How I Lost 50 Pounds in 4 Months Training Only 2 Days Per Week

 

I always wanted abs growing up.

From the age 17 to 20, I thought that meant training 5 to 6 days a week.

So I did what everyone else was doing.

I followed complicated splits written by bodybuilders and influencers who weren’t natural.

We have all fallen for it. Someone with the body you want tells you this is how to get there, so you run their program.

What they don’t tell you is that most of them are on steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. That is a big reason they look the way they do.

8 exercises a workout. 15 sets.

I committed to those programs like my life depended on it. I was convinced the results were coming fast.

Yet two to three weeks later, I would find myself completely off the plan.

Why?

Because programs like that aren’t sustainable.

I remember being hungry all the time.

I remember being constantly sore.

And no matter what I did, I could never stick to my calories.

That’s the part I didn’t understand back then. All that training was driving my appetite through the roof, so the deficit I needed to actually see my abs never held.

It wasn’t until I switched to a 2 day a week split that I started seeing the best fat loss results of my life.

I credit Mike Mentzer for that. Training 2 days a week is something I learned from him.

Here’s a quote from him:

“I learned from training close to 2,000 people plus myself that the precise amount of exercise required to induce optimal growth stimulation isn’t nearly as much as you’ve been led to believe or would like to believe.”

Mike Mentzer is famous for taking every set to complete failure. The was on steroids, so he recovered from things a natural lifter can’t. Taking a set that far also means you need someone standing over you to finish the reps.

What I have found to be most effective is 3 sets per exercise, training just short of failure.

The research backs this up.

Once your calorie deficit gets to around 500 calories a day, muscle gain basically stops. What sticks around is your strength.

So while you are cutting, training is not there to build you a new body. It is there to keep the muscle you already have while the fat comes off.

In one study, people trained hard for 16 weeks and then dropped to one day a week for the next 7 months. The younger group held onto all of their size and all of their strength.

In another, trained guys spent 7 weeks in a calorie deficit. One group did 1 to 3 sets per exercise. The other did 3 to 5. Both ended with the same amount of muscle.

The research clearly shows you don’t need nearly as much training as most people think to maintain your muscle while getting lean.

You need enough hard training to maintain your strength, and then you need to actually stay in the calorie deficit long enough for the fat to come off.

Once I stopped trying to use the gym to force fat loss and started using it for what it was actually there for, everything actually got easier.

I recovered better. My hunger was easier to manage. And sticking to the deficit stopped feeling like a constant fight.

For the first time in my life, I got the result I had been chasing for years.

I lost 50 pounds in 4 months, finally got lean enough to see my abs, and did it all while only training 2 days per week.

Want to see exactly how I structure my 2-day training split for fast fat loss?

Click the link in my bio on Instagram or Facebook and I’ll show you exactly how to set it up.