Yes, what's going on, everybody. Welcome back to the rugby muscle podcast or YouTube channel. Have you are watching or listen? It's obviously great to have you here today. We are going to be talking about big body composition changes, namely fat loss big body transformations. And what I've learned from coaching. These big body composition changes in rugby players, the overarching themes and lessons that can be applied to you in your pursuit of the same thing. So when it comes to big transformations and body competition changes, this is obviously at the heart of the fitness industry. What it's about those before and after pictures. And they are always good to look at, but some more often than not, it's not appreciated the work that's gone in either, cuz it's just not believed or because it's overhyped as some sort of special training regime or supplement or whatever to elicit that change. Unfortunately that's not the reality. It's there's lots. Common themes that go into making these big body composition changes. And that's what we're gonna be discussing in this video. But before I do, I would like to invite you right now to hit the thumbs up button, because that will promote this video. It will help the channel. Obviously it's gonna make me feel good, but it's more about helping this video reach people that fool for nonsense hypey things when it comes to this fitness industry, I'm not a big fan of what the fitness industry does and the way it misleads. So with this video, we're going to get into actually what it does take to make a big drastic body composition change. If you haven't already hit the thumbs up button, then hit subscribe. At least if you are new or let me know at any point in the comments blow, whether you'd agree or disagree with any of these points, If you've made some sort of body transformation yourself, you can detail whether you agree with these points, whether you have any extra points I'd love to hear and interact with you in the comments below, but before I get into the actual themes and the lessons, let's give some examples. So you can see here, if you're watching on the video, obviously you can't see it. If you're on the podcast, it's just eight or so transformations. I think that I've just pluck out. Those were the first eight that I could grab. I, I was gonna say nothing special about these guys, but they're, I mean, obviously they're all special. They're all in like impressive transformations. Most of which are going to be big amounts of fat loss with a little amount of muscle gain, along with it. Some are a bit more muscle gain, but overall, as you can see, each one of these would be considered a transformation and all of these guys that did this, yes, they put in hard work, but they also, you know, they applied these lessons that I'm going to get into. And actually at the beginning, they might have been skeptical that they could have made this big change. You know, they're, they're not necessarily like, wouldn't believe you at all. If you were to like, you know, come from the future and show them this after picture, but they would be like pleasantly surprised, at least, you know, it's not something that they knew they were going to achieve. They look back and they're very happy with this progress and maybe somewhat surprised, but they obviously made that change. Let's get into it. Number one, nutrition is everything. We know this, right? You know, you probably expected to see this as part of this video, you wouldn't have expect it. Would've been weird if I'd have got into a body transformation video without addressing nutrition. Sometimes training regimes do that. And the reality is that training regimes like are a small contributor to a body transformation, obviously a little bit more when it comes to gaining muscle, but not as much as nutrition still because you cannot, out-train a bad diet, poor nutrition is always going to lead to poor results. So nutrition needs to be there. And then training can facilitate that change. But if nutrition is not there. Is incredibly difficult to make any sort of body composition change, body transformation, even like, if you do the best muscle gain in training ever, if you're not eating enough, if you're not eating enough protein, or if you're doing the best you know, the highest intensity you're doing all the work that you can with your training to try and lose that fat, but you're eating too many calories again. You're just not gonna make that transformation. Yes. With training, you can make some training adaptations, right? Your body can adapt that way. That can become more powerful and stronger. But when it comes to body composition, it is every, everything is nutrition, right? And these people that have made these body transformations some will already have good nutrition in place and they don't need to make too many adjust. I still find that they need to quantify stuff, particularly as they make bigger and bigger and more impressive changes. There will be some level of quantification in there that just to, just to know how much protein, how many calories, their general themes, it doesn't have to be tracking every single day. Every single gram has to be perfect. It's more about just getting quantities down that they can then use to, you know, adjust as they need to, to get this big body transformation. Some will need to quantify, you know, and they don't have good habits and just quantifying itself helps them along the way, because they start to learn about their nutrition. They start to learn about the different foods that they're eating and the, you