Everyone wants to get jacked but no one knows where to put forth their time and energy.

The 80/20 rule remains true for fitness. A vast majority (about 80%) of your gains will come from about 20% of what you do. This means that there are endless gimmicks in the other 80% that will distract you and waste your time. Focus on these 5 high impact pillars of fitness to get the most out of your efforts.

The 5 Pillars of Being Jacked and Fit

I can simplify getting jacked and fit down to 5 things: lift heavy 3-4 times per week, do high intensity conditioning, eat well, sleep well, and manage your stress. If you neglect any one of these things, your results will take a large hit. There are an endless number of extra gimmicks like massage guns, red light therapy, overpriced supplements, cryotherapy, and rolling around on foam tubes to distract you. If you don’t take care of the 5 pillars first, then none of the extra gimmicks will make any difference.

Supplements can be helpful, but not if your nutrition isn’t dialed in.

Massage guns, foam rollers, and cryo can all be helpful, but not if your sleep isn’t taken care of.

And all of the “corrective” exercise in the world won’t help you if you’re not on an intelligently designed training program.

I repeat: a vast majority of your gains and results come from the core behaviors and principles of training, nutrition, and recovery. We need to differentiate that from the fluff.

So let’s dive in.

1. Lift Heavy 3-4 Times Per Week

In order to get strong and jacked, we need to be lifting heavily and focus on the large compound exercises. These include squats, deadlifts, lunge variations, presses, pull ups, and rows.

Compound exercises are more effective than isolation exercises. The big movements are the core of your training program. Curls and triceps extensions are the icing on the cake. You don’t get dessert before your protein.

We should also be lifting heavily. A vast majority of people will make incredible gains lifting within the 5-10 rep range. I will sometimes push that to 10-20 reps for certain phases and exercises, but most of my sets are done between 5-10 reps.

There is no way around progressive overload. If we want our muscles to grow in size or strength, we must be doing more in the future compared to now. This means doing more reps per set, more sets per exercise, or lifting more weight.

Lifting about 2 times per week is the absolute minimum dosage for strength gains, but 3-4 days seems to be the optimal range. I advocate for an upper/lower split. This is how most athletes train.

If you train 3 times per week, your training schedule may look like this:

• Monday: Upper Body 1 Bench Press Emphasis
• Wednesday: Lower Body 1 Squat Emphasis
• Friday: Upper Body 2 Overhead Press Emphasis
• Monday: Lower Body 2 Deadlift Emphasis
• Wednesday: Upper Body 1 (The cycle begins again)

A 4 day training week may be distributed to Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.

High Intensity Conditioning

Don’t do cardio. Perform conditioning.

Low intensity cardio will only yield disappointment when it comes to performance gains and body recomposition. High intensity interval training and sprint interval training are both vastly superior in terms of performance and fat burning.

We don’t need to look much further than Olympic sprinters to have a visual understanding of this.

High intensity conditioning is more effective and time efficient than low intensity cardio. You can get a good HIIT or SIT session done in 20-30 minutes, whereas it can take up to that amount of time of jogging to even sufficiently reach a fat burning state for some folks.

Here is a good sprint interval training protocol to try:

Complete the following 2 times a week:

1. Week one: 4x10s, 4 minutes rest between each
2. Week two: 6x10s, 3 minutes rest between each
3. Week three: 8x10s, 2 minutes rest between each
4. Week four: 4x20s, 4 minutes rest between each
5. Week five: 6x20s, 3 minutes rest between each
6. Week six: 8x20s, 2 minutes rest between each
7. Week seven: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each
8. Week eight: 4x30s, 3 minutes rest between each
9. Week nine: 4x30s, 2 minutes rest between each

Complete the following 3 times a week:

1. Week ten: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each

Dial In Your Nutrition

You must tailor your nutrition towards your goals. If you trying to gain weight, then you need to be in a calorie surplus. If you are trying to lose weight, then you need to be in a calorie deficit. And, if you trying to maintain your weight, you need to be at calorie maintenance. There is no way around this law of thermodynamics.

Gaining or losing 1-2 pounds per week is a healthy start. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. In order to lose about 1 pound per week, you need to be in a 500 calorie deficit everyday.

Gaining a pound of muscle requires about a 2800 calorie surplus. This means you should be in a 400 calories surplus per day if you are trying to gain weight.

The calorie surplus and deficit are the most reliable metrics of altering body composition. The next most important is macronutrient distribution. This is the ratio of protein, carbs, and fats if your daily diet.

The most important macronutrient to focus on is protein intake as this will help with building muscle during weight gain phases and maintaining muscle during weight loss phases. Once you have protein dialed in, you should focus on taking in more complex carbs than fats, as carbs will provide more readily available energy than fat.

This does not mean to completely eliminate fats! Fats are important for a wide array of functions throughout our body.

If you have your calorie surplus/deficit and macronutrient distribution dialed in, then you will have covered a vast majority of your nutritional needs.

Sleep Like You Mean It

Sleep is the foundation of all health. If you neglect your sleep, then you are essentially throwing away all of your hard work.

I cannot emphasize the importance of sleep. Sleep is usually the first thing that gets neglected when life gets busy and hectic. However, skimping out on sleep will negatively affect literally every aspect of your life. You will notice that you have less energy, are more irritable, make poor food decisions, perform poorly at complex tasks and at the gym, and have reduced vitality overall.

There is a reason why professional athletes obsess over their sleep. It is the foundation of their performance. Sleep is the time that our body repairs itself, the brain literally cleans itself, and balances our hormones.

I have written about the importance of sleep and how to optimize our sleep in previous articles here and here (don’t worry, they open in new tabs).

Here is the gist. You should sleep between 7-9 hours every night (children and teenagers will need more). Get to bed around the same time every night. Make your bedroom as dark, cool, and quiet as possible. Cut out screens and stimulating activities about 3 hours before bed time. Stop caffeine at about 1pm.

Don’t neglect sleep.

Manage Your Stress

This is a big one for the modern world. Our attention and focus are being stolen from us everyday from every direction and our jobs only get more stressful. Responsibilities quickly pile up.

If we don’t do something to manage our sanity, we are heading towards a world of anxiety, panic attacks, and depression.

All of these factors significantly impact our health and well-being. Chronic and high levels of stress will negatively impact our mental health, motivation, hormonal health, sleep, nutrition, and gym performance.

We are all wired to handle stress differently. Some people can manage loads of stress without any negative consequence, and others will fall apart at the slightest derailment of plans.

You must understand your needs and manage your stress or else suffer the negative consequences. Some strategies to help manage stress include meditation, journaling, exercise, sleeping enough, and making time for your passions.

Your life cannot just be your job and responsibilities. You need to make time for your tribe and community. You need to pursue your passions and hobbies. Go outside.

Spend Your Efforts Wisely

We only have so much time during the day. Ensure you are spending your efforts on the right things that will yield the most results.

Lift heavy weights.

Do conditioning.

Dial in your nutrition.

Sleep enough.

Manage your stress.

If you have these 5 pillars in check, then you are off to a good start.