How to Make 2021 Your Best Year: Periodizing an Entire Year of Nutrition and Training
Let’s be honest… 2020 probably hasn’t worked out exactly as you expected. 2020 really hasn’t worked out as anybody expected...
Whether it’s training, nutrition, or even your mindset, a lot of us are looking for a total body reboot in 2021. It’s safe to say that COVID probably interfered with your plans, despite your best intentions. Or maybe you've been stuck losing and regaining the same weight over and over again.
I get it because I’ve experienced the same exact thing. I’ve spent years training my ass off and “eating healthy” without getting the physique I wanted.
If you finally want to make 2021 the year you become your leanest, strongest, and most confident self, then you need to have a plan. Going into the year hoping for good results, without a specific strategy or plan will give you the same exact results as every other year prior. If you want actual results, you gotta try something new.
Specific results require a specific plan
To achieve your goal, you need a solid foundation and structure to build upon and customize along your way.
Take a look at Ben. He committed to building a solid nutritional foundation and making a long term commitment so he can retake control of his life.
By this time next year, you can completely transform your body or be stuck in the same rut you’re in now. My online clients get great results because we have a plan and structure in place for months in advance. We reverse engineer their end goal starting where they’re currently at.
Achieving specific results requires a specific individualized strategy. The following strategy is just an example to use going into 2021, not the exact recipe.
Now, this strategy will work for a plethora of different people and can be highly individualized to be custom-tailored to you based on what you’re willing to do to achieve your results. The reality is this periodization strategy will likely for you.
So, if you’re ready to finally achieve your leanest, strongest, and most confident version of yourself, this article is your complete guide to planning out 2021 month by month to ultimately transform your body.
To Quote the Black Sheep, “The Choice is yours.”
Client Avatar:
Before going any further, I want to quickly define the client avatar, aka who this specific plan is for and the example client I’m applying this strategy to, and why.
James is in his mid 30’s and busy CEO of a high-end Men’s haircut salon. He has a decent amount of training experience in the past. However, COVID-19 has completely detailed his progress both within the gym and the kitchen. With the gyms slowly reopening in 2021, James wants to get back to lifting weights and being consistent with his nutrition.
James has A LOT of trouble with consistency both with nutrition and training. Because of this, James is constantly feeling like he’s letting himself down. James realizes that he needed accountability, guidance, and structure.
Based on that information, I’ve created this specific strategy for James:
January 1st to February 1st
Nutrition Phase - The Momentum Phase
When my online clients first start nutritional coaching, I always start with the Momentum Phase. Within this phase, we’re completely focusing on building a solid nutritional foundation and developing nutritional habits as this will propel James into the other nutritional phases throughout the year. It’s absolutely essential to making quality food choices, becoming proficient in tracking his nutrition, and focusing on proper food choices. You’ll be surprised how by simply focusing on making better quality food quality choices, you’ll find yourself eating more yet still losing weight.
While we’ll be working on making food choices, you’ll find yourself still losing weight and making progress. Now the length of the Momentum phase is highly individualized and depends on your experience, lifestyle, exact goals, and nutritional history and experience. This phase is completely individualized as it can take anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months. As for James, he has some experience tracking calories, yet hasn’t done so in a long time and wasn’t very consistent.
Therefore, here’s a broad view of what we’ll exactly be working on and the why’s behind the Momentum Phase. It depends as some clients already begin with a solid nutritional foundation in place and others need to build their nutritional foundation.
1) Building a Solid Nutritional Foundation
The honest truth is that the majority of clients are not ready for an aggressive fat loss phase right out of the gate. Over the years of coaching, I’ve repeatedly found simply giving someone some fat loss macros almost always leads to failure.
Instead, as a new client, you generally need time to be educated on proper food choices, how to maximize fullness while fueling your body, how to track your macros accurately, how to identify and change behaviors and habits that held you back in the past WHILE managing life stressors, training, and recovery.
There’s a lot to take care of and coach you up upon. However, these are the lowest hanging fruits we can immediately clean up right away. With relatively minimal effort, you’ll be in a better position both mentally and physically. In addition, I’ll be educating you every week on how to do everything you’ll need to do so you’ll be able to maximize your fat loss.
2) Breaking Free from the “All or Nothing” Mindset
During the Momentum Phase, I use this time to educate clients on the dangers of all or nothing thinking. The honest truth is no matter how disciplined you are, at some point along your fitness journey, you’ll feel like you failed via seeing progress slower than you want, missing a workout, and/or missing your calorie/macro goal.
