit, you can't build muscle. That is not true, especially if you are starting from a higher body fat percentage, because The more body fat you have on your body, your body's going to use that stored energy, stored fat, for energy to build muscle. If you were somebody who you were already very lean, it would be much harder to build more muscle because you don't have as much excess energy. But if you have the higher body fat percentage, it's kind of a good thing. I know you don't want to have it, but it's kind of good because you'll be able to use that towards building muscle. And to be clear, it's not that you can't build muscle when you're in a calorie deficit, it's just a little bit slower. Would you build more muscle if you ate more calories? Yes, but you wouldn't lose fat. So if your goal is fat loss, you have to be in a calorie deficit. The important part about being in the calorie deficit is not going too low in your calories, because what will happen, you won't have enough calories to repair and recover your muscles after workouts. And You won't have enough to push yourself in your workouts, which we'll talk about a bit later as well. So a good guide I like to use for setting up your calorie deficit is roughly 500 calories minus your maintenance calories. And by the way, I have a totally free calorie deficit calculator. If you click the link in the description of this video, enter your information, it will shoot over to you your calorie deficit number. And that will be a roughly 500 calorie deficit because when you start going lower, than that, that's when you start to run into those issues that we talked about earlier. And by the way, I know some people have trouble sticking to their calories, especially on the weekends or when you're going to social events or when you're eating out. And again, we will cover that in this plan a little bit later in the video. But that brings us to step number 3 in the plan of how to lose fat and build muscle at the same time: 3 to 4 times a week of progressive overload strength training. Some people think you need to work out 5, 6, 7 days a week in order to build muscle. Couldn't be farther from the truth. In fact, this is me right here, and I work out 4 times a week with weights. And it's not just me. This is our client Jessica, and this is our client Rich, who both work out 3 and 4 times a week. In each of these workouts, you should have 4 to 8 exercises staying in 2 to 3 working sets in the 5 to 12 rep range. And the goal is very simple: lift more weight or do more reps than what you did the previous week. And here's how you can set up those workouts. If you're doing a 3-day-a-week workout split, day 1 will be lower body, day 2 would be upper body, and day 3 would be full body. And yes, when I say lower body, that would include glutes, quads, hamstrings, When I say upper body, that would include chest, shoulders, triceps, back, biceps. And yes, you can do all these things on the same day and not have a 2-hour workout. I'm going to talk about that in a second. And if you're doing 4 times a week, it would be lower body, upper body, lower body, upper body. The 4 times a week, all 4 of those workouts would be different workouts. So you'd have different exercises on each of those 4 days. And when you're doing your exercises during your sets, you should be pushing yourself close to failure, meaning you should get done your set and say, I maybe could have done 1 or 2 or 3 more reps if I was lucky. And once you do that, you should come back the next week and then try to do A little bit more weight or a little bit more reps. And I promise you, if you follow this week over week, you will see yourself getting stronger and building muscle while seeing your clothes fit different, your pants fit a little bit looser, and losing fat along the way. And if you're like, Eric, I need to know exactly what workouts to follow, you can click the link in the description of this video if you want to check out my fitness app where I have exact workout programs you can follow. You can track your workouts right inside of the app. Check it out, link below if you'd like. And this brings us into the 4th step in the plan, your daily protein intake. Protein is one of the biggest keys to losing fat and building muscle at the same time. If you don't have enough protein, your body will not just lose fat if you're in a calorie deficit, but it will also lose muscle. muscle. It will burn muscle for energy because you're not signaling to your body that you have enough protein to keep and build the muscle that you have and want. Now again, the calorie calculator I talked about earlier will tell you exactly how much protein to eat, but at a bare minimum, we should be shooting for 100 grams of protein per day. And it's not just the overall protein intake that matters. We should be splitting up this protein intake throughout the day across 3 to 5 meals and/or snacks. So this might look like breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, snack/dessert. Because spreading out your protein intake throughout the day will increase something called muscle protein synthesis, and this is just the fancy word for the process that your body does to actually build new muscle tissue. Think of eating protein like bricks to a house. If you don't eat enough bricks, there won't be enough bricks to build the house. So eating this protein more evenly and spread out throughout the day will give your body multiple opportunities to build muscle throughout the day, and it'll signal to your body that it does not want to use your muscle for energy because it needs that muscle to stay there and continue to build. You can also think of it like watering a plant. If you just dump a gallon of water on a plant once a week, it's probably going to die. But if you water the plant a couple of times throughout the