How long until I see results?

Because I find that the way you speak is very empathetic but also relatable and accessible, and that's not always the case, especially in our space, let's be honest. Yeah, yeah, I've been told that and I appreciate that and I guess it comes from the seeing the people around me how their choices over time especially my older folks in my family how it catches up to you over time and gives you poor health, whether that's metabolic disease, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer's, just obesity and wanting to change my genetic tree, as they say. So I can't say. There's one point in time it probably took from late 2019 to like 2021, two years of just experimenting. But experimenting is probably the thing that's going to get anyone listening to figure it out, right, yeah Is test, test, test, retest, track and measure.

I think doubt always creeps in when people don't see. They don't see. So they can be working really hard, making strides, but may not be the ideal of where they think they should be right now. So when I do, and that's when people start asking me we've been training for a long time and then when you break it down and give them a snapshot of, I'm always looking forward, but it's always to take a good snapshot. Here's what you do and then looking at it and seeing it, oh okay, they don't see how much strongly they've gotten from what they're pushing and what they're doing and you've probably heard this multiple times as well and distance and clients have been training for a long time. I can't believe we're not getting any better. I'm getting tired.

I'm a very fast eater. If my wife has made very clear to people that know us because if we're invited for dinner she will die, will be done in five minutes. How long are you planning for like, and I'm like, ah, whatever it is, what is, but I'm trying to work on that too. But but after doing that small sort of shift, how did that build your confidence or give you that confidence to move forward and start doing other things? Because I'm wondering what you start doing after that. Because I know you could do 50 pounds just with nutrition. But dude, joe, you're fit, dude man, you got a lot of muscle mass. I know you got a sports background, you're also coach, so I know fitness is a big part of it. So I'm curious like, when? Where did it go from there? What else helped you with that 50 pound weight release. I started doing some exercising. Yeah, so I was a sit-ups man. I started doing sit-ups.

So please speak to that. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, it is a mindset thing, and where my engineer hat comes in, and you know I- call myself a physique engineer. I love it. Is if we can create massive awareness of what choices we are making that lead to these feelings, that lead to our training and our eating and our diet and thinking that we don't have enough time in our schedule and whatever else. Rather than try to unravel the psychology, which is very difficult and I'm not a psychologist either I'd rather say why don't we just measure or track to measure the things we want to measure? What do we want to measure? We want to measure what's going in our mouth of how it makes us feel. We want to measure our stress and we want to measure our training and kind of just measure these things.

I would say my average client, 50 years of age, is on three to five medications, from blood pressure meds to you name it, and within six months they're normally down to one, if not none at all, because they're starting to really get it. I guess my one selling diversity tool, as a trainer myself, is that we're relatively old compared to those trainers that are not. And yet how can you do this stuff you're doing? There's no magic. There's no steroids involved other than my natural steroids that I generate. So how do you do it? It's a plan and it's hard, and I'll let me tell you. Dave, my least favorite and favorite cardiovascular tool is called an ascent climber. There's spicy, spicy. I'm the most evil cardio tool on the. You're always against gravity, so there's not a single ton that I've ever done that that I've tried to subconsciously talk myself out of it.

Sure it is. That's the incredible thing about the human body it's so adaptable. But here's the problem it's extremely slow at adaptation, extremely slow, so slow. The majority of humans give up because we want our brain wants instant gratification. I don't know if you know this, but we come into this world with only two fears the fear of falling and the fear of sound. Every other fear is self-induced. All these phobias are self-induced, of which I've got many. I've got itch-to-phobia, by the way, you can research that later. What is that? What's itch-to-phobia? It's the fear of fish. Really, I've never been bitten by a fish. What's going on? I can probably blame Steven Spielberg, I don't know, but I stopped doing triathlons. I was doing a triathlon in Kingston and I took a panic attack because I thought a fish was attacking me.

I am, but I also love myself enough to make some health changes. Like. I didn't like how I ate and I wasn't eating very well, like lots of rice and pastas that weren't protein filled or just not healthy choices, and I was eating a lot and going out with friends a lot and I was buying lunch from school every day and money also wasn't smart choices and I knew I wasn't making good choices for myself. That, like always, I had you guys in the back of my head, like just from hearing you talk for years of like like all the advice and things that I hear you give other people, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm not following that right now, I'm kind of ignoring that.

Some clients are there to supplement your regular diet, so you should be getting everything within that and if you are, then you can piggyback one of the things and I'll get this question like what should I be taking? You said we take on this. I don't take on stairs from the fat burners A lot of them and I'll say this have I do I use them. I use them once in a blue movement for times when I'm like yeah, I've been the same. Not feeling it and I have to get out. I'll use it for that. But what happens if you start taking a fat burn and start to take and you take it for every workout and just absolute people? I know when there's a day that you don't have a certain level of wisdom, you will not work out. So your workout depends on something, on taking something which you do not want. You might get scaps to reverse. Bcaa is on ways to people yeah.

And why most timelines lie to you. Thirty years of coaching, one cohort of twenty-three men, and every number I have, including the ones that do not flatter me. FIG. 01 The unglamorous part nobody photographs. The honest answer to how long it takes to get back in shape is this: you will feel different in about two weeks, you will be measurably stronger in about six, and you will look different somewhere between weeks eight and twelve. If you are over forty and you have been out of it for years, put those numbers at the slower end and stop reading the ones that promise otherwise. Every "six week transformation" you have seen is measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. It measures the photo. The photo is the last thing to change. That gap, between the day the work starts paying and the day it becomes visible, is where almost every man I have coached has quit.

