Table of Contents No BS Follow-Along ............................................................................................................................3 About Me...........................................................................................................................................4 The Aesthetic Body .............................................................................................................................6 Workout Routines ..............................................................................................................................7 Workout Routine Questions ................................................................................................................8 Hamza’s Advanced Workout Routines..................................................................................................9 How to Build a Habit of Working Out ................................................................................................. 10 Training Age: 0 – 1 Month ................................................................................................................. 13 Training Age: 1 – 3 Months................................................................................................................ 16 Training Age: 3 – 12 Months.............................................................................................................. 20 Training Age: 12 – 24 Months ............................................................................................................ 25 Mistakes You’ll Probably Make .......................................................................................................... 28 Diet ................................................................................................................................................. 30 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 34 No BS Follow-Along If you want to start taking action immediately, just follow the advice on this one page and you’ll be on track to building your aesthetic body… 1. To build an aesthetic, attractive body, you have to focus on building your neck, traps, upper chest, lateral delts, lats and abs 2. Follow the routines on the Workout Routines page of this training program 3. If you’re a complete beginner, focus on making working out into a habit by working out at the same time every single day, preferably first thing in the morning 4. Focus on improving your technique of the exercises by watching the video demonstrations (which are linked in the routines) and then record yourself in the gym to see where you can improve 5. Every single workout you hit should be challenging. To keep the workouts challenging you have to add more reps or weight or sets to the routine About Me My name is Hamza and I’ve built my dream body. Starting off my training at age 17, I used to spend at least an hour every single day on my gaming PC consuming fitness knowledge on YouTube and Reddit. Everyone was saying the same things… “Lift heavy BRO. Do Stronglifts 5x5” “Eat big to get big” “Don’t do those pussy isolation movements! Just squat, bench press and deadlift and you’ll look jacked” Most of the advice I found online was targeted at guys who wanted to lift heavy weights. I didn’t care about lifting heavy. I was a young man who just wanted to look good and feel confident. I wanted to look like a fitness model with an attractive V-shaped upper body and I believe I have achieved that goal. The training program that you are reading is my no bullshit, practical advice for any man who wants to build a body they are proud of. Almost 7 years of experience has went into what you are reading. The advice out there will not work for you. To achieve unconventional results (less than 1% of men have a body like this – Including the guys on Reddit that are giving you advice!), you have to put in unconventional actions (less than 1% of men train and diet like this). The Aesthetic Body First of all, what even is an aesthetic body? This was the picture that inspired me. I remember being around 18-19 years old, seeing this picture on YouTube and thinking that the guy on the right had the ‘ideal 10/10 body’. The aesthetic body isn’t massive. It’s lean enough for the abs to pop and has a V-taper (the shoulders are wide and the waist is thin). It has key muscles that are prioritised to create an attractive look. The key muscles to focus on to build your aesthetic body are: Neck, Traps, Upper Chest, Lateral Delts, Lats and Abs. All of routines in the ‘Workout Routines’ section of this program are optimised to target these key aesthetic muscles and grow them efficiently. You’ll now be able to tell why the advice of lifting heavy and going onto a training program like Stronglifts 5x5 will not work – There isn’t any focus at all on these aesthetic muscles. Ordinary routines will have you prioritising legs and lower back through squats and deadlifts instead of the muscles that actually make you look good. For most of the muscles that we want to prioritise (neck, traps, lateral delts, abs) we cannot use heavy weights. These smaller, attractive muscles must be hit with low weight and high reps imagine trying to use heavy weight to train neck! Now you know what an aesthetic body looks like. You have a rough goal to aim towards. It’s time to check out the workout routines… Workout Routines 1. Go to your training age on the left column (how many months you’ve been working out for) 2. Choose the equipment you have from a standard gym, home workouts with no real gym equipment or gymnastic rings 3. Click on the workout links in that section and download the Strong app 4. Come back to this program and click on the links again and the workout routines will open on your phone. Save the routine as a ‘template’ on the Strong app Training Age Gym Workouts Home Workouts with limited equipment Gymnastic Rings Workouts Push: https://strong.app.link/yqPPvsp5hhb Push + Legs: https://strong.app.link/mpzvOjx5hhb Pull: https://strong.app.link/WzCv9n34hhb Pull: https://strong.app.link/AaHeeSp5hhb Pull + Legs: https://strong.app.link/fA5NHIx5hhb Legs: https://strong.app.link/yMVOPR34hhb Legs: https://strong.app.link/e3PLWgq5hhb Push: https://strong.app.link/eDiQLBrDxgb Push: https://strong.app.link/qkskeBqiOgb Push + Legs: https://strong.app.link/sW1NCCviOgb Pull: https://strong.app.link/Bsd25IvDxgb Pull: https://strong.app.link/2ZoSAouiOgb Pull + Legs: https://strong.app.link/ojAs02viOgb Legs: https://strong.app.link/9jsKisFDxgb Legs: https://strong.app.link/7pJNc2uiOgb Push: https://strong.app.link/8M11FbzjOgb Push: https://strong.app.link/ZHkAsDAjOgb Push + Legs: https://strong.app.link/4gSxGYBjOgb Pull: https://strong.app.link/7uP6ENzjOgb Pull: https://strong.app.link/fyjU74AjOgb Pull + Legs: https://strong.app.link/Y2cSgpCjOgb Legs: https://strong.app.link/14XP0cAjOgb Legs: https://strong.app.link/1s0ItwBjOgb Push: https://strong.app.link/AxLRMdKkOgb Push: https://strong.app.link/Zisz6JLkOgb Push + Legs: https://strong.app.link/5cXST3MkOgb Pull: https://strong.app.link/UjEGuNKkOgb Pull: https://strong.app.link/Ral0WdMkOgb Pull + Legs: https://strong.app.link/adXJ2qNkOgb Legs: https://strong.app.link/M2iNqhLkOgb Legs: https://strong.app.link/NVgVnCMkOgb 0-1 Month of Push: https://strong.app.link/ut784GO4hhb consistent exercise: 1-3 Months of consistent exercise: 3-12 Months of consistent exercise: 12-24 Months of consistent exercise: Workout Routine Questions I can’t do this exercise / it feels painful for me. What should I do? If some of the exercises feel very awkward for you, feel completely free to substitute them to a similar exercise that trains the same muscles. For example you could switch pullups (overhand grip) to chin ups (underhand grip) if pullups hurt your shoulder. If you’re unsure what exercise to substitute to, simply search for the