This article series and video companion is designed to help you get radical results with your body transformation. It is from knowledge and experience collected from hundreds of clients. For more information on how to succeed you can contact Omar at omar_isuf@hotmail.com.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Nothing can be more critical when designing a transformation than to know what you will be doing. Having a plan is a template for success. It allows you to intelligently pave the road to a sexier you. You should set aside time to effectively plan what you’ll be doing over the twelve weeks. I’m talking careful, intelligent planning- seriously.

Success Tip: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Even having a poor plan and following through with it is superior to “sort of” following a plan.

 Let me restate it this way: most people don’t know how to plan a transformation. The most common faults are too much exercise of the wrong choice, lack of a sound nutritional base (eating nothing isn’t “sound”), lack of progress (doing the same old routine), and copying another person’s routine (Madonna’s or another celebrity). Let me put it this way, spending one hour to plan out what you’ll eat, exercise, sleep and do throughout 12 weeks will save you countless hours of frustration.

Success Tip: Frame your planning around action oriented habits not lofty goals (I`ll work out five days a week instead of I`ll lose thirty pounds of fat)

I’ll give you a quick story. A woman wanted to lose those last ten pounds and refused advice. After all, she read the tabloids and had a “pretty good” (aka no idea) of what she was doing. So she decided to do five hours of low intensity cardio a week (why?), pilates (for toning the tummy) twice a week, and yoga once a week. Her diet consisted of not eating white bread and eating Special K (the breakfast of losers). She did this for one week, lost two pounds. Confident in her results she decided to do nothing. Next week she didn’t lose any weight. WHAT?

Success Tip: Save time, money and calories by preparing your meals in big batch quantities. Grill up your chicken breast, make that chilli, prepare some buffins- what ever you need to do- do it.

Clearly something was wrong. So she upped her cardio to eight hours a week. Lost another pound. Then week 4 came and she actually gained a pound! Horrified (it must have been that one oreo she ate on the weekend!), she upped her cardio to twelve hours and cut her calories in half (double dd: dangerous and dumb). She lost two more pounds and then hit a plateau.

The sad fact is that most of the weight loss was muscle and on top of that she messed up her metabolism for a good long while. It took even longer to fix the metabolism and eventually, through proper planning she got back on track and actually lost the weight (can you tell she became my client .

The point of the story is that if she just decided to actually PLAN out what she would do for 12 weeks, she wouldn’t be stuck after week two with no idea what to do. She would have saved countless hours, endless frustration, and actually saw results.

You need to have a plan not only what you will be inside the gym but outside as well (like that little thing called eating). Prepare your meals, plan your work outs, and get your sleep (there’s nothing cool about being a wimp in the gym because you didn’t sleep enough!)

Success Tip: Be realistic with your planning so that it coincides with your lifestyle and the amount of effort you are willing to put into your transformation (vowing to work out seven times a week is setting yourself up for failure and will get you odd looks from colleagues).

Now with all this talk of planning- what the heck am I planning on doing? Well here is a template for MY Plan- this is an example and NOT meant to be followed.

Here is MY Plan

Work out Plan: I will train with weights five days a week focusing on lifting heavy weights to maintain my muscle mass and expend as many calories as possible to burn as much fat.
I will perform low intensity cardio post-workout and on off days to accelerate the amount of fat I lose. The amount of time spent performing cardio will vary week to week depending on my goal.

Nutrition Plan: My nutrition will vary but the basics will stay the same
- Lots of protein and green veggies
- Limited carbohydrates except possibly post-workout
- Get a good blend of healthy fats (coconut oil, olive oil, fish oil, mixed nuts, flax seeds)
- Frequent meals (5-6 times to eat per day)
- Always consume post work out nutrition to maximize the effect of the work out
- Drink water like its my job

Recovery Plan: Get a solid eight hours of sleep a night (ya right!)
- Take as many Epsom salt bathes as possible
- Foam roll and stretch throughout the week to help muscles to recover
-Listen to as much Barry Manilow as possible (ya right!)

Assessment Plan: I will use the following assessments to see whether I`m on track with my goals.

Photographs:                                                   Bi-Monthly
Body fat Analysis:                                            Monthly
Anthropomorphic Measurements:                 Monthly
Scale Weight:                                                  Bi-Weekly

Now based off of this plan, I’m down three pounds in the first week!  The small amount of time it took me to plan this out saved me endless hours of frustration.

Week 2: September 7^th 2009
Weight: 168.4

What is YOUR plan for success?

This article series and video companion is designed to help you get radical results with your body transformation. It is from knowledge and experience collected from hundreds of clients. For more information on how to succeed you can contact Omar at omar_isuf@hotmail.com.

            If you don’t have a purpose, you don’t have anything. Why work out? Why even try and transform your body? Is it to look better for others, feel better about yourself, get out of the risk of a whole host of medical issues? You must be able to clarify why you are working out. The why determines everything. It is what is going to keep you motivated when the going gets tough, when that pizza is calling out your name and your stomach feels like it is on fire.

Success Tip: Figure out WHY you want to Transform

 Why am I doing this? A little bit of my background story…

At first I was intimidated by the weights and by others in the gym. I was way smaller and less experienced. I remember hanging on the pull-up bar trying to knock out one chin-up while the guy next to me was lifting three pounds on the bench. It was shaky at first, but I kept at it. Slowly I started lifting more weights, seeing progress and results with my body. Unfortunately I was not informed about nutrition. My diet during this phase can best be described as the see-food diet; if I saw it I ate it. A regular meal for me was eight eggs, three turkey sausages, three pieces of toast and a quarter block of cheese. This was one meal of about five or six. In about nine months I gained sixty pounds (I looked pregnant- but without the baby). Mentally, I believed I was all muscle. I lied to myself when I saw my double chin and gut and tried to ignore it. The shocking reality came when I came home from university for the summer…and my mother called me fat.

Success Tip: The most important thing is to list the reasons WHY you want to transform

Mine are
1. To feel better about myself
2. To reinforce self-control and discipline
3. Relate to Clients
4. Long term health benefits

My purpose for this fat loss phase is to get the leanest I’ve ever been. The reason is because I don’t feel my best unless I’m operating at peak efficiency. I like the feeling of being lean and healthy, I like the way I look, I like that I have more energy and it just gives me more satisfaction out of life. Fat loss to me is also an inward improvement; it helps curb your animal desires of food and pleasure and lets you focus on more important things in life (like your direction and purpose). I find it clarifies my mind and teaches me self discipline

Now you must ask yourself:

Success Tip: Ask, what would happen if you don’t fulfill your goals?

You see you must determine the pain behind what would happen if you fail to succeed. Sometimes we need to reinforce the outcome of NOT succeeding to remember why we should. My results are that if I don’t succeed, I wouldn’t feel good about myself, I’d feel like I let myself down and my clients. I’d not learn to improve focus and discipline and quick honestly I’d feel like crap. I can tell you from doing this before with myself and countless clients, the outcome of succeeding is far superior to any potential pain.

So now I’d tell you to make the transformation, make the choice, decide to succeed and you will!

Week 1: August 31^st 2009
Weight: 171.4

What is YOUR desire and purpose in your transformation?