With the wrong mindset, this temporary “failure” usually leads you to quit the diet altogether. The Momentum phase helps us avoid this by educating clients on the power of consistency over perfection, and teaching them to become focused on the process, knowing that this will lead to your desired outcome.
→ Click here to learn more about the Momentum Phase
3) Finding his Ideal Diet
Dieting can be absolutely difficult, overwhelming, time-consuming, and a pain in the ass. As a coach, I’m always aiming for getting my clients to adhere to a long-term plan.
There are many factors to consider when creating your ideal diet. A few factors to take into consideration are dieting history, eating preference, lifestyle, social life, and work and home stress. James and I will be working together to discover what works best for him while making objectively based progress (more on that later)
→ Click here to learn more about Discovering your Perfect Diet
Training - 3x week Full Body Training + Daily Step Count Goal (8K) + 1 optional Cardio Day
James has been inconsistent in the gym over the last few years and that was before COVID stopped all the gyms.
James knows what he’s doing in the gym, has considerable lifting experience, and has trained 4-5 times per week. However, we want to start with a training strategy James can adhere to extremely well.
We’ll start James training with the “minimum effective dose” aka the amount of training volume that will get James results while being extremely consistent. James, being a busy CEO of his own company, doesn’t have the luxury of spending hours within the gym every day. His time is very limited, so a 3 times a week training program is often perfect. This allows James to effectively train with his limited time while building a nutritional foundation by getting his nutrition and tracking dialed in.
An often overlooked aspect is not paying attention to daily movement. We want to make sure James is consistent with his daily movement outside the gym. As a defense mechanism against fat loss, your body will actually subconsciously down-regulate movement. Since you’re eating fewer calories and exercising more, your body wants to preserve its energy source (aka body fat.)
This is why having a system for tracking and accountability is essential.
Have you heard the saying, `If you’re not assessing, your guessing?” When it comes to coaching, it is extremely spot on. This is why I’m collecting a lot of data with things like
→ Weekly Check-ins
→ Daily Training Logs to gauge your performance
→ The Accountability Tracker to ensure you stay on track
→ Biofeedback (sleep, hunger, stress, etc.)
The reality is, most coaches are just missing the necessary system to truly help their clients. The beauty of the tracker is, it shows us exactly how much progress you’re making, and if you’re not progressing at the rate we want, we can quickly identify the issue so we can make the exact adjustment needed.
February to Mid-April
Nutrition Phase: Body Recomposition
At this point, James has been crushing it. He has all the necessary habits in place, eating plenty of protein and calories, constantly nailing his food quality, and consistent training and step count totals.
Jame really wants to focus on building some more muscle and strength before really pushing the fat loss. Therefore, we are going to focus on body recomposition aka building lean muscle and losing fat at the same time.
Now, it’s very important here that we’re tracking multiple metrics to accurately measure James Recomp’s progress. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in the quest for getting leaner and stronger is not tracking their progress. Therefore, you have absolutely no idea of what they’re doing is actually working or not.
To accurately measure James progress, we will be looking at the following metrics
→ Weight:
James should be tracking his weight at least 3 times per week (ideal every day). First thing in the morning, before eating or drinking, and after using the bathroom.
Don’t freak out about the daily weight changes. Instead, we’ll be looking at the overall tread over multiple weeks/months.
→ Body Measurements:
Body measures give us a more accurate picture of progress. They’re also more time-consuming so we don’t assess every week. James will be typically taking these bi-weekly.
James will take the following measurements bi-weekly at the same time you weigh in. For consistently, measure in centimeters with a soft tape measure.
Chest: Take a circumference measurement, with the tape at the level of the nipples.
Arm: Take a circumference measurement around the broadest part of your right bicep (flexed).
Navel: Take a circumference measurement of your torso with the tape 2" above the navel, at the navel, and 2" below the navel.
Hips: Take a circumference measurement around the broadest part of the hips.
Thigh: Take a circumference measurement around the broadest part of the right thigh.
→ Progress Photos:
While the scale provides a definitive number, bodyweight alone is a poor measure of progress, especially within James’s body recomposition goals.
Your progress photos will provide clear visible evidence that you are making progress towards changing your body. At the end of the day, how we look after a workout program is more important than body weight, so it’s important to take progress photos every week.
What to do:
Use your smartphone in good consistent lighting (i.e. natural light)
Full-body photos with minimal clothing
Take a photo from the front, side, and back
→ Training numbers:
James is following his fully customized-training program and tracking his numbers on our private training app. We can both see it so we make sure he is getting stronger. This helps us to see how his nutrition is fueling his training performance while matching his physique related goals.
→ Biofeedback:
This is another method that allows us to individualize the program to match your goals and needs. Tracking biofeedback allows us to take into account anything that could be inhibiting your results. This is an essential part of why my online clients get such great results - we take your whole life into account.
→ Non-Scale Victories:
At their core, non-victory wins are celebrating things that help you reach your health goals that have nothing to do with your actual weight. Celebrating non-scale victories help you notice your progress within your everyday life. These are the smaller, yet very noticeable differences. I’ve categorized these as gym performance, and physical and behavioral changes.
Training: Remains the same
James has been smartly progressing within his training program. Without an intelligent progression scheme built into your training program, you’ll end up doing the same reps, sets, and weights for months on end. This will quickly result in a training plateau.
The reality is we often need progression schemes built into our program to force strength adaptations and growth to occur. This is especially true in the case of body recomposition.
I program my client’s workouts in 12 weeks phases with three distinct training blocks with highly individualized training goals. However, since James hasn’t been working out consistently and hasn’t been into the gym in over a year, we need to take this into account when designing his training program. In this case, here is a simple and highly effective progression I love to implement with online clients returning to the gym after a long lay off.
The first training block is the accumulation which we are just slowly increasing James' overall training volume. This is important especially after James hasn’t been consistent in the gym and hasn’t been working out in forever thanks to COVID. I don’t want James to lift heavy right away. Strength is still important, yet it takes time for ligaments, tendons, and joints to recover from heavy lifting. By initially taking it slow, this will help James make progress, stay consistent, and prevent injury.
For example, James initial accumulation training block will look like this:
Accumulations Phase:
Sample Main Exercise: Squats
Week 1: 2x12, rest 90 seconds
Week 2: 3x10, rest 90 seconds
Week 3: 3x10, rest 60 seconds
Week 4: 4x10, rest 60 seconds
Week 5: 4x8, rest 60 seconds.
Week 6: 3x8, rest 90 seconds (Deload week)
This set and rep scheme progression will allow James to safely return to the gym while giving adequate time for his ligaments, joints, and tendons time to adjust and getting back into the groove of training. Overall, this will provide an increase in lean body mass, improve your conditioning, and prepare your body for more intense work going forward.
For the next training phase, we’ll gradually add lower volume strength work within the intensification phase. Overall, the weights are still staying “relatively light” to gradually build up your tolerance to heavyweights.
Intensification Phase
Sample Main Exercise: Squats
Week 1: 3x6, rest 90 seconds
Week 2: 4x6, rest 90 seconds
Week 3: 4x5, rest 120 seconds
Week 4: 4x4, rest 120 seconds
Week 5: 5x5,5,4,4,3 rest 1200 seconds.
Week 6: 5/4/3/2/1, rest 120 seconds
Again, strength is still extremely important and still being prioritized. However, after a layoff, you're still better at playing it safe and conservative to give your body the necessary time to adapt.
Mid-April - End of April
Nutrition - Diet Break
At this point, James has been seeing great changes over the last few months, dropping pounds, losing inches off his waist, and is much stronger.
However, over the last few weeks, his adherence to the nutritional plan has been slower and more difficult. In his biofeedback, he’s consistently ranking her hunger and cravings higher than normal and motivation has taken a hit.
This is completely normal after an extended period of dieting and tells us that James is ready for a diet break.
A diet break is essentially 4+ days with calories at maintenance, primarily coming from carbs. These diet breaks allow James a psychological break from dieting while allowing his metabolism and hormone levels to return to normal.
Training
No changes are necessary! James has been crushing his workouts and nearing the end of his first 12-week training phase.
May 1st - July 31st
Nutrition - Fat Loss
At this point, James is feeling good! He’s in a good place both physically, nutritionally, and mentally with his short diet break.
James is wanting to look and feel great in his swimsuit this summer and his body has changed a lot since starting at the beginning of the year. We know that by the end of the fat loss, James should be nearly as lean as he wants
During the fat loss phase, our goal is to keep James’ calories as high as possible while still losing 0.5-1% of body weight per week. We are looking for this rate of fat loss as we know this is a realistic rate of fat loss. Especially with the increase in training volume coming up, which will lead to an increase in calories burn, plus her consistent progress within the last phase, we likely won’t need to decrease calories so much.