muscle your training onto YouTube + “exercises” + equipment you have available. For example you could search this into YouTube: “Chest exercises no equipment” “Lateral delt exercises dumbbells” If you purchased my full Aesthetic Body Course you have access to a group coaching chat. You can post your questions there and get my personal advice… Purchase the Aesthetic Body Course: https://hamza-ahmed.co.uk/aesthetic-course-preorder The workouts feel too short. Is that it? This is exactly the mindset that we want you to have as a beginner. We want you specifically leaving the gym wishing you did some more, that’ll get you straight back in the gym tomorrow. The beginner who leaves after doing a huge workout often doesn’t come back tomorrow. For the first month especially we want your workouts to be ridicously short – less than 30 minutes. This makes it far easier for you to build working out into a habit. The gains will automatically come once you’ve built this habit. Why are we hitting the same abs exercises every day? Shouldn’t we hit different exercises for the abs? Flat lying leg raises are the king of abs. The reason why we’re doing them every day is because this one exercise hits the entire 6 pack unlike most other ab exercises. If there’s one exercise for abs that you should do, it’s this one. I’ve put the flat lying leg raise exercise at the end of all of your workouts but that isn’t how I train abs myself. Instead of hitting abs at the end of my workouts, I hit abs as part of my morning routine – completely separated from my usual workouts. I wake up, meditate, cold shower etc and then I hit 2-3 sets of abs every morning. If you’d like to train abs just like I do, remove the flat lying leg raise from the end of your workouts and simply do 1-3 sets till failure every morning in your morning routine instead. Hamza’s Advanced Workout Routines To continue making progress after your first 2 years of training, you’re going to need to level things up. Here are the exact workout routines that I do as well as some extra bonus workout routines I’ve made for anyone reaching the intermediate/advanced stages of their training. These routines have extra volume which will keep you making progress. My workout split is push, pull, legs… with a twist. I hit my push and pull workouts starting with the gymnastic rings and then I go to my home gym to finish off some extra sets that can’t be hit by the rings as well. Rings + Gym combo (My exact workouts): Push - https://strong.app.link/7y0A2iPMqhb Pull - https://strong.app.link/RfltLKRMqhb Legs - https://strong.app.link/3nD6obYMqhb Gym: Push - https://strong.app.link/zxlxRkgOqhb Pull - https://strong.app.link/EvDfWWfOqhb Legs - https://strong.app.link/foLQDHgOqhb Home: Push - https://strong.app.link/15bQeknNqhb Pull - https://strong.app.link/OhMEI5PNqhb Legs - https://strong.app.link/BYF3hvWNqhb How to Build a Habit of Working Out No BS Follow Along: 1. Stack your workout on top of a habit that you already have: Wake up, use the bathroom, go to the gym 2. Build excitement before your workout by visualising yourself with your dream aesthetic body, enjoying life 3. Start with short, easy workouts and workout every day to prioritise consistency above intensity (you have your entire life to build up the intensity, you need to be consistent first) 4. Make a habit tracker where you tick off habits like your daily workout to give yourself a feeling of instant gratification There is only one way to reach your aesthetic body and that is to make working out into a habit as soon as possible. Once your workouts become a habit, you’ll be making gains automatically. Below is the science of building a new habit from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. We are going to go through it in a No BS Follow Along way. There are 4 steps to forming a habit: Step 1: Make it Obvious We want working out to be automatic, at the same time every single day. The easiest way to do this is to ‘habit stack’ by working out immediately after a habit that you already have. For example, you could build the habit of working out by following this morning routine: Wake up, use toilet, go to gym. In this example we are stacking the habit of going to the gym on top of our current habit of going to the toilet in the morning. In fact, it was this exact routine (wake up, toilet, workout) that I used to get consistent in my training for 6+ years. You don’t have to workout in the morning if you don’t want to or if you can’t due to responsibilities like work or school but in general putting a habit in the morning makes it a priority. If your aesthetic body transformation is your priority, do it first thing in the morning. If you aren’t working out in the morning, find an already-formed habit that you can workout after (for example during your lunch break in work as you get up from your chair, or after dinner). 2: Make it Attractive Strengthen your workout habit by making it more exciting. Build up the anticipation of working out by visualising yourself with your dream body, enjoying life. Do this visualisation just before you are about to go to the gym (after waking up/in the toilet following the example from step 1 above). I personally feel so excited to see my morning physique in the mirror, always taking a minute to flex in the bathroom every morning. This got me in a good mood and led to me being excited to hit my workout that morning. 3: Make it Easy The number of times you have done a habit is more important than how much time or intensity you have put in. We want quantity above quality to form habits. The recommended workout routines (found below under Workout Routines title) prioritise getting into the gym (or wherever you plan to workout) every single day to do a short workout. In the beginning, we only care about forming a workout habit, not hitting intense workouts. You have your entire life to increase the intensity of your workouts. At the beginning stages, we need to make the workouts short and easy so that you feel more than up for them every single day. 4: Make it Satisfying As a beginner, you see the rewards of working out (increased muscle and strength) literally weeks or months after your workout session. That’s too much of a delay and you’ll struggle to continue going to the gym, sweating, feeling fatigued, feeling your muscles ache but not seeing any real results for weeks. Feeling satisfied after every workout is a must to increase motivation and continue working out in the future but waiting until you get the satisfaction from the increased muscle and strength will take too long. You’ll be like the beginner who quits because they went to the gym for a few weeks but didn’t see a difference in their body. Without taking steroids, there is no way to drastically speed up your muscle and strength gains, that means you need something else that gives you a feeling of instant gratification immediately after your workout. Something as simple as a habit tracker where you tick a daily box for your workouts will help you feel satisfied with this habit. The Strong app (free app that is used in the Workout Routines page above) presents a celebration page after you complete a workout, throwing some confetti on screen whilst showing you your workout stats. This will give you a small feeling of satisfaction after hitting your workout. Do not just read the 4 steps above and change nothing. These 4 steps are your secret to building a lifelong habit of working out (how awesome is that?). Really take the time to go through the 4 steps, journal and see what you can improve. Your future self will be very grateful if you build a consistent habit of working out now. Now you’re ready to begin your training with the focus of building a habit of working out as soon as possible. Read below of advice based on how long you’ve been consistently training for. Training Age: 0 – 1 