Meet Jenny. She’s a 54-year-old mother of 4 grown kids, and a business manager. She was able to drop 23.5 pounds, 2 dress sizes, and nearly 4 inches off her waist. How did she do it? That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article.
If you want to hear Jenny tell her own story, check out this 4-minute video:
And if you want results like hers, we have a special program just for you. It’s called “Fitness Over 50.” If you wish to see whether you qualify for this program, just fill out the application form on our home page. Filling out the application form doesn’t obligate you to anything. We’ll just get on a quick, 10–15-minute call, so that I can understand your situation, and see whether we can help you. There’s no obligation, sales pitch or pressure.
Jenny’s Life Before
To say that Jenny’s a busy lady would be an understatement. As you read earlier, she works a full-time job, on top of having raised 4 kids.
Unfortunately, as often happens, other people come first, so self-care became a lower priority than taking care of her kids, husband, and work.
Eventually, a few small things happened at the same time:
- Her weight reached 212 pounds.
- As her weight kept going up, she had to buy bigger and bigger clothes.
- Her strength was decreasing. One example of that was that in her younger/stronger years, she was able to carry multiple grocery bags in each hand. Eventually, her strength got to the point where even just a single grocery bag became a challenge. Another example of that is opening jars. That got to be difficult.
She didn’t like the direction this was all going, so she’s tried a few things:
- Different diets (keto, low carb, etc.), and like I said in many articles so far, the diet itself is not the problem. Compliance to the diet is the problem. So the diets were short-lived.
- She’s tried seeing a professional – a registered dietitian. And while she got great advice, it had the same issue as diets: compliance.
- She’s tried fitness classes, but while they got her sweating and moving, they didn’t improve her strength as much as she hoped. Makes sense, because fitness classes are not designed around an individual’s goals. There’s no accountability, regular measurements, customization on an individual basis, etc.
- Exercising on her own. But she had a nagging shoulder injury, and on her own, she’d always make that injury worse.
Fast forward a few years, and she’s been getting my newsletter for a long time now, read about our client success stories, and decided that it’s time to take things seriously, so she hired a personal trainer to overcome all the previous obstacles:
- Unlike diets, dietitians and fitness classes, where there’s no accountability, personal training has built-in accountability (you see your trainer on a regular basis).
- Safety: she needed someone who had a thorough understanding of shoulder anatomy, to avoid re-injuring a sensitive/nagging body part. Her trainer (Deanna) has that.
- Customization: it doesn’t get more personal than personal training. With group fitness classes, the client has to fit the program. With one-on-one personal training, the program has to fit the client.
- Despite her kids being older now, she was still quite busy, and needed a program that fit her busy schedule. Personal training accommodated to her schedule, and on top of that, Deanna gave Jenny a program that she could do even when she wasn’t working with us, in the limited time that Jenny had (which is often less than an hour).
Basically, personal training checked all of her boxes. Her only hesitation was whether she could commit to it. It’s now nearly a year and a half since she started working with us, so looking back at it now, it’s an emphatic “yes.” But at the time, she saw that her lack of commitment to nutrition and proper exercise brought equally bad results. Logic would dictate that a greater level of commitment would bring greater results. So she committed to herself, we set her up with her trainer, Deanna (who’s been with me for nearly 6 years at the time of this writing), and they got to work.
Jenny’s Exercise Program
Here are some of the highlights of Jenny’s program:
Format
Deanna has Jenny using supersets. What are supersets? It’s a way of organizing training. It means choosing two exercises, and going back and forth between those two exercises, until you’ve completed all the necessary sets of those two, before moving on to the next group of exercises.
There are several different ways of organizing training. The most common of which is something called “straight sets.” That is – you do an exercise. Then rest for 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Repeat that exercise. Rest again. Repeat the exercise for a third time. Rest a third time. Move on to the next exercise.
While there’s a time and place for straight sets, it makes less sense for someone trying to lose fat. Why? For two main reasons:
- In a 1-hour workout, you spend just as much (if not more) time resting as you do actually doing the exercise.
- Fatigue accumulates from one set to the next, and performance really drops.
