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Recovery: The Missing Piece in Your Fitness Journey?

A conversation between Jay and Pete from ATP on how to approach recovery in your fitness journey

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Recovery is a common concern for many of our new clients. Both of us at ATP have conducted hundreds of initial consultations, and we often hear worries about whether people will physically be able to handle a transformation journey. In this article, we’ll address these concerns and discuss our approach to recovery.

Show Notes

Table of Contents

  • 00:00 – Introduction & Context
  • 01:45 – The Science Behind Three Training Sessions Per Week
  • 04:30 – The Fitness Industry’s False Bravado
  • 05:15 – Recovery Modalities: Nice-to-Have vs. Must-Have
  • 08:00 – Zone 2 Training & Its Benefits
  • 11:15 – The Inversion Problem
  • 12:45 – The Time Investment Perspective
  • 14:30 – A Real-Life Framework
  • 16:15 – Avoiding the All-or-Nothing Trap
  • 18:00 – Progress Over Perfection
  • 19:00 – First Week Priorities
  • 22:30 – The Education Investment
  • 25:00 – Success Indicators
  • 27:30 – Understanding Trade-offs
  • 31:45 – Conclusion

Key Takeaways

“You get probably 80% of the benefits of training from going from zero to three hours a week.” – Pete

“Consistently hitting 7-8 out of 10 three times a week for an extended period of time is what drives most adaptations our clients are looking for.” – Pete

“Recovery modalities like ice baths and saunas are nice to have, but they don’t have anything like the yield of making sure your foundational behaviors and habits are in check.” – Jay

“If you never push yourself past what you can do and never activate recovery, you’re never going to be a person that is bigger, stronger, leaner, sleeps better, faster.” – Jay

“Discipline equals freedom. If you frontload your upskilling, education, and precision, then down the line, you have more freedom and ability to be flexible.” – Pete

.

Introduction & Context

[00:00]

Jay: Hello! So, the two of us here today, myself, Jay, and Pete are going to be discussing recoveries this week. This is quite a common conversation that we have with new clients. Pete and I collectively have done hundreds of initial consultations, and whether people feel like they’re going to be physically able to take on a transformation journey is a genuine concern for a lot of our potential new clients. So we’re going to take this opportunity today to address some of those concerns and talk about recovery in general.

The general way this usually goes is one of us at ATP is doing an initial consultation for a new client, and what we advise—as we’ve talked about in our previous article which I’ll link—is that clients train at least three times per week in the gym in the beginning. Obviously, if you want to add additional things like cardiovascular work or aerobic work, that’s great, but from someone’s perspective who doesn’t train at all, this can seem like a huge Mount Everest to climb. They’re often, and rightfully, worried that they may not be able to keep up with this kind of level of training.

I’ll first hand over to Pete to give us his idea on how we’ve set up our business and our assessments to ensure that your performance and your recovery is top of our priority list.

The Science Behind Three Training Sessions Per Week

[01:45]

Pete: I think it’s quite conclusive. A lot of the science and studies that have been done on the impact of introducing exercise show that you get probably 80% of the benefits of training from going from zero to three hours a week. That’s been shown to deliver the biggest return on investment in terms of how much time you’re putting in versus the impact on your overall health markers, longevity, strength, and all those outcomes that our clients want measured.

So we want to get people to about three hours a week of training as precisely as we can and in a controlled environment.

In terms of recovery, it can feel a bit daunting for people if they’re coming from zero training background to suddenly start training three times a week. However, I think it works for a number of reasons.

Why Three Sessions Works

[02:30]

Firstly, what it does is it means that more days during the work week than not, you’re actually going somewhere to train. I think having your training centered on a particular place as an event makes it more of a permanent thing, making it easier to keep that as an ongoing behavior, whereas twice a week can feel like it’s not moving the needle as much. It becomes the exception rather than the norm.

So three times a week is good. Monday/Wednesday/Friday, Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, or to be honest, any combination within those days could be Monday/Tuesday/Thursday—it doesn’t matter hugely. But it’s about dose-response. You want to get a dose of resistance training. You want to cause an adaptation. You want to have that adaptive response triggered.