week, it will consistently be healthy and stay alive. And one last note on protein spread out evenly throughout the day, you are also going to have more satiety. And this just means you're going to be more full and less hungry. This will help you stick to that calorie deficit even better. And something else that will help your calorie deficit is step number 5, having a step floor. To lose fat and build muscle at the same time, you need to make daily movement a priority. It's not just about the cardio or the weight training that you do. You need to move more throughout your day. And this is where setting daily step goal is a great daily movement goal to shoot for, and we should be shooting for at the very least 6,000 steps per day, but getting as close to that 8,000 to 10,000 step per day mark as possible. This will keep the calorie burn throughout the day higher, and it will actually help your recovery from workouts to be able to build muscle and more efficiently as well. Think of your daily steps as keeping a fire alive. If you just put one giant log on the fire per day, the fire may struggle to stay alive. But if you keep feeding the fire with multiple sticks and little brush throughout the day, the fire is going to stay stronger alive. And the same thing goes with your steps. And in fact, I was able to lose 20 pounds in 8 weeks doing zero cardio. All I did was 4 times a week strength training and my 8,000 to 10,000 steps daily. And again, you don't need one hour-long walk during your day. I would strongly recommend you split this up into little mini daily walks throughout your day. So this could be a 10-minute walk after lunch. This could be walking on the phone while you're taking a phone call. This could be parking farther away from work. This could be going into the grocery store and intentionally trying just to get more steps. That might be bad because you might be picking up some things you don't need, but you get the point. Think of it too like filling a bucket of water. If you just have one giant pour, you dump a bunch of water into this bucket, it's going to splash up and go everywhere. But if you just have small, steady pours throughout the day, your bucket is going to fill without it overflowing everywhere. And most people get overflowed or overwhelmed with the thought of trying to do a 10,000-step hour-long walk. You don't have to do that. And if you're like, well, Eric, I don't have anything to track my steps, most phones these days have a step tracker. That's how I track my steps. Or if you really want to get one, you can get a pedometer you can put on your shoe or your, your waistband to be able to track those steps throughout the day. Now, maybe just as important as Your daily steps is step number 6. Set a sleep floor. Think of sleep as your body's reset button. Aim for at least 6 hours per night, but as close to 7 to 9 hours as you can, because this is critical for your body's recovery and repair process to build muscle, as well as the hunger hormones that make losing fat a ton easier. Think of sleep like charging your phone. If you only charge it up to halfway, now you have to go through the entire day with a half-charged phone. It's going to be harder to get the most out of that and stay full of battery the entire day. At some point, it's going to die, aka your willpower is going to die. You won't have the discipline to stick to your diet because Your sleep is low, your energy is low, your motivation is low. And in fact, studies show just an hour or 2 less of sleep per night caused people to eat 300 to 1,000 extra calories per day. And the only thing that was different was the amount of sleep that they got. You can't out-train poor sleep. You can't out-willpower or discipline Poor sleep. It's the number one thing that can either amplify your progress and make it faster and easier, or it can be the thing that drags you down. And there's 2 main functions that sleep will help you do. Number one, there is something called deep sleep, and this usually happens in the beginning of your sleep cycle. This is where you have a physical recovery of your body, AKA building the lean muscle mass that you want. So if your sleep quality, especially deep sleep, is lower, You're not gonna build as much muscle. I don't care how hard you lift. I don't care how much protein you eat. You're gonna suffer from a muscle building standpoint if we're not getting deep sleep. And on that same note, sleep quality also impacts your hunger hormones. There's 2 main hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin. Leptin is the hormone that tells your body, I'm full, I'm satisfied, I don't need any more food. Ghrelin is the hormone that says, I'm not satisfied. I am hungry. I need to eat more. Even if you're not actually hungry, even if you've had enough calories, this hormone will make you hungrier. So if you're not getting enough sleep, your leptin decreases— I don't mean to flick you off— and your ghrelin increases. So you get hungrier, especially for more cravings and junk food and sweets and chips and processed foods. Which makes it easier to overeat and harder to stick to your calories. So the lack of sleep, harder to build muscle, easier to overeat. Not a good equation if you're looking for fat loss and muscle building. So aim for at least 6 hours. Cut out caffeine 10 to 12 hours before you go to bed. Try to get the hell off of your phone 30 to 60 minutes before you go to bed. Make sure you sleep in a cool-tempered room. And one of the most important things, try to stick to a consistent sleep schedule. So if you're going to sleep at 10 PM and you're waking up at 6 PM, try to keep that consistent schedule within 30 to 60 minutes. And that brings us into step number 7, weekend and alcohol rules. You and I both know it, weekends make or break your progress. I spoke earlier about calories