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2018 New Year's Challenge Live Tutorial Transcript

2018 New Year's Challenge Live Tutorial Transcript

The transcript of my live Facebook tutorial breaking down all the techniques in my New Year's Challenge

Written By Jim Stoppani, PhD

Updated September 28, 2023

Note: This tutorial video was recorded as a live Facebook event. The text below is an edited transcript of the tutorial intended to provide members with a convenient means of referring to and further researching the topics and content detailed in the video.

Transcript

Hey JYM Army. Let a few people join in, but today—happy Sunday, January 14th. Tomorrow—January 15th—kicks off my New Year's Challenge, and you know what the big deal about this challenge is? I'll be doing it right along with you.

Taking Train with Jim to the Next Level

That's right, I'll be participating in this challenge and posting my workout tips on my social media every single week, all through the six weeks. Now, I'm starting tomorrow—the 15th—starting with the 5x5 Full-Blown Workout System, and I'll break each one of these weeks down for you as more people join in.

But I want to tell you the urgency is if you want to train with me, if you want to be my training partner while I go through the challenge so we're all training doing the same workouts on the same days—that way the tips apply with where I am in the program, with where you're in the program—start it tomorrow.

Signing Up for the Challenge

That means you need to head to JimStoppani.com, you'll find the New Year's Challenge. Click on that. Members, you're already ready to go. You can start it off tomorrow. Non-members, you'll have to join up—it's $14 a month, guys. It's a six-week program; that's pretty cheap when you break it down—if you don't want to stay the full year.

Trust me, people that come to the challenge and sign up for JimStoppani.com, and then when they're done with the challenge they stay on because you have my app, you have all my programs, all my tips, access to completely everything.

Getting Started

But let's focus, again, on the New Year's Challenge. Six-week program, starts tomorrow—Monday, January 15th. Now, if you can't start tomorrow—or you don't want to start tomorrow, let's say you're finishing up one of my other programs: Maybe you're doing my Shortcut to Size, maybe you're doing Super Shredded 8, maybe you're doing my Super-Man program...

Maybe you don't want to start tomorrow, but the nice thing is you have until January 31st—the very end of the month—to actually start. And by starting it, that means you're going to sign up and get your Before photo posted onto the site, and you'll see mine posted as well starting tomorrow.

But if you want to train with me—again, I'm going to start Workout 1 of my 5x5 Full-Blown tomorrow. I'm planning, if all goes well, to do it as a live session tomorrow. If not tomorrow, I'll definitely be doing the 5x5 live this week.

I'll try to do at least one of these different workouts live because each week of the program we change up the training system. That way you're never getting bored, every single week you have something new to look forward to—not just in progress, but in a different style of training which prevents you from getting bored. That keeps you consistent, and that leads to the best results.

Plus, you have me right there as your training partner keeping you motivated, inspired, educated as we go. Keep up with me and you can't lose, guys.

New Year's Challenge Overview

So let's get into how this program actually breaks down. What the New Year's Challenge does is combine my Train with Jim series—for those of you who aren't aware, every single day I put on my social media—Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—my personal workouts, the way I train.

Now I'm training mainly full-body style training, meaning we're hitting all major muscle groups, and what I do is I break down the body into basically 10 major muscle groups. Let's see if I can name all 10 off without repeating or forgetting any: We've got chest, back, shoulders, legs, we have traps, we have calves, we have triceps, biceps, forearms, and abs, obliques, core, all that area.

Each workout we'll do at least one exercise—at least; sometimes we get into three, where we're over here in the Small Angles, for each muscle group; when we did my Giant System we were doing four different exercises for each muscle group, even though it's full-body training.

But we're basically going to be doing one exercise per muscle group, so when we start off tomorrow we'll be doing 5 sets of 5 reps for each muscle group. So we'll start off with chest—5 sets of 5 reps, some time of pressing movement, I recommend. But again, we'll be doing 5x5 for chest, for back, for legs, for shoulders, for traps, for calves, for biceps, for triceps, for abs, for forearms.