Getting Precise With Training

[03:15]

What we see with a lot of clients coming in is they might be dedicating a similar amount of time, perhaps even more time than three hours a week, but they’re doing it in an imprecise, almost shotgun way. They won’t have a particular strategy that they’re executing. It’ll be “I did this class, I went for a run, I played tennis.” And that’s all fine—we’re not trying to stop people from being active, but when you look at it from a time investment and opportunity cost perspective, we want to make sure that our clients are getting really precise inputs.

We know it’s precise enough because we measure the outcomes. So the biggest thing we do is get people in three times a week. We can then quantify what they’re doing, quantify the loading, ensure that they’re being challenged every workout, but also challenged in a way that is doable and recoverable—not just this kind of mental resilience test every workout.

There’s a time and place for really pushing people, but early on it doesn’t need to be this big test of how tough they can be in a gym. It needs to be: where are they? Let’s assess the client. Let’s see what they’re capable of doing. Let’s push them to their limits. And once we’ve found out what their edge threshold is, what an 8 out of 10 effort for them or a 9 out of 10 effort for them looks like, then we can just keep trying to hit that and progress the weights over time.

The Fitness Industry’s False Bravado

[04:30]

Pete: I think there’s a big false kind of bravado, which is driven by almost an intellectual dishonesty on the part of the fitness industry, where everyone’s supposed to be working as if their lives depend on it. Every single training session, every single rep, every single set, every single session needs to be a 12 out of 10. And it’s unrealistic. It doesn’t require that.

"When you actually scale it back and look at what inputs drive adaptation, it's not that. It's consistently hitting 7-8 out of 10 three times a week for an extended period of time that drives most of the adaptations our clients are looking for."

 So that’s how we set up.

Recovery Modalities: Nice-to-Have vs. Must-Have

[05:15]

Pete: In terms of recovery, lots of people ask about introducing things. We get questions about saunas, ice baths, foam rolling, massage guns, massage therapy, and I just say they’re nice to have. But again, every time you add something, it’s kind of like—we know that resistance training is a winner. We know that resistance training is going to drive most of your gains.

The Time Cost of Recovery Modalities

[06:00]

Anytime you add additional recovery modalities, what you’re doing is diversifying your inputs, but you’re not really getting any more outcome. All you’re doing is actually spreading the adaptation over more hours. So you’re getting the same adaptive stimulus from resistance training, but you’re increasing the time commitment spent on exercise.

For some clients, that makes sense. Some people will benefit tremendously from a stress reduction angle if they just commit to going in a sauna for half an hour twice a week. But again, it’s looking at the opportunity cost of that time. If the sauna is in their condo at home or they’ve got a home sauna, fine. That’s a really small commitment. If they’re traveling to a specific recovery center to do ice bath, sauna, massage—you’re looking at another 3-4 hours per week on top of the actual training, which is driving adaptation.

Return on Investment

[07:00]

In which case, maybe they’d be better off doing 20 minutes of extra cardio at the end of every session. Then at least they’re consolidating that time they’ve already committed. So a lot of it’s to do with return on investment and driving efficiency.

I think before people look at layering in lots of complex recovery solutions, they should just be looking at: am I maximizing my three hours of resistance training efficiently? And then the next question to ask is: what energy system work can I bring in on top of that? How can I add in some cardiovascular aerobic training that’s going to support my strength training? And that’s probably what we look at doing with clients.

Zone 2 Training

[08:00]

Pete: There’s a lot at the moment around Zone 2 training. I think Zone 2 training is tremendously beneficial for clients. It’s one of those where the recovery cost is very low, so it’s not actually introducing a big stimulus to recover from, but it will drive significant health and metabolic adaptations if carried out at sufficiently low intensity.

Practical Implementation

[08:30]

For actual genuine Zone 2 adaptations, which are the ones that drive metabolic health rather than fitness, you’re looking at quite pedestrian scores. It’s quite hard for a lot of clients to do while running. Most clients are going to be better served doing their Zone 2 work on a cross-trainer or a bike, or even just walking on a treadmill or rucking. That’s going to drive these low-level adaptations.

The problem with Zone 2 is it’s really time-intensive to drive significant adaptations. So with Zone 2 work, you’re almost looking at an extra block of at least an hour to two hours a week that people need to dedicate. And it’s one of those where the impact isn’t immediate, so people aren’t going to see or feel this for a significant amount of time. It’s quite a big investment. So it’s something you might layer in as a next-level phase two for clients.