and the weekends, and I'm going to give you a tip that we've used with thousands of our online coaching clients to be able to help you still enjoy yourself on the weekends, but still make fat loss progress. Most people think their calorie deficit goal is what they have to eat every single day, 7 days a week. And this is not true because you don't lose fat in 1 day. You lose fat over the course of a week. Maybe you've heard There's 1 pound a week of fat loss, 2 pounds a week of fat loss per week, not per day. So this means you will take your daily calorie deficit goal, times that by 7, and that's how many weekly calories you need to be consuming to be in a weekly calorie deficit. So as an example, let's say your goal was 2,000 calories per day. That would be 14,000 weekly calories. Calories, and as long as you have 14,000 weekly calories, you will lose fat. So you can think of calories like a weekly budget for money. You might not spend the same amount of money every single day, but as long as you don't go over your budget by Sunday night and spend more money than you earn, you'll be all right. So many of our clients will eat a couple hundred calories less during the week To be able to have a couple hundred calories more during the weekend. But mind you, this is where it becomes very important. Here's a caveat. This does not mean that you just eat 1,000 calories Monday through Thursday and then 4,000 calories Friday through Sunday. Number one, this creates a very unhealthy relationship with food. Number two, you're probably going to way overdo it on the weekends, causing you to go over your weekly calorie intake. And number 3, if you take that approach of having too big of a discrepancy, you're most likely going to see yourself have some very big weight spike-ups. Then maybe your weight drops down, but it spikes up a ton more because of bloat, inflammation, water weight. So if your goal is 2,000 calories per day, maybe during the week you eat 1,700, 1,800, and then on the weekends you eat 2,300, 2,400 calories, but you still have to make sure you're within those calories. It can't just be a free-for-all. I'm gonna eat whatever I want. I'm gonna go out to eat. I don't have to even track or think of it because I ate less during the week, so I'm gonna eat more during the weekend. You eat way more calories than you think, which is why tracking your calories for at least 7 days will show you how many calories you're actually eating. And on top of this comes Alcohol. And I get it, some people enjoy it. Me personally, I don't drink alcohol. But that being said, I understand. But if you really want to get serious about losing fat, you either have to massively cut back and/or cut out your alcohol consumption. A rule that we have for our online coaching clients is 2 drinks per week max. And yes, that is per week, you degenerates out there. Because alcohol is going to slow down the fat loss and muscle building progress for 2 reasons. When alcohol is in your system, the process of your body burning fat or building muscle stops. And the reason for this is alcohol is a toxin that your body has to get out first before it can do anything else. Now, this is not to say you can't lose fat or build muscle if you drink alcohol. You can. It's just going to take a longer process. And on top of that, alcohol has calories. Which can add up quick, and alcohol lowers your inhibition. This just means your motivation, willpower, discipline. So you get 2, 3, 4 drinks in, you don't really care about sticking to your diet anymore. You're not snacking on celery and carrots, and you're snacking on higher calorie, higher processed foods, which then causes you to go over your calorie intake without even realizing it. And so it's like digging a hole Monday through Friday, but then Saturday, Sunday, just like overfilling that hole again. You start the next week with no progress made. So while yes, you can still be flexible on the weekends, set that calorie goal and set that rule with alcohol so you don't get frustrated that you're working so hard but not seeing progress. You're not seeing progress because you're not sticking to the plan on the weekends. And that brings us into step number 8, which is probably one of the most important. Step number 8, progress tracking. The way you know if your plan is working is by tracking. And here's what you want to look at. If your waist measurement is trending down over the course of the weeks, this means you are losing fat. There is no other reason that your waist measurement would go down other than You losing fat over time regardless of what your body weight is doing. Now, it is typical, especially when you first start getting into a strength training program, your weight might not go down that much for 2 to 6 weeks. And I want you to be aware of this. You need to expect this to happen because what is happening in your body as you are building some muscle, pushing yourself in your workouts, you'll be building muscle, but there will also be some inflammation in your muscles. and some water weight in your muscles because your muscles are like, damn, we're starting to work pretty hard. So there will be some short-term water weight in there, which again, the scale doesn't just measure your fat and your muscle, it measures everything in your body. So in those first 2 to 6 weeks, you might not see a big difference, but after that, if you do have 30, 40, 50 pounds that you want to lose, that scale will start to continuously trend down. And something we've found with our clients is after the first 2 to 6 weeks, let's say you only drop 1, 2, 3 pounds. After that, we often see what is called a big whoosh on the scale where you might drop 3 to 6 pounds in a week and then keep that weight off for the long term. And that's your body getting rid of that excess water weight that it was storing