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3 Months ago I announced a body transformation challenge right here on UpgradeReality. The idea was to spend 90 days eating healthy and exercising regularly to get closer to the ideal body you’ve always wanted.
Quite a few readers emailed me personally and joined me in the challenge, so congrats to you all!
I stuck to the challenge I laid out for myself and I’m quite happy with my results. My schedule involved mostly strength-training 2-4 times per week and eating a lot of protein (chicken, fish, steak and eggs) with almost every meal.
- Before: 158.73 Lbs. (72kgs) | After: 168.65 Lbs. (76.5kgs)
- I gained 9.92 Lbs. (4.5 Kgs) in those 3 months.
- I’m lifting heavier weights with ease.
- I can see a difference in my appearance (although it doesn’t show as much on the picture below).
For those of you who want to know exactly what I ate and how I trained:
- Training days were 3 times per week with a rest day in between each (e.g. Monday, Wednesday, Friday).
- Each of the 3 training days involved a different muscle group (back + triceps, chest + biceps, shoulders + legs).
- My training sessions were usually around 30 minutes long.
- I always ate before going to gym (usually oats).
- I always ate a high protein meal after workout (chicken or tuna with salad).
- Most of my other meals consisted of high protein, but I also ate junk food (burgers, pizza, chocolate etc.)
Although I think I’m on the right path, I know that my approach was very unscientific and probably far from the best approach to achieving optimal results. If I was really serious about getting the best and fastest body transformation I’d spend money and time researching the best training methods and diets to follow, but I’m happy with my results and will continue to follow my own routine. It doesn’t take a lot of time, keeps me healthy and feels great while seeing decent results.
I’m confident that you can easily achieve similar results towards your ideal body (whether it involves gaining muscle or losing weight). The most important aspect is the discipline and persistence to stick to your challenge. You must continue to eat right and exercise, no matter if you’re tired, sick, stressed or whatever other reason comes up.
If you think that you’re going to give up or chicken out before you’re even half-way into your 90 day challenge, set an incentive that will force you to do stick with the challenge for the full 90 days. Make an official bet with your friends telling them about your challenge, and promise to pay them $500 if you don’t stick to it.
NOTE: I want to share a fantastic fitness website with you that I discovered via Twitter last week. It’s called NerdFitness and it’s run by a cool young guy called Steve Kamb. My favorite article on his website is called The beginners guide to the Paleo Diet and it’s a diet that I would be more than happy to follow.
The 90 Day Challenge Works With Anything
The 90 day challenge doesn’t just apply to fitness. You can apply it to any area of your life that you want to be more successful with. 90 Days is short enough to stick it out but long enough to see some significant results in whatever you’re trying to achieve.
As an example I can show you with which number of new subscribers this very blog grew in the last 90 days. I didn’t set an official challenge for myself but I’ve been working at this blog every day for the last 90 days, and the results are as follows:
I gained 1433 subscribers in the lasts 90 days!
To put that in perspective, when I started my blog it took me 12 months to gain 1000 subscribers.
What’s even more interesting is that once you get into the habit of working at something with constant focus for 90 days, it kind of becomes a habit. After your ‘challenge’ is finished, you’ll still have the same routine and you’ll continue to work hard to reach your goals.
A 90 day challenge is like a medium-term goal. You know it’ll come to an end relatively soon so it’s worth it to go for the goal you set with 100% of your focus and effort.
Do Your Research Before Your Challenge Starts
It’s easy to just decide on your challenge and dive into it head first, but that would just be stupid. If you’re going to do something, then do it right.
Whatever your goal is that you want to achieve in the next 90 days, make sure you spend at least a few hours researching the best method to achieve success. If it’s a body transformation challenge, research the proper diet to follow and the right exercise schedule you should follow.
You need to have some sort of plan or method to follow. I know that I mentioned earlier that I didn’t spend too much time researching a training plan and diet, but that is because I already have a decent understanding of exercises to follow and foods to eat, so I knew that I would see results if I did the challenge.
Even though there may not be a single “correct” strategy that you should follow, you can find one where the author or creator of the method has seen success not only with himself, but also his clients.
Armed with the knowledge of a proven strategy for success AND the persistence and dedication to follow that strategy for 90 consecutive days, it’s very likely that you will make significant progress towards reaching your goals (or even surpass them).
Allow Your Subconscious To Give You What You Want
If you’ve ever heard of the Law of Attraction or the term ‘manifesting’ then you’ve probably heard about the theory that you can train your subconscious to give you what you want.
Your mind can be broken up into 2 sections, a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The conscious mind programs your subconscious mind, in other words, the thoughts you consciously think and repeat in your mind become the beliefs and habits that your subconscious mind adopts and executes automatically. That’s why it’s so bad to think negatively and criticize yourself all day, because your subconscious will accept it as truth and concentrate on making that truth come true. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The conscious mind can process about 7 bits of information per second, while the subconscious mind can process around 20 million bits of information.
Your conscious mind is very limited compared to your subconscious mind, and that is why you are only aware of a fraction of all the information of your surroundings at any time.
As I mentioned earlier, your conscious mind programs your subconscious mind to let it give you what you want. The problem is that if you’re like most people, your conscious mind will give mixed signals and conflicting instructions to your subconscious mind. If you feel that you’re not good enough or deserve to have what you desire to have, then your subconscious is not going to be able to focus on giving you what you desire to have.
As an example of programming your subconscious to give you what you want, there was a psychology study done at a university in the UK. Test subjects were put into an empty room by themselves with a desk, a pad of paper, a pen and a stopwatch. They were instructed to start the stopwatch and write down every single word they could think of beginning with a ‘C’ for exactly 30 minutes. After the study was complete, test subjects reported to have come up with dozens more words starting with the letter ‘C’ for up to 2 days after the study was complete. This shows the power of telling your subconscious what to focus on and how it delivers to you once you tell it what to give you.
Imagine being able to tell your subconscious to focus on giving you more money, more clients, more dates, better opportunities… and it’s possible!
There is a whole science to the Law of Attraction and manifesting anything you want to have. It’s something that I’ll cover in depth in another post, because it’s truly amazing how you can get amazing results with a few small changes to your thinking pattern.
My friend Rishan B. has created an entire video series called ‘Manifest It All Today‘ about this topic and it’s something I suggest you check out right now if you’re interested in this kind of thing. (His course is super cheap at $17 and it’s no wonder he’s sold thousands of copies of it already).
The 90 Day Challenge – Putting It All Together
When you put all the points listed in this article together, you have a recipe to achieve success with almost anything. Let’s put it together in bullet-point format:
- Decide on what you want to achieve in your 90 day challenge.
- Research or buy a proven method for success for your 90 day challenge.
- Use your conscious mind to tell your subconscious mind what to focus on.
- Have the discipline to stick your 90 day challenge and not give up before it’s over.
Be sure to check out Steve’s NerdFitness site and Rishan’s Manifest It All Today video.