For Low Work Capacity Clients

[09:30]

I do like to encourage clients to do cardiovascular work, particularly if they come in with really low work capacity in the gym. It just means their aerobic system is not working well and not allowing them to recover between sets. In that case, we might prioritize quite a lot of aerobic work that’s going to drop heart rate, drop blood pressure, and give us a lot of good adaptations that help reinforce the resistance training that we’re doing.

Stacking Zone 2 with Other Activities

[10:15]

Beyond that, Zone 2 work is one of those where you want to stack it with other behaviors. We put together a little document on how to maximize the time you’re spending on Zone 2 because you don’t want to just be doing super low, boring intensity things. A lot of clients will stack meetings on top of it or just sit doing emails on a bike. In my home gym setup, I’ve set up a variable height desk above a bike, so I’ll just be on my computer doing boring low-intensity stuff.

It’s more one of those things that doesn’t require a huge amount of focus. It’s almost the opposite of what you’re doing in the gym. In the gym with us, you’re working hard, trying to get the most out of every rep, trying to master technical elements. Doing Zone 2 on a bike or cross-trainer, you’re actually trying to stack other things on top and be a bit distracted. You don’t want to be chasing intensity.

The Inversion Problem

[11:15]

Pete: Ironically, most people when they come to us, their aerobic or energy systems work is too intense. They’re running too hard out in the heat in Singapore, their heart rate’s massively high, they’re running pretty fast because they want to work hard, and they’re actually driving quite a lot of recovery costs from that training.

And then when they’re in the gym, they’re driving zero recovery costs. They’re coasting with weights, leaving 10-12 reps in reserve on most of their sets. They’ve been doing the same weights for like 15 years, the same routine for 5 years. There’s no challenge, nothing to adapt to.

So it’s really about almost inverting those and polarizing to a degree. On one end, you have pretty low-intensity stuff that doesn’t require a huge amount of focus or attention, and then the in-gym stuff is actually driving a focus on technique, execution, and intensity.

The Time Investment Perspective

[12:45]

Jay: I really like the analogy where you went with the cost, because in so many terms we look at the monetary cost of things, but the actual time investment cost for what you’re getting out of it, I think, is very important to look out for with some of these clients.

With us and our system, you’re coming to see a coach, so you know we’re going to be pushing you to get that result you’re looking for, which is going to be increased strength, increased muscle mass, increased range of motion, all these sorts of things. Then you have to really look at, “Okay, what can I spend the rest of my allowance on after that?”

The Elite Athlete Fallacy

[13:30]

We just looked at how aerobic work or Zone 2 work is going to be a time cost. You can couple other things, but you know that’s got a huge compounding benefit over time.

"I think that some of these recovery modalities like ice baths, saunas, and all these things get popularized by elite athletes that have unlimited time budget to spend on these things. They do make a difference, but they don't make a difference or have anything like the yield in terms of making sure that your foundational behaviors and habits are in check."

I like that analogy, and I think that’s something that we can discuss more with people going forward.

A Real-Life Framework

[14:30]

Jay: So I think to give you some context or an idea of how this would work for someone in real life would be: you have your three personal training sessions a week. You know you have to focus on achieving the complex lifts that you’re able to achieve, and this is a gradual progression over time, ensuring that each and every week you’re just doing a little bit more because you want to force change in your body.

 "If you don't do something that you couldn't do before, or you don't attempt to at least do something you did before, then we're not going to be forcing that adaptation."

Prioritizing Your Time Budget

[15:15]

So then what do we spend the rest of our time on? I said, well, if you have an extra two hours a week, then immediately we’ll be looking at doing aerobic work. And then there’s other things that we have to think about that don’t cost any extra time. How is your nutrition? No one really wants to bring that into the equation. Everyone wants to go to the sauna, ice bath, but nobody wants to think about what they’re eating three times a day. But if you’re going to eat three times a day anyway, that’s not an additional cost of time coming out of you—that’s just cleaning up what you’re already spending.

So I like that example. And I think that if we can get all of our clients to be spending 5 hours a week—3 hours on resistance training, and then whether you’re doing four half-hours or two 1-hours or a longer 2-hour stint of aerobic work—then what you decide to do after that can pretty much be personal preference in terms of recovery modalities, assuming you have enough time budget to spend on these sorts of things.