Month NO BS Follow Along: 1. Build a habit of working out by hitting a short workout every day (0-1 Month recommended routines are linked on the Workout Routines page of this program) 2. Record yourself hitting the exercises, send those videos to someone more advanced and ask for feedback on your technique 3. Leave the gym thinking that you could have done more and feeling excited for the next workout 4. Be aware of your lizard brain as it will try to convince you to skip workouts, don’t listen to it. Go to the gym even when you don’t feel like it. Training Knowledge: You’ve just started your aesthetic body transformation. That’s awesome. You should feel insanely positive for starting this hobby. Keep in mind that your future self is going to look back to you today and smile every time he thinks about how much effort YOU put in for him to enjoy his dream body. At this beginning stage we want to prioritise consistency above everything else. We want you to hit a short workout every single day. Go to the Workout Routines section of this program and choose one of the links for the ‘0-1 Month’ section (depending on what equipment/gym access you have). What you actually do in the workout is not important, the most important thing is to get you consistent in just showing up to the gym (or wherever you workout). It takes anywhere from 30-60 gym sessions until training becomes ‘normal’ for you. Most routines will have beginners training just 2-3 times per week but this leads to beginners never getting consistent in their training and eventually quitting – they never reached that point of it becoming a habit. We are going to shortcut the habit building process by getting you into the gym every single day. Once you’ve built up the habit of getting to the gym, we can start to maximise the routine to make gains. Until then, prioritise coming to the gym every single day just to hit a short session. The lizard brain is your worst enemy at this point. The lizard brain is the part of your brain that generates negative thoughts (which still sounds like your normal voice in your mind!) that take you away from your goals. You’ll find yourself thinking about skipping workouts just before it was time to go to the gym. Your lizard brain will sound convincing – it’ll tell you that you should skip today’s workout because you’re tired and you have lots of work to do anyway and you can just hit the workout tomorrow... Do not listen to the lizard brain. Once you have set a plan, understand that any thoughts you have that take you away from that plan are not logical thoughts, they are your lizard brains thoughts. To counter your lizard brain, build a habit of following this phrase: “Do the hard work, especially when you don’t feel like it.” Frequently Asked Questions At The 0-1 Month Stage: “What will I do in the workouts? I don’t even know how to do those exercises!” Don’t get overwhelmed with the workout routine. Simply get to the gym or wherever you will be training, load up the workout on the Strong app and follow the instructions on the routine. You’ll be watching a quick video tutorial of me showing you how to do each exercise with the correct technique before you actually perform the exercise so you’ll have a beginner’s grasp of how to do it. The best advice I could give you at this stage is to take your phone with a tripod (https://amzn.to/3ubYJIl) and to record yourself hitting the exercises. These videos you record are extremely valuable. You can send them to more advanced friends and get feedback on how to improve your form. If you’ve purchased my full Aesthetic Body Course you have access to a private group chat on Discord where I will personally give you feedback on your technique. Purchase the Aesthetic Body Course here (You get everything you need to build your dream body all in one place): https://hamza-ahmed.co.uk/aesthetic-course You may feel anxious in recording yourself at the gym but that is not rational. Many people, especially the advanced guys, do it to improve their technique on the exercises. Recording yourself in the gym is a very normal thing to do and no one finds it strange. “What about rest days? Won’t I be overtraining?” As your workouts will be very short (15-25 minutes) you can hit the workout every single day. Overtraining happens when someone has intense workouts with too much weight. Although the plan here is to get you working out every single day, the overwhelming majority of beginners will miss at least a few days per week as life gets in the way. It’s better for us to set the intention for you to workout 7 days a week and you end up working out 5 days a week rather than setting the intention for you to workout 3 days a week and you end up working out 2 days a week. This is also an experiment to see what kind of person you are when it comes to consistency in training. If you’re a guy who can consistently hit 6-7 of these workouts per week, we’ll change up your workout routine to one that optimises aesthetic muscle gain after 1 month of building up this consistency. If you’re a guy who misses a fair amount of these daily workouts, we’ll fix that early. “But what if I want to workout for longer than 25 minutes?” Beginners with high levels of motivation often do too much in each session. They’re hyped to be in the gym and they hit a 1 hour workout. That feels awesome for 1-2 days and they feel so confident telling everyone about their recent intense workouts… But then they start to skip workouts. Why? Because they get too sore. They get overwhelmed. As soon as they have a bad day that makes it hard to get to the gym (due to responsibilities, studying, work, sickness etc), they cannot imagine hitting a 1 hour workout, and so they miss it completely and they never form a workout habit. We want you to leave the gym thinking that you could have done MORE. That’s the best mindset a beginner could have. You’ll leave the gym excited for the next workout, unlike the beginner who overdoes it and leaves the gym excited that they get to take 3 days off now. Training Age: 1 – 3 Months NO BS Follow Along: 5. Follow the 1-3 Month routine in the Workout Routines section above 6. If you missed a fair amount of your workouts over the last month and you felt like you weren’t consistent in your training, reread the above section on How to Build a Habit of Working Out and really follow it Training: You’ve trained for 1+ month now. You will now start training 6 days a week (having a set rest day) with slightly more intense workouts. Go up to the Workout Routines section of this program and follow the ‘1-3 Month’ routine. Over your first month of training you’ve either built up some consistency and you’re getting close to the point where working out becomes a habit or you missed a bunch of workouts. Be honest with yourself, how consistent have you been over the last 1 month? Have you missed a fair amount of workouts for any reason? Or have you stayed dedicated to your training program? If you’ve been consistent in your training and you haven’t missed many planned workouts over the last 1 month, simply go through each individual workout by clicking on the links and following the workout on the Strong app. This routine will get guide you through your aesthetic body transformation as fast as possible. If you’ve missed a fair amount of workouts over the last 1 month, that’s a sign that you’ve struggled to create a habit of going to the gym. Take this seriously. Your future dream body relies on you training consistently and not skipping workouts. Reread the above section How to Build a Habit of Working Out and really follow along to the steps. Play around with your ‘workout variables’. Change everything that can be changed and make a note of it on your phone or a computer document. Change the time that you go to the gym and see if that helps you get more consistent. Most people find they are far more consistent in working out if they do it first thing in the morning before eating anything. Have humility and really question yourself. Ask ‘Why have I missed all those workouts?’ and journal the answer. It’s vital that you do this early on in your training. You will make achieving your aesthetic body so much easier if you can build the habit of working out now. Frequently Asked Questions at the 1-3 Month Stage: “When will I see a difference in my body?” Around the 2-3 month mark you should start to see some differences in your body, especially when you have pump (just after you have exercised a muscle it’s bigger because your blood rushes to that area). If you follow the advice in this program, this will be the reality for you. If you’ve found parts of this program overwhelming and so you just continued doing whatever you were doing originally, you may find yourself a few months in looking exactly the same (or even worse) than when you started. “I’m not making progress fast enough, what can I do?” You must have patience. You do not deserve to have a muscular body yet. It takes years. Always keep in mind that you have the body that you deserve. If you want to improve your body, make it so that you deserve it. Be honest and ask yourself – how has your training and diet (mentioned in the on the last page of this training program) been over the past few months. Is there room for improvement? Any improvement you make to your training or diet will speed up how fast you see progress in your muscle and strength. You really have to have humility here and ask yourself questions like “What would someone who hated me say about my training and diet?” Often you’ll find that you can’t criticise yourself because you’d like to believe that you’ve been working hard but when you step into the shoes of someone who hates you, they could probably say tonnes of things that you’ve been doing wrong like “You’re not training hard enough, you keep stopping the set early instead of going till it burns, you’ve missed a bunch of workouts, your diet is shit, you sleep late…..” Write all of these points down and use them to improve. Also, are you being influenced by social media? When a beginner says that he isn’t progressing fast enough, it’s usually because he’s been watching YouTube body transformations and looking at fit guys on Instagram. Social media warps your perception of what is real and achievable. It takes years to sculpt your body but you see someone’s entire body transformation in just a 5 minute video on YouTube. “What if I lose motivation?” Habits do not require motivation. Our main focus at this stage is to make working out into a habit. Its best if you workout at the exact same time every single day (preferably after the same existing habit, read the section above titled How to Build a Habit of Working Out to understand this). Think of motivation as an extra treat. It is not required to do something. You can do the hard work even when you don’t feel like it and in fact, that’s probably the most important time to do that work. The people who rely on motivation never get serious results because they only workout when they feel like it, and quite frankly you won’t feel like it a lot of the times. If you rely on motivation you’ll skip too many of the workouts that you didn’t feel like hitting. Making a habit of working out and building discipline allows you to workout even when you don’t feel like it. And often times you don’t feel like it until you start, as soon as you warm up in the gym with your hype music on, you feel glad that you’re there. So remember this, next time you don’t feel motivated to go to the gym, put one foot in front of the other and get in the gym anyway. You’re an athlete now. We do the hard work, especially when we don’t feel like it – that’s when the most gains are made. This is too much! I can’t workout 6 days a week. What should I do? You should try to make the 6 days a week workout routine into a habit. The workouts are short enough for you to squeeze in before your work day if you can build the discipline for that. Still, if you can’t workout 6 days a week, simply workout as many days as you can. Follow the same routine that’s titled 1-3 Month in the Workout Routines section above and go through the workouts in order (Push – Pull- Legs – Repeat) when you can hit them. Just remember that setting the intention to hit 6 days a week and actually hitting 4 is far better than setting the intention to hit 3 workouts a week and actually hitting 2. Often time’s beginners say they can’t do that many workouts per week but they do have the time for it, it’s just their lizard brain convincing them that they aren’t up for it. If you can make the time right now, you’ll be guaranteeing your dream body YEARS faster. There’s a huge return on investment for every minute you spend working out. What if I miss a workout? What should I do with the workout routine? If you miss a workout, for example you miss the Push workout from the 1-3 Month workout routine, simply hit that Push workout tomorrow. Your workouts should be based on going through the Push – Pull – Legs rotation. What should I do on my rest days? Rest your muscles but there’s no reason to not do a bit of cardio every single day for the rest of your life. That’s what we are built for. Do ‘normal life’ exercise – Go on a walk whilst listening to an audiobook and get 5000-10,000 steps in, go on a jog, attend an MMA class, go for a bike ride, go swimming etc. On rest days just rest your muscles, not your entire body. Our body rests every night whilst we sleep. Working out and building an aesthetic body is not my priority. I’d like to have it but I have other, far more important things to focus on like my studies and my business. What should I do to maximise my aesthetic body transformation whilst minimising the investment I have to put into it? You should know that the return on investment for building your aesthetic body is huge. Think about the life you’re going to enjoy when you have the body that not even 1% of men have. The 5 hours a week that’s required for this pursuit is absolutely worth it. Busy people will often alternate between how much they can invest into their training depending on their current workloads. Some months you may be able to train 6 times a week, other months you may miss weeks entirely. This is unideal and it’s often these guys who don’t see any visible gains after months. To counter this, build the habit of working out as your priority. If getting to your workout felt ‘automatic’ even when you were low on time, you’d feel happy hitting it and securing those gains for your future self. Also exercise improves our brains function. If you’re studying for exams or you’re in a competitive business/career, you will perform better after exercise. The 25 minutes you spend exercising will literally improve your grades or improve your skills in your business/career, so it isn’t a total time sink away from your bigger priority, it aids it. Still, let’s say you’re on a deadline and you really are low on time. Just hit the workouts when you can with a stress-free mindset. If you were not hitting consistent workouts previously, even just hitting 2-3 short workouts a week will result in progress. After your deadline is gone, you can allocate more time to your body transformation and aim for 6 workouts a week again. Training Age: 3 – 12 Months NO BS Follow Along: 1. Follow the 3-12 Month routine 2. Add weight or reps to the exercises every week to maximise gains through progressive overload 3. Perfect your technique on the exercises by recording yourself or asking an advanced gym-goer for feedback (this counts as progressive overload too) Training: You started training over 3 months ago. Although you may not feel entirely consistent because you’ve recently missed some workouts, you’ve been exercising