We hit all major muscle groups in the body, and the benefit there is unlike a split system where you might do chest and triceps on Monday—and that's it—and then you do back and biceps on Tuesday—that's it—and then another muscle group on Wednesday, here you're hitting every muscle group every single day that you're in the gym.

Better Fat Loss Without Cardio – The Benefits of Full-Body Training

What's the main benefit there? Well, make sure you watch my videos and read my articles on full-body training. You can see them both at JimStoppani.com, and at Bodybuilding.com as well—I have a nice article on full-body training, with a nice video that goes along explaining the true benefits of full-body training helping to really shed the body fat.

For those of you who don't recall, last year right around this time—it was the very end of the month—2017 in January I completely ruptured my quadriceps tendon. Almost been a full year recovery, but all of last year—and still to this day—since January of last year I've done zero cardio. No cardioacceleration. No HIIT. No tabatas of any form. All full-body training.

Weightlifting—that's how I kept super-lean despite being on crutches, despite not being able to train legs, despite never being able to do cardio. I've maintained about 3-4% body fat year round, on crutches, going through surgeries. Why? Whole-body training, full-body training.

What it does is it activates the genes—when you're hitting every muscle group in the gym—it activates metabolic genes that stay turned on pretty much all day long, and keep you a fat-burning machine.

You've got more muscle groups—as I said, I broke the body down into 10 major muscle groups—if you hit all 10 major muscle groups in one workout versus, say, 2 major muscle groups, you can see the difference in your fat-burning potential. Having the metabolic genes turned on in 10 major muscle groups of the body versus 2, well it's 5x as much fat-burning if you really want to break it down that way.

That's the real benefit of full-body training. But also, there's research showing that it may actually be superior also for strength gains and even muscle mass gains. It's really been the trick for me this year, despite having four surgeries on my knee, despite being on crutches, despite my physical activity being completely decreased—drastically decreased because I was on crutches and couldn't be as mobile as I normally—despite all that, just adapting the full-body training to my training system, versus a split, kept the body fat off and kept the muscle mass on.

So let's get down to the real nitty-gritty here. Like I said, six-week program—every single week you learn and get to experience a new technique. That keeps the body guessing—the old Joe Weider muscle confusion principle—but it also prevents stagnation and keeps progress going.

Breaking Down the Weeks of the New Year's Challenge

We start off in Week 1 of the program, 5x5 Full-Blown program. Like I said, down here I have the days—how many workout days per week you'll be doing. In Week 1 we do five days per week, basically Monday through Friday.

Week 2, we're going to move to my Full-Body Supersets—and we'll talk about each one of these a little bit more, I'll break it down—that's going to be six days, basically Monday through Saturday.

Then in Week 3, we get to my Speed Set System—and I'll explain that for those of you who aren't familiar with my Speed Set style—but there we go back to five days, I've got Monday through Friday.

Then in Week 4, we do German Volume Training, GVT—and I'll talk about what this asterisk means—six days a week. Monday through Saturday.

Then Week 5, we go to Oxford Drop Sets, down to five days so you're getting two days of rest.

And then in Week 6 we do my Small Angles, where variety is key. Here we will stick with the five days, five workouts per week.

Keep Your Rest Days Active for Better Recovery

Now, like I said—you could do Monday through Friday, the five days—but you don't have to. That is likely how I'll be doing it. I like to do the five days in a row, or the six days in a row, and then I get the last day or two off. So it'd be the weekend off.

However, my off day is active—very active—and I recommend that for everyone, to have an active rest day. You don't want a rest day where you're just sitting around doing nothing. You've got to stop thinking about recovery meaning you have to sit on your ass doing nothing all day.

You can recover completely fine while you're staying active—in fact, you recover better while you're active because it keeps the heart rate up, it keeps blood flow moving. When your blood flow moving through the body more rapidly, guess what's going on: You're bringing more nutrients, more oxygen to those recovering muscles—more nutrients helps them recover.

And there's more blood flow going away from the muscle, basically meaning it's washing the muscle—literally, the blood flow literally washes the muscle from all the waste products that have been built up during that recovery process, and that enhances recovery. So keeping active speeds up recovery in two main ways: Getting more stuff to the muscles that are recovering, and getting more crap away from those muscles that are recovering. So it actually helps recovery.

