FAT LOSS PERSONAL TRAINING FOR MEN
Welcome to “Meltdown” at Ultimate Performance, our intense and proven fat loss program.
We have been fine tuning our Meltdown Fat Loss Regime for over fifteen years, and now have perfected it to the point that after 2 weeks of working with you at UP we can tell you almost exactly how much body fat you should drop in the remaining weeks – so long as you do what we ask of you!
Results, Not Promises
Promises are easy to make, but for those of you who are prepared to work hard and follow our advice to the letter then life changing fat loss results can be yours. Here are just a sample of our hundreds of fat loss results, take your time and read their stories, they were all once where you are now.
Click here to read about our clients Real Results
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
All our clients, male and female, have deeply personal, sometimes complex and often very emotional reasons for being unhappy with their current body weight or shape.
Whatever you are thinking, you are not alone.
Most often feeling too busy or stressed with work and family commitments or even a little bit of laziness or lack of knowledge trap us in an unhealthy self-perpetuating cycle and we feel tired and sluggish, our sleep suffers, we binge or comfort eat or rely on unhealthy convenience options too often and it affects both our body and mind.
We can help change this and break the cycle.
The pattern is familiar; it doesn’t happen overnight but accumulates over time and tends to hit us as a big shock in the clothes store, the mirror, looking at old photographs or when we just can’t physically do something we once found easy.
Glenn didn’t achieve this in 6 weeks but he took his commitment beyond that time to change forever using skills gained from Ultimate Performance personal trainers.
Maximum Results Minimum Time
For some of our clients their motivation is less dramatic but no less meaningful, they want to look great in their wedding suit with all their friends and family around them, or more toned on the beach so they feel better about themselves or their work demands they are in shape for Catwalk or Screen.
Click here to read about our clients Real Results
OUR UNIQUE PROGRAM
Full Diet and Nutrition Plan
We understand that nutrition plays a huge role in getting you the results you want and for that reason we make sure all of our clients have their own bespoke diet plan. This is created during your first session using a questionnaire, which asks all we need to know about your diet history and lifestyle in order to put the perfect plan in place.
We then take your body composition stats and ask about your goals, then combine all this together to create the ultimate fat loss plan unique to you.
Unlike a lot of fad diets that take away entire food groups or drinking shakes to severely limit calories this plan has been made to fit your lifestyle not just for now, but for the long term. This means that once you have got into the shape of your life, you can then maintain that shape year round.
Once this plan is in place we will then monitor your progression via daily emails and constant feedback from you, making small changes to the plan along the way as and when needed. This daily monitoring of your nutritional habits and progression is how we ensure the best fat loss result while training with Ultimate Performance.
Bespoke Supplementation Plan as Needed
Your diet plan will cover everything you need but we’ve found over the years that most clients can benefit from a small amount of supplements. After our assessment and on an ongoing basis if we spot an issue or deficiency not easily or conveniently corrected with food we can recommend the best available supplement products to you.
Your Photographs & Photo-Shoots
One of the best ways to monitor your progress and see the changes you are making to your body, is to take weekly photographs.
This can seem nerve wrecking at first, standing in front of a complete stranger whilst they point a camera at you.
All of our trainers are highly skilled professionals who look at the pictures from a completely professional point of view, noticing subtle changes that aren’t always seen by the untrained eye.
These subtle changes help the personal trainer to make sure you are moving in the right direction; after the 12 week plan once you see the pictures the changes will no longer be subtle but dramatic.
All of the pictures are confidential, between client and trainer for the benefit of judging progress but many clients when they are happy with their results want to show them off. The images you see here represent those clients who want to act as inspiration for others and are happy to share.
Many of our clients don’t want to be shown, and we respect that.
We are also able to arrange professional gym photo shoots for our clients.
Body prophet is a unique assessment tool from Ultimate Performance.
It has been created by our world leading personal trainers, in order to get you the fastest results possible by helping us understand why you are storing fat.
The system works by creating a hormonal profile, assessing why you store fat in certain areas and the ratio in which you store fat across your body.
From here we can put together a highly specific nutritional and supplement protocol, which is unique to your body and will accelerate results.
Unlike similar tools Body Prophet has been creating using data from our own fat loss clients across the globe. We are constantly collecting and comparing the data between our trainers worldwide in order to ensure our software is up to date.
Workouts
On the basis of the data gathered by our initial consultations we then build a unique Fat Loss / Fat Burning training programme unique to you based on the Meltdown principles. This is a 6 week plan that is designed to evolve as your conditioning improves and will see you burning fat and stoking up your metabolism right from the very first workout.
We also take into account the information gathered during the physical assessments, and construct a plan that takes into account any pre-existing or potential structural / muscular imbalances, addressing weaknesses head on and eliminating them with the application of modern sports science programme design.
Your trainer is with you every second of your workout at UP Manchester, making sure your form is perfect and that you get everything possible out of each session.
Your Questions Answered
How much weight / fat can I expect to lose?
This question necessitates two separate answers.
Actual net weight loss is something that we rarely consider at UP because our clients’ goals are less about some arbitrary number on the scale and more visual, health and performance based.