know, the amount of calories, the amount of carbohydrates, maybe the amount of protein and fat as. But they start to learn about the different foods. They also learn about their habits as far as you know, when they're hungry, because now they're, you know, they're having to be conscious every time they eat. It's impossible to do unconscious snacking when you've got to consciously write it down every single time you eat, you know, a lot of people will eliminate a large degree of their snacking simply because they're logging. So obviously that helps with their habits, but it helps them just become conscious of it. It's. that they're, they hate snacking. It's just that they didn't even know they snacked when they were watching TV or whatever it was. Right. It's they've learnt the habits by becoming conscious. A lot of people it's that unconscious eating that ends up sabotaging them because they don't even really register the fact that they're eating these snacks because they're, they're distracted. They're doing something else. Whil they're doing it. Then there are other people that just have horrendous nutrition, you know, I would say horrendous is in like they barely any protein. They're barely proactive. What they even want, or even having a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or even four different meals or whatever, you know, or should I say, let alone four to five meals throughout the day. They have no idea. And these people will still quantify over time. But their main priority would be to, learn the basics, learn to have structured meals be predictable enough with their nutrition that they can then build a base to then, you know, have their habits and then quantify off of after that, if you are just, if you're someone that doesn't eat or have no idea how much protein you're eating, you have no idea what your next meal is gonna be. You have no idea about the amount of vegetables you're eating. You, you just eat, what's given to you and, and that's it. Then you need to get some basics down first, before you even have to worry about tracking, because tracking is just gonna be an extra layer of complexity that you don't need at that point. And in fact, that leads me to my next point about these body transformations. If I can press the slide, there we go. Simplicity is key too many people when they're looking for a body transformation, look for perfection on week. these guys did not because the, the reality is week one makes no difference. Right? And in fact, it can actually lead to a negative because you put so much emphasis on getting everything perfect. You put so much focus and energy and motivation into getting week one. Perfect. And obviously like no big changes are gonna happen within one week. And, and then that can be kind of disheartening. It kills momentum and then you've realize, oh my God, I've put so much effort into this week. One, I've gotta do this. You know, several, several, several more weeks, more months going into the future to even see a change. I don't think this is gonna be worth it. And then you drop it right. Instead you should take that first week to sort of find a groove. And it's not about tracking all of the minutia and getting everything down to the perfect. It's about building the habit's about getting close enough. It's about doing your nutrition well enough so that you can find a groove that after a few weeks, you know, then you can feel that momentum come and you can feel it fitting in with your life. And in fact, because it takes a few weeks to find that groove, it works doubly well, because it also takes a few weeks to see the transformation or the sea that, you know, the body composition changes in the mirror that doesn't really happen usually after a week, it will. After a few weeks, if you are doing things right. And then even then once you've got onto the track, sometimes you won't see it after a few weeks, but then it'll take a few more weeks after that to really notice it because these changes are slowly happening over time. And, you know, if you apply more and more and more time, then they're gonna be bigger and bigger and bigger changes. And that's why you need to find a groove. You need to make it fit in with your life. and that's what happened with these people. They fit their, their nutrition in with their life, which allowed them to stay consistent, which obviously then allows 'em to get the change and not just get a change. You know, anyone that makes a change within a month or, or, or two months. Yes. That's kind of impressive, but it's more impressive is, is if you can keep that body transformation you can keep that new physique that you've now attained. That's more impressive. And for the most part, at least keep like 80 to 90% of it. Unfortunately, most we don't have a, a problem losing fat. We don't have a problem making these transformations. We have a problem keeping them because so many people have lost a few pounds and then fallen off the wagon. Right? These people are able to make a huge transformation because they found a. A regime if, if you will, that fits in with their life and allow them to keep the change. And because they've done that they've been able to stay consistent, right? No matter what's happening with their rugby season, you see this, a lot of people, a time with rugby players where they'll get in season, that's say I'm playing every weekend. There's no way I can diet or I'm playing this every weekend. There's no way that I can even bother training to try and gain muscle. You know, or you see this with people when they, they get in