for 3+ months, that’s awesome. Now it’s time to really up the intensity of your workouts. You’ll still be working out 6 days a week, your workouts will be far longer (45-60 minutes each) and your focus will now be on progressive overload. Progressive overload is simply doing more than you used to do and it’s vital to continuously make progress. If you lifted 50lbs a week ago, you would be progressively overloading if you lift 52.5lbs today. In the 0-1 month stage you were automatically progressively overloading just by showing up to the gym because you likely were not doing any consistent workouts before that, so it was of course ‘more’ than you used to do (which was nothing). Now that you have been working out for a couple of months, you must progressively overload to keep making maximum gains. Think of progressive overload similar to how levelling up works in video games. In a video game, to go from Level 1 to Level 2 could take 100xp, to go from Level 2 to Level 3 could take 125xp, and to go from Level 89 to Level 90 could take 365,492xp. This is exactly how it works to continuously make progress in your aesthetic body transformation. To make the initial gains is fairly easy, you just have to show up and do the bare minimum. But as the months go by you have to start to do more and more in the gym to keep making progress. Have the mindset that if you want to continuously grow, every single workout you hit needs to be challenging relative to your current strength. This is why a beginner’s workout is challenging for that beginner and an expert’s workout is challenging for that expert. If the expert did the beginners workout, he would make no progress because it was not challenging enough. The ways to use progressive overload are: Increase the weight that you lift overtime, increase the reps that you lift of that weight, increase the number of sets in each workout, make the exercise harder. The Strong app makes this very easy to follow. You’re shown what weight and reps you hit last week and you can play a game with yourself to beat your ‘score’ from last week. For a completely free app, Strong is a must have. The workout routines for this training age (found on the Workout Routines page) have additional sets compared to the routines from the 1-3 month training age. Those extra sets add progressive overload straight away. Now it is your responsibility to hit your workouts and prioritise increasing the weight or reps of some of the exercises every week. For example, you could add the smallest weight your gym has to your bench press today, hitting the same number of reps that you hit last week. Or you could add 1 extra rep to all of your sets on leg press. This should be your intention when you get inside the gym. Now that you are fairly consistent, we want you to start focusing on intensity. Step inside the gym thinking about exactly what you are going to increase today (weight or reps – the sets have already been increased in the workout routines for you). However there is a common mistake beginners often make at this point: As you use progressive overload to increase the difficulty of the exercises, you’ll likely start to cheat on the exercise which will eliminate the point of the progressive overload in the first place. For example you could add 2.5lbs to your bench press today but then press the weight 1 second faster than you usually do, and press more with your shoulders rather than your chest. This ‘progressive cheating’ defeats the purpose of our training and can lead to injury. You must have the intention to keep your technique of the exercises consistent over the weeks. This is where the final method of progressive overload comes in: making the exercise harder. Beginners can make the exercise harder simply by hitting it with the correct technique (as beginners often cheat when hitting exercises, making them easier). You would be progressively overloading if you put huge intention into perfecting your technique by recording yourself with your phone and asking for feedback on your technique online or simply asking an advanced gym-goer to watch you hit a set. Making the exercise harder by perfecting your technique is the best progressive overload method for beginners as it still results in as much muscle gain as possible but does so by making your workouts safer. You’ll need to perfect your technique at some point anyway, why not start now and have more time training with great technique that better grows your muscle? Your workout length will be roughly 40 minutes near the start of this training stage (when you are around 3 months into training). As you consistently train for months, you can start to add additional sets or even new exercises to your routine. This will increase your workout length. Ideally you’ll be working out for around 5 hours per week at the end of this training stage (when you are around 12 months into training). Since you’ve already seen some muscle growth, now is the time to personalise the workout routine you follow to build your aesthetic body exactly how you want it. You’ll have areas that seem like they are lagging behind, for example, you may feel like you’d look a lot better if your chest popped out more. Whatever your lagging muscles, simply add more sets of that muscle into your routines. If your chest was lagging, you could add an extra set or two of bench press on both Push days of the routine so that would be an extra 2-4 sets of chest per week (which would bring up that lagging body part in a couple of months). The routines I’ve provided will work to cause overall growth but your individual growth will be unique. It’s up to you at this point to determine where you want your body to go and to adjust your workout routine accordingly to that. Don’t get overwhelmed at that, literally just add a couple of sets per week to the muscles that you feel are too underdeveloped. Frequently Asked Questions At The 3-12 Month Stage: I’ve been training for months but my body still looks the same! Why? Forcing your body to grow takes time and effort. Look at your body right now and really think about the process needed to literally reshape your body, it’s not a small deal. To cause that muscle to grow, you have to tear it in intense workouts. Be honest with yourself, how intense have your workouts actually been? Have you been skipping sets or reps, just leaving the gym early? Have you been skipping entire workouts and ending up training just 2 times a week? Beginners who have trained for months but who look exactly the same often don’t have the confidence and humility to admit that they haven’t nailed their training. Everyone online will tell you that it’s your diet or sleep that’s causing a lack of gains. I don’t think so. When you’re just a few months into training your rate of muscle growth is the fastest it’ll ever be (unless you take steroids in the future) and that’s even if your diet and recovery is poor. As long as you show up to the gym and workout the target muscle enough, it will grow. Not seeing as much progress as you want really does leave you with a negative emotional state. Do not live with that. Take action right now, get out a journal, have humility and ask yourself this question “If I hated myself, what negative stuff could I say about my recent training?” – Imagine you are your worst enemy, what shit could he talk about you? This style of journaling forces you to acknowledge your weak points that you’ve avoided. I’ll do it right now with you… If I hated myself, what negative stuff could I say about my recent training? I’ve had to rush some workouts over the past few weeks because I’ve had coaching calls that I had to get to. That’s poor time management, I had enough time to hit a full workout and get to the calls on time but I wasted minutes here and there which meant that I skipped a couple of sets of the last exercise (forearms) in