Body Transformation Client Spotlight

Freaky fast results through coaching.

As a long-time coach, it’s not often that working with a client provides me with a scenario I’ve never encountered before. Regardless, when Lonna reached out for guidance, she did just that. Her goals of fat loss, muscle gain, and feeling better all around certainly weren’t new.

The thing that was different was that she was following another plan, but wanted me to help her get the most out of it. Let me explain…

Lonna took part in Andy Frisella’s 75 Hard program, which is designed to help people get to better physical and mental places through the completion of daily mandatory habits. These habits, per Google, are as follows:

• Take a daily picture to track your progress. 

• Drink 1 gallon of water.

• Read 10 pages of nonfiction literature.

• No alcohol or cheat meals. 

• Follow a healthy diet. 

• Exercise for 45 minutes twice a day, including one outdoor workout. 

• Do a random act of kindness to make someone's day better.

This is a great list and it’s bound to make people feel better inside and out. At the same time, it leaves decisions/guesswork for participants.

As a wife and mother of five, she wanted to take the construction, planning time, and guesswork out of the diet and training habit portions of the plan. This is where I joined the party and became her training and nutrition coach.

We got to work right away, and, in just over two months, she transformed. The pictures below speak for themselves.

• Fat Loss - 17.0lbs

• Muscle Gain - 1.5lbs

• Confidence Built - Yes

With coaching comes weekly check-ins and unlimited Q&A. During a recent check-in, Lonna told me how she was feeling about her experience so far.

“Hey Ryan! Thank you for your kind words of encouragement! It is worth having a trainer just to get some feedback from someone who is unbiased. I am very happy with my results. I just wanna make sure I keep things going strong! I look forward to continuing to work with you to reach some of my other goals. I also have looked back on week, zero and have for sure made some strength gains!”

Speaking of those strength gains, here’s another quote from Lonna, along with a video of dips she sent in for a form check.

“I love that I can do weighted dips. When we first started this macrocycle, I was actually pretty sad that I could only do bodyweight dips because I remember what I used to be able to do. But I am bringing it back!”

If you’d like to take Lonna’s route and participate in both training and nutrition coaching, fill out my questionnaire for a complimentary assessment and service/pricing details.

Her Numbers

While their reflection in the mirror, how someone feels about their progress, and health markers are the most valuable forms of success, numbers such as bodyweight, lean body mass, and body fat percent are important for the coaching process and understanding what’s really going on from a technical standpoint.

Looking at Lonna’s scale-weight trend line, and considering her goal of fat loss, we see steady progression from a peak of 154lbs to a low of 141lbs.

When we take her timeframe of 66 days into account, her average loss per week equals 1.4lbs.

So far, we know she lost 13lbs from her highest weight to her lowest weight, but Lonna also has access to an InBody machine at her gym, so let’s break her scan numbers down.

This is where I’m able to illustrate the importance of a muscle building-based training program in combination with fat loss-based nutrition. This combination provides the ultimate endpoint results.

The two pictures above show Lonna’s before and after InBody scans. The important values here are her Total Body Water, Dry Lean Mass, Body Fat Mass, and Weight. Let’s examine all of them.

• Weight - We see a total loss of 11.5lbs. This shows us that, taking into account the changes in water, muscle, and fat, she ended up 11.5lbs lighter from start to finish.

• Body Fat Mass - This one is interesting because we see a much larger loss than 11.5lbs. In fact, from start to finish, Lonna lost 17lbs of fat! This is phenomenal, but also a little confusing. How did she lose just 11.5lbs on the scale if she lost 17lbs of fat? This is where the other two factors come in; Dry Lean Mass and Total Body Water.

• Dry Lean Mass - While her body burned 17lbs of fat, it also gained 1.5lbs of lean mass. This is a result of her coached gym program, which was focused on building muscle…and it did.

You see, eating in a calorie deficit without training for muscle will result in muscle loss; this is bad. Counteracting this caloric deficit side effect with resistance training is crucial; this is good!