Avoiding the All-or-Nothing Trap

[16:15]

Pete: I think what we see with exercise, and you see it with nutrition more commonly, is an all-or-nothing approach where people go, “Alright, I’m going to be perfect now for the next eight weeks.” It breeds fragility when you try to be over-perfect and try to over-optimize, when actually you don’t have to be 11 out of 10 or 12 out of 10 to get results. It just needs to be 8 out of 10 for a long enough period of time.

The Problem with Complex Routines

[16:45]

It’s the same thing with training—sometimes we get people coming in who are outliers because they’re putting a lot into their training. They might be doing a bodybuilding split they’ve seen online, training six days a week with a big split routine, and it’s just such a fragile routine because it doesn’t marry with the demands of having a job, having a family, traveling for work. It means invariably you’re failing, missing workouts, having to cut workouts short, and you might end up just training the same body parts once a week and making no progress.

Why Full-Body Training Works

[17:30]

I like full-body training three times a week for 90% of clients just because if you drop down from three sessions to twice a week because of work or family or travel, it doesn’t matter that much. You’re still stimulating your muscle groups twice a week. You can still drive overload. At the very least, you can put a marker down and retain what you’ve worked hard to build.

So I think looking at it from that perspective as well, it’s just giving people something that’s a good baseline that works even during conditions of stress, during travel, around family gatherings, around busy occasions. It means we’re getting clients who are more resilient in the long term, and their results are going to be more sustainable for them.

Progress Over Perfection

[18:00]

Jay: I agree. That’s another good point—a little bit of a left topic that I hadn’t really thought about coming into this discussion was contingency planning. Setting up your training to maximize benefits under all circumstances is beneficial. So total body training, as you said, if something happens and you only do it twice a week, it’s not all ruined.

I remember, slightly off context, we all need to be thinking about progress over perfection. Someone said to me, “Well, if I’m having three McDonald’s a day and then I take one of those McDonald’s and make it a whole food meal, that’s progress.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, that is absolutely progress.”

Meeting Clients Where They Are

[18:30]

So that’s like the core theme of what we’re doing with our clients. We have just talked about what we think is going to be an optimal setup for a client, but our goal is to meet you wherever you’re at and then just help coach you to the best version that you can be. Someone might never get to the point where they can spend five or six hours a week on activity. That’s fine. But what we want to do is just drive you as close or keep pushing you north as possible. That might be two and one, that might be three and zero, that might be any combination that works for you. And also assuming that your needs might change over time—if you don’t have five hours a week now, you might have five hours a week in the future, but it doesn’t mean you can’t make gains now.

First Week Priorities

[19:00]

Pete: In terms of driving success, what do you think new clients should be focusing on in week one? Where do you think someone looking to start out on this would benefit from spending more time in their first week?

Jay: I think it depends on if you’re doing this on your own or with coaching. I’d always say trust in the process, getting yourself in the mindset that I’m going to be creating a new version of myself that’s going to be able to handle a lot more over time, and just trusting in that journey.

Scheduling for Success

[19:30]

But if I was really going to be layering on what I’m going to be doing in a week, if it comes down to daily behaviors, it’s scheduling those training sessions where they can’t be easily taken by other activities. That’s going to be my first thing. I need to look at my diary and go, “Okay, where is the least chance that a child, a work employee, a boss, or an event is going to steal this time out of my calendar?” So booking in and being accountable to yourself or a coach is like my first foundational behavior, because that’s what’s going to drive momentum, and momentum is going to eventually turn into habitual behavior.

The Specific Habits

[20:15]

But if you want to learn the specifics, it’s basically summarizing this conversation: making sure that you’re doing total body training three times a week and then getting some degree of aerobic work in for 1-2 hours. Even if you’re not perfectly in Zone 2, just being outside for a couple of hours a week is going to have a huge benefit in general.

And then identifying outside of those, what is going to be your biggest limiting factor? Is it the food? Is it sleep hygiene? Is it alcohol consumption? And then putting in strategies to work on that.

Avoid Chasing Celebrity Programs

[21:00]

It’s quite hard to really put myself into the mindset of a new client since we both have 10-15 years of experience at this now and have pretty much dialed in a lot of these habits. But that is what I would do. I would avoid looking at what famous athletes are doing or what other people are thinking about in terms of pro recovery and really just dial in on the foundations and the basics.

