Christian Finn has been a long time fitness role model to me. His philosophies on body sculpting, fat loss, and muscle building are very much inline with mine and his writing style really resonates with me. He’s a no B.S. kinda guy with your best interests at heart, which is why I called upon him to share an article about his top 5 principles for sculpting your body into a work of art.
Enjoy!
5 Timeless Principles for Turning Your Body into a Work of Art
By Christian Finn
Creator of Muscle-Evo
Today I’m going to tell you about five timeless principles for turning your body into a work of art that will leave people thinking Michelangelo was having a bad day at the office when he created David.
They are five very simple principles. Put them to work in your life and they will make a big difference in the time it takes you to accomplish your goals, as well as the satisfaction you experience while working towards them.
Principle 1: Focus On Performance Not the Outcome
The traditional advice on goal setting goes something like this: Set a specific goal, such as losing 20 pounds or gaining 10 pounds of muscle. Then set yourself a deadline by which you plan to achieve it.
A commercial airplane will never leave an airport without a flight plan, the old adage goes. It requires a destination, a time of departure and an arrival time.
When it comes to setting goals for fat loss or muscle growth, I’m going to suggest that you take this advice, tear it up and throw it out the window.
Unless you’ve been in shape before, trying to predict in advance exactly how your body will respond to a particular program of diet and exercise is never easy.
Figuring out the direction of change (i.e. fat loss or muscle gain) is relatively easy. It’s a lot more difficult to put a precise number on the speed at which that change will take place.
Or to put it another way, if you’ve never flown the route before and you don’t even know what type of plane you’re flying, it’s very difficult to figure out in advance what time you’re going to arrive.
Someone that’s been training for a while will know how long it takes to lose a given amount of fat or gain a certain amount of muscle. For these people, attaching some kind of deadline in the form of a contest or photoshoot is a great way to instill a sense of urgency and excitement.
But for everyone else, all you need to do is focus on two things – where you want to go and how you plan to get there. And that’s it.
Deadlines can be motivating. But they can also be incredibly de-motivating if you repeatedly fail to hit them. Not because you haven’t put the effort in, but because of the highly unrealistic Ferris-esque ambitions you started with in the first place.
It’ll take as long as it takes, and there’s no point in attaching some highly unrealistic deadline simply because that’s what everyone is telling you to do.
Principle 2: Ready, Fire, Aim
The best way to find out if a particular program of diet and exercise works for you is to jump straight in and do it. You can always adjust and tweak your strategy as you go. It’s the Ready, Fire, Aim approach and I much prefer it to the more common Ready, Aim, Fire method.
The reason is that after you’ve fired once (i.e. taken action) you have some real-world data that you can use to adjust your aim in future.
It’s easy to get bogged down in the planning stage and never reach the point where you actually do anything. You’ll learn a lot more by taking action than you ever will by planning and thinking about it.
Principle 3: Economy of Effort
There’s a good chance you’ve heard of the Pareto Principle, which you might see called the 80-20 Rule or some other variation on the theme.
What it says is that 80% of results, rewards, or outputs are generated by 20% of causes, efforts, or inputs. For example, 80% of a company’s sales come from 20% of their products… 20% of thieves account for 80% of all crime… 20% of motorists’ cause 80% of all car accidents… and so on.
The numbers don’t always come out to 80-20. But it’s rarely the case that 50% of causes lead to 50% of results. The relationship between input and output is not always a balanced one, and a small number of causes are usually responsible for a large percentage of the effect.
So what does all of this have to do with diet and exercise?
Probably the best way to explain how the 80-20 Rule applies to fitness is in terms of training volume. As you know, there’s an ongoing debate about the optimal number of sets required to stimulate gains in strength and size. On the one hand you have people saying that one set per exercise is all you need. On the other, there are those claiming that multiple sets deliver the best results.
There are plenty of studies out there to show that three sets of an exercise produces faster results than one set. But they don’t deliver three times better results.
In other words, the relationship between input (number of sets per exercise) and output (muscular gains) isn’t a balanced one, and spending three times longer in the gym is no guarantee that you’re going to add muscle three times faster.
Getting in shape requires that you do a few simple things right, do them consistently and avoid big mistakes. Those few simple things will be responsible for 80-90% of your results.
Principle 4: Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing
You are currently plugged into a constant stream of information, be it Facebook posts, Twitter updates, e-mail newsletters and whatever else, demanding that you pay attention to whatever happens to float your way.
Every day you hear about some new and amazing training method. This leaves you unsure about what you’re currently doing. You start to wonder whether you’re doing it properly, or if it’s working as well as it’s supposed to. So you try to combine elements from half a dozen different routines and diets… a little bit of interval training here… a bit of carb-backloading there… all topped off with some functional training for good measure.
Despite all of this, your weight hasn’t changed for weeks… maybe even months. Your bench press has been stuck at the same weight for longer than you care to admit. So you keep looking. And you keep reading.
STOP!
Pick one goal and one system, and then do exactly what it says for the next 12 weeks. Don’t second-guess what you’re doing or allow yourself to become paralyzed by too much information.
If it works the way it’s supposed to, you’ll be in better shape than you are today. If it doesn’t, at the very least you’ll have learned something about the way your body responds to a particular program of diet and exercise.
Get clear on what the main thing is. Then make sure that it stays the main thing. Work hard, be patient and give your body the time it needs to change.
Principle 5: Strategic Ignorance
Much of what passes for health and fitness information is either completely irrelevant or plain stupid. Most of it is a complete waste of your time.
It’s actually worse than useless, because it distracts you from the things that are really important and misleads people into thinking they’ve discovered something of value.
Every piece of information over and above what you need to get the results you want is a cost. And I’m not talking about cost in terms of money. I’m talking about what it’s costing you in terms of time and energy.
You have to read through it… evaluate it… decide whether to use it, add it to your growing “stuff I’m going to try later” list or ignore it completely.
The more information you have, the more you run the risk of having your attention turned from the things that matter to the things that don’t.
Be honest. How much of what you read about last week have you used? How much of it can you even remember?
Life is short. There’s very little point in wasting any more of your remaining time on this planet reading yet another article from someone who’s saying something controversial for no other reason than to get your attention.
The solution is strategic ignorance. This means making a conscious decision to ignore distracting, irrelevant, or otherwise unnecessary information.
Stop trying to keep up to date with everything. Ignore the links coming your way on Facebook and Twitter. Get rid of the huge reading list that’s getting bigger by the day. If the information is worth anything then you’ll hear about it again in future.
Choose a few people to pay attention to, limit your reading to a handful of sources and ignore the rest of it.
Want more? If you want unbiased reviews on the latest “hot topics” in the world of fitness, you’re confused by all the conflicting advice out there, or you just want to know the best way to burn fat, build muscle and get strong, click here to check out Muscle Evo now.