How I got Ripped in 2 Years by Following These 12 Principles
It takes time and effort to get ripped. It won’t happen magically overnight. These are the most essential principles that I’ve lived by and followed for the past two years in order to get ripped.
After having read this post you shouldn’t have to read anymore about this stuff. Now you should focus purely on following through and taking action.
This post has been a long time in the making. It came out a bit larger than expected: 3300 words. Here’s a summary of the principles you will learn:
Consistency is Key: Condition yourself into going whenever possible.
(Intermittent) Fasting: Eat 1-3 times a time. Try different fasting methods to find one that works.
Alcohol Rule: If/when you go out drinking don’t eat anything.
Lifting Heavy Weights: Compound Exercises: Keep it below 10 reps and don’t do isolation exercises or machines.
How to Spend your Leisure: ABF: Flex your body as much as possible!
Track Results: Write down results, feelings, or take pictures. It adds up quickly!
The Four Parts of a Workout: Pre-workout ritual, lifting weight, recovering between sets, and resting.
Get Good Sleep: Sleep in a pitch black room and make sure you properly exhaust yourself.
Skip Cardio: It won’t make you ripped or build muscle.
Protein and Diet: Eat 1 g protein / pound or 2 g protein / kilo.
Experimentation: Do a hair analysis to find out how well your current diet is working for you.
Philosophy of Rippedness: Go five more minutes, enforce the mindset of a champion!
It was actually quite challenging to write this post because most of the stuff in here –even if it may seem like a lot to take on – is automated. I do a lot of this stuff without having to think about it anymore, so it was a little hard to remember all the strategies that I use.
Before I get into how I got ripped in 2 years I need to inform you that you can get very, very advanced in theory of bodybuilding, nutrition, diet, and health, but that’s not what I’m going to do in this post. I’m aiming to simplify as much as possible!
Besides, these areas of research are subject to a lot of contrary claims – there is relatively little conclusive research. As far as I know, one of the very few things that everyone agree on is that the more muscle you have the higher your metabolic baseline will be and the more calories you burn every day as per automation.
It’s easy to drown in information about what or how you should lift, diet, or carry on with your life in order to get ripped, but ultimately I would not take the advice of anyone who is not ripped him/herself. Especially not if they are trying to sell you on some weird product.
Ok, let’s get into it…
1. Consistency is Key
You must be consistent. You must go to the gym rain hail, or snow.
You must go even when you feel tired to enforce the habit of consistency.
I’ve never had any trouble being consistent – which is probably explanation for why I’ve gotten away with doing a lot of unhealthy things from time to time and yet remained ripped.
I don’t take breaks unless I am over-trained or sick, and that is rare.
Here are two smart tips for being consistent:
Finding smart times to work out preemptively: when you know you will be super busy for maybe 1-3 days in a row, make sure you do a killer workout session before so that you can use that time to be sore and recover. That should be one of your mottos: always be sore when you know that you cannot go to the gym!
Find a good time that you can stick to: Find some time a day that works with your schedule so that you can be consistent. It is a lot less mentally demanding to go the same time a day every time than it is to go different times, because this increases the likelihood of making it a habit. For most people the best time for working out is around 4-7 PM assuming they woke up at 8 AM.
I usually wake up 5-7 AM and go around 11-14 PM and follow up with a huge post-workout meal to break my fast after around 15-20 hours.
2. (Intermittent) Fasting
I could write about this forever, but I won’t.
There are at least five reasons why you should be doing intermittent fasting:
It temporarily switches on ketosis , which means that you will start running on fat instead of glucose as your body’s main source for energy.
It increases the amount of growth hormone that your body produces. This is good for many reasons other than building muscle.
It provides mental clarity and increased focus as a result of increased ghrelin levels.
It probably reduces the risk of getting cancer.
It saves you time that you could be working or learning things. It makes you more productive. Time is money – don’t spend that time eating.
