You too six can pack get a in just 8 weeks
F45 is a brutal new fitness movement loved by millennials. But married mother-of-four GERALDINE BEDELL insists...
AT THE end of this summer, I was distinctly flabby. I’d got out of the habit of exercising. I’d broken my arm on holiday, and then my gym burned down. I know that sounds like ‘the dog ate my homework’, but it’s true.
Then I came across the F45 Challenge, a fantastically successful — if punishing — eight-week programme of exercise and dieting from the world’s fastest-growing fitness empire. F45 promised that if I joined one of its gyms, and followed its diet plan, it would transform my body — making a new, lean me in just eight weeks.
If you haven’t heard of F45 yet, you will soon. The company started with one gym in Australia in 2013 and grew faster than McDonald’s. Since then it has gone global. Its gyms have spread like a rash across the world and Ireland too, with several throughout the capital.
So, along with about 1,000 other people worldwide, I sign up to do the eight-week F45 Challenge, a course that runs several times a year. The results are amazing, certainly if you look at the before-and-after pictures of the global challenge winners — men and women who have lost between 11 and 20kg (24-44lbs), whose wobbly torsos and muffin tops have transformed into rippling muscles and lean lines.
Could I be like that? Could I transform my out-of-condition fiftysomething body and get a six-pack?
I ask Ben Cramant, who set up my local franchise, nearly a year ago, how often I’ll need to come to the group exercise sessions. There are four on weekday mornings, starting at 6am (three on some days), one at lunchtime, and two in the evening, plus three on Saturday mornings.
‘The really keen people come seven to ten times a week,’ he says. Seeing my horrified expression, he adds: ‘But you can probably get away with three to five.’ Who has the time for ten workouts a week? Or even five? People with no lives, I suspect, or addicts. I think I may have inadvertently joined a cult.
Most of the F45 members at my new gym are considerably fitter and younger than me. Before the various disasters over the summer, I went to the gym occasionally, but in a slapdash sort of way. ‘When did you last do a HIIT session?’ Ben asks me. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
HIIT, I discover, is high-intensity interval training and the answer to his question is ‘never’. HIIT turns out to be vaguely familiar, resembling what we oldies used to call circuit training, with an emphasis on short bursts of exercise interspersed with even shorter recovery periods.
THE ‘F’ in F45 stands for Functional, because the exercise routines use large muscle groups rather than isolating individual muscles. In theory, this mimics the activities of daily life. The ‘45’, meanwhile, refers to the 45-minute sessions. To thumping music, I make my way around my first circuit: squatting, jumping, twisting, pulling, pushing.
There are a couple of rowing machines and spin bikes, but most of the equipment is simple and portable: sandbags, weights, balls, kettlebells, ropes, hammers.
On the screens at the front, a guy I think of as Fit Guy, although I suspect he is really Computer Generated Guy, demonstrates how to do each exercise.
Fit Guy helps everyone to keep up and see what they need to do next. Ben also demonstrates the circuit beforehand so that we all do the exercises using what fitness people call ‘proper form’. I still get confused.
Doing squats holding a couple of 8kg weights requires a great deal of concentration — and when the 20-second break comes, I am confused about whether it’s the one-handed press-ups next or the sit-ups holding a hammer — and where do I have to go to do them? The gym floor is crowded and several times I find myself trying to take over the wrong station. People look at me pityingly.
At the end of my first session, I am out of breath, sweaty and dazed. Three days later, lowering myself onto the sofa is still hard.
At the start of the Challenge, we also have to do a fitness test. This involves a lot of jumping, which I can’t do because I have a longstanding ankle injury from falling off an unsuitable pair of shoes in my 30s.
Ben tells me it might be a good idea to concentrate on the Tuesday and Thursday resistance sessions, which focus on weightlifting, rather than the high-energy cardio classes that call for jumping and running. That, he says kindly, might be more my thing.
I take it all as seriously as I can, but even in the resistance sessions I am on the lightest weights and definitely at the bottom of the class. When I do finally pluck up the courage to do a cardio class, I think I am going to be sick in the middle of it, and I don’t recover until the next day.
Once you sign up, the Challenge is ever-present, even if you’re not making it to the gym ten times a week. There’s a Facebook group, an app to book your sessions, plus regular emails revealing success secrets from previous Challenge winners.
One arrives in my inbox, listing the ‘things you only understand if you do the Challenge’. These include:
You see your fellow F45ers more than you see your family.