It sounds so cliche and boring, and no one’s going to be like, “Oh, I’m so inspired,” but basically if you want to feel better, sleep better, recover, and all of these things, you need to challenge yourself.

 

"By challenging yourself, you're going to push your body into that pro-recovery state. And if you never push yourself past what you can do and never activate recovery, you're never going to be a person that is bigger, stronger, leaner, sleeps better, faster—all of these things that we're looking for over time."

I’ll repeat the same question to you actually. Maybe you can look at it from more of a simple point of view than that.

The Education Investment

[22:30]

Pete: In terms of that first week as a new client when you’re quite motivated to make changes, I think people get caught up in executing at a tactical level and don’t spend time building the systems that they need to succeed over the coming 8-12 weeks.

Building Logistics Systems

[22:45]

So I think a big part of it early on is logistics—making sure that you’re able to sustain your nutrition plan for a significant period of time. It’s really boring stuff, but these are the things that drive success or that will cause a really keen, motivated client to fail if they don’t do them:

If they don’t have a food scale at home, if they don’t have a well-stocked fridge with enough food to stick to their diet for 4-5 days, they’re going to struggle. If they don’t have 2-3 meals they can prepare that are high protein, high nutrition, but take maybe a minute to prepare, they’re going to struggle.

There are lots of little things that you can do in that first week or two that make the entire process much easier. So it’s really dialing in on that. It’s getting people onboarded so they’re actually able to execute systems well.

The Diet Learning Curve

[23:45]

And that’s what we look to do with all of our clients—rather than just giving someone a diet plan, we show them how to actually bring this to life. You can outsource your food production to a degree. If you’re lucky enough to have help, you can outsource food preparation there. But there’s still a base level of education needed, and the more that you learn as a client in those first few weeks to a month, the more robust and enduring the changes will be.

So I think early on, there’s often a little bit of a pushback against following a diet, like it’s somehow the most restrictive and horrible and hateful thing you can ask someone to do. But if you don’t know how to eat, you really need to just follow orders for a period of about a week. You need to pretend that you’re a person who eats healthily by being a person who eats healthily. And then you’ll understand how to do it.

Discipline Equals Freedom

[24:30]

Over time, you’ll get more freedom and more flexibility in what you’re doing. But the first couple of weeks, the best thing most people can do is just try and be as accurate, precise, and strict as possible. Then once you’ve upgraded your own internal operating system around food, you’re going to have much more flexibility in the long term.

"It's like the classic Jocko Willink quote: 'Discipline equals freedom.' To a degree, that's what it is. If you frontload your upskilling, your education, your precision, then down the line, you have more freedom, more ability to be flexible, more ability to make decisions and improvise."

Success Indicators

[25:00]

Pete: For example, in the UK we have service stations, and I suppose 7-Eleven is the Hong Kong/Singapore version. You know that your client’s going to be quite successful when they can go into 7-Eleven and pick out a meal from the food items available that fits within their dietary needs of the day. That’s the long-term definition of success—being able to forage in 7-Eleven and come out with a meal that is relatively high protein. It doesn’t have to be a perfect organic meal, but it has to be a 7 or 8 out of 10 meal that’s going to support your goals and isn’t going to derail your diet.

I think with clients, if you start people off on quite a strict, precise diet, by the end of the process, they’ve upskilled themselves to a point where they can go to a brunch, client drinks, or 7-Eleven and still be on their plan while doing it.

Core First Week Habits

[26:00]

Jay: I would definitely agree. I was thinking back to your point about what you’d recommend for the first week, and I was thinking about every time I’ve been on a phase, what are my cornerstone things that I put into play to get me going? It would be food prep, scheduling those sessions ahead of time so I know exactly when I want to be there, and honestly, getting a weighing scale just so that I’ve got a daily weighing and some sort of gamification around it.

Pete: Yeah, stepping on a scale is really useful. It drives momentum, it drives feedback, and then that rebuilds motivation. That’s a big component. People come in super motivated for about a week, and that needs to be replenished regularly.