Training Phase - 4x weeks (Upper, Lower, Upper, Lower Split) + 1 Cardio Day
James has been super consistent with his 3x/week training, recovering well, and feeling motivated to train more, so we are going to bump his training volume to 4x week. Since James wants to get his summer body ready, we know this will speed up his fat loss a bit and have James as lean as he wants.
James has been smartly progressing within his training program to safely return to lifting heavyweights. Now that we have built a strength foundation and he’s being super consistent with his workouts, we can start incorporating a more traditional progression scheme into his training program.
Without a smart progression scheme built into your training program, you’ll end up doing the same reps, sets, and weights for months on end. This will quickly result in a training plateau. The reality is we often need progression schemes built into our program to force strength adaptations and growth to occur. This is especially true in the case of body recomposition.
A simple and highly effective progression I love to implement with online clients looks like this:
1) Slowly bumping up the reps across the mesocycle (4-8 week block of training)
→ Week 1 3x6 reps
→ Week 2 3x7 reps
→ Week 3 3x8 reps
→ Week 4 3x9 reps
2) Decreasing Reps in Reserve (RIR) from week to week
→ Week 1 3 RIR
→ Week 2 2 RIR
→ Week 3 1-2 RIR
→ Week 4 0-1 RIR
→ Week 5 3-4 RIR (Deload Week)
3) Rep Ranges:
For example, let’s say you’re doing DB bench press for 6-10 reps. If you can lift more than 10 reps, increase the weight. If you cannot lift more than 6 reps, then reduce the weight. This is an excellent method to build up a strength base and knowledge on how to lift correctly.
Overall, James’ goal is to beat your previous performance on a per-set basis weekly by either adding an extra rep or increasing the load slightly. This progression scheme works extremely well as the decrease RIR across the weeks allows week 1 for clients to “feel out” any new exercises and “setting the standard” you’ll need to improve upon weekly.
This allows my online clients to get hyper-focus on improving every set from the previous week’s performance, which is what it takes to become leaner and stronger.
As we get closer to the start of summer, we’ll add a few low-intensity cardio days and fat loss focused finishers to speed up his progress and add more isolation exercises to get his biceps and abs ready for the beach.
August
Nutrition - Maintenance Phase
By now, James is at the tail end of the summer and he is feeling lean, strong, and his confidence is at an all-time high. James has built a very solid nutritional foundation, he knows what foods to eat and how much. As we wrap up his fat loss , it’s critical that we make sure James knows how to maintain his results long term. This is one reason why we spent so much time educating and giving James all the tools and information to sustain his results forever.
Without question, the maintenance phase is a super important and huge piece that is often overlooked and missing from most coaches ’ programs and the typical yo-yo dieter’s nutritional plan.
As the name implies, the maintenance phase is simply a time where we’re focusing on maintaining your new leaner body post-diet. Here’s exactly what we’ll do: We’ll gradually bump up James’ calories to his new maintenance intake so James can still enjoy the summer BBQ’s, and drinks without feeling like he’s failing. Over my coaching career, I’ve always found that these types of situations often cause people to “fall off the wagon” and overindulge in their calories. This point helps illustrate the importance of having a plan for the diet after the diet and having a long term plan in place.
Here’s what we do:
1) Increase calories intake to your new maintenance intake:
After completing his fat loss phase, James has a new body. It’s smaller and different hormonally and metabolically. James simply cannot maintain his new body with the same calories as his older, heavier body.
2) Find New Maintenance:
Science tells us that 1 pound of body fat requires a deficit of ~3500 calories. So, if you've been losing an average of 1 pound per week, we know you’re in a weekly calorie deficit of ~3500 calories or a daily deficit of ~500 calories. We’ll find your specific maintenance and increase your macros to match that. Once here, your hormones and metabolism will start to normalize and you’ll start burning more calories.
3) Chill at Maintenance:
Once we are finally at Maintenance, you’ll spend 1-2 months of maintenance, actively practicing everything you’ve learned at this point to sustain your results. Periods of practicing maintenance allow you to learn new habits and behaviors around your food choices, training, daily movement, dietary flexibility, and knowing exactly what your lifestyle needs to look like to maintain your new body.