That typically means that “fat loss” and “body recomposition” (fat weight becoming muscle weight) are the desired outcomes.
Sometimes we are presented with clients who need to drop substantial bodyweight for health purposes, but giving an actual number here would be to generalise so widely as to be wasted conjecture. In some cases it might be optimal for a morbidly obese male to drop several kg in a week, whereas many others would be best served with a number that is a fraction of that.
Fat loss is typically a more representative goal of what we do at UP, and whilst actual numbers are hard to define because a 75kg male can safely and effectively drop body fat at a different (slower) rate than a 115kg male, we usually aim for 0.5kg-1.5kg (1lb-3lb) of fat loss every week when this is a priority.
At UP we opt for far more accuracy than the scale alone can provide and use our own proprietary BodyProphet software to track body fat % changes. Our goal for most males who have the willingness to stick closely to our advice is to see a 1% body fat improvement every week.
There’s a natural slowing down of this process at the extremely lean sub 10% body fat mark, and a commensurate speeding up of the process, with 5% body fat improvement in the first 3 weeks not massively uncommon, with males in the standard 17%-25% body fat percentage range.
Can I lose fat and gain muscle at the same time?
Almost all of our new clients lose fat and build muscle at the same time. After the initial honeymoon period of rapid body composition improvements, which can be as wide as 9-18 weeks, it is often advisable to focus on one goal at a time, either fat loss or muscle gain. Some so-called “fitness experts” will tell you that it’s impossible to achieve simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain. They will claim that in order to grow new muscle you need a calorie surplus and in order to lose fat you need a calorie deficit. In actual fact, as the client results that pepper our website will testify, so long as you have the right stimulus for building muscle (resistance training that is either smarter or harder than anything you’ve done before), and higher quality nutritional intake than your norm (as we would expect all our clients to adopt once working with us on their diet plans) then the human body is more than capable of a wonderful feat of body recomposition. The more deconditioned and out of shape you are the more likely this is to happen. Conversely, the leaner and more muscular you become the harder this is to achieve and typically at around the 10%-12% body fat mark we need to look at calorie intake a bit more carefully and fat loss needs to be prioritised over muscle gain until the desired body fat levels are achieved.
How many times a week should, I train?
Your results are always going to in part be determined by how frequently you can exercise. Olympic athletes look the way that they do in no small part because they train so often. We know that you don’t have the time to live like a professional athlete and almost all of the results that you see on this page are from our clients training a maximum of 3 times per week. In an ideal world, we would prefer that approximately 25% of our male clients come to the gym 4 times every week, whereas the other 75% do not have the lifestyle or hormonal recovery abilities to get the benefit from anything more than 3 times per week of hard gym work. Recovery sessions such as outdoor walks, swimming and Yoga are all great additions to the standard 3-4 times a week UP training session.
What is the best diet for fat loss?
There is no magic diet for fat loss. At UP we work closely with our clients in order to come up with a highly individualised prescription that fits your goals and commitment levels. For some clients we keep it as simple as “Ten Rules To Live By”, whereas others like to keep daily online food trackers based on a range of UP weekly meal plans that they review several times a week with their trainer. Our motto is that the best diet is the one that you can stick to at the time.
How many meals should I be eating per day?
Total daily and weekly calories, and the overall quality of your nutritional intake, will always be a far more important factor for fat loss than how many meals a day you eat. We typically advise a client to consume nutrients 4-5 times a day, but please pay attention to how this has been phrased. 4-5 meals a day may be both ideal and practicable for some men, but many of us have neither the time nor inclination to do this so a couple of the meals on a UP meal plan may be something as simple as handful of almonds and an apple, or a protein shake with added fats from avocado or coconut oil.
How many meals should I be eating per day?
We actively advise against “taste bud boredom” because in the long run it makes your dietary adherence that much harder to put into practice. Are there foods that we strongly advise are temporarily off the menu when maximal fat loss is the goal? Yes, because there may not be room for empty calories with zero nutritional benefit, or you may be the person who can’t stop at one chocolate bar or just one pint of beer. Ultimately your diet is highly individualised, so in conjunction with your trainer you can make it as varied as you wish within the confines of your goal and temperament.
What is the best exercise for fat loss?
First of all lets accept that all exercise is good and no proponent of one training modality should bash the proponent of another training modality. However, we must also accept that some forms of exercise are much more time efficient for ramping up your overall metabolic rate and for improving your body’s hormonal status so that you can better handle the food that you eat. The number one form of exercise for this is resistance / weight training. This is why when you walk into any UP gym anywhere in the world what you will not see is scores of treadmills and stair masters. If these were the most effective exercise tools for fat loss then this is what we would use, as our raison d’etre is to maximise time efficiency for our busy clients who expect to achieve results, with just a handful of hours of exercise over weeks and at most months of time, that the majority strive in vain for over years of fruitless effort and wasteful gym memberships. The tools of our trade at UP are there because they are the most malleable (we can adapt them to any goal – fat loss, muscle building, endurance, speed, relative strength, rehabilitation) and controlled forms of exercise in the world. You will find weights, exercise machines, bodyweight training apparatus, stationary sprint bikes used by the British Olympic Cycling Team (the most successful cycling team in Olympic history), and our famous red sprint tracks that we rarely employ for running and instead use for such fun sounding activities as prowler pushes and farmer’s walks.