So if you're sore, you don't have to worry about skipping a workout. It's fine, if your biceps are still sore, to train your biceps. You're not going to hinder recovery if your biceps are sore and you go and train biceps. People think, "Oh you're just causing more damage, and now those muscle fibers will never recover." Wrong.

Completely wrong, and any expert that tells you that doesn't know a damned thing about muscle physiology. They haven't read anything about recovery. Tell them to go back to the research and take a look at how muscles recover. When muscles are damaged, they go dormant—that's right: The body doesn't use those muscle fibers.

In my biceps, for example—and as I talk about it, we have two different heads—but in each one of those heads, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of muscle fibers. When you do a curl, you're not using all those muscle fibers in that long head or that short head of the biceps. You're using a small percentage.

The ones that get damaged during that workout go dormant, so that if you work out tomorrow, do the same exact exercise for biceps, guess what's going to happen: Those muscle fibers won't be used—you'll have to recruit other muscle fibers.

What happens is you're using more muscle fibers in the muscle, meaning more muscle fibers are being stimulated to grow, and it's enhancing recovery by keeping blood flowing to the muscle—more nutrients in, more crap out, helps recovery. So we've got to get it out of our heads that when a muscle is sore it can't be touched, it has to be rested—and by "rested", meaning you can't do anything. Stop thinking that way.

So back to my active rest days on this 5x5, I'm going to train—I'm going to start Monday, and I'll be done Friday. Unless something weird happens in the week. My travel schedule, my children—I might have a day where I'm literally on the road 24 hours and I simply don't get to the gym—then I might have a break. But other than that, I'm planning on doing Monday through Friday.

For those of you who want to train with me—be my long-distance training partner—I'm going to be doing all five workouts on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Then Saturday and Sunday, I'm going to take off as my active rest.

I'll still do a whole full-body workout—it'll be a different style from the 5x5, and a different style from anything I'm doing the other weeks of the program—but I'll be doing some form of full-body training still. Lower intensity of course, and might even just be a bodyweight workout. Oftentimes I'll do a bodyweight workout.

For example, for my birthday I didn't lift. But I also started the day with a full-body workout—my Push/Pull/Leg/Ab split—for 50 reps, as well. I did that just in case I didn't get into the gym. So I may do something that simple, I'll make it to the gym—or you can even just do something overall active like swimming, tennis, hiking, etc. But stay active on those off days.

Week 1: 5x5 Full-Blown

So, in Week 1: 5x5 Full-Blown. Now for those of you who don't know what the Full-Blown is, it's the old school 5x5 system. This thing has been around for decades. In fact, as I've mentioned before, it's one of the programs that an old-school bodybuilder called Reg Park, who was Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding hero.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was growing up and chasing a bodybuilding career—before he was Mr. Olympia, before anyone knew who he was—his idol was Reg Park. Reg Park loved the 5x5 system because it was great for strength—because you're in that lower rep range—but you're doing higher volume, 5 sets of 5—so with that volume you're getting some muscle hypertrophy, muscle growth.

My style takes it up a notch. What we do here is we're going to literally complete the same exact—this sounds a little weird, but stay with me, guys—every one of these five workouts that we're going to do, these five days—every one of them is going to be the same exact workout this week. Sounds not too effective, right? But hang on, there's a reason why we're doing this.

With each exercise, you're going to do 5 sets of 5 reps—but the time is going to decrease that you get to perform 5 sets of 5 reps. So what you're going to do is when you come in on Monday or whatever day you start—I'm going to be doing this tomorrow—you're going to record how long it took you on each exercise to do those 5 sets of 5 reps.

Rest period's up to you guys, but you have ten exercises to do 5 sets of 5 reps—ten, ok? If you give yourself a minute rest—let's just say—5 sets, it's about 5 minutes, right? Of just rest time, close to about 5 minutes after when you move on to your next exercise. 5 minutes of rest time, so you've got a minimum of—10 exercises, 5 minutes—that's 50 minutes right there. 10 exercises, 50 minutes, right?

