Summer is here. The pool is packed and the coolers are full. Smoke from the grill and the scent of sunscreen are in the air… along with the feeling of utter despair.

Wait…what?

If you’re looking in the mirror and still have a one-pack (even under the best overhead bathroom lighting), you know the summertime panic I’m talking about.

The good news is you still have time to get in shape before your beach vacation without doing something stupid like a lemon cayenne juice cleanse or two-week water fast.

It won’t be easy, mind you: you’ll need a lot of determination and focus to slim down over the next four to six weeks, but it can be done if you follow these steps.

Disclaimer: I DO NOT advocate using the following strategies year-round.

If you follow the advice in my book or on this blog, your beach bod is glistening and ready to go. But for those of you who’ve stumbled and need a last-minute fix, I’ve got your back.· Continue

The day has finally arrived.

After months of counting calories, tracking macros, and pushing yourself at max effort in the gym, you wake up one morning, look in the mirror, and see abs staring back at you.

Hallelujah!

You snap a couple photos with the overhead lighting on and then off, just to prove that your new abs are legit and not just light and shadow sorcery.

You can’t wait to tell the world about your new six-pack, but as you sit down and bend over to put on your socks, you feel something squishy in your gut. What was that?

You pull your shirt up and look down in horror at a huge roll of fat on your stomach.

What. The. F*ck!

If you’ve been through a cut, you know the feeling of having abs while you’re standing up and flexing, but the moment you sit down, you look like a fat ass again.

Before you assume your abs are a mirage, let’s dig into what’s going on here.· Continue

If you’ve been in the fitness game for a while, you’ve discovered two truths about eating clean:

• It sucks
• It’s expensive

Foods labeled with words like organic, natural, free range and humane seem like healthier options until you look at the price and think, “Do I really want to pay that much for eggs?”

I’ll leave the “organic” foods debate for another post, but there’s no doubt it’s tough to find reasonably priced, high quality foods with all the buzzwords and hype we see at the grocery store.

We don’t need any more roadblocks on the arduous road to single-digit body fat, so in this post, we’re going to cover how to build a healthy diet without breaking the bank.

Let’s start with cheap sources of macronutrients and then move to buying and planning tips.· Continue

Vascularity is one of the holy grails of fitness.

Bulging veins are a surefire way to judge someone’s fitness because they can’t be faked.

The only way to achieve vascularity is through an extreme reduction of subcutaneous fat, which allows for maximum muscle definition and veins to show.

The definition alone tells us you can automatically rule out any sort of quick trick, extreme crash diet, or supplement that touts a magical “pump” to get your veins to pop.

To have vascularity, you need to be lean.

· Continue

“You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.” —Marcus Aurelius

Tell me if this situation sounds familiar:

You jump on a hardcore health kick and commit to working out regularly.  Only instead of hitting the gym first thing…you spend two weeks searching for the best gym bag.

Yeah, that was me too. We’ve all been there.

The fitness industry wants you to believe that more accessories make for a better workout.

The fitness hacker’s mentality is to make do with as little equipment as possible.

In this article, we’re going to cover all the equipment you need and don’t need.

· Continue

If you’re new to the world of diet and exercise, the term “calorie cycling” may sound like an advanced strategy that’s too complex for you to implement.

Calorie cycling is actually simple to understand and easy to implement.

Here’s how it works with Hack Your Fitness, where we work out three times a week:

• On workout days, you have a maintenance calorie budget (we’ll help you calculate this).
• On rest days, you slash your calorie budget to achieve a caloric deficit for the week.

As we go through this piece and unpack the science behind calorie cycling and discuss how to implement it, don’t be freaked out by the terminology or calculations.

The math is simple and the concepts are easy to grasp.

By the end, you’ll be able to cycle your calories just like a fitness expert!

Let’s get started with the reasoning behind calorie cycling.

Calorie Cycling Keeps You on Track

If you’ll recall from the piece we did on calorie counting, there are two fundamental truths when it comes to humans and their calorie consumption:

1. We do not need as many calories as we think we do.
2. We consistently underestimate the number of calories we ingest.

When combined with a switch from calorie-rich foods to wholesome foods, calorie cycling has the potential to be an eye-opening shift for fitness newbies.

Not only does their weight begin to drop consistently each week, but they’re now eating more food than they ever thought was possible on a fat-burning program.

“How can you lose weight eating this much food?” is a question I get all the time.

When you abide by a calorie budget, you can eat like a king and still lose weight if you make the right food choices. The first step, of course, is calculating your calorie budget.

Let’s do those calculations now for workout and rest days.

How Many Calories Do You Need?

The goal with calorie cycling is to feed your body the energy it needs on training days while slashing your calories on rest days to maintain a long-term caloric deficit.

The first step in this process is determining your weekly calorie budget, and to do this, we’re going to calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).

Here’s part one of the equation, which involves determining your basal metabolic rate (BMR), or the calories you need each day just to live – your coma calories, if you will:

• Men = 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches) – (6.8 x age in years)
• Women = 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years)

Here’s an online calculator if you need it.

Once you have your BMR, multiply it by an Activity Factor of 1.2. (I like to underestimate activity because the “downside” of underestimating is losing more weight!)

Take your TDEE (daily calorie needs) and multiply it by 7 to get your weekly budget.

If your TDEE is 2,000, then you have 14,000 calories for the week.

Adjusting Your Budget to Shed Body Fat

One pound of body fat equals 3,500 calories.

So, in order to shed 1 pound per week, you must deduct 3,500 calories from your budget.

Now your weekly budget of 14,000 calories is down to 10,500.

