What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
So, inevitably it seems that every time summer rolls around the questions start to roll in
as to how to get the physique of – insert the celebrity physique of the moment – and
that's the one that most guys want.
This year it seems to be Zac Efron from Baywatch.
Now, this is what Zac Efron looks like in Baywatch.
This is what Zac Efron looked like a year ago in his last movie Neighbors.
So how did he make this transformation?
Now, before people start saying "Oh, I know how!
It's always steroids.
All these actors use steroids to get themselves ready for a role."
I think it would be discrediting the hard work that he put in.
all you've got to do is look at some of the clips of him training.
We've seen his workouts.
Secondly, you've got to have a little bit of a realization of how far he actually came.
In this after photo Zac Efron is actually only between 165 and 170lbs and he started
at 155lbs.
so you're looking at a 10lb lean muscle gain over the course of a year.
Now, there's a lot of things that I'm going to cover in his training that I actually like
a lot that I believe could easily lead to that type of lean muscle gain, especially
because he hadn't been doing some of those aspects.
Before we do, this isn't the first time I've covered one of these sort of reviews of what
this celebrity of the moment has done.
Years back I did one on Taylor Laughter.
A lot of guys probably wouldn't even remember who Taylor Lautner is.
This is what he looks like, by the way.
Interestingly, in this after photo he was, yet again, about 165lbs to 170lbs.
So the first thing I want you to realize is that you don’t have to be all that huge
to look really good.
If you can maintain a lower body fat level and maximize the amount of lean muscle that
your body can carry, you're going to look way bigger than somebody would ever guess.
They're going to imagine you weighing 15lbs to 20lbs heavier than you do because of all
that lean muscle.
Now, Taylor doesn't look that anymore.
As a matter of fact, he looks like this.
I'm going to cover why I feel that happened to him, and why I hope and feel in Zac Efron's
case it's not going to happen.
Let's start with Zac Efron's training.
When you look at his training there's some things that I really like about it.
first and foremost, if you've been watching this channel for any length of time there
have been no bulking or cutting in that one year period.
I've talked about how I think that's unnecessary bullshit.
You do not need to bulk up and then cut down to maximize your muscle gain.
You don’t need to do that.
I don’t care what anybody says.
The fact of the matter is, I know more guys that get stuck in that perpetual bulking phase
that can never get out and the guy that can take that slow an steadier approach and maximize
and make some really nice gains without ever having to go down that road.
In this case of Zac Efron, I feel like he's done exactly that.
Secondly, one of the reasons why I feel like he's been able to do that is he introduced
heavy training to his workout and reportedly for the very first time.
I know there's a lot of guys watching this channel right now that maybe have shied away
from heavier training.
They felt that it's not something that either they're comfortable with, or maybe they don’t
feel like they've built the base for that, or maybe they just don't want to try the exercises
because they're going to try them for the first time in public.
As I've said in previous videos, you've got to start somewhere.
So you want to start incorporating heavy compound lifts and start adding the weight as you're
able to.
As you do that you're not only going to see your size gains improve, but you're going
to see the muscle density improve as well.
So we know that those two elements are in place.
Thirdly, the reported split that he used was a push-pull leg split.
There's a lot of reasons why I like that split.
As a matter of fact, it's one of the phases that we have in our ATHLEANX training system
and it's because it allows your body to train the way it prefers to train.
To train athletically.
You're training muscles for function, not necessarily individually.
So we know that biceps and back are both pulling muscles.
All their actions are going to be pull, either your body closer to a bar, or the bar closer
to your body.
When we know that, we can concentrate on increasing the athleticisms of our muscles and how they
work together by doing that and choosing exercises that do that.
So I could do a heavy, compound movement here like a bent over row.
We know that I'm not just working my back here.
Because my elbows are bending here, flexing, we know that we're getting bicep activation
as well.
Same thing on a pull up.
I can load up the pull up with added wei4ght here to make sure it's heavy.
But at the same time we're getting bicep carryover and activation as well.
If I were to split these two up and I were training biceps tomorrow and I had back done
today, we're not allowing for another critical component, one that Zac apparently had a high
priority for.
That is recovery between workouts.
Because while I stimulate the biceps in my back workout today, when I go back tomorrow
to do biceps on their own, I haven't given them enough time to recover on their own.
So you're in this perpetual state of breaking down as opposed to actually allowing any of
those muscle to recover in between those workouts.
So you've got your pull day, your leg day, and then on your push day you're training
you triceps, your chest, and your shoulders.
Various activities like this: inclined bench press, a shoulder press done with heavier
weights, or even just a tricep push down.
Now, on top of the split, it was referenced that he also did daily ab training.
So now I just talked about the recovery of muscles and how important it is, but when
it comes to the abs, there's something unique about the abs.
They're incredibly resilient muscles.
As a matter of fact, until you put your head down on the pillow at night your abs are working.
They're working posturally just to hold you upright and if you want to make sure that
you can improve their ability to do that, I think you need to increase the training
volume of this muscle that you don’t have to do 30 minute workouts or 45 minute workouts,
but I've been a big advocate of daily ab training in small sessions.
Five, six, seven minute sessions.
We even have a whole app – the six pack promise – devoted to that end goal to allow
you to start building the resting tone of the abs and to have them become more stable
and strong even just when you're not training.
So it's a very important muscle and something that you probably could benefit from by increasing
the daily frequency of that.