How long do you want to be in the gym? Not that long. So what I recommend you do is if you want a quick workout keep the rest time to about one minute rest periods. Somewhere around there—eyeball it. You're not going to be counting rest periods, you're really going to be counting the time it took you to do all 5 sets, from Set 1 to the completion of Set 5.

You can rest a little longer between Sets 2 and 3 than between Sets 1 and 2, or however you want to do it—you don't have to keep the time the same. What you're going to do is go in there, do 5 sets of 5. Now, you've got to complete all 5 reps on all 5 sets. If you go in there and you can't get 25 reps—5 sets of 5—you went too heavy. You need to all 5 sets of 5.

So you know, if you go in there and you pick too heavy of a weight, you can't get all 5 sets of 5—don't worry, you get to do it again tomorrow. Remember we're going to repeat this tomorrow. If you do complete 5 sets of 5 reps, you record that time that it took you, and now tomorrow your goal is you're going to do that same exact exercise for 5 sets of 5 reps, but you have to beat your time from yesterday. You have to.

And again, it's going to come down to dropping rest periods, but you're not doing this like my Rest Rundown where you literally decrease your rest periods by about 15 seconds each week or each workout depending on how you're doing it. This one is not as methodical, where you're just simply cutting away the rest periods.

Here, you've got a bit of wiggle room. For example, you could speed up your reps to get the 5 reps done faster. You could rest less. You could rest the same maybe early on or later on and cut your rest in the beginning—this is an adaptable way for you to decrease your total time by not just going, "Ok I'm going to decrease 10 seconds from my rest periods now."

You could do that if you really want to, and that'll make those 5 sets of 5 reps quicker, but you could also watch the clock and play around how you want. You can get the reps done quicker, the rest periods quicker—just beat your total each and every workout, all the way to Workout 5. That's your goal.

If you can't beat your time? Don't worry about it—it doesn't mean that you failed. You're still getting the results of trying to beat your time. It's a very brutal system increasing strength, muscle hypertrophy, and of course fat loss.

Week 2: Full-Body Superset System

Week 2—after Week 1, we go into my superset style of training. Here, what's nice about this week is—do you guys know what supersets are and the different ways that you can do them? If not, you're going to get a superset tutorial during this week, because each and every workout the superset style changes.

Now, supersets—as the name is here, "supersets"—that means a specific way of doing supersets. I know that the term "supersets" just kind of means two exercises done back to back, but a true superset is two exercises from two different muscle groups—preferably two opposing muscle groups, like a pushing and a pulling—say, bench press and row—that is a true superset.

If you do two exercises for the same muscle group, however—which is also considered a "superset", two exercises back to back with no rest—we call that a "compound set".

Here, in the superset you train one muscle group to failure or whatever the system—in my system you go to failure—then, without any rest, you move to a different muscle group because the chest is getting a rest while the back is working. The other muscle group gets a rest during that other exercise, and vice versa—the second muscle group gets a rest during that first exercise.

Well with compound sets there's no rest, it's chest followed by chest, right? Or shoulders followed by shoulders, or back followed by back. That's a compound set. Still a style of superset and you can see why that would be different. Here you're getting more total muscle groups trained at the same time so one's getting a rest while the other is working; there you're getting more basically work done for the same muscle group, so you're basically increasing the total work that that muscle has to do. Instead of one set and then getting a break, it has to now do another set before it gets any break. So back to back.

With extended sets—which is another style you learn this week, Week 2—the extended set is basically a compound set, if you will, in that it's for the same muscle group. However, what's different with the extended set is it goes in a specific fashion. For example: With your compound sets, you could do two chest pressing exercises—say the bench press and the dumbbell bench press. Or, with a compound set, you could do a multi-joint exercise like a bench press, and a single-joint exercise like a flye.

If you then switched the order of those two exercises—did the flye before the bench press—that would be pre-exhaust, right? We're pre-exhausting that target muscle group with a single-joint exercise before we do the multi-joint exercise, so that when we get to the multi-joint exercise and we fail it's because the pecs were fatigued, not because the shoulders were fatigued or the triceps fatigued, but the pecs. And we ensured that by doing flyes before so that the pecs are already tired. Now when we get to the bench press, the pecs are the weak link—not the triceps, not the shoulders—the pecs will fail, hopefully, because we pre-exhausted them before any other muscle group. It's an intensity technique.

