Joe Warner: avoid my mistakes to build your best-ever body
New Body Plan co-creator Joe Warner reveals the three things he wish he’d known before starting his own body-transformation challenge. Use his expertise and experience to lose weight and add muscle and make the fastest possible progress towards the leaner, bigger and stronger body you want!
My name is Joe Warner and I’m a fitness expert and author. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve made an awful lot of fitness mistakes.
When, in my early 20s, I first decided I wanted to build a bigger, leaner and more athletic body, I started with running. A lot of long and slow running. It definitely made me fitter, but just doing cardio meant I didn’t add any muscle, nor lose much fat.
Don’t get me wrong: cardio is great, and high-intensity interval training cardio is the best kind of cardio for fat loss. It’s just I wasn’t being clever with cardio to get the fat-loss results I wanted.
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I started seeing some results when I began lifting weights. But only the “newbie” gains of adding a bit more muscle that everyone gets when they start lifting weights for the first time.
After those initial easy wins I was stuck in a rut for what felt like years. I couldn’t strip away stubborn belly fat. Or eliminate lower back fat or shift chest fat. And I certainly didn’t add the big, lean and chiselled upper body muscle I do desperately wanted.
It turned out I was making some pretty silly mistakes that were stopping me from getting the results I wanted. Here they are, so you can avoid them and start taking giant strides towards achieving your perfect physique!
Joe Warner says “Believe in yourself to lose weight fast!”
I suffered from “paralysis by analysis”. So I doubted my ability to make major changes to my body. And that meant I kept finding reasons not to start. I was waiting for the perfect time to start my better-body challenge.
Or when I eventually did start I repeatedly chopped and changed my training methods all the time – without knowing why. I wasted months and months when all I needed to do was stick to a tried-and-tested training plan and then trust in the process.
I’d tried training for my natural body shape. I did high-weight, low-rep workouts, then low-weight, high-rep sessions.
I had played around with lifting weights every day, then twice a week, and even twice per day. But my problem was I never stuck with an approach for very long – so it had no time to start to work.
Remember, every day you delay the start of your body-transformation challenge the harder taking that first step becomes. All you need to do is find the perfect programme for you – then stick to it. Do that and the results will come as quickly as you want.
“Don’t get obsessed by calories or macros!”
If I had a £1 for every time somebody emailed me some variation of the question, “Dear Joe Warner, how many calories do you eat a day?” I’d be writing you this email from my very own desert island.
The truth is I have absolutely no idea. But my initial attempts to get into good shape floundered because I kept getting caught up in the “calorie conundrum”. I’d meal prep religiously, and log every morsel that entered my mouth. I’d spend ages each day tracking and adding up the grams of carbs, fat and protein I’d eaten.
If I’m brutally honest, I became a bit obsessed. It made me think differently about food and eating. And not in a good way. Then I started following the New Body Plan “Perfect Portion” approach to nutrition. Everything fell into place.
Gone were the days of calorie counting and precision measuring; all I needed was my two hands! The reality is that to eat for a better body really doesn’t need to complicated or stressful.
Joe Warner says “Losing weight is never all-or-nothing!”
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking, especially when you have a busy week coming up, that if you can’t do all the training sessions in your plan then there’s no point doing any of them.
I used to think like this. Because like many people, I have a tendency to think in all-or-nothing terms. But this is the least-helpful attitude you can have when trying to get back into shape. Why? For one simple reason. The success of your body-transformation challenge is ultimately determined by one factor: consistency.
Can you eat well and exercise effectively more often than not? If so, you’ll make positive progress.
Consistency is king, which is why four sessions is a bit better than three, but why three is much better than two, one or none.
So don’t do what I did and use a busy week as an excuse to bench your training. Instead use it to prioritise your training knowing that doing so won’t only get you leaner, it will also make your working week far more productive.
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