• Total Body Water - With 17lbs of fat lost, but only 11.5lbs lost on the scale, there are 5.5lbs unaccounted for. New muscle accounts for 1.5 of those pounds, but what about the other four? Well, as expected, water solves the case. We see a gain of 4.0lbs of total body water in her InBody results. Some of this water will be intra-muscular, which is a good thing. Hydrated muscles are healthy muscles. The rest? It’s honestly not important, as fluid retention fluctuations are just part of life for every person on the planet.

The Crucial Calorie Concept

Without a doubt, I could write an entire article, or maybe even a series, on the pros, cons, benefits, and dangers of feeling the need to reach those perfect nutritional calorie and macro targets every day. I’d discuss many aspects pertaining to what it takes/doesn’t take, nutritionally, to see results.

One of them would center around the fact that it’s actually not necessary for one to perfectly adhere to their goal numbers in order to see phenomenal results.

The trend line chart below shows Lonna’s daily calorie intake over the course of her transformation. Clearly, she did not hit her daily calorie goal on the head each day. In fact, she almost never did. Even so, she absolutely crushed it in the results category. Does this surprise you? Does it give you a feeling of relief? Do you find yourself upset when you don’t hit your calorie goal perfectly?

So, if she never perfectly hit her calorie goal, how did she see such stupendous results? The answer is found in the red line, the trend line. Lonna’s daily calorie goal was 1490. Some days she consumed near that amount, some days were much lower, and some days were significantly higher.

But the trend line, signifying the average intake over time, is dead on. We see her average across her transformation sitting at her recommended calorie goal. That’s what matters.

Now, I know for a fact that millions of people in this world aren’t keen to what you’ve just learned about calorie goal adherence versus results. These millions of people believe that if they finish a day and they’re above or below their goal calorie number, they’ve failed. This is really unfortunate and it leads to them feeling like a loser, which leads to dieting failure.

The standard they believe they need to uphold is not only impossible to meet, it’s also completely unnecessary.

Imagine the situation of striving for an unnecessary impossible daily standard. It’s a recipe for failure and, if you’re one of the millions of people who are stuck in that loop, my hope is that Lonna’s results compared to her calorie intake chart, along with my words, get you started on a different path…a healthier and more productive path.

Want me to be your nutrition coach? Fill out my nutrition questionnaire for a complimentary assessment and service/pricing details.

Coaching Perk: Unlimited Q&A

Earlier I mentioned weekly check-ins and unlimited Q&A being part of my coaching service. Lonna takes advantage of being able to pick my brain, as do other clients.

Honestly, I love answering questions because I’m able to pass on knowledge through my answers. There’s also another reason; I want to deliver value to my coaching clients and, to me, answering their questions does just that.

To show you how value is delivered, here’s Lonna’s latest question, along with my answer:

Lonna’s Question - I actually had a guy come up to me last week, when I was doing dips, and he told me that it was impressive, but he suggested that I used a different setup in the gym… He said that my arms looked a little bit wide. But with the machine I was doing my dips on, that distance is the only option. He showed me another place in the gym where there was a knee raise dip station and those handles seem to be a little closer together. Does it really matter?

My Answer - Here are some steps to help you think about dips and grip width:

1. Dips are basically just super-declined presses. Visual what dips look like if you were flipped upside down; do you see how they're a super-declined press? That's step one.

2. Step two is to understand how grip width affects what muscles are activated during presses. Wider grips tend to activate chest muscles more. Closer grips involve the front deltoids (shoulders) more. Both grips involve the triceps.

3. So, if you're using a wider grip during dips, you're going to place more stress on the chest and triceps. If you're using a narrower grip, you're placing more stress on the front shoulders and triceps.

4. One more thing, the more you lean forward during dips, the more likely you are to work your chest. The more upright you stay, the more it becomes about the triceps.

5. Since I'm not having you do them as a chest workout, you should try to be upright and use the narrower of the two grips at your gym.

Want me to be your training coach? Fill out my training questionnaire for a complimentary assessment and service/pricing details.

Conclusion

I wrote this feature for a few reasons:

• Lonna is a phenomenal client and her results are inspirational. I want you to be inspired and I’m proud to show off what she’s accomplished.

• While this is a client profile, there are gems of knowledge throughout, which I want you to read and remember.

• I’m on the hunt for new clients and existing client results show you how signing up with me will change your life.

Thank you for reading my article. I greatly appreciate you taking the time.