season. and that that's the time or preseason even I've done a video about this. There's that's when they decided that's when they they've gotta get fit. And when they're not playing rugby, they have, they don't do anything. You know, that's not their approach that you need to take. If you want to make a dramatic change, you have to, you know, apply this consistently over periods of months, which will cross through the off season, the in season and the preseason. And the whole time you will be training. Training becomes a priority for these people. to make this change, before this transformation, a lot of these people were still in the gym, but it was somewhat sporadic, right? It would be dropped if it was inconvenient. If you had any sort of social plans, if work got stressful, if you know, whatever happened, you would look for an excuse or these people would look for an excuse to kind of skip the gym. But that's not the reality with the training process. It has to be consistent. You're not just trying to get the perfect first weeks or you really push it. No, you're just going into the gym and you're ticking the box, you know, perfect first weeks or, or special training programs again, that's magic bullets. That's type. That's what the fitness industry is trying to sell you. But the reality is that it doesn't exist. Right? It's training is about the process and just being consistent and ticking the box every time and every now and again. Yeah. When the weeks are cool for it, you can absolutely push the intensity when it is needed. But for the most part, you're going into the gym. You're ticking the box. You're not expecting the big body transformation because of a couple weeks of going to the gym. You're expecting the big body transformation because of the consistency that you've applied. And these people also stayed consistent when it comes to socials. And what I mean by that is both sides of the coin. Right. They stayed consistent with their nutrition to an extent when it came to socials, but they also stayed consistent by keeping their social commitments in their life. They didn't just drop everything and say, oh, I'm gonna diet for eight weeks. I can't do anything. That's not sustainable. Obviously that's not gonna work. You have to keep a social life. Particularly as a rugby player, there are socials that are important for you to be a part of your team. And I would encourage you, even if you're making, you know, the most drastic body transformation that you could to instill, attend these socials and be a part of them and, and, and obviously enjoyed them. Now, there are several different ways that these guys that made these transformations I handled it with them as part of their coaching. Some of them, we would just say, okay, this day is a wash, but it doesn't lead to, you know, a binge for the next few days. Actually it doesn't lead to any binge within itself. You're just gonna enjoy that day. You're not trying to get as many calories in because this is your one day off the wagon. No, you have to still stay fairly consistent others. We would set aside calories. So we would lower calories down for the summer, or we. You know, budget calories by increasing the training that in the days leading up or the day of and that's quite rare, but it would still be a tactic that we could use or lowering the calories around the social. That would also happen or, or the day of, if it was a big social event, maybe, you know, we would practice lowering the calories for breakfast or whatever it was. There were several different tactics we had. And one of the biggest tactics that we did with, with these socials was to say, okay, this is just gonna be a deload or a time or some of your time off, particularly when we're looking at like tours or we're looking at going away for a. this sort of thing is the perfect time for a time off. You don't really want to be taking a week vacation and thinking, oh my God, I've gotta stick to my diet and I've gotta do everything. Perfect. Likewise, you still shouldn't be going on vacation and going, oh my God, I'm off my diet. I'm going to eat everything sight. Both of those things are going to lead to a bad time. When you're going on vacation, it's a good time to have a planned pause because then, you know, you're not going on vacation just to eat. Whereas if you were saying, you know, if you were going to a Chinese buffet and that was your one meal off, then you know, you're gonna get several plates and you're probably gonna overdo it. Whereas if you're just on a vacation, you're still, you're just enjoying yourself and you're joined your food as part of that. And we would make a few simple rules just to make sure the wheels didn't completely come off and we had to undo a load of bad when we come back. but it still wasn't overly restrictive. And that way, you know, we're not getting the binges that take us away from our, our goal, because obviously like the longer you do these pauses and the more you do these pause. Like the longer it's going to take you to eventually reach your end goal. And these people understood that. So, you know, when it was time for their pause, they took it, but they took a pragmatic approach. They didn't feel the stress of having to diet, but they also didn't feel the guilt of, you know, having a terrible binge or even like just staying or straying slightly away from the diet because it was planned time off. And these planned pauses are important times to sort of reset the motivation battery to get you excited to diet. Again, excited to make more changes, but also prepare you for