You can only commit to weeknight activities that finish before 8pm, so you can get enough sleep. You prefer to skip dinner out with friends so you can afford a week’s training (silver membership costs around€189 a month while platinum is €209.
I worry I’m not sufficiently keen because I keep staying out after 8pm. Most of the millennial F45ers don’t have children. I have four, and even though they are all over 18, three of them live with me, along with assorted partners, and they think I should be spending my time on them, rather than hanging around the gym or preparing eccentric food that they aren’t going to eat. And the food takes a lot of preparing.
The F45 Challenge diet involves two weeks of detoxing at the start, four weeks on a high-protein diet in the middle, and then a high-fat, lowcarb diet for the final fortnight. (Women should never eat more than 1,300 calories.)
The five small meals a day are designed to maximise weight loss and the transfer of fat into lean muscle. A typical menu in the middle phase is a green garden omelette for breakfast, green beans with almond flakes for the mid-morning snack, oven-baked basil turkey with roasted vegetables for lunch, a chocolate coconut ball mid-afternoon snack, and Cajun chicken breast with
Southern spicy brown rice for dinner. All this has to be made from scratch. At our Challenge induction meeting, we are advised to spend Sunday — the one day the gym is closed — weighing out the ingredients. I calculate that I should be in the gym for about 48 hours over the eightweek period and give up eight Sundays to food preparation. That’s easily 100 hours, before the shopping.
The first shopping list is 85 items long, with things I’ve never heard of. Buckinis anyone? It’s also expensive. That food shop costs well over €200 — and that’s just for me, because my family intends to go on eating pasta and bagels and butter.
At the end of the first week, I walk into a plate-glass window at a party. Everyone assumes I’m drunk, but I am just light-headed from lack of food. I also have a splitting headache.
I’m not sure whether that’s caused by caffeine withdrawal (coffee is banned in the first two weeks), dehydration from exercise, or the constant stress about which station I’m meant to be moving on to next in the HIIT sessions.
There is an alternative to all this meal preparation. A company comes to the introductory Challenge session, promising to deliver food that meets the nutritional guidelines. The meals for the day arrive at your door between midnight and 6am. It’s not cheap: a five-day package of five meals a day costs €220, and most major cities do a similar meal plan for health-conscious people.
I try it for a few days, and the food is nutritious and tastes good, but there is something about pre-prepared food delivered in plastic boxes that reminds me of aeroplane meals.
In fact, everyone on the Challenge agrees that the food is thehardest part. I try sticking to the overall principles — low calorie, high protein foods, no white carbs — but I worry I am not getting the full benefit. In the four-week middle phase, for instance, you’re meant to eat 45 per cent protein, 40 per cent carbsand 15 per cent fats, with a focus on Vitamin C, potassium and the B vitamins.
Unless you follow the meal plans to the letter, it’s hard to know whether you are achieving the muscle hypertrophy that the Challenge’s online portal tells me is the current goal.
I have to look up muscle hypertrophy. It means increasing the size of muscle cells. This, basically, is how you get a six-pack.
Still, while I am on the Challenge, two new pieces of research hit the news. One is that weightlifting workouts — what the F45 calls resistance — are really good for older people, improving balance, coordination and strength. GPs should prescribe protein powders and weight lifting to combat frailty, the study recommended.
The other is that resistance training is excellent conditioning for bodies and brains at all ages.
And an odd thing happens to me over the course of the eight weeks. I become addicted to the HIIT sessions. I look forward to them. I also feel great afterwards — happy, as well as fit.
As for the results? For me, weight loss wasn’t a priority: what I really wanted was to feel fitter and look more toned — and that is certainly the case.
By week eight, I am running up escalators without a second thought, I can see more of my ribs and, yes, I would even go so far as to say I have a six-pack.
Yet despite not having wanted to lose weight, I am slightly ashamed when I discover that the female Challenge winner at our F45 gym lost 9 kilos (20lb). I lost, er… one.
But my body composition stats are good. I’ve lost 1.5 per cent of my body fat and gained 0.3 per cent lean muscle. And my husband keeps saying I look in great shape, although I suspect he may just be relieved that the Challenge has ended and I am no longer either out at the gym or talking about it.
But then Ben warns me what takes eight weeks to take off you can put on in only two. I find, to my horror, I now have to embark on the maintenance phase: plenty of alkalising foods including dark green veg, nuts and lemon in water, and five gym sessions a week. Yes five. And I realise I may have to choose between my six pack . . . and my life.