The 10-Minute Man

One of the biggest mistakes we make is underestimating how much the simple things have an impact on our health and fitness. We think losing weight and being healthy needs to be complicated and time-consuming because that’s what the people and companies selling the so-called solutions have taught us.

The health and fitness industry makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year from trendy diets and exercise programs; unfortunately, however, most of them promise the world but deliver an atlas. Who has an hour to train at the gym, let alone the hour to get there and back? Who can be bothered counting calories? And who can stick to a diet where you never get to eat the food you enjoy and can’t have a beer with your mates? It’s no wonder that 80 per cent of people with gym memberships don’t use them and 65 per cent of dieters end up putting the weight back on!

But it really doesn’t have to be that hard. No, you don’t need to take out an expensive gym membership or have a degree in maths to figure out how many calories are in that sandwich – just focus on something simple that you know is good for your health and start with that. It could be as basic as eating a high-protein breakfast, cutting out soft drinks or going for a walk at lunchtime. There’s nothing stopping you and the best time to start is now!

That one small change will have a positive impact on your health and fitness and flow on to other things, and that’s ultimately how you get results. In fact, with most things in life, we get 80 per cent of our results from 20 per cent of what we do – economists call this the 80/20 rule, and it applies to health and fitness too. The trick is finding the 20 per cent that will give you the biggest results, as I discovered when I was a footballer.

Fitness Economics

While I was playing rugby league, I did an economics and finance degree. I wasn’t sure what I’d end up doing with it, but it turned out that the principle of using scarce resources to get the best return actually came in handy sooner than I expected.

At the time, we were spending hours upon hours swimming laps, going for long, slow runs and riding bikes, which I felt had little carryover to playing footy. I remember one day I cracked it and said, ‘The day we ride a bike onto the football field is the day I’ll ride a bike for three hours.’ Why spend your limited resources – your time and energy – on something that has no practical application?

My frustration only grew after a bad knee injury stopped me playing for nearly 18 months. I fought my way back but couldn’t spend hours training anymore or my knee would blow up, so I had to adapt. That’s when I started hacking different fitness theories and training methods to develop a program that would keep me fit enough to compete at the highest level without wrecking my body or wasting time on things that didn’t work. It was the best thing I could have done, and ultimately it prolonged my career. I was the oldest guy to play finals football in the NRL, playing to just shy of my 37th birthday.

Now I have a normal job and a baby and even less time, so getting the best return from exercise is even more important. The 10-minute workouts in this book are simply the smartest way I know to train: they deliver the most bang for buck in the smallest amount of time possible, using the best gym in the world – your body. You can work out whenever you like, wherever you happen to be, and it’s free. Even better, if you’re smart about what fuel you put into your body, you can easily maximise the muscle-building, fat-blasting value of your workouts.

You Really Can’t Out-Train A Bad Diet

I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating – you simply can’t out-train a bad diet. If you are eating refined, sugary, greasy crap, exercise alone will not shift your gut, stop you having problems in the sack, or protect you from type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer or, ultimately, premature death. So if you want to get the most from your training, keep the lead in your pencil and stick around longer, you need to apply some fitness economics to what you put in your mouth.

Once again, it comes back to making the simple changes that will give you big results. I always say, the best diet is the one you stick to – if you can stick to something it’ll become a habit, and healthy habits lead to long-term success. So yes, you should eat three square meals a day and enjoy a well-earned treat meal every week. And no, you don’t need to join a food cult or hire a personal chef! I’m going to give you the tools to feed yourself fast, simple food that tastes great, fills you up and makes it easy to replace bad habits with healthy ones. I’ll show you how to load your plate with the right fuel to build muscle and blast fat, so that you can get the most out of your daily life.

Modern-Day Madness

Our lives have really changed since our ancestors were hunting and gathering and learning to rock the use of their opposable thumbs. A lot of it’s been great – we now have beer and football. But our health and wellbeing has also taken a big hit, especially in the last 50 or so years.

Not only has our food become more processed and further removed from its natural state, to the point where poor diet is now the number one contributor to early death around the world, but movement has been engineered out of our lives. We drive wherever we need to go, work on computers, and watch TV for fun – and spend most of our lives sitting on our arses because of it. Plus we are all constantly engaged with our mobile phones and devices, and the lines between work, rest and play are now so blurred they’ve almost disappeared. The result is that our minds – and our opposable thumbs – are always busy but our bodies aren’t.

The thing is, none of this happens in isolation and our lifestyles have physical consequences that we may not even be aware of. We all know that eating too much sugary crap makes you fat, but did you know that it can also destroy your hormone balance? Or that accumulated stress and inactivity can send your body into fat-hoarding mode? Or that high mobile phone use has been linked to stress and depression? Unfortunately, all of these factors then make it harder to lose weight and get fit.

If your hormone balance is out of whack, for example, you’ll probably find it easier to grow a pair of boobs than to build awesome guns. Or if you eat well during the day but then find yourself trashing the cupboards in search of sugar late at night it could be because your body is stuck in stress mode. And if you struggle to get moving in the first place, it could have more to do with your mood than your willpower.

Yes, your lifestyle, your hormones and your mindset all influence your health and fitness, and vice versa. That means if you want your efforts training and eating right to really count, you have to get those other ducks in a row, too. Fortunately, you don’t need a life coach for this. You can simply do it yourself by making smarter choices that will lead to massive gains. I’ll walk you through it now before we get stuck into training.