Greed is a word with nasty connotations. People think of greed as a terrible thing. A greedy person has lack of control, a lack of kindness, or a complete lack of caring for anyone but themselves. But greed can also be a good thing when it’s used under the right circumstances, such as in our training.

Most of us start training by first answering this question: What are my goals?

Good question but not good enough. The answers I hear from clients are usually one of the following: “I want to lose fat” or “I want to build muscle.” Great, but I bet that’s not all you want. Get greedier.

Instead ask yourself this: If I could build my ideal body, what would I have to change about my current self?

My bet is that it would involve more than just a bit of fat loss or lean mass gains. When I first started training, there were three things I needed to change about my physique if I was going to build my ideal body.

I needed more muscle. I was a skinny dude—too skinny actually. This left me feeling unconfident in how I looked, reluctant to take my shirt off at the beach, and a bit shy around the ladies. I felt muscle would be the remedy.

I needed to lose fat. I didn’t just want muscle. I wanted lean muscle. I wanted six-pack abs and a lean, athletic looking physique. Ladies like abs on guys. They also like a guy who has muscle but doesn’t take it too far.

I needed to improve my athleticism. I was always an athlete, starting out with hockey, moving to basketball, and then finally boxing. Becoming stronger, more powerful, quicker, and faster was as important to me as well as building muscle. So just muscle wouldn’t do. I needed improvements in my athleticism as well.

Ask for more and receive more…

So I had all these goals with my training, but I was still skinny. I had spent years looking to the “usual” sources like bodybuilding magazines and so forth, but nothing gave me the results I wanted for a number of reasons.

I couldn’t add size training like a professional bodybuilder because a professional bodybuilder’s workouts didn’t allow enough recovery time for a skinny guy trying to gain mass. They also didn’t help me improve my athleticism whatsoever so I knew I had to look elsewhere. I needed rest as much as I needed to be in the gym, and the workouts I was following didn’t allow this—a lesson I would finally learn years down the line.

However, I did eventually come across the right training routine when I met a trainer at a gym that I was working at. I lucked out when I got that job. Part of the reason why they brought me in was because I was boxing and they felt I could bring something unique to their staff. But to be honest, they already had some pretty impressive trainers on board, and I was just starting out. So naturally I felt pretty lucky to be there.

This gym focused on training professional and semi-professional athletes. Many of those athletes needed to maintain muscle during a grueling season. I sat down with one particular trainer and we came up with the system that would help me turn things around and get all I wanted to achieve.

Here are eight changes we made to my routine:

  1. To start, I threw out the isolation exercises. Later I added them back in and replaced them with compound exercises. This meant more bench press, squats, and deadlifts and fewer curls. I also dropped the number of sets I was doing for each muscle group. Instead of doing body part splits, I did an upper/lower split or even a full body split. This meant more sleep between each time that muscle was worked. More sleep = better recovery = more muscle. Whereas I used to hit a body part once a week, I was now hitting it two to three times a week. This was something that had an immediate impact on my gains.
  2. I got more rest. I dropped the amount of days I lifted each week to a maximum of four, sometimes three. This allowed me more time to recover and actually see the benefits of the work I was doing in the gym. If you’re trying to put on your first bit of muscle, you need recovery time as much as you need training time. I’ve been in that mode where nothing is working and you think the solution is to do more. Resist that urge because more often than not, if you aren’t gaining mass, the answer is to actually do less.
  3. I added heavy lifting to my routine simply to improve performance. Sometimes I’d lift heavy on the same day as a hypertrophy day, and other times I’d split it up. With heavy lifting, you want your time under tension to be lower than with “muscle building” workouts. If I had one or two days of just heavy lifting, the actual time spent lifting weight was pretty short. The lifts were fast as well. With hypertrophy exercises, I’d have a cadence of one second for the concentric contraction and a three-second count for the eccentric contraction. Or even a five and five count. But with powerlifting, it’s as fast as possible. You want to explode with the weight. Time under tension isn’t the goal.
  4. I dropped the duration of my workouts. I went from an hour or more to never more than 45 minutes, primarily finishing around the 35-minute mark. Again, this allowed more recovery time and increased the intensity of my workouts. Increasing the intensity of my workouts was the key. I thought I was working hard before, but now I was timing my rest periods and even some of my sets, and I was gassed at the end of each session. Hard work truly pays off.
  5. I focused my nutrition around my workouts. I had a good meal an hour before my session with lots of protein, good fats, and whole carbs. I also had a shake with a 2:1 carbs/protein ratio within 15 minutes of finishing my workout, which was followed by another big meal an hour or so later.Centering my meals on my workouts meant that my body was getting the nutrients it needed when it needed it most—when my muscles were starving for nutrients after having just been broken down during an intense training session.
  6. I ate a ton of food. I didn’t necessarily follow a meal plan or count calories; I just ate a lot more than I ever had before. I drank a lot of whole milk and had carbs, proteins, and fats with every meal. And I never said no to seconds.
  7. I changed up my training split every three weeks. This meant that my gains wouldn’t plateau and I wouldn’t get bored doing the same stuff in the gym week after week. One of the biggest obstacles of consistently gaining lean muscle mass is avoiding plateaus. By changing things up every three weeks, I was able to consistently gain a pound a week for 32 weeks (average of a pound a week).
  8. I added weight to my lifts every week. Whether it was two pounds or ten pounds, each week I tried to improve—another important thing to do to avoid plateaus. No matter what you’re doing, constant improvement is important. This is never more important than in the weight room.

The results

The immediate results were increases in my strength and power. I ended up winning my next two fights by knockout, having not won a single fight by knockout in any of my previous fights. I also began adding weight—something that I really thought wasn’t possible having tried so many bodybuilding programs without adding a single pound of lean muscle. I gained 32 pounds of lean muscle in 32 weeks. This meant no more boxing because I was now way above my fighting weight. But I was happy. I was now more confident than ever before, and I actually got all that I wanted out of my training.

In short, I built my ideal body. I was more muscular, leaner, and more athletic than I had ever been, and it felt even better than I thought it would.

The lesson

I’m all for focusing on one thing at a time, but I think it’s important to go after our ideal, not just settle for what’s most realistic. Also, training using a performance-based method keeps our training intense, but it can also have a greater aesthetic effect on our physiques than simply bodybuilding or lifting for hypertrophy. You truly get the best of both worlds

I could have built a rounded, muscular body, but that wasn’t my ideal. My goal body was lean, muscular, and athletic. Training to improve performance helped me achieve all three of those goals in a big way.

Doing exercises like plyometrics helped me increase strength in lifts like squats and deadlifts—two lifts that are very important for lean mass production because of the fact that they’re responsible for the release of testosterone and human growth hormone. These are two very powerful and important hormones in our quest to build muscle.

All in all, we can achieve everything we set out to achieve. The greater the goal, the more likely you are to achieve something you’re happy with.

“If you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you land among the stars.”