Before we get started I should point out that I am not a doctor, certified nutritionalist, certified personal trainer or anyone who is qualified in a legal sense to provide instruction on what you should do to your body and I refer you to my disclaimer page for more detail on this. If you want to send me a message with your email there's a Contact page also.

Weight lifting 

My objective in addition to simply having visible abs, was to ‘frame’ the abs well - I wanted big shoulders, strong back muscles and lats (long back muscles under your armpits). While dieting in a caloric deficit there is a real risk of losing muscle mass, two things help to reduce this - keeping protein high, and lifting weights. I lifted weights four times per week (at home - I don’t have a gym membership). In this article I’ll cover the weight lifting workouts I did, why I chose them and a bit about my home gym setup also.

My workouts

I was willing to spend quite a bit of time lifting weights during this body transformation (each workout was close to an hour or so) so I did all the exercises that I wanted. I did a combination of compound exercises (where you are exercising multiple muscle groups simultaneously like in a pull up or bench press) and isolated exercises (like a dumbbell arm curl). There are arguments for each type (which I won’t go into here) but because I wasn’t concerned about time I did both (if you had to choose only one type I would choose compound). Here are the four workouts I did, I use a notation which gives the number of sets, the number of reps and the weight (if applicable) as a note on my phone so I can ensure consistency:

Monday:

1. Pull ups (wide grip palms facing away from me) 4x8

2. Clean and press (using dumbbells) 4x5x50

3. Dumbbell rows 4x10x50

4. Lateral raises 4x10x20

5. 8 Minute Abs (see video here)

Tuesday:

1. Chin ups (palms facing me, hands close together) 4x10

2. Dumbbell bench press 4x12x60

3. EZ bar curls 4x12x40

4. Hammer curls 4x8x20

5. Elevated press ups (feet on a bench, hands on the floor) 3x15

6. Weighted crunches (holding a dumbbell on my chest) 2x25x30

Thursday:

1. Pull ups (wide grip palms facing away from me) 4x8

2. Standing Arne shoulder press 4x6x50

3. Dumbbell shrugs 4x14x60

4. Reverse dumbbell flys 3x18x20

5. 8 Minute Abs (see video here)

Friday:

1. Chin ups (palms facing me, hands close together) 4x10

2. Dumbbell bench press 4x12x60

3. Dumbbell flys 4x10x30

4. Dumbbell curls 4x9x30

5. EZ bar 21s 3x20

6. Weighted crunches (holding a dumbbell on my chest) 2x25x30

You’ll see some similarities across the Monday/Thursday and Tuesday/Friday workouts. This is intentional. My original plan was to have two workouts, let's call them A and B and to just do each of them twice a week. Broadly speaking my A workout (Monday and Thursday) covers shoulders and back and my B workouts (Tuesday and Friday) covers chest and arms. This split worked for me but you might have to experiment with what works well for you. I just found that if I did bench press I didn’t have the energy to also do shoulder press/clean and press. One cliche I’ve heard about splitting up your workouts is to have ‘back and bi-s (biceps, chest and tri-s (triceps) but mine didn’t break down quite like that. As a slide aside, I also do one set of crunches every morning when I wake up - it helps wake me up plus I think it all helps with building the abs too!

Running the sets

Maybe as important as what exercises you do is how you do them. Here are a few tips that I found helpful:

Time your rest period, if you don’t run a timer between each set you’re likely to either go into the next set before giving yourself sufficient rest time, or (more likely in my case) get distracted and wait too long - reducing load on your muscles and extending your workout time. I ran a timer for 90 seconds between every set on my watch (I’ve heard that anything between 1-2 minutes is typical). I also took advantage of the down time to walk around getting in some of my daily 10k steps while I waited. If you’re resting for 90 seconds for roughly 24 total sets (if we had 6 exercises each comprising 4 sets) you get 36 minutes of walking!

I also have a tendency to lose track of which set I’m on (I know it’s only counting to 4!), so I’ve got two plastic cups in my home gym with 4 metal bolts in (but you could use anything that acts as a counter of course); every time I complete a set I transfer one of the bolts to the other cup to make sure I don’t lose count of my sets. 

Equipment my home gym

I do all my weight training at home and most of my exercises use dumbbells. For pull ups I have a pair of gymnastic rings which I take down to the local park and hang on the swing set. I have a few sets of dumbbells (I have 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 pound pairs). If you prefer you could use an adjustable set of dumbbells but I prefer having the basic ones. I have a bench (it doesn’t elevate it’s just a basic one) which I use for dumbbell bench press, dumbbell rows and elevated press ups. Finally I also have an EZ bar - but I don’t think this is essential at all, I just got it because I was injured and it seemed more stable than using dumbbells.

Cardio

For the majority of my body transformation I did not rely on cardio to lose weight, at least not formal cardio. I did target 10k steps per day and for the first 12 weeks I did run 5k once a week and went to a martial arts course once a week. For the final four weeks I ran a 5k four times per week. I’m not sure how much I really needed to do all that running but I do think that the 10k steps per day is obligatory. 

One note of caution relates to what type of cardio you decide to incorporate, there is plenty written online about the different types:

• HIIT (high intensity interval training)

• LISS (low intensity steady state)

• NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis strictly speaking not cardio but relevant to the discussion)

HIIT has a lot of good press, it gives your lungs and heart a good workout and studies indicate it is more effective at burning calories than other types of exercise. But here’s the problem - you need a lot of energy to do a HIIT session of any length and I definitely didn’t have enough energy for this while in a calorie deficit. Including a couple of low intensity sessions per week felt about right for me (I did a very slow and steady 5k run). 

The primary calorie burner for me was my daily steps, 10k did feel like a lot but it wasn’t so bad if I broke it up a bit. I work from home so without a concerted effort I probably only get about 3k. I started to incorporate going for a short walk after each meal which helped a lot. On days where I ran of course getting the steps in was much easier (I think running a 5k probably got me about 7k steps). As it’s not ‘formal exercise’ this would fall into the NEAT category. If you also work from home you could also consider combining a standing desk with an under-desk walking treadmill.