Supersets solve both of those problems. By choosing two exercises for unrelated muscle groups, while one muscle is working, a different muscle is resting. An example of this would be pairing leg extensions (which work the quads – the front of the thighs) with lat pulldowns (which work the mid-back and arms). While the quads are working, the mid-back and arms are resting. While the mid-back and arms are working, the quads are resting.
This maximizes the amount of workout time actually working out and not resting in between sets.
Because working the mid-back and arms is considered rest for the quads, the resting muscle group inevitably gets more rest than if we were doing straight sets, so performance doesn’t drop as much between the first and last sets.
Very efficient. We like efficiency.
Exercise Selection
When I look at other personal trainers’ exercise programs, I see complete neglect of entire muscle groups. While there’s a time and a place for it (for example, if there’s an injury, or someone is specializing in a certain muscle group for whatever reason), when I ask why, it’s often due to a combination of neglect, and a lack of knowledge of basic anatomy. I don’t hire those personal trainers, as I talk about extensively in my article on my hiring process.
Deanna covered all of the major muscle groups.
The majority of the exercises also focused on what’s called “multi-joint exercises.” Those are exercises that work more than one muscle at the same time. Again – we like efficiency. An exercise like squats works both the quads and glutes simultaneously. That cuts the workout time in half, compared to doing one exercise for the quads, and a second for the glutes.
Rehab Exercises
Lots of times, people use their injuries as an excuse. I elaborate on that thoroughly in my cathartic article on excuses. To Jenny’s credit, she didn’t use her shoulder injury as an excuse to procrastinate or delay exercise.
To Deanna’s credit, she didn’t just “work around” the injury. Rather, she deliberately used exercises to improve the injury. Rather than having the conservative mentality of “let’s not worsen it”, we prefer the more proactive mentality of “let’s make it better.”
So Deanna used some direct exercises to improve Jenny’s shoulder injury (and pain).
These are just the highlights of Jenny’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 Jenny’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.
How Jenny Ate Less Without Starving (or Crying)
Want to know the super-secret, highly advanced nutrition plan that Jenny used? Well, for 3 easy payments of $19.99… just kidding.
The advice Deanna gave Jenny was ridiculously simple:
- Eat your first meal at 2PM.
- Eat smaller portions.
Done. Seems simple? Almost too simple? Good. That’s the goal. The reason most diets fail isn’t because they’re ineffective. They’re all equally effective – if you follow them. But that’s a big “if.” A new diet doesn’t just require new food choices – it requires new logistics. If you’re cooking for your family, and you’re on a diet, but your family isn’t, do you then prepare two (or more) different menus? Or does your family (who’s not on a diet) now have to eat what you eat? Basically, the most common reason for dietary failure is simply that your social circle is not conducive to your diet.
Fortunately, fat loss is ridiculously simple. Contrary to what the gurus say, there are only 2 factors that matter:
- Weekly calories
- Daily protein
…and that’s it.
Inevitably, whenever I say that those are the only 2 things that matter, someone emails me, and asks “but what about [FILL IN IRRELEVANT VARIABLE]?” My answer is always to refer them back to those 2 variables.
- But what about sugar? If it’s within your caloric limits and you’ve met your minimum quota for protein, you can have sugar.
- But what about intermittent fasting? If you’re intermittent fasting, but eating too many calories, it won’t work. If you’re intermittent fasting, but eating adequate calories, it’ll work.
- But what about carbs? If it’s within your caloric limits and you’ve met your minimum quota for protein, you can have pasta/potatoes/rice/bread.
Do you get the picture?
So why did Deanna recommend that Jenny have her first meal at 2PM? I spent most of my intermittent fasting book explaining how overrated it is. But don’t get the words “overrated” confused with “useless.” Overrated means that something is being attributed benefits or superiority that it doesn’t have. Intermittent fasting is not a nutritional tool (it doesn’t tell you what to eat – only when to eat), but it is a logistical tool. If this logistical tool helps you make better nutritional choices, awesome! And that’s what worked for Jenny.