life. I guess when you are not diet, because you're not supposed to be diet all all the time, you know, it just gives you a bit of a break cuz. It is a, a constant underlying stress trying to adhere to strict ish nutrition rules. If you're trying to make this. And by default, because you're trying to make a change. It means you're trying to do something different. It's going to be causing underlying stress. So if you just take some planned pauses, it's always gonna help as, and when they're needed. The other cool thing about these pauses is, you know, they give you a deadline to, to work towards it. It's not your gonna be sticking with this diet that is somewhat restrictive. For the foreseeable future or forever, you've got a light at the end of the tunnel where you say, okay, I'm gonna work for a few weeks or for six weeks or for three months. And then I'm gonna take a plan, pause, and then we Cango again. Or we can assess where I need to be. Once I'm there that allows you to, again, practice the habits, you know, that you've learned whilst you're dieting in a less restricted state, so that you're not always dieting or undoing the work of that diet, but allows you to be less, totally restrictive, but still practice and sort of get yourself rid of all of that underlying stress that comes with, the bigger transformation that we're trying to make, the stricter we're being, and it gives you that opportunity to just get yourself rid of all of this underlying stress that comes with diet because of that change, you know, that you are making on a, on a continual basis on a day to day basis, you're having to do something that is still not quite who you are. Right. does that make sense? Let me know if it makes sense. I'm sort of rambling here, right? final point I'll say on this is that it still takes time away from the transformation process, right? So we're not looking to do as many pauses as we can because we know that that's gonna help sometimes. Like we need to just grit our teeth and get into the, the work that needs to be done. We need to keep an eye on the calories that we're in taking. We need to keep consistent in the gym and taking a plan. Pause just for the sake of taking a plan pause, because we think it's good. It's still it's not always a great idea. Planned pauses are great. When the time is needed, vacations, socials extra stressful times at work, there are definite times for planned pauses To really help push on from, in the future. Also when someone is overly stressed with their diet and they just, you know, just can't see, you know, their, their motivation is starting to drop. Those are great times to plan pauses, but it still has to be a knowledge that these planned pauses whilst they're great are still taking time away from, that end goal of the transformation. Right. So if you were to do, let's just pluck out some numbers outta my ass, it could take, say a transformation that took 12. We're in the middle of it. We're now gonna take a two week pause. Well, now that transformation is gonna take 14 weeks. So we're pushing that date back of, of our sort of end goal. And obviously, you know, we're not dealing with a specific date that has to be done by, but we are dealing with a physique that we are pushing back and back and back and back on an end goal that we are pushing back by taking these pauses. And we're acknowledging that these pauses are a net benefit when they are a net benefit, but we're not taking them for the sake of taking a planned pause. Onto the next overarching theme of these body transformations. none of them were bulking. In fact, when you're trying to lose fat. You can be kidded into thinking. Bulking would be a good idea just because subconsciously you want to eat more food and you want to eat all of the food. Bulking, you know, I hate the term. Bulking is a terrible term, but it's what people understand. So I'm gonna go with it for this one. And unfortunately it ends up being a real slippery slope and more often than not is way more of a net negative than it is a positive bulking or, or gaining mass should only be done once. Good habits are in place. And that's what happened with these transformations is in fact, I think maybe, you know, I can count on my hand, the amount of times that we, we really focused on bulking and we really had to really push the food for the most part, people that need to push the food already have a decent enough physique. And if they're the people that just forget about eating, and if they're stressful, they have to, you know, just be proactive about getting in enough calories. And that's again, more about performance than it is about gaining muscle. There are still different ways that we can handle it. But the most important thing I wanna stress here is that it's way too easy when we're looking to gain muscle and people wanna do it at the end of a diet because they want to eat more food because they've been restricted and they really want to see how much food that they can eat and, and enjoy eating food and, and tell themselves that, yes, I'm, I'm bulking. I'm allowed to do all of this. When in reality, that's not the case. You're not gonna be gaining muscle that far so that you need to force the nutrition or force feed yourself calories and, and really ramp up the. Because the reality is that if you're someone that's had to really focus to lose fat, like eating enough, calories comes easy to you. In fact, it comes too easy to you. That's why you gain the weight in the first place. And so rather than you know, go for the traditional bulking approach, normally what we