a few of my workouts. I skipped a couple of entire workouts near the start of May 2021, I have a pretty good excuse for that (going through a breakup) but the gains don’t care about any excuse. I would have felt better hitting those workouts rather than skipping them. Your turn. Ask yourself the question “If I hated myself, what negative stuff could I say about my recent training?” and use the answer as a learning lesson to improve your upcoming workouts. This will speed up how quickly you see a major difference in your body. These workouts are making me too sore. Should I do less? That feeling of soreness is awesome, it means you’ve teared the muscle and it will grow back bigger within a few days. Well done. Start to feel grateful for the soreness – If you feel sore in the muscle you hit in the last few workouts, you’re going to grow. Beginners often don’t like the feeling of muscle soreness because to them it’s just pain. As you get more advanced and you start to associate the soreness with muscle growth, you actually start to feel happy that you feel sore. We expect you to feel very sore after your workouts. If that soreness is in the right place (the muscle you worked out yesterday or the day before) then we’re happy and you should just suck it up. At worst you can take some paracetamol or ibuferon to reduce some of the pain. This is an awesome time to level up your meditation practice. You feel sore, that means that the pain cannot be avoided. You don’t, however, have to suffer. You will feel the pain of muscle soreness but suffering is in the mind. If you’re suffering because of the pain, you are choosing to feel that. You can experience the pain and not suffer from it simply by being very mindful (aware, focused) of the muscle soreness. To learn more about meditation watch this video: https://youtu.be/nDFE1GAovMw No BS guide to reducing suffering through meditation: Feel the pain, don’t have any mental thoughts about it, just really feel the pain with interest and feel the specific areas of the muscle that are sore. An important note: If you feel sore in your joints (ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows) or your lower back, that’s a sign that your technique in the gym needs to be improved. Our joints get sore when we use too much weight that the target muscle can’t handle, so we mess up our technique to help that muscle move the weight and that messed up technique leads to joint injuries. You’ll probably know exactly which exercise caused this joint soreness. Simply reduce the weight of that exercise by 10-30% and start to really focus on your technique for that exercise. Bring in that tripod, record your sets, and watch YouTube videos of the correct technique to use. I plan to workout 6 days a week but I only manage x days a week. What could I do to improve that? Working out must become a habit. Reread the How to Build a Habit of Working Out section of this training program and really see what changes you can make to create that habit. The book Atomic Habits by James Clear goes into far more detail, you should read it. Generally people don’t workout as much as they would like because their lives aren’t set up to build that habit. The easiest way to get more workouts in is to build the habit of working out first thing in the morning, every single day. Follow this ‘morning routine’: Wake up, use bathroom, workout. This may mean you’d have to wake up earlier to have time for the workout, it’s worth it. Go to sleep 30 minutes earlier and wake up 30 minutes earlier (what productive stuff where you really doing at night-time anyway?). One side of my body is bigger than the other side!! What should I do? Beginners often get really obsessed with this. It’s mostly in your head and the actual differences in the sides of your body are much smaller than you think. That’s why when you ask someone about your uneven muscles, they look at you and say that they “can’t even tell”. As you continue training, the uneven muscles will even out. Don’t think about your uneven muscles, focus instead on the fact that you just don’t have much muscle right now anyway. Build more muscle over the next few months and you’ll forget about this. Training Age: 12 – 24 Months NO BS Follow Along: 4. Follow the 12-24 Month routine 5. Continuously make your workouts intense and challenging to continuously grow Training: You started training over a year ago. Fantastic. By now everyone around you has noticed your gains, you’re taking some sexy shirtless pictures that make you feel so proud of yourself. You’ve built a fantastic habit of exercise. Well done. By this stage you will likely be finished with your ‘noobie gains’ which is the accelerated progress that complete beginners make in their first year. That means that your progress will slow down. Your rate of strength or muscle mass will stall and you’ll stop being able to make awesome progress every single week (you’ll be able to add weight, reps or sets to your exercises perhaps every 1.5 or 2 weeks now). Although your potential for gains has slowed down, you shouldn’t let that effect your training. In fact, you should use that as motivation to do even more to force growth. Many gym-goers don’t make much progress after their noobie gains finishes. They built a somewhat decent physique and then they never get any bigger. This is entirely due to progressive overload. They keep roughly the same kind of workout, same intensity, same consistency and expect continuous results… If you want to keep growing, you have to keep doing more, even when it’s difficult. Each and every workout you hit has to be challenging relative to your current strength. Remember that video game analogy for progressive overload – To level up now, you must get far more XP than you needed previously. That means you have to really enter the gym having to hype yourself up for your challenging workouts, holding the intention of exactly what you are going to do today to induce progressive overload. The workout routines for this stage (found in the Workout Routines page) are optimised to force muscle growth after your noobie gains have diminished. Your workouts will be 60+ minutes each by now with a variety of different exercises that will really fine tune your aesthetic body. Like the previous section (training age of 3-12 months) you will start to see lagging areas where you wish your muscle was more developed so that you looked more aesthetic. Bring up those lagging areas simply through progressive overload – adding more sets, more reps or harder exercise. This is bodybuilding – Critiquing your physique to fine-tune it. Frequently Asked Questions at the 12-24 Month Stage: I’d like to switch workout splits from PPL to x. Can I do that? Sure. At this point you’ll have enough knowledge and experience to know your body and you’ll probably be able to tell whether a different exercise, workout or entire split would be better for you. It’s awesome to experiment at this stage to find what truly works best for you. In general, a PPL split will lead to the most gains. But if you’re finding it not working for your schedule, perhaps you can only go to the gym 3-5 times a week and you’d like to hit longer workouts per session rather than having more short sessions per week, what matters most is that it works for you. There’s no point putting you onto the ‘perfect’ workout split if you weren’t able to follow it. Have flexibility over your choices but do not get comfortable. It’s often with decisions like this (wanting to change workout split or diet) that guys in this stage stop making muscle. It’s very likely that this will be you. Don’t have a huge ego and straight away say “nope not me”. Have humility and really question whether your decision to change splits and other factors of your training is a calculated decision or it’s just your lizard brain convincing you to be a