On workout days, you follow the TDEE (or maintenance) budget and consume 2,000 calories.

So where does that leave you on rest days? The math is simple:

• Rest Day Calories = [Total Weekly Calories – (3 x TDEE)] / 4
• Using our example = [10,500 – (3 x 2,000)] / 4 = 1,125

Going from 2,000 calories on workout days to 1,125 calories on rest days is quite a jump, but it makes sense – on rest days, your energy needs are far lower.

As you make progress with your lifts and your diet, your weight will change and you’ll need to recalculate your TDEE to maintain an accurate calorie budget.

Matching Your Macros to Your Calorie Budget

Knowing your calorie budget for workout and rest days is the first step in a proper diet.

The second step is knowing the macronutrient intake you need for each day in order to properly fuel your body and keep you satiated (feeling full) longer:

Here’s how 100% of your calories should be spent throughout the week:

• Workout days: 45% protein, 40% carbs, 15% fat
• Rest days: 55% protein, 20% carbs, 25% fat

You’ll tweak these percentages over time, but this is the best place for beginners to start.

How Many Grams of Each Macro Your Body Needs

Using the 4-4-9 rule – 4 calories per gram of protein, 4 calories per gram of carbs, and 9 calories per gram of fat – you can see how many grams of each macronutrient you’ll eat.

Let’s continue with our previous example to see how the math works:

Workout days

• Protein: 2,000 x .45 = 900 / 4 = 225 g
• Carbs: 2,000 x .4 = 800 / 4 = 200 g
• Fat: 2,000 x .15 = 300 / 9 = 33 g

Rest days

• Protein: 1,125 x .55 = 618.75 / 4 = 155 g
• Carbs: 1,125 x .2 = 225 / 4 = 56 g
• Fat: 1,125 x .25 = 281.25 / 9 = 31 g

When people talk about calorie cycling, this is essentially what they mean.

You’re cycling the total number of calories you consume and your macro percentages every day based on what your body needs that day for energy and recovery.

Feeling overwhelmed with all this math?  Don’t worry.  We got you covered.

When You Don’t Want to Cycle Calories

The only time calorie cycling does not make sense is when you’re trying to bulk up quickly and need to be on a calorie surplus.

Then again, the first step in bulking is getting your body fat down to an appropriate level:

• 10% or less for men
• 15% or less for women

If you don’t cut before you bulk, you’ll end up fat jacked.

Have you been burning fat lately? Well, I have some good news and some bad news.  Let’s start with the bad news first:

• Bad News: After a few weeks of consistent fat loss, you’ll probably hit a plateau.
• Good News: You can conquer that plateau if you respond in the right way.

I hit a plateau during my first 12 week cut in 2008 between weeks four and six. After steadily losing 1.5 pounds per week for the first month, my fat loss stalled during those next two weeks.

I panicked and doubled the amount of cardio I was doing each day to try and break through. The only thing that accomplished was pushing me dangerously close to burnout.

I learned a valuable lesson from that experience: Trust the science of fat loss and trust your body when facing a plateau. Overreacting only makes thing worse.

In this piece, we’re going to examine four scientific reasons you shouldn’t panic when facing a plateau and explore three strategies for dealing with it effectively.· Continue

When you come off a caloric restriction like the one we use in Hack Your Fitness, there are two things you’re itching it do: Eat like there’s no tomorrow and bulk up. Now that you’ve got your abs chiseled, you want to get your chest jacked.

But before you go out and buy 10 pounds of protein powder and a stack of Flex magazines, let’s review three important points and set appropriate expectations for your bulk:

• It’s actually very difficult to build lean muscle.
• If you’re a guy, you need to hit 10% body fat before bulking. For women’s, it’s 20%. If you bulk before you cut down to those levels, you’ll end up fat jacked.
• Always remember the hallowed law of energy balance: calories in vs. calories out.

Seems simple, right? Let’s make it a little more nuanced and dive in deeper.· Continue

Anyone who has returned from vacation committed to getting rid of the belly they just spent a week acquiring while sipping pina coladas on the beach knows this routine well.

You step on the scale in the morning, workout, step on it again, and pray for a change.

We measure our fitness in terms of our weight, and this is simply wrong. Your weight could stay the same over the next year, and you could still go from beer belly to six pack abs.

If you want to get fit, you should focus on your body fat percentage, not your weight.

We’ve established on this blog that losing weight is not enough to achieve a ripped physique. If you lose weight without shedding body fat, you’ll simply end up “skinny fat.”

Of course, to lose body fat, you must first know your body fat percentage.

This is a surprisingly controversial topic. Body fat percentage is inarguably the deciding factor in how defined your muscles are, but we still fight quite a bit over how body fat should be measured.

We’re going to explore four methods of measuring body fat in this post, and by the end, you might be surprised which method receives my endorsement. (Hint: Think low tech). At the very end of the article, I’ll explain my #1 fitness hack for measuring your body fat accurately, using things you already have in your home.

Let’s start with a highly accurate – and expensive – method of measurement.· Continue

Speaking from experience, fitness burnout is real.

I’ve had plenty of days where I’ve woken up and not been feeling it (usually squat days).

Other times, after spending months maintaining my discipline and mental fortitude, I get to the gym and struggle big time with my lifts.

Some days, you’ve just got no gas left in the tank. Don’t worry, it happens to all of us.

It’s crucial to rest and let your body recharge when you hit that wall. Persevering in the face of burnout is noble but can ultimately do more harm than good.

In this article, we’ll look at the causes of burnout, four rules for dealing with it, and two advanced strategies to use if you can’t get over the wall you’re facing.· Continue