would do is just look at slightly higher calories than the diet. And these people would still have to keep the same habits, in those slightly higher calories to stop them from over because over eating can still be really easy. And in fact, what we would use is high calories as a base. And then even when they would go, you know, they would go out to eat for socials and they would have like, you know, because again, people look to bulk because they want to eat these unquote dirty foods and they want to go out and, and have a real good time at restaurants and stuff. That's fine. But that still has to be included within your higher calories. Right. you still have to learn the lessons to keep things under control. And so that's a really important point that people that are looking to bulk and these people at the end of their body transformations had to remember. Right. Sometimes we didn't even put their calories up much at all. And in fact, we always just said was there's, you know, two to three times a week when you go out to eat or, or when you feel like it, you can have a meal that's higher calories and that's gonna be enough to. keep you away from a deficit, keep you in a surplus to allow you to gain muscle, but it's not gonna be so much that you're gonna gain fat. Thanks to the fitness industry. We kind of get crazily, overly optimistic of the amount of muscle that we can gain in a short period of time. Like even six months, if you can gain a pound a month for six months, that is absolutely phenomenal progress. And I wouldn't expect. For most people, like, that's just a reality. That's why I've put Johnny Sexton here. Because particularly when we're looking at rugby players, When it comes to gaining muscle, that can't be the only priority when you're in the gym. There has to be other things going on. And Johnny sexted here, he is looking pretty jacked, but he is also like now in his like late thirties or at least past his mid thirties. So it's taken him, you know, 10 to 15 years. Plus to gain this amount of muscle to look this impressive. If you look here, he was always smaller and smaller and smaller. He didn't just do this over a period of three to six months. No, he did this over years and that's the way it has to be. If you want to gain muscle mass as a rub player. You have to adhere to this process of training. in order to facilitate that muscle gainer. And nutrition can obviously is then a part of it, but it becomes performance nutrition you eat to perform at your best, whilst not gaining fat. That's, that's kind of, it, that's kind of how bulking for rugby players should be working. And that's, that's the approach that these guys would take, particularly the ones that gain muscle. That's it, there's an occasional trim up like once a year where you. It's either, you know, from one to two months to maybe three months where you would just trim up the excess fact that you might have gained from one too many socials. But throughout the year, the main goal is just to eat enough and eat well enough to keep performing. And that way, you know, you've got that monkey off your back. And that's why I encourage transformations like this to happen at the front end, where you lose that fat so that you, and build the good habits so that then you can focus on your performance, nutrition so that you can eat to train at your best without worrying about gaining excess fat, because you've got a little bit of wiggle room because you're not already, you know, carrying too much LA, hopefully that makes sense. Right? You get that monkey off your back of that fat loss so that you don't have to worry about it. So you don't have to worry about performing at your best and. Losing fat. No, you know, you've lost that fat. Now, your only focus is performing at your best and then occasionally once a year or so, you'll try and trim that up if you really need to. But otherwise all your focus and resources can be into performing at your best. And if you do that and you train efficiently, you do the right sort of training. You're going to gain muscle. Look at Johnny Sexton here, right? That's not, he's not been training like a bodybuilder for years and he's not got the best genetics for building muscle yet. He's built himself, you know? Well, at least a pretty jacked arm, if not a bit of a weird farmer's town because of that years of work that he's been able to put into the gym and the nutrition that he's sort of allowed himself to perform at his best. And, and that's why he's still in his late thirties and performing at a ridiculously high level, as you've seen in the past few weeks in this island test series, actually, you've seen the past couple years still with Ireland in, in his late thirties, performing at his best. And a final point that I wanna make about these big body transformations that I have helped coach is the conditioning side of things. A lot of people think, oh, I'm getting fit and I'm losing fat. And those two are the same thing. They're not. yes. Conditioning can be a part of this process, but they're two separate goals. They're very, very much interlinked, but they're not the same thing, right? But when they are properly done together, right. firstly, if you are carrying less overall weight, right? It's like you are not wearing a weighted vest. Imagine playing a game with an extra 10 kilo weighted vest. That game would be significantly harder. Imagine doing a fitness test with a 10 kilo or even a five kilo weighted vest that would make that game much more difficult. Well, that's what you're doing. If you're carrying excess fat, because