With extended sets, however, what we do is we basically the same exercise but a different version. Not just a random different version, but a version that has a biomechanical advantage—meaning it's easier to do. So for example, you could do an extended set of a reverse-grip bench press—which you're going to be likely weaker on than your overhand, regular bench press—so you do the reverse-grip first, then immediately switch to the overhand grip where you're now stronger to continue the exercise—extending that set.

You're going to get all these different versions—the supersets, compound sets, both normal and pre-exhaust style, you're going to get the extended sets as well—and it's a six days per week program. So we're going to be going Monday through Saturday, or at least I am. I'll be getting Sunday off as my active rest day. You guys can take any day off you like during that week.

Another point I'll make here is if you're following this program and you don't have a lot of training experience—say, you're somewhere under a year—you may want to consider reducing some of the workouts. Maybe do five days during Week 2 instead of all six days, or you could even reduce some of the total sets or exercises as well. But hit me up on social media, I'll get you guys an answer. And always check on the JYM Army Facebook group page as well to get your answers there much quicker.

Week 3: Whole-Body Speed Set Training

Now in Week 3, we move from supersets to what I call "speed sets"—this is my Speed Sets System. Here, every set we do 15 reps. But it's not just 15 reps, it's 15 reps—this is why it's called "speed sets"—of different rep tempos. The speed of your reps are going to change—we break it into three different rep speeds.

The first 5 reps you do are going to be done super fast. Explosive. 5 fast explosive reps. So if we're doing curls, we're throwing it up—but we're not just letting it drop, we're controlling it on the negative. It's the positive that we want to get the momentum going and get that speed going. And yes, on these style of reps you can use other muscle groups to help get the momentum going—essentially cheating. You want those reps to be going as fast as possible, but on the negative—control.

First 5 reps, super fast; immediately, once you've completed those 5 you don't put the weight down—you now move to a different rep tempo. Here we're going to do super slow reps. Here it's going to be 5 seconds on the positive—so a count of 5 up, and a count of 5 down. That'll be one rep. Five times.

Then, when you're done with those 5 excruciating, brutal reps, you've got 5 more reps to go—here, you can use a normal rep pace, or whatever rep pace is going to complete all 5 reps. However you can get them done, and yes you can cheat—you can throw it up—however you get those 5 reps done. That's the Speed Sets System.

So we've gone from doing 5 sets of 5, the typical strength style with a speed component added. Then we move over to supersets, where we're more hypertrophy oriented. Then we get into speed sets, where we're changing up the rep tempo doing fast, explosive reps—which is going to help develop more power, as well as muscle strength.

But also, with the slow component we're increasing time under tension, so we're increasing muscle hypertrophy, muscle growth as well. And of course, because we're doing full-body and because of the speed that we're moving in the workouts, this is all enhancing fat loss. So simultaneously building strength, muscle, and dropping body fat.

Week 4: High-Frequency German Volume Training

Week 4—now Week 4, I've got a little note here that we now move away from the full-body training split. We're actually going to do a two-day split here, where we train half the body in Workout 1, and the other half in Workout 2.

So basically we do the major torso muscle groups in Workout 1: Chest, shoulders, back; and then in Workout 2 we do the limbs: Legs, biceps, and triceps. So in two days you've fully trained all those ten major muscle groups. So we basically break it up into five muscle groups Workout 1, five muscle groups in Workout 2.

Why is that? Well, it's due to the German volume training. Like I said, full-body training is definitely superior for fat loss—but I'm a firm believer in change. Even your split, you want to change up; so here we're going to change the split up.

The reason we're doing it with the German volume training is because with German volume training—remember, we have ten exercises—remember with the 5 sets of 5 reps I said "How long is that going to take you?" You've got 50 minutes minimum just on the rest periods. You want to consider that when you get to German volume training, because we're doing double that—double the sets, double the reps. So guess what that means: At least double the time.