Building Motivation Through Small Wins

[26:30]

Anytime that you create a series of tasks aligned with your goals and you actually complete them and tick them off, you’re replenishing your motivation. You’re getting these little dopamine drips through the day, and you’re associating dopamine with something that’s driving you in the right direction. So you’re stacking the odds in your favor. Every time you give yourself a task related to your ultimate goal that you then complete successfully, you’re voting and saying, “Okay, this is what I’m doing. This is the person I am now,” and you’re pushing yourself more to that side of the ledger.

The Problem with Gradual Behavior Change

[27:00]

There’s one mistake people make—you see people jumping in, you see it with lots of well-meaning coaches who have a desire to soft-coach people with “we’re going to change one habit a week for 43 weeks.” It’s this kind of well-meaning and slightly paternalistic approach to behavior change that’s based on some psychological studies with questionable results, and it’s really hard to get clients to be successful that way.

We’re always biased towards stuff that we’ve most recently done. So if they’ve just completed their behavior change nutrition course, they’ll think, “Wow, this makes so much sense to me,” but they fail to see that they’re already quite advanced and have a big knowledge base on fitness and nutrition. These behavior change tactics are going to work really well for them, but that’s not what they’re dealing with when working with a client who’s 45 years old with three kids and a busy life—they don’t have that base knowledge set. They actually need to build that from step one.

Understanding Trade-offs

[27:30]

Jay: I agree. And I think we also just need to be careful of recency biases in terms of negative impacts because if we’ve just done our own photo shoot, we might be like, “Oh man, I’ve got an eating disorder for a few weeks. I can’t project that onto my clients.” But being in a deficit when you’re at 20-25% or 30% body fat is the most pro-health activity you could possibly do, whereas being in a deficit from 12% or 10% down to 5% actually starts to become detrimental for your health over time. So it’s completely different worlds that we’re working in.

Avoiding Projection

[28:15]

It’s funny, we’re all guilty of applying our own circumstances and narrowing down other people’s worlds based on our own worldview and abilities. I think I’ve safely been in the middle-aged coach/trainer group for a while now. As a young coach, you’re always worried that you’re not showing empathy with your clients and their circumstances.

Now that I do a bit more coaching with younger athletes—12, 13, 14-year-olds—more in a sports context, I have to be super aware that I’m not projecting my own limitations onto them. As an older coach with limited athletic ability and recovery ability, I need to make sure I’m not restricting those younger clients from performing and reaching their potential by throttling down the loading that they can experience and recover from.

So there’s always that bias where you just think, “Okay, the thing I’ve most recently done is the most relevant thing because that’s what I’m thinking about,” or “My most recent experience is universal, and everyone’s experience will be the same.”

The Value of Experience

[29:30]

I think that’s why having me, you, and Jeremy at the core of what we put out—our average age, our time in the industry, and the average age of clients we coach (we’ve all got families and kids)—we’ve got a good base of real-life experience to work from that makes our product a very good fit for the type of clients we work with. Because at this stage in our lives, we very much are the type of clients we work with. So there’s much more of a natural understanding rather than an imagined projection of what people can do.

Pete: I think it’s understanding that—and I think this comes with age, having been doing this for a while now—you understand that everything’s a trade-off. I think the industry as a whole is largely driven or populated by 20-something personal trainers, and that’s great because a big driver of success on the gym floor is energy, client engagement, and being fun to be around for an hour.

Real-Life Trade-offs

[30:15]

However, the trade-offs are much smaller for them. For most of those personal trainers, going to the gym is one of their biggest hobbies—probably the biggest thing in their life. And that’s simply not true of most of our client base. It’s going to be quite low down on their list of priorities.

So if we can get them just to prioritize it—if it gets into the top five priorities, fantastic. But they don’t have unlimited time and energy to spend focusing on this particular goal. It needs to integrate well into what they’re already doing.

So the trade-off is, “If I do an extra cardio session, am I spending less time with my kids? If I do this, am I missing a meeting at work? If I do this, am I not getting what I need done?” For most of our clients, those are very real trade-offs that they encounter on a weekly basis. So we want to make sure that our proposition to them is realistic and achievable but still drives success and results.

Nutrition and Output

[31:00]

Even in terms of nutrition: fueling clients is always going to be based on what their output is, what their activity contribution is to creating a deficit. The more training you do, the more food you can eat—it’s quite simple. So if people really enjoy their food, they often find time to drive more activity. If people are tight on their exercise budget, they’re not going to be able to eat as much food. It’s pretty simple.