that fat is not helping you in any way in your performance. So to take that weight. Obviously is going to give not the illusion, because it actually is a reality of B bed's edition, but it's without any sort of extra conditioning work. And obviously with that, like as I've already touched on, once you've lost that weight, you can then obviously eat to really perform at your best, which is obviously going to really help your conditioning. And whilst both of those things, aren't directly affecting the actual condition side of things, right. You're fueling yourself is just allowing you to perform it your best and losing that fat is just taking that weight, your vest off., but they still lead to a greater increase in performance, which is what you're wanting at the end of the day. Then when you're looking at your training now you've got the freedom to really choose what you want to improve about your performance. What is it in your, in your rugby that you need to improve? And for a lot of these people that are overweight, it is that conditioning component, but they're not training for that fat loss, right. They're training to improve their conditioning. Yes. Training to improve their conditioning is going to burn calories, which is going to make fat loss that much easier. And that's kind of the interlink and how really synergistic these two things can be. And it does really work well together, but they were viewed as absolutely separate things they did. You know, in fact, these guys did a lot of low intensity aerobic conditioning. it's almost a fat burning zone. If you're on a machine in the gym, the aerobic zone as the fat burning. But it's also the zone where you can get most bang for your buck as far as not causing a, a large amount of fatigue and really improving your aerobic system, which will then fuel you when you play rugby. Now. I'm not gonna go crazy into like zone two and stuff. I I've done enough videos on that. You can go check out the rest of the channel if you want to see more about why aerobic work is so important for rugby. But just understand that, you know, performance training itself leads to so much greater motivation in training. It leads to a, a better net fat loss result because you're not just training for fat loss. I don't think fat loss training really exists. Right. Working out to burn calories. Like it fails over and over again, because we mentioned at the very start of this video. When it comes to fat loss, nutrition is everything. Performance training can help that, right? Cuz it's going to be a period of time, you know, hour or so a day. Give or take where you are going to be burning a higher amount of calories than you are just doing nothing. And it's going to, you know, which will then. Give you more calories to play with when it comes to your diet, but at the end of the day, it's, it's a separate thing. And these guys viewed their performance training as a separate thing. They did that zone two work to improve their aerobic conditioning. Yes. It caused minimal amount fatigue and allowed them to get a lot of fat loss done. But that's not the point, right? They did that to to boost their aerobic system. Not to I elicit fat loss. There was no working out just to burn calories. That's, that's a stupid use of your time. It's a waste of your. In, you know, because it can all be undone by one bite of a cookie. And with that, we'll go for one last final point, the rugby physical preparation pyramid. Now in this new rugby fiscal preparation pyramid, obviously things have changed a little. But for the most part, what you're gonna see here and what these guys shared in common, wasn't even like the level one human phase. Yes. they worked on their aerobic system, their strength and a hyper trophy. Yes. Those things, were done with these transformations. But again, that was the training. The training stuff was what built the pyramid. It's not what elicits the fat loss. The fat loss comes from that foundation. Some people have great genetics and they're already shreded and they come out the womb shreded and you know, they're 12 or 13 and they've got six packs and they've got like large amounts of muscle. Those are gonna be the professional players. Those are gonna be the people that you see if they ever go to the gym, end up being post trainers that don't know anything because they haven't learned the habits and the consistency that is needed to really make a change. They've always just been blessed, looking great. Whereas these people that made these transformation. Their focus was on the foundation, as far as habits and consistency goes, that's the big focus, right? Don't get distracted by the training. Don't get distracted by any of the crazy stuff. That's not what these people did. They stayed ridiculously consistent. They kept things simple. They focused on their nutrition and then they allowed their training process to allow them to improve their body. As far as playing rugby goes and obviously in turn that helped them with their fat loss, but that wasn't the. All right. That'll wrap this video up. If you've made it to the end, you haven't already kicked thumbs up. Please do so. Helps us out. And if you enjoyed this video, if you've made it to here, I'm assuming you found some stuff valuable. So click that thumbs up button. Let me know any points you agree or disagree with in the comments below If you wanna work with rugby muscle, I'll put links to whatever we've got available to you in a description also below and subscribe. If you are new with that, I think I'm done here. See you guys in the next one.