When you hit 30, life tends to take over.
Busy job, mortgage to pay and kids running around everywhere. Fitness and exercise can take a back seat, your metabolism slows down and it’s easy to pile on the pounds.
But it doesn’t mean that your best days are behind you. Quite the opposite actually. Joshua Adeloye is a prime example of how you can still be hench as fuck even with the mad job, the kids and the busy life.
The 32-year-old video games developer nailed an incredible 20-week body transformation to prove to himself and his wife that he wasn’t past his best. The results were pretty impressive.
Over five months he cut down from 15 and a half stone and 34 per cent body fat, to a lean and ripped 12 and a half stone and 11 per cent body fat.
“I decided around Christmas time that I really needed to lose weight and change my lifestyle,” he said. “Since starting university I had definitely let myself go and used all my energy on my career and own business developing games.
“I was doing no exercise at all, all I did was work and overeat. Looking at pictures of myself compared to how slim and in shape I was in the past was definitely not easy.”
“My wife always joked that she met me after I’d been at my physical peak and that it wasn’t fair, and even though it was said in jest it definitely made me think about getting back in shape. Another factor was my children; as they are getting older I definitely need the stamina to keep up with them, which was something I was lacking.”
To kickstart his transformation he needed to make two big changes: he needed to clean up his diet and control his calorie intake, and start training to build muscle and burn fat.
The biggest change was around what he was eating. Before he started his programme he would have a breakfast of coffee and cereal or a fry-up, a meal deal with chocolate, crisps and sandwiches for lunch, and then burger and chips for dinner.
Joshua switched all this for foods that would properly fuel his training and support his body composition goals – getting more lean protein, good carbohydrates and fewer simple sugars, along with good, fibrous fruit and vegetables.
During his transformation plan he was eating a small bowl of porridge at breakfast, chicken and salad for lunch and then pesto chicken, brown rice and vegetables for dinner. Snacks like chocolate, sweets and popcorn were swapped for healthy fruits in between meals.
“I eat much more healthily now than I used to,” he said. “I’ll have chicken for lunch and dinner, with salad or brown pasta, and instead of snacking on chocolate and sweets I’ll have fruit to keep me going.”
Joshua really stepped up his training which helped him begin building more muscle tissue and also creating a calorie deficit with HIIT cardio, putting his body in fat-burning mode.
He was training five days a week in the gym on the LDN Muscle Cutting Guide which he downloaded. But he was even coming into the gym on his days off too.
“If I came into the gym on my days off, as the program was usually scheduled for five days a week, I would do some lighter weight training which would make up part of my Tabata, personal circuit routine,” he explained.
“All in all my training usually lasted about 90 mins, which I did before I went to work. I found going in the morning woke me up for the rest of the day – even on the weekends I would prefer to go in the mornings.”
Cardio was also critical to the process of getting lean for Joshua.
“I found cardio was definitely vital to my weight loss, but of course a bad diet just renders all cardio useless. At first, because I didn’t really know what to do with cardio, I joined in on some of the fat burn classes which focused on getting your metabolism up and keeping you sweaty in order to burn the fat clean off.
“I found that from doing the cardio fat burn classes I felt like it was continuing throughout my morning – even though I was sitting at my desk I felt like I was still burning fat.
“I soon upped my cardio by doing circuit training which is where I first rode a speed cycling bike and was getting to learn new techniques for targeting the core and exercises related to getting my stomach flat, which was a big goal of mine.”
He also did some straight-up HIIT cardio in the form of treadmill sprints which can help boost your metabolism for up to 48 hours after.
It’s amazing what you can achieve with a bit of hard work and consistency – and no matter how busy you are, there’s always time in your day to train.
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