As for serving sizes, if you shrink your servings without feeling hungry, you also shrink your calories.
Again, sticking to a diet long-term is more about simplicity than complexity. For example, our 83-year-old client, Stellis, lost 6 inches off her waist by doing 2 simple things:
- Eating more protein at each meal.
- Stop eating when she’s 80% full.
Our other client, Miriam, lost 15 pounds by doing 2 other simple things:
- Before each meal, she’d rate her hunger/fullness on a -10 to +10 scale (-10 to -1 is hungry and +1 to +10 is full). If she rated herself in the pluses, she’d simply delay her meal until she was in the minuses. Do you know what this did? It reduced her calories. And I didn’t even tell her what to eat, and what not to eat. Everything was fair game.
- Pre-planning her meals. If we wait until we’re hungry to eat, we make the tastiest choice. Unfortunately, the tastiest choice is rarely the healthiest choice. But if we thought about what we’re going to eat hours ahead of time, we’ve taken that decision off our plate (pun intended) later. The other reason behind planning is so that we can plan “cheat” meals. A cheat meal is only a cheat meal if it’s unplanned. If you feel like you ate something that you weren’t supposed to, you’re more likely to go off the rails. But if you planned to have a chocolate cake (you knew there would be a work party, birthday party, outing at a restaurant, etc.), and you had the chocolate cake, well, you just followed the plan. You’re not off track, so there’s no need to get back on track.
Three different clients, three different strategies, but the end result was the same: a drop in body fat and dress sizes.
Again, I want to emphasize that the key is simplicity. For Jenny, the two strategies that worked for her were intermittent fasting and smaller portions. But that’s because Deanna asked her a bunch of questions to figure out the easiest, laziest, yet most impactful ways to reduce Jenny’s calories. We have over 40 tools in our toolbox to help clients lose weight. But the key is simply selecting the 1-3 tools that will work for the individual.
The Results
Methods are nice, but if they don’t lead to results, what’s the point? So how were Jenny’s results? Fantastic!
- She dropped from 212 lbs. to 188.5 lbs – a loss of 23.5 lbs.
- That translates to a loss of two dress sizes.
- She also lost 9 cm (almost 4 inches) off her waist, 7 cm (almost 3 inches) off her hips, and 4 cm (about 1.5 inches) off her thighs.
- She went from doing rows with 45 pounds to now, 70 pounds – so her mid-back muscles (the ones responsible for good posture) are much stronger.
- Her leg extensions went from 34.5 pounds to now, 52.3 lbs. – so her thighs are much stronger.
- Her hamstring curls went from 30 pounds to now, 40 pounds.
Jenny’s Obstacles
We wish that success was a straight line, but inevitably, “real life” happens. Just so you don’t think it was easy for Jenny, it wasn’t. Some obstacles did get in the way:
- As mentioned earlier, she had a shoulder injury (impingement) that limited a lot of motions for her, and when she started, hurt significantly (about 7-9 out of 10). Nowadays, it’s only about 3-4/10).
- A few months into working with us, she fractured her ankle in an accident. But that didn’t stop her from working out. She’d come to the gym in her brace, and exercise the rest of her body. She’s not an excuse-maker. Nowadays, she’s pain-free.
- She also has arthritis in her toes. Occasionally that flares up, but again, that doesn’t stop her from working the rest of her body.
How Jenny’s Life is Different Now
Now that Jenny is leaner and stronger, how does that translate to her life outside the gym?
- As mentioned earlier, she can now wear clothes that she couldn’t wear when she was first starting out with us.
- That leads to more confidence that she’s actually doing something good for herself, and no longer putting herself last.
- She’s back to being able to carry multiple grocery bags in each hand, like she did in her younger years.
Overall, we’re very proud of Jenny, and the results that she’s achieved. If you want similar results, we have a special program just for you. It’s called “Fitness Over 50.” If you wish to see whether you qualify for this program, just fill out the application form on our home page. Filling out the application form doesn’t obligate you to anything. We’ll just get on a quick, 10–15-minute call, so that I can understand your situation, and see whether we can help you. There’s no obligation, sales pitch or pressure.
