Matt Collins Coaching

A reverse diet is a period of time after your fat loss phase.
How quickly you reverse and how quickly your food increases depends on a couple of things, how lean you got, your mindset towards seeing weight increases, your ability to digest food can come into it as well. But the goal is to, as quickly as possible, get you up to maintenance calories. You hold that position for around four weeks.

You’re doing this to wash the fatigue off from a long period of dieting. You’re doing it to make sure you’re satiated, increasing your energy levels, increasing training performance, and you’re holding the fat loss result that you’ve achieved.
Side note, if you’ve prepped for stage or a photo shoot and you’re really, really lean, the goal might actually be to accrue a certain level of body fat, but not excessive. You’re not trying to add excessive amounts of body fat. You’re trying to either maintain your progress or slowly increase body fat, because the goal is to move onto your next phase, or to maintain the progress you’ve achieved and make it part of your lifestyle.
But you can’t move onto either of those phases if after your diet you click the f**k it button and think, right, that’s the end of my goal, now it’s time to do whatever I want and get rid of all the habits and the structure and the quality nutrition. Believe me, if you don’t stick to it, you’re gonna end up in a bad position where you probably need to diet again. And I’ve been there. It’s not fun.

Are you wasting time? If you really wanna make progress, you are wasting a hell of a lot of time. Increasing body weight too quickly and increasing body fat too quickly can also have a wide implication on health.

And your ability to transition into a building phase, where you’re progressing and focusing on building muscle, you’ll never get to that point if you don’t reverse out effectively. You’ll never get to the point where you can maintain your physique and be happy with it if you don’t reverse out effectively, because you’re just gonna end up in a perpetual loop of dieting.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make on the leg press is not actually knowing what they’re trying to achieve.

If your goal is to bias the quads, then your setup should allow you to get as much knee bend as you can.

The more you limit your knee flexion, the more you limit the challenge and stimulus you’re placing on the quads.

That’s why there isn’t one “perfect” setup.
It’s not as simple as “feet shoulder-width apart” or copying someone else’s foot position.

Instead, ask yourself:
• How much hip flexion can I get into before my pelvis starts to tuck underneath and round?
• How low can I get my feet before stability becomes an issue?
• Would opening my hips slightly allow me to achieve more range of motion?
• Would adjusting the backrest let me access more knee flexion?

Your anatomy, mobility and mechanics determine your setup, not someone else’s.

Before you start adding more weight to the leg press, make sure you’ve found the setup that allows you to achieve the most knee flexion your structure and mobility allow while staying stable. Once you’ve got that position, then focus on progressively loading the movement.

I can’t get rid of my stubborn belly fat

A common theme/ question I get, particularly from my male clients.

Unfortunately there’s no magic, all you need is time, time spent in a deficit is what’s going to get rid of any stubborn area that tends to hold body fat

So stick with it and it will happen. Patience and consistency is the key 🔑

Should you cut or build

Two questions you need to ask yourself is my body fat percentage too high to be in a calorie surplus for an extended period or am I lean but require more muscle to actually make a difference too my physique

Once you’ve answered those you’ll know you the phase you need to

Good rule of thumb if we are talking numbers 15% and above a cut is needed

Prime kit, strive you will have seen this kit popping up in gyms up and down the country.

The reason it’s difference is it allows you to change the resistance profile of the machine depending on where you load it

But most people load what ever arm they fancy, with no thought behind why and its affect on the movement

If you’ve got questions on how to use this kit or any other that your unsure of drop me a DM

If your goal is to lose weight, nutrition is king.
But if your goal is to build muscle, improve your physique and actually change the way your body looks... Training deserves far more credit than it’s given.

I see too many people adding more calories, different programmes or new supplements, when the biggest issue is the quality of their training.

Ask yourself:
• Is the load challenging enough?
• Are you training close enough to failure?
• Are your reps actually creating tension in the target muscle?
Nutrition fuels performance.
Recovery allows adaptation.

Training is what creates the reason for adaptation in the first place.

Before you change your calories, ask yourself if you’ve earned the recovery you’re trying to optimise.

What’s your take, does training get overlooked when people talk about building muscle?