If you’re sat down in an office for 10 hours a day and the only respite from that is three times a week to come and train with us, your diet’s going to have to be more focused. You’re going to have to be tighter in terms of measuring things as well.

Conclusion

[31:45]

Pete: I think that really rounds off this discussion. For better or for worse, we’ve all started to narrow in and even surpass a lot of the ages that our clients are. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We know what works for us when we were 20, we know what works for us when we’re 30. You and Jeremy know what works for you in your 40s and beyond, in Jeremy’s case.

To summarize where we started off in this conversation: I wouldn’t worry about recovery, because everyone that’s ever come in to us at ATP has done a transformation—we’ve survived 100% of the time! We know that everything has a cost. Just focus on training and your aerobic work first and all of your lifestyle behaviors outside of that. You will improve dramatically over time.

"If you do have extra time to budget, then by all means try any of these latest modalities to see which one works for you. But you're just looking at a one-time benefit in that specific instance or something you need to keep up. Whereas resistance training and aerobic work over time is going to give you a benefit that you're going to keep—money in the bank."

ATP Personal Training Singapore client William with his coach

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FAQ

  1. Other commercial gyms are focussed on session numbers and hitting sales targets and personal training is an afterthought product layered onto their gym membership model. Personal Training gyms are either exlcusively focussed on short term, unsustainable transformations or waste their clients time and energy with a rent a friend service.
  2. We do things a little differently. Our gyms are exclusive personal training facilities; all of our coaches work 1 on 1 with their clients. This allows for a remarkably efficient training experience, your entire training session will be tailored to maximise results based around your specific needs.
  3. Unlike other gyms we offer support, feedback and coaching outside of the gym.
  4. Other gyms only focus on training, and sometimes nutrition. We offer a complete service including lifestyle, diet and your non-gym activity.
  5. Other gyms treat their clients like the product, driving them towards photos shoots in a set time period. We place your needs above the needs of our marketing department. We care deeply about the sustainability of the changes that you make.

Every client’s plan of action will be unique. Your D.N.A. (Daily Routine, Nutrition and Activity) plan will be unique – this is not a generic, templated plan.

You will be assigned a dedicated coach. Your coach will take the time to understand you , your history, your goals and motivations to help you to build a customised plan and tailor the long term strategy accordingly.

Your coach will review your progress and measurements and provide clear feedback and advice, as well as act a a strategic advisor to help you make adjustments to your plan as you progress.

Everyone can achieve dramatic results and experience an amazing personal transformation. Your personal coach will tailor the starting level of intensity based around the initial consultation and assessment workout. This will ensure that you are always working towards the edge of your current capacity but not beyond it which would invite sloppy technique, loose form and potential injury. Some of our most dramatic transformations have come from clients who had little to no experience with training and nutrition prior to starting with ATP Personal Training. We’re there alongside you for the entire process and will ensure that you’re properly able to execute on our advice.

Our coaches will ensure that you are ramped up towards exercising intensely over the course of your first week or weeks with us. We take pride in applying the appropriate dose of exercise to match our clients’ existing capacity, there is no benefit to training far beyond your current capacity. In fact, this type of approach will actually be less efficient, place an enormous recovery cost on the body and potentially compromise your structural integrity.

We track bodyweight, body fat percentage and girth measurements to give us a wide array of progress markers.

For most clients as they start the transformation process Weight loss on the scale is a good indicator of progress and you can expect to lose between 0.5kg to 1.0 kg each week. During the early stages this number can be even higher as the body responds to the new program and becomes rapidly less inflamed.

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*Results will vary from individual to individual
**Results are based on each client’s circumstances.

HONG KONG

  • Telephone: +852 2866 8808
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Address: 6th Floor, On Hing Building,
    1 On Hing Terrace,
    Central, Hong Kong
  • Updated 2025
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SINGAPORE

  • Telephone: +65 81891789
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Address: #01-01, 105 Cecil Street
    069534
    Singapore
  • Updated 2025
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ATP Personal Training- Serving Singapore since 2018.

Voted #1 Personal Trainer in Singapore by Expat Living, ATP Personal Training delivers fast, sustainable results—fat loss, strength, and lifestyle change. Expert trainers optimize your health and life. Join us today—be your best self!