Here are the most popular ways of doing it:
Every day eating during 8 hours and fasting for 16 hours.
Fasting for 24 h once a week.
Fasting for 48h once a week or every two weeks.
Personally, I eat 1-3 meals a day and fast for the rest of the day. My feeding gap is 8 hours and my fasting period is ca 16 hours. Then I usually fast for 24 or 48 hours once a week as well. I recommend drinking water mixed with L-glutamine to get protein without breaking the fast. L-glutamine is also very healthy for your stomach because it is used to regenerate your stomach lining. I used to have a shitty stomach, but now it’s quite good thanks to drinking glutamine every day.
(For more info on IF check my links in the resource section at the bottom of the post… And NO fasting does not break down your muscles. In that case I would have died by now. If you seriously think believe this you need to get educated.)
3. Alcohol Rule
If/when there is a day that you will consume alcohol, here’s what you will do:
Make sure you don’t drink in vicinity of having eaten – a couple of hours should be fine. This way you get drunk more easily and won’t have to consume as much alcohol.
Drink only straight liquor to minimize carbs and sugar.
Don’t eat anything after having consumed alcohol. Alcohol is seen as a poison by your body and will be attended to first, this means that it gets precedence by your body’s metabolism and that everything you eat while you are drunk will be stored as fat.
Minimize fats (even healthy ones) during the day that you know that you will drink. Fats contain a lot of calories and take a long time breaking down.
Alcohol isn’t really that bad in itself, but the food you may indulge in prior to or after drinking is the “dangerous” part that is counterproductive to getting ripped.
Check out this post by Martin Berkhan if you want to read about this more extensively.
4. Lifting Heavy Weights: Compound Exercises
It’s all about compound exercises. Getting ripped – like every other skill – is about figuring out what the fundamental 80/20- activities are.
Lift free weights and don’t go over 10 reps, don’t use machines. Unless you’ve got some injury of course.
Here are the most important exercises that you should be doing some variation of:
Whole body (back & core):
Deadlift, stifflegged deadlift, squat, clean, and clean and jerk.
Legs:
Squats, front squats, and lunges.
Upper body:
Benchpress, dips, pullups & chins, and shoulder press.
5. How to Spend your Leisure: ABF
ABF – Always Be Flexing!
Here a number of exercises you can do anytime a day – like when you’re sitting in class or at work, when you are reading, and when you sit in front of your computer. The point is to get in the habit of tensing your muscles as often as you can.
Tense neck & jaws. “CHEW” imaginary food until your jaw or neck get tired. Warning: doing this in a public environment will make you look retarded.
Stomach vacuums & tense stomach. Stomach vacuum is when you suck in your stomach as hard as you can for as long as you can. Combine that with flexing your stomach frequently. Especially when you are in the gym – always flex your stomach while doing exercises.
Flex all muscles in your body, especially chest and arms..Very easy to do while sitting by the computer. Good way to burn calories when “sitting still” and good way to keep alert as well. You’ll get better control of your body too – in the beginning you might not be able to flex only one chest muscle for example.
So if you ever see me stretching or flexing, now you know why. I don’t even think about it most of the time because it’s so deeply ingrained in me by now.
6. Track Results
It can be a good idea to keep track of your results in the gym and to write down your progress:
How much did you lift each session and how did it feel going there and when leaving the gym?
It can also be smart to measure bodyweight and to take pictures of yourself pre-workout and post-workout and keep a collection. Not only to measure, but also for motivational reasons and see how far you’ve come. It adds up and gets noticeable after some months.
But beware of missing the essence of what you’re supposed to be doing, don’t track results for the sake of tracking. Always have a purpose in mind. When you start mindlessly tracking for the sake of tracking you tend to do it purely from a state of habit because you are used to it, but it is only a waste of time.