With the German volume—my system—you do 10 sets of 10 reps with one minute of rest. So looking at just the rest periods—there's 10 sets—that's about 10 minutes just in rest periods. Given that, if you went in and did 10 exercises, 10 sets of 10, you'd be in the gym a good two hours. So we're going to split it up into half the body one workout, half the body in the other workout, due to the time component.

And, this is a very brutal, very intense system of training. You have to get all 10 reps. This isn't shoot for 10, this is—you've got to complete all 10 reps on every one of those sets. That's 100 reps for each exercise. So that's my German volume training.

Because it's a two-day split, you're basically going to repeat each of those three times so we're going to do a total of six workouts that week. Even though it's not full-body training, it's half—it's not like we're moving to doing just chest. So you're still using high-frequency training. We're training each muscle group three times a week.

Prior we were doing it five times a week, six times a week, each muscle group; here, three times. So a drop a bit in frequency because, like I said, with the German volume training—a time component and that intensity factor.

Week 5: Whole-Body Oxford Drop Sets

Week 5, we then move to my Oxford Drop Sets. Now, the Oxford system is basically what we call a reverse pyramid. It means—and you guys have probably seen this, those of you who have read my book and read my articles on pyramid training—with the Oxford you're basically starting with your 10-rep max. You take that to failure; your heaviest set is Set 1. Whereas in an ascending pyramid, your first set is lighter than your second set, and your second set is lighter than your third set. This is the reverse, where we start with our heaviest weight.

So obviously you want to do a bit of a warm-up exercise on the first one—not to failure—then you get to your 10-rep max, and you're going to go to failure. Now, here's the key: You're going to do 3 sets, but you'll notice "sets" is a questionable term, because you get no rest between these sets. Zero rest. Meaning they're essentially drop sets, or rest-pause if you didn't need to drop the weight—but you're going to have to drop the weight to be able to get another 10 reps.

It's essential that you get all 10 reps. if you can't get all 10 reps you've got to do rest-pause until you get those 10 reps. So, let's say again for curls—I do a little bit of a warm-up, and then I'm ready to go. I've got my 10RM weight on the barbell. I do 10 reps, I hit failure. Now, I put the weight down.

Immediately I need to reduce that weight so that when I pick it up without any rest—just taking the weight off and picking it right up; what is that, maybe 10-15 seconds of rest after hitting failure from the first set?—you have to pick it up and get all 10 reps. If you didn't reduce the weight enough to get all 10 reps so you only get 7? You've got to put the weight down, take a rest-pause—10-20 seconds—and then pick the weight back up until you've completed all 10 reps.

Once you've completed all 10 reps on Set 2—or the first drop set, if you will—you put the weight down again, reduce the weight to allow you to keep completing 10 more reps. And again—if you don't get those 10 reps, put the weight down, do a rest-pause, until you get all 10 reps.

That's my Oxford Drop Set system. It's fast, it's brutal, it's going to burn fat, help build muscle from the intensity. We're doing this one five days a week because it's so intense. You're going to need those two days for active rest.

Week 6: Small Angles Full-Body

Then we finish—Week 6 of the program—with what I call my Small Angles style of training. With the Small Angles style, it's basically talking—like I said, when you damage a muscle—remember, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of muscle fibers in every major muscle: Pecs, shoulders—and I'm not even talking about front delt, middle delt, rear delt—I'm talking about just in the front delt, thousands and thousands—tens, hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers in that one muscle head.

What Small Angles takes advantage of is variances of exercises. For example, curls: You guys have heard me talk about barbell curls and where you place your hands. If you go wide, you tend to use more of that short, inner head of the biceps; the arms turn out, more inner head. As you go closer on the bar, your arms turn in a bit—medial rotation in—that's going to target more of the long head.

Now it's not just like short head or long head, it's changing muscle fibers within those muscles as well. And so, by doing these different variations, these small changes—same with pulldowns: Wide, narrow, reverse—remember, with the reverse and the narrow it brings the shoulders in front of the body, so that's hitting more of the lower; with the overhand, elbows out to the sides, hitting more upper muscle fibers in those lats...