pussy. As always, journaling will help you here. My strength has went up significantly since I started but now I’m scared to lift that much weight. I don’t want to get injured and it doesn’t seem safe. What should I do? If your strength has went up considerably that means you’ve nailed your training and diet so far. Well done. Being scared of the heavier weights is completely normal. You’ve probably watched videos of people failing the exercise and putting themselves into a dangerous position and that’s making you fearful of putting too much weight onto the bar. Those ‘epic fail’ videos only happen to idiots who lifted too much weight at once. If you slowly (through progressive overload) increase the weight you use, you won’t be putting yourself in danger. For example, if you hit 100lb on bench press today, you could reasonably hit 102.5lbs next week, and even if you failed that exercise, the weight isn’t incredibly high that makes failing the exercise dangerous. Compare this to the dumb asses that may have lifted 100lbs in high school 2 years ago, they start going to the gym with ego and load on 150lbs because their friends are hyping them up and of course they fail, the bar falls on their chest, the weights fly off the bar causing a huge noise and damage to the gym. Don’t train like an idiot and that won’t happen to you. The same can be said for getting injuries. You will absolutely injure yourself sometime in the next few years, almost everyone does. But it won’t be a serious injury as long as you don’t lift with ego. If you slowly increase the workout intensity and the exercise weight over weeks, your muscles will be able to handle the weight and your joints won’t get injured. My workouts have gotten too easy. How can I level things up? This is exactly the position we want you in. If you feel like the 12-24 Month workout routine is too easy, that means you’ve made some great progress. Well done. To level things up and keep up the intensity, simply follow the progressive overload knowledge you learnt earlier in this training program: Increase the weight or reps that you lift, add additional sets or even whole new exercises. Remember, each and every workout you hit should be challenging relative to your current strength. If your workouts feel too easy for too long, you’ll be stunting your growth. Make sure to stay on top of that and constantly add more challenge and intensity to your workouts. I feel very fatigued from this training. Can I take off more than 1 rest day per week? Training 6 days a week is optimum for growth but sometimes we can’t manage that much. You can take off extra days if you really feel like you need to or you can consider taking a ‘deload week’ every couple of months. A deload week is an entire week of workouts where you do just 50% of the sets and reps that you normally do. For example you normally do 3 sets of 8 reps of bench press, on a deload week you’d do 1 or 2 sets of 4 reps of bench press (and also take off 50% of the rest of the exercises). Take a deload week every 2-3 months if you feel like you need it (lots of soreness and fatigue, feeling tired from training that has started to affect your normal life). Taking deload weeks isn’t shown to decrease gains as although you do less work for a week, you recover and train better for the weeks after that which makes up for it. I got sick / took time off training and lost my gains. What should I do? When we take a couple of weeks off from training we end up looking significantly smaller than we thought we would after just a short time off and that feels discouraging. But the great thing is that your muscles didn’t actually get that small. You simply lost ‘glycogen’ which we can say is like the long term pump you get from consistent training. Just get back into your consistent training as soon as possible and you’ll see yourself gain significant size within a week of workouts. Mistakes You’ll Probably Make The biggest, most detrimental mistakes that a beginner makes are: Cutting Instead of Bulking I was obsessed with getting a 6 pack when I first started training and so I constantly would try to cut. Every time I’d cut for a couple of weeks and lose a couple of lbs, I’d start to look too damn skinny and realise that I didn’t have enough muscle to cut. So I’d start to bulk. But then I would want to get a 6 pack again and so I’d cut again. If there’s one mistake that’s set me back the most, it’s cutting instead of bulking. When you’re a beginner with less than 1-2 years of training, have the mindset that you cannot get lean, you can’t have the 6 pack or the veins. But you can have the size, and as a beginner, that’s more than enough to be hyped. The most progress you’ll ever make is when you do a long lean bulk followed by an 8-12 week cut. You do not deserve to be lean. Beginners cut because they want to look lean and see their abs before they’ve even built their abs! This is a huge mistake because anytime spent cutting before you’ve actually built a significant amount of muscle (at least 1 year into training) is wasted. Every month that you cut for is an extra month that you have to add on to achieve your 10/10 dream body in the future because cutting stunts your muscle growth. Bulking supercharges your muscle growth. Not Creating a Habit of Training Making your training into a habit is the foundation for everything else. There’s no point thinking about anything unless you’re building a habit of consistent training, otherwise all of your efforts will be wasted when you eventually quit. This deserves a lot of your intention and focus. Do whatever it takes to solidify a habit of training – Experiment with different routines and schedules Not Training Hard Enough Beginners fear the pain that comes from training hard. They’ll be hitting an exercise, for example bench press, and stop the set early even though they could have hit an additional 4 reps, just because their muscles started to burn. Your muscles burning is a good thing! That’s what we want. Each and every workout you hit has to feel challenging – You may get the thoughts in your mind that you don’t feel 100% up for hitting the entire workout, that you might even take off some sets or just skip the last exercise. Get those thoughts and then smash the workout anyway. Inside of the workout, each and every set has to feel challenging. If you want to make muscle, every single set you do has to be close till failure. You have to feel like you could barely hit a couple more reps. Diet NO BS Follow Along: 1. Build the habit of weighing and tracking every gram of food that you eat 2. Fill up your calories and macronutrients from clean, healthy foods 3. Have a small treat every day (cube of dark chocolate and cup of tea/coffee is all you need – 30 calories) 4. Do not follow the advice of Fitness YouTubers – eating junk food just because it fits your calories will result in more fat gain 5. Junk food increases insulin – a hormone that makes you fatter and weaker You know nothing about diet and nutrition. You’ve never been taught any valuable knowledge in school (you probably have overweight teachers), at home (you probably have overweight parents) or anywhere else in society (you’re surrounded by overweight people). Most of the people around you have unhealthy diets. That means you cannot follow the diets of the general public. You can no longer eat on impulse. Remember the lizard brain? Your lizard brain craves junk food. It wants you to overindulge in sweet treats even when you’re on a diet. You must not listen to your lizard brain. It’s only after you eat the junk food (sometimes even whilst you’re eating the junk food) that the regret kicks in and you realise the seconds of pleasure were not worth the sacrifice to your goals. Average people eat for pleasure. You will eat for nutrition, just like athletes do. The biggest improvement to your diet