Then pick the smallest week you will actually repeat. Three sessions, a protein target, a step target, and a bedtime. Repeat it for sixty days. Retest. That is the whole method, and it is boring on purpose. How long does it take to get back in shape? Most men who train three to four times a week feel different within two weeks, feel stronger within four to six weeks, and start to look different somewhere between weeks eight and twelve. Sixty days of honest consistency is enough to change your baseline. It is not enough to finish the job. How long does it take if you have not trained in years? Longer to look different, faster to feel different. When you are starting from nothing, sleep, energy and mood usually shift inside the first ten days because you are giving the body inputs it has been missing.

The men who keep going have had enough time to associate the behaviour with feeling better, which takes longer than most programs run for. How do I stay motivated to exercise? You do not, not reliably. You lower the bar until motivation stops being the deciding factor. Pick the smallest amount you would do on your worst day, build the week for a bad week rather than a good one, change one default a month, and get one other person who would notice if you stopped. Why do I keep quitting after a few weeks? Because month one feels like nothing is happening. The visible results arrive in month three and four, and most men quit in the gap between doing the work and seeing the work. Measuring what you control, rather than the scale, is what gets you across that gap. Fothergill, E., Guo, J., Howard, L., et al. (2016).

Here is every score, not the average: five, seven, seven, eight, eight, eight, nine, nine, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten. FIG. 03 Week three of the first cohort. Only thirty-four percent of that group completed every scheduled workout. Seven of the twenty-six ended up inactive. My own notes from week three say "system overload and confusion was a real thing still." So the real answer to how long it takes is not a number of weeks. It is however long you can keep going, and that is a design problem, not a willpower problem. I gave those men too many moving parts. The ones who finished were not the most motivated, they were the ones whose week could absorb a bad day. That is why the next round is twelve men instead of twenty-three, and simpler. I would rather twelve men finish than twenty-three start.

A man who cannot do something never gets six weeks in. A man who gets six weeks in and then stops is telling you something about the fuel, not the engine. Because the thing that got you started is not a thing that can keep you going. This is the clearest pattern I have seen in nearly thirty years of coaching, and I first wrote about it in 2016 after running a 28-day challenge and asking the participants a simple question three weeks in: how are you staying motivated? The useful distinction is between motivation that comes from outside you and motivation that comes from inside. Outside: a number on a scale, a wedding, a photo you saw of yourself, a doctor's warning, a bet with a mate. Inside: you want to be able to do something, or be someone, and the training is how.

I still think that is true and I now think it is close to useless as advice, because it describes the destination and not the road. Here is the road. You change the defaults, one at a time, and you wait. Protein at breakfast for a month until it is not a decision. Then fat at every meal. Then the evening cutoff. Each one takes about four weeks to stop requiring thought, and the compounding is what does the work , not the intensity. I have watched this play out with enough men to be confident about the timeline, and the honest version of it is that the first six weeks feel like nothing is happening, and then the fourth month is when someone asks you what you have been doing. Does eating fat make you fat? Not in the way the low-fat era claimed.

Training is one third of it. The framework is thirty minutes a day split between movement, stillness and reading, held inside a small cohort with real accountability. The body changes because the days change. What is a dad bod, and is the project about getting rid of one? The dad bod is a body shaped by a decade of putting everything else first, and it gets treated as a joke or a life sentence. It is neither. The project is not about chasing the body you had at 25. It is about rebuilding the energy, strength and self-respect to be useful for the next forty years. The original 2019 #DadBodyProject post is archived here unedited . The framework it describes is written up on the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto page. The 2% Solution. Play it here, with the full transcript on the page. The post that started all of this. Republished unedited.

The most common reason men give me for not training is time. It is also the one I have the least patience with, and not because I think they are lying. FIG. 01 Sixty seconds of hard work, three times a week. The single most common reason men give me for not training is time. It is also the one I have the least patience with, and not because I think they are lying. They are not lying. They genuinely believe that if they cannot get to a gym for an hour, five or six days a week, there is no point starting. That belief is wrong, it is expensive, and the fitness industry built it on purpose. Less than you think, and the study that established it is worth knowing about in detail. In 2016 a team at McMaster University led by Jenna Gillen and Martin Gibala took 27 sedentary men and split them into three groups for twelve weeks.

DadBody 28 is the shorter option if you would rather not wait. Still not answered? Read every question or message me directly and you get me, not an assistant. One hundred fifty episodes on movement, stillness, reading, nutrition, mindset and recovery. Search the transcripts or listen from the archive. Browse episodes Start here: the whole library Apply for one of twelve 0 of 12 places filled Every result above is a real man who will tell you about it himself. Named with permission, and shortened at their request.

Tell me honestly where you are starting from. Can I do DadBody 28 from outside Vancouver? Yes. It runs online, with coaching scheduled Vancouver time. Still not answered? Read every question or message me directly and you get me, not an assistant.

I should qualify that. I was good at the training. I was bad at the business of training, and the reason I was bad at it is the reason I do what I do now, so it is the right place to start. Years ago I had a client I will call John, because that is what I called him when I first wrote this down and he is entitled to stay anonymous. John was successful. Good career, two young kids, a wife who loved him, a life most people would take. The one thing he did not have was his health, and it ate at him, because he had had it once. Somewhere between the career and the family he had stopped being active, and one morning he looked in the mirror and did not recognise the man looking back. So he hired me. He wanted to lose weight, put muscle back on, and get back to being the man he was in his twenties.