The Small Angles takes advantage of making small adjustments to whatever exercise you're doing for that target muscle group so that you're really maximizing the number of muscle fibers you're recruiting or involving. The more you involve the more you have that signal to grow. That's really what the main benefit of those small angles—and this one we're just going to do 5 days per week.

Go for your Goals – Deciding on a Diet for the New Year's Challenge

Now, diet—what diet do you want to do with the New Year's Challenge. Well that's really up to you and your goal, and your style of dieting. Remember, with nutrition—sure, there are foundations you want to follow—read my Dieting 101 for some of those principles, as well as my Muscle Building Nutrition Rules article; it gives you some basic foundations like how much protein you should be eating—a minimum of 1g per pound of bodyweight, if not 1.5g—fat, about half your bodyweight in grams, so a 200lbs person would eat 100g—those are all important factors.

However, then comes your true goal and the type of person you are. With the New Year's Challenge, do you want to maximize fat loss? Or do you want to maximize muscle growth? Or muscle strength? Or do you want to get the best of all those worlds? Those differences in your goals are going to determine what type of diet you want to follow.

Then you have to ask what kind of person you are. My Dieting 101—for those of you who are looking to truly maximize fat loss during these six weeks, if that's your main goal—then you've got two choices: You can go right into my Dieting 101—and I recommend everybody do that regardless of whether you're using my Intermittent Fasting, because that will teach you how to take a snapshot, take a look at what your current diet is.

What's really important is that when you are ready to change your diet it's not just changing into something random, but it's changing based on where you are currently. How many calories you're eating, carbs—that's going to vary based on where you currently are. So read my Dieting 101 for how to assess that and getting comfortable with knowing what you're eating, recording what you're eating, and getting used to that.

Intermittent Fasting for Fat Loss

When it comes to the type of person you are, it's a question I ask with intermittent fasting or the standard style of dieting where you've got the entire day—you can eat anytime—but you're limited to what you can eat.

You've got two main ways to diet: Typical dieting, where there's no time limit—you can eat any time of day—but because you can eat any time of day you have to minimize the food choices that you make. So typically less fun food choices; you have to be a little bit more strict with that diet when you're allowed to eat all day long.

With the intermittent fasting diet, you only have certain windows where you're eating—8 hour window. Read both my Intermittent Fasting: Fat Burning Blitz article and my Intermittent Fasting Carb Cycle article on intermittent fasting. Because you have certain times where you're not eating, you can be a bit looser with your diet with intermittent fasting—which is what I really enjoy, is the looseness of it.

Also, what I like about intermittent fasting, is the convenience. There's no—I don't have to prep my food in the morning. I eat from 4-12, and I won't go on and on about how to slowly get into intermittent fasting, but it's easy to sort of take baby steps in there. You can read my articles on how I recommend starting with the 12/12 and then slowly increasing your fasting window, decreasing your feeding window.

The other thing I love with the intermittent fasting is there's no head games that you play with yourself. When you're on a diet, you typically—from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed—you're bartering with yourself.

You're constantly talking to yourself, making adjustments, going—you're standing in line at Starbucks and you're looking at that pumpkin bread...your mind starts to do math, "Well how many carbs are in that pumpkin bread, about 30 or so? 30g? Ok, if I eat that with my coffee this morning, I will then eat no beans tonight with my dinner, to cut back..."

See, you're constantly doing this give or take, "I'll eat this, I won't eat that" all day long. I hate that. I hate that about dieting. I like to not worry about stuff, so I like the intermittent fasting because when I'm at Starbucks and it's not 4 o'clock—and for those of you who follow me, you know I love that pumpkin bread—when I look at that pumpkin bread I just look at it. The answer's already there: No. There's no bargaining—it's not 4 o'clock yet. Answer's no. It's that simple.

I don't have to sit there and go, "What if I ate it now, then I'll cut—" you don't have to do any of that sort of bargaining or bartering with yourself, it's yes or no. And then the nice thing is, later on because you had that period of fasting you could be far more loose with your diet and still get lean.