in the beginning. So both the waist measurement and the weight will be trending down. And we also want to take a look at your strength in your workouts. This is why you should be tracking your workouts, because if you know week over week you did 5 or 10 more pounds than last week, you did 1 or 2 more reps than last week, that is how you know you're getting stronger and building muscle. Remember, you might not physically see in the mirror the progress that you're making right away for many reasons, because Progress takes time because we are our own biggest critics, because we see ourselves every day in the mirror. But just because you don't see the progress right away doesn't mean that progress isn't happening. And it's important for you to track this progress because when you can actually see it on the scale, on— in your workouts, you will see, I am making progress. And that will motivate you to keep going long enough to then physically see the progress On the scale, in the mirror, in your clothes. And a great example of this is one of our clients, Evan. Initially, he didn't see the scale drop that much, but as you can see in his progress pictures, he completely changed his physique. That was because over the period of time, we saw his weights going down, he was still getting stronger in his workouts, and he just stuck with it long enough to see that physical change. And so I would encourage you, you have to make sure you're tracking these If you're not, you're gonna get discouraged and demotivated, and you're going to quit because you don't think you're making progress. And that's the worst part. You probably are making progress, you're just not tracking it correctly. And by the way, if you want an exact plan to follow for your workouts, for your nutrition, and if you want an all-in-one app to track your measurements, track your body weight, track your workouts, your progress pictures, click the link. in the description of this video to check out the online fitness app that I built. It's an all-in-one app. Everything you need is there, and it's less than $2 a day. So feel free to check it out. And that brings us into step number 9 of the plan. Step 9, plateau adjustment. So if you're like, Eric, I'm doing all of these things, but I'm not seeing progress, we're going to talk about that in the last step of the plan. First, it has to have been at least 14 days before you say, I'm not seeing progress. Yes, that is 14 days, not 14 hours, not 4 hours or 4 days. Most people just don't give it a long enough time to actually stick with to determine if it's working or not. So it has to be 14 days, and within those 14 days, you need to be consistent. Because if it's been 14 days, but you've only hit your calories 7 of those days, it's not that it's not working, you're not working the plan because you haven't been as consistent as you need to. So you need to be at least 90% consistent with your calorie intake, with your workouts getting done, with your steps getting done, with your sleep, with everything that we just mentioned, 90%. So that means at least 12 out of the 14 days, you need to be consistently hitting all of the markers that we talked about. If that hasn't happened, then you're not in a plateau. You're just either not being patient enough or you're not being consistent enough. And that's the hard truth that you need to come to terms with. Now, let's just say you are a special unicorn. 99.9% of you are not, but if you're the special unicorn, corn, and you're not seeing progress after 14 days, here's what that would look like. So if you take your waist measurement today and then 2 weeks from now and there's no change and you've been 90% consistent, at that point I would then decrease your calories by 100 to 200 per day. Depends on how many calories you're currently eating. The more calories you're eating, I would say the bigger the adjustment. The less calories you're eating, I'd probably only adjust by 100 calories per day. That's option 1. Or option 2, you would either increase your daily steps by 2,000 per day. So if you're at 7,000, you would go to 9,000. Or instead of increasing your daily steps, you may add in extra cardio. So 2 to 3 times a week of 15 to 30 minutes of cardio on top of what you're already doing with your daily steps, because one of those 2 options will help you re-get into a calorie deficit, and that will allow you to keep losing fat and building muscle that you want. And a couple of other key points here: if you're finding you're not getting stronger in your workouts, I would re-look at how many calories you're eating and making sure you're properly fueling yourself. And if you're using my calorie calculator and eating those calories, You should be okay. But even if, make sure you're eating before your workout. A lot of people will go into their workout fasted, not eating anything, and they'll feel weak and they'll feel like they can't really push themselves as hard. That's because typically you want to eat especially carbohydrates 30 to 90 minutes before your workout. This will give your muscles the energy that you need to push yourself hard. And please just remember everything that I just told you, it's not theory. We've coached over 25,000 people in the last 8 and a half years with my online coaching program, and this is the results that we get people. This is the plan that we give people. I know this is going to work if you commit to it and stick to it. In fact, if you'd like to become one of our clients, you can click the link in the description of this video to get a structured, laid-out plan, get the proper progress tracking in place and finally help you see the results you're looking to see. So click the link below for that, or if you're interested in the world's easiest diet to lose belly fat, then you can go ahead and click this video to watch right here.