Finally, we talked about his ability to maintain those lean levels all year round and to have
some of those low levels of body fat.
That's going to come in from a combination of diet – which we'll talk about in a second
– and his conditioning.
His conditioning, I don’t care who you are, you're going to get bored if your conditioning
relies and revolves solely around long walks on the treadmill.
It ain't going to cut it.
If you want to become more engaged in your workouts and more engaged in your conditioning,
particularly, so you can get better results and actually look forward to it, then start
training more athletically.
Get out there and start doing some sprinting.
Do some agility work.
He's even been shown doing a lot of upper body agility work just climbing around on
monkey bars.
That's a good way to train.
As a matter of fact, I have these bars here that I installed in my gym so that I could
do that to break up the monotony.
I could go back and forth over these, try to go fast, try to go slow, change it up to
allow myself to just have a different effect on y training, rather than just straight up
and down pullups.
It's all about training athletically and when you look at the whole picture here, you're
looking at ATHLEANX.
You're looking at how you look like an athlete by training like an athlete.
That's what we preach over and over again.
Of course, the diet is a major part of it.
This is where I think Taylor Lautner kind of missed the mark.
If you go back to these pictures of what Taylor Lautner looks like now, you have to just start
with the clip.
I'm going to play a clip of him from a radio interview he did a while back around that
period of time that he was in that shape, and in his best shape.
Interviewer: It took a couple months to get to that form that you were before, or do you
not worry as much, or how does it work?
Taylor: What I learned is that I have to stay on it.
I can't ever give it up as long as I'm filming this franchise because it's tough.
If you stop at all it all loses like that.
The biggest thing I learned is that it is just as hard to maintain as it was to put
on in the first place.
The most challenging part was definitely the eating process.
I basically had double my calorie intake per day eating every two hours, not the most yummy
things.
So did you hear what was going on there?
It sounds pretty, almost painful for him.
Very, very challenging.
Something that he felt like – you could almost hear the short term nature of his approach
to eating.
He was so rigid and so strict, and he was eating foods that he didn't sound like he
really even liked all that much and he was eating it so often throughout the day.
let me tell you something, if you don’t like what you're eating, I don’t care how
you're eating right now, there's a lot of different methods, and a lot of different
styles of eating.
I don’t care what method you're following right now.
If you don’t like it and enjoy it, you're never going to stick with it long term.
What we're talking about here is getting long term sustainable gains.
Not just looking good for summer.
We don’t want to just look good this summer.
I want to see what you look like next summer, too.
If you can't find an eating plan that allows you to be consistent with it by liking what
you're following, it's never going to work long term.
So back with what Zac Efron is doing.
It's been noted that he follows a very solid nutrition plan, but allows himself to break
away and have a cheat day later in the week.
I've been asked a lot of times about cheat days and what my feelings are on them.
I don’t necessarily have cheat days.
I don’t necessarily have entire stretches of meals put together where I'm eating things
that I should be eating, or eating things that are less desirable than a solid nutrition
plan would provide, but you can do that.
If that's what you want to do and that's going to help you keep your sanity, that's totally
fine.
In his case, I love that.
I love the approach because it allowed him to stay locked in.
it's going to allow him to stay locked in, I feel, a lot longer than maybe in Taylor
Lautner's case.
So, I've always used a batting average analogy in baseball because that's sort of my background.
If you were going to eat five meals a day over the course of a week, that's 35 meals
in a week.
If you eat six times a day that's 42 meals in a week.
Let's say you're eating those 42.
If you go 35 for 42, or 36 for 42, 37 for 42; that's a hell of a good batting average.
You'd be going in the hall of fame if you did that.
Well, you can have that same approach to eating.
Maybe you eat perfectly throughout that entire week, but you save all those five meals for
that one day on a Sunday.
Great!
No problem!
It's no different than spreading them out through the week, having one here, one here,
and one here.
The idea is, if you strive for perfection and that consistency of perfection every single
day, to the point where it feels like a deprivation to you, it's never going to work.
I think that's what happened here to trip up Taylor, and it's something that you don’t
have to have happen to you.
As a matter of fact, our X-FACTOR meal plans are really sustainable and easy to follow
because we allow you to pick the meals that you like from within all the meals that we
provide and then allow you to stay consistent with them because they're not all that hard
to prepare, they actually taste good, so you never feel like you're missing out.
If you want to work in your cheat meals I even show you how to do that in our program
by selecting the individual meals, calculating them in to your overall 'average', you're
eating/batting average, and make something that you can actually live with.
So, guys, I hope you've found this video helpful.
There's a lot to learn from when we do these celebrity reviews.
Are we all going to look exactly like them?
No.
Are we going to look like them in a month, ready for summer?
Hell no.
But if you can start following the major themes behind what they're doing, I'm telling you,
your ability to change your body, the sky's the limit.
Your ability to keep that body, most important, keep it – that's what we preach here all
the time – is definitely something that you can attain and something you can master
once and for all.
If you're looking for a step by step plan, training like an athlete, all the elements
we just covered and talked about, day by day, meal by meal; it's over at ATHLEANX, guys.
I'm happy to show you exactly how to do it every single step of the way.
All right, guys.
I'll be back here in just another couple of days.
More videos, three videos every week.
Let me know what you want me to see, what you want me to cover and I'll do more of that
in the days ahead.
This video came from all the emails that you guys have written in to us.
Tell me what else you want me to talk about and I'll do that the best I can.
All right, I'll see you soon!