Case Studies

I work some days for up to 18 hours. Up early, home late and working back to back with squash clients. In addition to that, I had to move from London to Wales but have maintained many of my London based clients so I now travel between the two locations for weekends. I am there for my daughter and wife and sometime travel Bristol too.

​

My life is full on. I run my own business, have a young family and wife, and I live around 150 miles away from my London clients. So, sleep, training and diet are always lower down on the list of my priorities. Don’t get me wrong, I eat lots of healthy food, but often have wine to unwind, or add too much sugar to my coffee or drink too much coffee because of the long work hours. The result of all of these pressures is I was often feeling run down. This was evident in my body too. I took off of my top and looked, well, soft I guess. 

​

I often made excuses such as I can’t train as I am too busy, I need coffee as my days are too full on and so on. I was starting to build reasons why I didn’t look as toned or ripped or I wasn’t playing my squash competitions quite as well as some others. After listening to an audio book about discipline, I wondered whether I needed more discipline or whether I needed to cut myself a break. Afterall, I work much longer hours and travel far further than most people my age. Perhaps catching a cold or having a glass of wine was ok. I sought after a coach and had worked with Anthony before, he was someone that had previously mentored me into the industry I was in and someone I knew would investigate my situation and give me an open and honest answer about what I needed to do, whether I was accepting a lesser version of myself or whether I should just ease the pressure.

​

It was the best move I made. I set him a very extreme task. I wanted to build up muscle, I wanted to play 4 hours of competitive squash without losing my performance and I wanted to keep up with my 18 hour days. I also wanted to keep up with the morning routines with my little girl and I wanted to transform my body at the same time. I wanted to show my clients and myself that no matter how hard things are, you can achieve the transformation you're after if you apply yourself and become fully committed. But, you need someone that fully understands your situation and is able to map it out effectively, all the moving parts from hormones, to training, rest and recovery, diet and even behaviour. I have never met anyone that understand things and explains them the way Anthony does. He is able find and create the right plan. So, that’s what we did. I said. I want to have my Hollywood before and after and not let a plate fall in my personal life, oh and win my squash tournaments too. He laughed as he knows I am always ambitious.

​

First stage was to start building my muscles up. So, I had to train 5 times per week but the only time I could do that was at 4:30am in the morning. He prescribed some food and supplements to help me recover faster from training to attempt to counter the lack of sleep. Over the 8 weeks of consistent training, I managed to gain around 3kg of solid muscle. Very tricky to do when playing that level of squash and trying to get the food right. Next was the count down to the photoshoot. This had 3 main components. First was the numbers. I have a degree in maths so I loved this part. I was around 15% BF and needed to get down to between 8-10% for my muscles to look fully defined for the photo shoot. We had 10 weeks to achieve it and my total weight was 85.6kg. S0, 85.6 x .14 (14%) = 11.9kg in bodyfat. I had to reduce 6%. My daily BMR (basal metabolic rate) is around 3100 with the workouts and squash included. 4.7 x 8000 = 37600 (total calories I needed to burn). 37600 = 90 (days until shoot) = 417 (that’s how many calories I needed to burn above my base rate per day each day. So, we rounded up to 500 to be safe and I ate 2600kcal per day.

​

Second part was the fasting. Sometimes the body becomes slow at losing fat and needs a little helping hand. You can always tell when this happens because the weight on the scales tends to stagnate. This happened around 4 weeks before the shoot. So, intermittent fasting was introduced with bulletproof coffee with C8 MCT oil in it. Together this helped to mobilize and metabolise the energy from fat. So, I was fasting 16 hours. Training and eating within the 8-hour window. When we started this, weight started dropping again at a steady and consistent pace.

​

The third part is the extreme level. I asked Anthony to show me how they do it, how these actors go through such transformations. He assured me it was possible, but we must act carefully and safely as it includes small levels of dehydration. This helps to show the definition but is very hard. I wanted to know if I could still work and maintain my life while pushing my body and would I get the result I wanted?

​

Now I know what I am capable of. I will keep my training up, keep helping my clients and transforming my body. I won’t ever do the last part (dehydration) again and it was extreme and unnecessary for my life, but I am glad I did it so I can see what it takes. It also illustrates how unrealistic is it as a standard for most people. I will now keep bodyfat low, keep my weight lifting up and track my food and macros to ensure I maintain a healthy look and weight for my long term health, and to feel good when at the beach with my family.

​

Here is my result: