here’s a new article I wrote for The Soko:

About a year and a half ago, I started training a kid (we’ll call him Johnny) who was 13 years old. He was around 250 pounds, not very tall and was in need of some help and fast. He looked like a mini obese adult, to be blunt.

He was quiet the first time I met him, but you could tell that this was a kid that really wanted this change to happen, and he would be willing to work extremely hard to get some life changing results. As you would expect, exercise was a struggle for this young man, off the bat, and his nutrition needed some definite tinkering.

Let me explain a couple things he had to deal with (maybe they are issues for you too) and what he did to get down to almost a third of his bodyweight.

“I Did NOT Want to Get Out of Bed This Morning.”

Have you ever said that to someone the day after a tough workout? Well, that’s exactly what he said to me. I hear trainers all the time telling people that they won’t feel sore or shouldn’t feel sore after a workout because it means you went too hard.

Personally, that’s a load of you-know-what. Now, I’m not telling you to sprint until you drop for your first workout ever. I’m just saying, for the first little bit of training, if you’re doing anything productive at all, you’re going to be sore.

So live with it.

The first workout Johnny and I did together consisted of teaching him the proper way to do a bodyweight squat and testing how many knee push-ups he could do in a minute. Grand total was somewhere around 14, I think.

Other than that all we did was the warm-up, where I taught him some functional stretches to get him ready and the cool-down, where he learned some static stretches.

His muscles just weren’t used to working or being stretched, so he was sore. Plain and simple. From my experience I know you just have to push through it for a week or two. Your body is an amazing machine and it knows how to adapt to the newfound stress.

“It Says I Gained a Pound This Week…What’s the Deal?”

Ever have this happen to you? Heartbreaking, isn’t it? When you bust your butt all week and the ‘truth-teller’ (also known as the scale) tells you that you gained.

Yep, it happens. One thing you’ve probably heard before and you will hear a lot from me (so be prepared) is that the scale doesn’t matter.

There are many reasons why the scale might be off a little bit at the moment in time when you decide to weigh yourself.

Johnny gained a little bit of weight the second week of training with me and was a little confused, so he asked me why that happened. Maybe he gained a little muscle, maybe he weighed himself at night and not in the morning, or maybe he was retaining a little extra water because he had been eating some high sodium foods.

Did his pants fit better? Yep.

What are you worried about…your pants fitting better or a silly scale that’s going to tell you if you’ve succeeded this week or not?

He Had a Vision

I have to give a lot of props to Johnny. He made the commitment to change and change he did. He wanted to learn everything from mental training to nutrition.

Now there were workouts that he just wasn’t feeling up to, but he did them anyway. There were times when he really wanted his favourite drink in the world, iced tea, but he didn’t. There were times when he really wanted to sleep in at a friend’s house, but he chose to have me over at 10 a.m. on a Saturday so he could get his workout in.

He knew what he wanted. He had a clear vision of 75 pounds dropping from his body. As I write this, he has achieved around 78 or 79 pounds of weight loss. He now has a 33-inch waist and is finding new things to enjoy with his old friends (and new ones who have started to notice how great a kid Johnny is since his fat loss).

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the journey is always worth it

There is always a burst of motivation when you start going after new and exciting goals that are going to change your life. Sometimes the struggles that come along with those new goals make it really hard to stick with them though.

Johnny was sore, tired and frustrated at some points throughout his body transformation, but he made it, and I know he’d tell me he’d go through it all again because the results he got were worth it.

Make a commitment to yourself, learn what you need to do, be prepared for both the ups and downs and look forward to the great results you’re going to be getting from all your hard work.

What are your thoughts? Send me a line at dan (at) thesoko (dot) com.

Dan Grant

PS - The Fat Loss Crew is ‘on fire’. Reviews are coming it on Oprah superstar Lynn Haraldson-Bering’s interview. It’s available for FREE right now…but probably not for a whole lot longer so if you want to hear it go to www.thefatlosscrew.com.