7. The Four Parts of a Workout
You should mentally define what an optimal workout looks like. To help you with this there are really four parts that a workout can be divided into:
Pre-workout ritual: this is when you get yourself into a state that is conducive to working out. You shift your focus onto your body instead of having it in your head. You can do this by visualizing your sets or dancing around a bit. You might drink some coffee or stimulant to boost your energy. I usually drink coffee, L-glutamine, and creatine. The point is to feel awesome and get in the zone and get stoked to lift some weights and love it!
(This first one is really important. You need to condition your brain into associating positive emotions with the gym!!! Also, you will have a lot more fun and get MUCH stronger if you are in a motivated and focused state. The amount of focus and presence that you can infuse into every repetition REALLY matters: a set done absent minded will not yield the same payoff as a set done with strong intent!)
2. Lifting: When you lift you want to be focused fully on your breathing and tensing as many muscles in your body as possible.
3. Rest properly in between sets: When you have just executed a set it is important that you face the pain and breathe properly. Many people don’t do this and walk around not quite letting the body adapt to the stress that has been imposed on it. By doing so they are failing to recover properly and will not maintain allostasis –the state in which the body optimally adapts to stress.
4. Rest and recovery post workout: It is a good idea to rest for at least 5 minutes after the workout if you went at it hard. You also need to…
8. Get Good Sleep
In this post I went into detail about how to get good sleep hygiene and the main things to avoid. You need to form a ritual that serves as cue for you to get tired, and you need to be consistent with doing it. I struggled with this for a long time, but now that I’ve got it down it’s very nice.
Here’s a summary:
Exert some damn energy and make sure you truly are tired by the end of the day. Most people are too passive and sedentary. Stop trying to conserve energy – spend it!
Sleep in a pitch black room. That means no light at all. Your brain is smarter than your eyes are, it will detect the least amount of light and that will diminish your production of melatonin .
Don’t consume stimulants several hours prior to going to bed.
Open up a window to get fresh air.
Avoid sitting by LED screens at least one hour before bed. Don’t go immediately to bed from doing some activity, read or meditate for at least 5 minutes to prepare the body for sleep.
9. Skip Cardio
Cardio does very little for you in terms of losing fat or building muscle. Cardio burns surprisingly few calories. You will burn a lot more calories by lifting heavily or by doing some sort of interval training than you will from doing steady state cardio.
Point being, don’t do cardio unless you enjoy it. Don’t do cardio if your goal is to get ripped, it is time inefficiently spent.
10. Protein and Diet
Eat about 1g protein/pound – that’s about 2g of protein/ kilo. Experiment and see how much protein your body is capable of consuming. People are not born equal in this regard, some people can assimilate more protein than others – it’s an unfair advantage. If you consume more protein than your body can assimilate you tend to get gassy or perhaps feel a bit slow. You want to be on the sweet spot so that you consume just about enough every day without feeling bad. For me that is pretty close to 2g protein per day.
You should carefully measure how much protein you eat per day at first, then soon it becomes very easy to know. By now I can guesstimate quite accurately how much protein I get for every meal I eat whether I cook it myself or eat out, it’s like a sixth sense of sorts.
In this post I wrote extensively about what I usually eat and why I eat it, going into nutrition and so on. The key points are to eat a lot of spinach, broccoli, eggs, and meat while minimizing unnecessary calories that usually stem from carbs and sugar.
11. Experimentation
One of the best investments in terms of money and time that you can make to improve your long-term health is to do a hair analysis (Read mine as a PFD!) to examine your vitamin, mineral, and heavy metals levels. This will give you great feedback on what to include or remove from your diet. You will quickly find out whether you are deficient or over the top in something. You could also do a blood test, which is better but more expensive.
I learned a lot from my hair analysis (check picture above). The most important thing I learned was that I had too much mercury in my body. That could’ve been very bad in the next coming years had I not fixed it. I stopped eating so much canned fish after that.
In either case you should not skimp on these things, remember: this is your long-term health we are speaking about!
Ultimately you have to find out what works for you in terms of diet and lifting. No two bodies are the same, and just because XYZ works well for me or someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you.