How much cardio should I do?
For fat loss to occur you need to use more energy than you consume, meaning you need to be in a calorie / energy deficit. However, the calorie deficit does not have to come entirely from food. Adding some cardiovascular work to expend more energy rather than restricting your energy intake alone could also be useful. Again, it all boils down to the individual’s goal, body type and time frame. Balance and moderation is key when it comes to cardio, and we prefer our clients to start off at the lower volume end until we can assess how their new diets and resistance training programs are working. One quick point to add is that the UP style gym training is almost always a massively cardiovascular workout in its own right. It’s a common myth that weight training doesn’t exercise the heart – anything that gets you out of breath and is physically demanding can count as a good ‘cardio workout”, and many of our long term clients opt exclusively for resistance training “cardio workouts” over traditional steady state exercise such as jogging. Their body shapes and their doctors’ feedback are testaments to the benefits of this!
HIIT or Steady State Cardio? Which one is best?
The one that is best for you is the one that you can stick to consistently. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is more efficient in terms of time spent doing it and calories burned afterwards. However, the benefits of HIIT can only be had if you can actually perform HIIT to the level required. It’s an all-out maximum effort and many people just starting out on an exercise regime may struggle to achieve that high level of intensity. Additionally, you may not have the required fuel to perform HIIT optimally, or after performing HIIT you may be extremely hungry. Slow steady state cardio may be a good option if you are new to exercise or you’re on restricted calories. As ever it all boils down to the one you can fit into your daily / weekly schedule and the one you can do consistently whilst still seeing results. Many of us enjoy long “steady state” walks in the countryside for example, and the health benefits of such an activity go way beyond simple fat loss. If I do sit ups or abdominal crunches every day, will I get a six pack? Abdominals are muscles just like any other and need to be trained effectively if you are to have a visible, sculpted six pack. However, if you are not training the big muscles with the big exercises, and your nutrition is not on point then training your abs will be ineffective. If your training and nutrition are correct, you may see the benefit of more direct abdominal training. The great thing about abdominals is that they can be developed quite easily in a matter of months. The hard part is that the diet and the fat loss needed to reveal them is the bigger challenge for all of us!
What supplements should I take?
Supplements are exactly as their name describes – supplementary. We do not ever advise supplements until and unless you are willing to work with us on getting your diet in order first. And if financial budget is a consideration then we always prefer that you invest it in good quality food above expensive nutritional supplements. That said, every UP client takes our BodyProphet skinfold and software analysis and the results from this allow us to take into consideration lifestyle factors such as stress, sleep, inflammation, gut health, and any potential nutrient deficiencies. From here, we will devise a specific supplement protocol with specific dosages, to ensure the fastest results in the minimum amount of time.
Our Methods Work
The precise and highly focused nature of our fat loss training is proven to burn calories long after you have left the gym.
Traditional workouts burn fat whilst you’re exercising, but as soon as you get off the treadmill your metabolism shifts back down to normal. With the application of tried and scientifically tested systems we can guarantee that your metabolism stays elevated, and you therefore continue to burnbody fat, for up to 38 hours after you have finished exercising! All our clients say after finishing their first Fat Burning workout that for hours afterwards they feel as though they are “light on their feet”, “walking on clouds” and often “ravenously hungry”!
All fantastic signs that the overall metabolism has been stimulated to a level that they have never experienced before.
Such is our reputation in this field that we often get the clients that nobody else wants, those who have been everywhere and tried everything in an increasingly desperate attempt to be in great shape for the first time in their lives. Have these people who once considered themselves “nohopers” been pleased with their results on the Meltdown program? Let’s put it this way, we have had many hundreds of very happy clients. Click here to read about our clients Real Results
Meltdown Isn’t For Everyone
We are very proud of Meltdown’s reputation and unlike most personal trainers who will take on any client, no matter how wavering their commitment, at Ultimate Performance we have very limited spaces for personal training and we are very particular about who we take on as a client.
You must be ready, committed and want to change.
If we are a good fit, we are willing to work at any time of the day or night, and will even open the gym at 4am if you ask us very nicely!
There are always legitimate reasons not to exercise, but we will not accept that you can’t find the time for a 12-week period that is a tiny amount of time in the grand scheme of your life.
These are the things that we expect of you. If they sound too challenging, then we are sorry but Meltdown isn’t for you.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
- Noticeable fat loss within 10 days
- More energy and vigour for life. You will have a spring in your step that will take you back to your youth!
- Better skin tone as a result of the clean diet and toxin free lifestyle
- A more toned and shapely body
- Better sleeping patterns
- After 12 weeks, a slimmer and more confident you will be looking back in the mirror
- Envious glances from colleagues!
- A small hole in your wallet as you start buying better fitting clothes!