Meet Veronika. She’s a 31-year-old copywriter. She first started working with us over a year and a half ago, with the goal of looking as good as possible for her upcoming wedding. Once the wedding was behind her, she shifted focus to building strength.
While Veronika was a talented athlete (swimmer) in her younger years, when she moved out of her parents’ home and started planning her wedding, the stress built up. Along with the stress came snacking when she wasn’t hungry, and drinking alcohol every other night.
Then she got engaged. That was just the kick in the butt she needed to get back in shape. And get in shape she did. She looked spectacular on her wedding day, and nowadays, with the wedding almost a year and a half behind her, she’s gained a level of strength seen by less than 1% of women – she can do 6 chinups.
How did she do all that? That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article. If you’d like to see Veronika tell her own story, check out this 10-minute video:
And if you’re jealous of Veronika, and have your own deadline to prepare for (whether it be a special birthday, anniversary, vacation, etc.), just fill out the form on our home page. Doing so does not obligate you to anything. It’ll just set up a short, 10–15-minute chat where we’ll discuss your current situation, and figure out whether we can work together. There’s no obligation, sales pitch or pressure.
Veronika’s Life Before
As mentioned earlier, throughout her teenage years, Veronika was a talented swimmer. Fast forward to the end of high school, and she stopped swimming, went to university, graduated, and started working.
Along the way, she lost a lot of her fitness, and went from competitive athlete to average Jane. She was playing squash twice a week, and in addition to that, was going to the gym by herself a couple of times a week, but she didn’t really have a plan when she went in the gym. In spite of her decent activity levels, she still ended up gaining about 30 pounds and lost a lot of her upper body strength.
She was doing well in her career, but unfortunately, not so much in her fitness.
Fast forward a few years, and she got engaged, so now there was a firm wedding date – and therefore a strong reason (and deadline) to get in shape.
Veronika had already been my friend for about 12-13 years at that point, and she was reading my newsletters for a while.
So when it came time to get serious about her fat loss, you know who she called: ghostbusters me.
I set her up with one of my top long-time personal trainers, Davin, and they got to work.
Why did she decide to take it seriously and actually hire a personal trainer? A couple of reasons:
- Having read many of our client success stories, she could tell that we really care about our clients.
- She needed her hand held. Not every day is going to be a home run. She needed accountability on days when she was tired, or as she put it, had a “blah” day.
- She was tired of spinning her wheels – putting in effort, and getting nowhere.
And although she didn’t live very far from our physical location, she still preferred online personal training. Why? The main reason is convenience. Yeah, she’s only 25 minutes from our location, but a 25-minute drive in each direction is still an extra 50 minutes on top of her workout. She preferred to work out at the gym that’s just 5 minutes from her home (she would take Davin with her to the gym on her phone/tablet).
The other big reason that she preferred online personal training is because she wanted to not give herself any reason to say “no.” Being able to work out from anywhere eliminated all of her excuses.
Veronika’s Program
Here are the highlights of Veronika’s program:
Exercise Frequency
Veronika was strength training 4 days per week. Because of the relatively high frequency, her program was divided into an upper body day and a lower body day. She would do two of each every week.
Exercise Selection
One criterion of an effective exercise is that one exercise works multiple muscles at the same time (those are called “multi-joint exercises”). It saves time without losing effectiveness, and has a greater cardiovascular effect as well. So for Veronika’s upper body, Davin used exercises like assisted dips, assisted chinups, bench press, and others.
For her lower body, Davin chose deadlifts, back squats, split squats and others.
Yes, there were some isolation movements (single-joint exercises) in her program, but it was largely built around multi-joint exercises.
Sets and Reps
All the exercises were mainly done for 2 sets of 8-12 repetitions. Different repetition ranges have different effects. Lower repetitions (under 8) build strength pretty well, but not very much endurance. Higher repetitions (over 12) build endurance, but not very much strength. So we compromised, and came to the middle ground of 8-12 reps.
Effort
Veronika took most of her sets very close to muscular failure. The effort is the key. No challenge, no benefit. Most people in the gym are afraid to push hard enough to make progress. That’s why Veronika was working with Davin – to make sure that she was pushed hard enough, while maintaining good technique, and minimizing her risk of injury.