The same is true about food. There are some pretty accurate fundamentals for how and what to eat, but it can differ between individuals. It also has a lot to do with stomach health, some people have much better digestion than others do. Some people can eat a lot of gluten, milk, and processed food without being negatively affected by it. It’s unfair. Deal with it.
12. Philosophy of Rippedness
Here are some essential mindsets and mental habits to implement:
5 more minutes. When you want to quit or go home do at least one more rep. Beat your brain. Never let your brain get the last word, don’t give into its weakness of wanting to quit. Condition yourself into going a bit further when you want to give up.
Disregard your surroundings. Be loud. Scream. Be a beast. You are not there to look good to others. You are not there to dress up and show off your gym clothes or tattoos. You are there to lift some damn weights and to improve your mental and physical strength. You are there to enjoy the beauty of concentration that comes from perfectly executing the repetitions. Mind over matter.
Conclusion: The Hill is the Steepest in the Beginning
It gets gradually easier the more muscle you build and the less fat you have.
This is partly explained by the fact that the more muscles you have the higher your basal metabolic rate will be, and the less body fat you have the less of the hormone leptin you will generate: this makes you feel less hungry. (leptin is a hormone that regulates the amount of calories you need every day – it makes fat people crave more food, despite not really needing it from a survival standpoint)
This is why it’s hard to get ripped but easy to maintain, that’s why you should do it ASAP in life before you get too busy living your life purpose.
You may not have the time to get ripped later when you go really fucking hard and want to be the best in the world at your area of expertise.
Summary of Principles:
Consistency is Key: Condition yourself into going whenever possible.
(Intermittent) Fasting: Eat 1-3 times a time. Try different fasting methods to find one that works.
Alcohol Rule: If/when you go out drinking don’t eat anything.
Lifting Heavy Weights: Compound Exercises: Keep it below 10 reps and don’t do isolation exercises or machines.
How to Spend your Leisure: ABF: Flex your body as much as possible!
Track Results: Write down results, feelings, or take pictures. It adds up quickly!
The Four Parts of a Workout: Pre-workout ritual, lifting weight, recovering between sets, and resting.
Get Good Sleep: Sleep in a pitch black room and make sure you properly exhaust yourself.
Skip Cardio: It won’t make you ripped or build muscle.
Protein and Diet: Eat 1 g protein / pound or 2 g protein / kilo.
Experimentation: Do a hair analysis to find out how well your current diet is working for you.
Philosophy of Rippedness: Go five more minutes, enforce the mindset of a champion!
RESOURCES:
Here’s three summary posts I’ve written before about two of the most famous books about intermittent Fasting.
Part 1. Eat Stop Eat – 24 hour fast once a week.
Part 2. Fast-5 diet – ca 5 hours to eat every day and 19 hours fast.
Part 3. My general take on IF and miscellaneous stuff.
Here’s Martin Berkhans website about lifting, dieting, and intermittent fasting. In my opinion this is one of the best sites out there in terms of time invested.
Here’s Mark Sisson’s blog about primal living, paleolithic diet, and all things health-related. This site is huge, it is one of the best sources for information out there, but be warned: you can easily drown in information. Don’t read more than you necessarily have to, beware of information overload.
Here’s the first out of seven summaries that I’ve written about the Ultramind Solution, which is a pretty good book about nutrition, lifestyle and living healthy. This book is helpful, but I wouldn’t read it if I was only interested in lifting.
Here’s some motivational reading and mindsets to immerse in from Arnold Schwarzenegger – the champion.
PS:
Remember, your goal is to get strong and ripped, not to learn all the (quasi)theories from guru XYZ. In this post you have all the information that you need. This information literally took me over a year of hardcore studying and experimenting to learn.
If you apply these principles I guarantee you that you will see some massive results within a year.
Don’t take on all of them at once, but apply a new one every week or so in a manner that is appropriate to you.
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