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.