Fitmaxxing

Getting genuinely strong

David leads the strength side of Fitmaxxing — what happens after the fat is off, and why we do it in that order rather than both at once.

This is the pillar page for everything we publish on strength. It assumes you have already done the fat loss, or never needed to.

David leads this half

Fitmaxxing is two people with two competences, and we say plainly which is which. Mark takes you from obese to lean. David takes you from lean to strong.

That is not a division of marketing. Neither of us answers for the other, because a programming answer from the fat loss guy is worth about as much as a deficit answer from the strength guy. When you ask a strength question in the Monday Q&A, David answers it.

Why we sequence rather than run both at once

You can make progress on both simultaneously, badly. Or you can do one properly and then the other.

We sequence because it wins over any realistic timeframe, and because the recovery demands of serious strength work are hard to meet while you are in a large deficit — and a large deficit is the whole point of how Mark runs the first half.

There is also a psychological reason, and it matters more than it sounds: a man carrying significant excess weight has one job, and giving him two halves the attention he gives either.

More on why the order matters →

One thing Mark will tell you now

Mark does not believe in bulking. You can build muscle at maintenance and lose fat in a deficit, so the bulk-and-cut cycle most of the industry treats as the only route to size is not one he uses — and for a man who has just spent a year getting weight off, being told to put some back on is the last thing he needs to hear.

That is Mark's position, on his own side of the line. Strength programming is David's, and his approach is his to describe rather than ours to summarise.

This page is not finished

We would rather leave it short than fill it with generic strength advice you can get anywhere. David's method goes here in his own words, with his own numbers, and it is worth waiting for.

In the meantime the Monday Q&A is the fastest way to ask him something directly.