Eating for Lean Gains

If you want to maximize muscle size and strength during this program? Then read my Muscle Building Nutrition Rules, follow those. That'll teach you how to build lean muscle mass. Don't forget my mass gainer will be coming out soon as well; should be any week now. You'll have that, as well, to use if you're truly trying to maximize that lean muscle mass.

New Year, New You – with the 2018 New Year's Challenge

The other thing you have to remember, guys—you can get me on social media. If you have any questions about what diet to use, or you run into a diet snag, or you're going on vacation—ask me. I'll help you along, and like I said I am doing this live with you starting tomorrow. I'll be doing this workout over the next six weeks as part of my Train with Jim, so I'll be posting my workouts, my tips right on my social media. So follow along.

And if you don't want to do the challenge and sign up for a chance to win a trip to come out—the grand prize winner, whoever makes the best transformation, not only gets to show off their results—I mean that's the real prize, the results you're getting in these six weeks—but the grand prize, you fly out to L.A., hang out with me, train with me, go to my favorite donut places, my favorite restaurants. We eat, we hang out, we train, we have a blast with the JYM Army.

So that's the grand prize, and of course there's all the JYM swag that comes with it, and the JYM Supplements. And I'll be picking a runner-up from both the men and the female categories. Two grand prize winners—one male, one female—we'll fly you and a significant other or whomever you choose to come out with you. Come out, hang with me, train with me, have some fun, see how we do it here on the West Coast—JYM Army West Coast—all that for getting results. Doesn't get any better, guys.

I'm going to head out—what time is it, about 3 o'clock here, Sunday in L.A.—I hope that this tutorial helps give you a heads up on what you have to look forward to over these next six weeks. Again, I'm starting tomorrow—January 15th—so if you want to train with me, right along with me, the same days I'm doing, the same workouts—start tomorrow.

However, you could also start any time you want up to January 31st and complete it any six weeks after that. You don't have to do it with me. So you can either do this on your own and look back at the tips that I've given, that way it gives you a little bit of time to prepare, or you could follow along with me so that you're doing the same exercises, you're getting those same tips as I'm doing them.

It's my New Year's Challenge guys, please come train with me. Like I said, even if you don't sign up to win you could follow along with my social media—I'll be telling you about the workouts, you can do those as part of the Train with Jim system. Or get the full benefit—go to JimStoppani.com, sign up for the challenge, get your Before photo posted and keep your weekly photo updates going as I'll be doing. We will see who makes the best transformation in both the male and female categories, as well as the runners-up.

So, New Year's Challenge kicking off tomorrow. Get me on my social media for any questions. If you're just joining and you're going, "Oh, what's he talking about? I missed the breakdown of all this." Don't worry, I will post this live session on Facebook so that you can watch it at your leisure.

If you have any questions, you can post right there under the live video—or at least it won't be a live video then—but post your question and I'll get you an answer. Don't forget to head to the JYM Army Facebook group page because that's where all the talk about the challenge is going to be going on starting tomorrow.

Ready tomorrow, we're going to do my 5x5 system. I will likely, on the 5x5, pick dumbbell exercises—I'll talk about that during the week, but you want to be picking exercises that you can do all five days. So if you're traveling, if you don't know you're going to be able to get to the same gym, either pick a barbell—you don't have to do all barbell exercises, you can do a variety of both—or dumbbell, that way when you get to a new gym—you know, a 40lbs dumbbell is typically a 40lbs dumbbell. One might be a little thinner or thicker, but—and the same with a barbell, you know what a 45lbs barbell is. That way it's the same weight, because we want to be using the same weight, the same exercise—but doing it all in less time. That's the 5x5.

But again, like I said that's only Week 1 of the program. Then we keep changing up the style of training each and every week. New Year's Challenge combined with my Train with Jim series. 2018, let's make this your best, fittest, strongest, leanest year ever. Who's with me? JYM Army Strong, guys. Enjoy the rest of the weekend, and I look forward to crushing this challenge with you—starting tomorrow.

All my training partners out there, let's get ready for tomorrow's 5x5 workout. Stay JYM Army Strong. See you guys, thank you.

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