will come from building the habit of weighing and tracking your foods. If you aren’t currently weighing every gram of food that you eat, transitioning to this will give you a fantastic feeling of mental clarity, you’ll know exactly the calories and nutrients of what you’re eating and so you’ll have a sense of comfort and confidence that average people do not. Apps like MyFitnessPal make it incredibly easy to track everything you eat and after 1-2 weeks of doing this, it’ll start to feel normal. What gets measured gets managed and once you start managing your diet like this you’ll find it strange why everyone else doesn’t weigh and track their food too. Below is an extract from a Diet Plan that I’ve wrote: Why should you eat clean, healthy foods if all that matters is calories in – calories out? First of all you must understand why the fitness industry has been promoting calories – in calories out. It sells. The videos of the fit people eating junk food are more likely to be watched, diet plans advertising “eat all your favourite junk food and still lose weight” sells, fitness coaches marketing their “eat the processed food you love and lose weight” sells. But does it work? Yes. This is where it gets tricky. Eating junk food (as long as you follow the rules of calories in – calories out) will result in weight loss… but it will stunt your aesthetic body transformation. Whilst you may be able to eat ice cream and still lose weight, the calories from the ice cream are not used to build muscle. Essentially you have just lost 350 calories that you could have used on complex carbs like rice or potatoes that would have fuelled you up for your workout, leading to increased strength and therefore increased muscle. This isn’t even mentioning your health. When you follow a ‘flexible diet’ of eating whatever you want as long as you eat the right calories, you’ll naturally start to eat junk food that’s heavily processed, filled with all sorts of unhealthy ingredients and is always higher in trans fats and sugar – the 2 things that will make you fat and lead to metabolic syndrome (one of the leading causes of death in the world). Eating unhealthy food also makes you much more likely to overeat above your calories. It’s not so difficult to eat most of a pizza by yourself, that’s around 2000 calories in one sitting. Imagine trying to eat 2000 calories of a healthy meal like salmon, potatoes and vegetables. It’s practically impossible. Yet people who follow flexible dieting overeat above their calories all the time. That leads to even more fat gain. Whilst you CAN lose weight eating unhealthy food, you often WON’T. And even in the best case scenario of losing weight whilst ‘eating your favourite foods’ you’ll be sacrificing muscle, health and your lean body fat %. Eating junk food will undoubtedly cause you to be at a higher body fat % than if you were eating healthy (even at the same calories!) Why would eating 2000 calories of junk food lead to more fat than 2000 calories of healthy food? Calories are just a very simple way of looking at your diet but it’s actually your hormones that you should care about. No BS explanation of diet hormones: Eating junk food like ice cream and biscuits will increase your insulin production. Insulin is a hormone that’s released from sugar and it literally causes the fat building process, making you feel weak and tired. The more sugar you eat, the more insulin in your body. The more insulin in your body, the more your body produces fat and also the more tired you feel. This will directly undermine your workouts. Complex carbs like wholemeal bread or potatoes don’t produce anywhere near the same level of insulin in your body. That means calorie for calorie, junk food will result in more fat gain. So not only does eating that junk food produce more fat (even at the same calories) but it actually leads to you being less active and performing worse in the gym which means even less calories burnt and reduced muscle growth. The reduced activity caused by insulin (which is caused by junk food) is often coupled with instant gratification activities like binge watching Netflix or wasting hours on social media. For most people, there is no benefit to eating sugar other than the instant gratification you get (and that’s something we want to desperately avoid as men on self improvement). Athletes may get some benefit from having sugar near their workouts, but this is marginal and is just a few grams of sugar. The issue comes from people who randomly eat junk like donuts, cake, sweets, and chocolates throughout the day. Calories in – calories out just doesn’t make sense when you start to look deeper into nutrition. How our body reacts to those calories is more important than just the basic number of how much you’ve ate. Just imagine anyone who says that ‘All calories are the same’ is an idiot who says ‘All money is the same’. An in general, if the rest of the population are eating that food (fast food like McDonalds, sweet treats like candy, soda, cake) just know that you should be steering way clear of it. If you want to build a body of the 1%, you must do everything differently to the 99%. What about junk food that isn’t sugary? Junk food that isn’t sugary (pizza, burgers and fries) is still problematic but it’s less of an issue than sugar. The problem of this foods comes from how easy it is to overconsume. You will eat more in a meal of junk food than you would in a healthy meal. These junk foods are often high in sugar anyway! Isn’t that crazy? (A burger from McDonalds has more sugar than a small bag of sweets, a sandwich from Subway has the same sugar as 1.5 large energy drinks and 3 slices of pizza from Dominos has the same sugar as a donut. If you’re going to eat junk food, make it ‘proper’ food like a takeaway/restaurant meal that you’re also having for a social experience to share with friends and family. But what about adherence? Isn’t a diet that restricts your favourite foods bad? Adherence to a plan is the priority. However our plan isn’t to restrict your favourite foods. It’s to change your favourite foods. Imagine if you felt no craving towards unhealthy foods. You could have your old favourite snack right in front of you and you felt nothing towards it. That’s the best case scenario. That’s what this Diet Plan aims to walk you through. The meals I’ve given you in this plan are still incredibly tasty. You’ll look forward to your meals and you’ll quickly start to lose the craving for sugar especially now that you’ve learnt that it negatively effects your muscle mass and body fat %. Your adherence to the plan will be increased as we will allow 1-2 cheat meals per week and a small daily treat of 1 cube of dark chocolate. This treat will improve your meditation and willpower practice and will battle cravings away. Conclusion You have in your hands the blueprint to building your dream body. Refer back to this training program often and have humility. Overcoming just some of the most common mistakes can help you build your dream body literally years faster. The pursuit to build my 10/10 aesthetic body truly changed all parts of my life. It is the foundation of every other part of success that I’ve achieved. Weightlifting took me from an average video gamer who didn’t really like himself to a young man who has an incredible amount of self-love. Every single time I see myself in the mirror, I’m reminded that Younger Hamza delayed gratification so that I could have this body today, and that makes me smile. I wish that for you. All the best, Hamza PS. Here’s your last reminder: The Aesthetic Body Course is affordable and practically builds your dream body for you. The amount of hours you’ll save from no longer needing to watch fitness YouTube videos is insane. Click this link right now to build your dream aesthetic body: https://hamza-ahmed.co.uk/aesthetic-course