Out of the Gym
Outside of the gym, Veronika’s target was to get 10,000 steps per day, 7 days per week. If that was done in one shot, that’s a walk of about an hour and 20 minutes. The purpose of this was not cardiovascular endurance (taking 10,000 steps per day doesn’t build much endurance, unless those steps are consecutive, and either very fast, or on a pretty steep incline), but they do burn a few extra calories. If those 10,000 steps are taken in one stint, they’ll burn about 250-280 calories for Veronika (how many calories your burn depends on the duration of the exercise, a person’s body weight, as well as the pulse during exercise). If those steps are spread across the day, they’ll burn fewer calories.
She ended up starting each day with a 15-minute walk (and eventually progressed to 60), even if she was super busy, the weather is bad, etc. This feels like a good way to start her day for 2 reasons:
- She’s less likely to put it off entirely.
- It feels to her like she’s starting her day on the right foot (pun somewhat intended). She starts her day with a small accomplishment. That snowballs into bigger accomplishments later that day.
Nutrition
Of course, exercising alone to lose fat is often a futile approach. Nutrition plays a major role in fat loss. So what Davin recommended to Veronika was:
- Increase her protein intake
- Reduce portion sizes
- Either avoid snacking, or have lower-calorie snacks, like fruits. Another strategy was scheduling in snacks, so that it’s part of the plan, and also, so that she has something to look forward to.
Nothing particularly fancy, but the power isn’t in complexity. Rather, the power of this is in its simplicity – and the results showed it.
These are just the highlights of Veronika’s program. There were more elements to it, and it evolved over time (she didn’t stay on this program forever).
Furthermore, if you just read about the exercises, you’d miss the “secret sauce” of the exercise program – the progression model, and the workout-by-workout adjustments that were made based on Veronika’s progress from the previous series of workouts, energy/fatigue levels, and more. After all, no exercise program should be a static program, where you’re doing the same exercises for the same weights, sets and reps every single time. An exercise program should be dynamic, intelligently, purposefully, and systematically changing the exercise variables to move the client forward… as opposed to haphazardly changing the program whenever you feel like it, without rhyme or reason… like a lot of personal trainers do.
Veronika’s Results
Methods are nice, but we also have to look at the results. So what were Veronika’s results?
- She dropped 18 pounds.
- She went from size 14, back down to her original size before the weight gain: size 6. Despite being 12 pounds heavier than before the weight gain, her dress size was back to the same.
- She added 40 pounds to her squat – so her legs and butt are a lot stronger
- She went from doing chinups and dips with about 70 pounds of assistance – to now doing 4-6 reps without assistance. To impress the significance of this on you, for a woman to be able to do even one chinup is impressive. It puts her in an elite category. Fewer than 4% of women can do 1 chinup. She can do 4-6.
- She can do 20 standard pushups (on her feet, not on her knees). Again, a rare feat for most women.
Basically, she didn’t just regain the upper body strength she had during her competitive swimming days – she exceeded it.
Obstacles Along the Way
Success is rarely a linear line upwards. On the way to success, there are often setbacks. That’s just real life. And certainly, Veronika did have her share of setbacks, like:
- Her honeymoon. What you eat on your honeymoon stays on your honeymoon. Wait – that’s not how it works. Extra calories still pass through customs. So she regained some of the weight she lost. But once she returned to her old routine, the fat came off again.
- Other vacations – the same thing happened as on her honeymoon.
- Lower back pain/tightness. But Davin modified Veronika’s program to accommodate for that, and nowadays, she’s pain-free.
How Veronika’s Life is Different Now
Besides being much leaner and stronger nowadays, a lot of other benefits came, like:
- Her mindset completely shifted. Before, she would think that if she’s tired, she shouldn’t exercise. Now, she has the opposite mindset: if she’s tired, she will exercise, with the expectation of feeling more energetic after her workout. And it comes true almost every single time. Even if she doesn’t have the best workout, she feels good after she completes it.
- She’s much more disciplined. I often say that motivation is overrated and discipline is underrated. Motivation means you’re waiting for an external source of inspiration to get you to exercise. You’re relying on external factors. If they don’t happen, your workout doesn’t happen. Discipline, on the other hand, is doing something when you don’t feel like doing it. You’re not relying on an external source to get you moving. You’re just committed. You’re responsible to yourself.
- She has much lower stress levels. In her video, she says that starting her day with exercise or even just movement sets her up for a much better day.
Overall, we’re very proud of Veronika and what she’s been able to accomplish. If you have your own deadline to prepare for (whether it be a special birthday, anniversary, vacation, etc.), just fill out the application form on our home page. Doing so does not obligate you to anything. It’ll just set up a short, 10–15-minute chat where we’ll discuss your current situation, and figure out whether we can work together. There’s no obligation, sales pitch or pressure.
