ABS Liverpool personal trainer, Rhodri, has spoken about the time he completely transformed his body through a series of ‘relatively’ simple steps over 14 weeks.
Rhodri has gained a reputation in Liverpool for being one of the city’s top personal trainers. Based at our gym on Castle Street, Rhodri decided he wanted to put himself through a rigorous transformation programme to see what he could learn and how he could use the experience in his sessions with clients.
His training was led by fellow ABS personal trainer Connor from our gym in Speke who put together a carefully crafted progamme for his training sessions and he designed a nutrition plan which perfectly complimented his fitness.
Explaining why he decided to push himself and train with Connor, Rhodri said, “As a PT, I think it’s really important to be trained by your peers every so often, and to push yourself physically to see what you can learn and how you can use this to improve your own client sessions.”
He continued, “I am training clients day-in-day-out and asking a lot of them. To not expect that same back is not right, so I decided to put myself through one of our transformation programmes at ABS.”
Rhodri explains that the processes put in place to achieve his result were relatively simple. The first area to target was his nutrition. Working with Connor, he made sure his weekly food intake was rich in protein and the pair calculated Rhodri’s weekly calories to ensure that he was eating in a deficit over the week.
Rhodri said, “too often people will calculate how many calories they eat on a daily basis and worry when they eat over. The best way to track calories is by understanding how many you should be eating on a daily basis and then multiplying this by 7 so you know how many calories you have to play with over the week. If one day you go over, you can always correct this by eating under a little bit the following day, so you are hitting your weekly calorie goal.”
The personal trainer then revealed the tips that gave him the impressive results. He said: “Monitoring my calories and my food was key, but so too was setting an end date. This allowed me to have a clear focus and I could arrange my food, lifestyle and training around this time frame.”
“I also had to cut out anything that wasn’t going to help me get the results I wanted. I like a drink or two, but this wasn’t going to help, especially as I wouldn’t be eating fruit on a hangover, so cutting out alcohol was necessary to keep me on track.”
The recovery process was also essential to ensure he could keep training in the gym at least 3-4 times a week over the 14 week period.
The training sessions were all weight based and Connor coached Rhodri to progressively push harder as sessions went on. Having Connor coach him through sessions was vital as the support Connor provided allowed Rhodri to push harder and go beyond what he could have done by himself. He said, “there were definitely days I would have skipped, or only have given 60%, but having Connor there to motivate me and keep me on track meant I pushed and pushed to achieve the very best over the 14 weeks.”
As New Year is coming up, which is a big month for fitness, Rhodri said that anyone looking to get stuck into a serious training programme should make sure they plan it out like he did and then take it one step at a time.
Rhodri said, “For my transformation I didn’t rush anything. I set my time frame at 14 weeks for this reason. It allowed me to make tweaks where necessary and change things that were not working. It also allowed me to bring my calories down step by step so there wasn’t a big cliff edge that was unsustainable.”
Towards the end of the 14 weeks Rhodri admits to hitting a wall and had to find ways to keep himself motivated and on track.
He says this has massively helped him to understand the journey so many of his clients go through.
He said “hitting a wall with fitness is completely natural and will happen to us all. Evaluating why and how we can make the necessary adjustments is key. Stick with it because if you make the right small changes you will always get back on track.”
Since his transformation, he has continued to apply what he has learned in his training of clients and he is seeing some incredible results coming out.
