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!