In short, the maintenance phase is the often overlooked, yet critical part of making sure you can sustain your newer leaner, stronger, and more confident version of yourself.
Training
No changes are necessary! James has been crushing his workouts and nearing the end of his 12-week training phase.
September 1st - November 30th
Nutrition - Lean Gains
Like the maintenance phase, the huge thing most people are missing within their nutritional plan is actually spending time focusing on eating more calories and building muscle.
To simultaneously build muscle and stay lean, your nutrition must be dialed in. Missing this critical piece is why the majority of people spend years chronically dieting, yet never getting as lean as they want.
For example, let’s say you’re 170 pounds with 30 pounds of body fat and 140 pounds of lean muscle. If you can 5 pounds of muscle (145 pounds of lean muscle and 25 pounds of body fat), your overall body fat percentage still decreases. You’ll look and feel leaner, even though you haven't lost any more fat.
This is knowing as to their body fat settling point, where they cannot lose any more fat without fighting extremely hard. Once this happens, we’ll switch to a lean gains approach with an emphasis on building lean muscle without adding excess fat.
Within the lean gains phase, you’ve aiming to gain 0.25-0.5% of body weight per week. Body measurements will give you an idea of what muscle groups are growing, as well as how much your waist is growing. Depending on your measurements, we’ll increase or decrease your calories accordingly.
Training - 4x/week (Upper/Lower) or 5x/week (Lower/Upper + Specialization day)
Since we are increasing overall calories, we need to bump up our training volume, specifically the number of hard sets with higher intensities. As you increase training volume, you’ll increase the amount of growth stimulus within your muscles.
However, if you take a massive jump in the number of hard sets (completing sets within 1-3 reps in the tank), your body won’t be able to adapt and handle the sudden stress increase and you’ll get worse results.
As you increase training volume, you increase the amount of growth stimulus your muscles are capable of. Also, you’re increasing calories burned via increasing your physical activity levels. While this is fantastic for fat loss, it’s not ideal for building muscle.
The Solution?
We’ll gradually drive up both training volume and carbohydrates simultaneously. This extra food will help you recover and grow from the extra training volume, by shuttling to the muscle.
Your training volume needs to be increased gradually.
For James, we’ll spend the first 6 weeks training with a 4x/week upper-lower split followed by a 5x week lower, upper, lower, upper, chest specialization phase.
December
Nutrition: Maintenance or continuing Lean Gaining Phase
Instead of setting unrealistic expectations, I’ll discuss with James what he wants to do going into the holiday season. James is super social and knows he has a crazy holiday season lined up, so he wants to take it easy. Previously, this is where James usually fell his training program altogether, so our goal is to create a sustainable training program for James.
This is a strategy I take with a lot of my online clients during the holidays. We have literally spent the last 11 months crushing our goals while making great progress so I want to focus on maintenance aka keeping our results.
For James, this mindset shift makes a MASSIVE difference for being able to sustain his results.
Training: 3x/week Full Body
James is absolutely loving his training, yet his crazy holiday schedule doesn’t allow for the 4x or 5x a week training. ALSO, he knows that James can make good progress following a 3x week full-body program. Again, this is a MASSIVE mindset change for James who has previously fallen off the wagon during the holidays.
Plus, James has some solid strategies on how to manage the holidays season (Click here to learn more)
By the time January 2022 (Mann that just sounds weird!) comes around, James is at his all-time, leanest, strongest, and most confident version of himself. After realizing how much progress and how far he has come, James is absolutely ready for another year of amazing results.
AND THAT’S HOW I’ll PERIOD AN ENTIRE YEAR OF NUTRITION AND TRAINING FOR MY CLIENTS!
THE NEXT STEPS:
As I told you in the beginning, you need to have a specific plan to achieve specific results.
Could you imagine if James just said, “I want to lose some body fat this year…… Hopefully, I’ll do it!”
Without question, this is the biggest mistake TOO MANY people make every new year.
As for your next step, you should know….
All the knowledge you absorbed within this article doesn’t equal change.
If you’re fed up with how COVID fucked up your year, invest in a coach.
If you’ve read LITERALLY DOZENS of guides like this in the past and still haven’t made the change nor the confidence you want, invert in a coach.
If you’re overwhelmed by the content in this article, invest in a coach.
If you cannot be consistent with the strategies within this article, invest in a coach.
If you are ready for a change, I’m here to coach you.