My One Year Transformation with the Greek God Program

The whole reason I became a partner of Kinobody.com is because of my results with the Greek God Program. Luckily I recorded short videos from time to time while following the GGP and I was able to make this transformation video.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I read and answer everything.

In this post I’ll share what I did to achieve these results. Here we go!

How the Greek God Program works

The training philosophy of the GGP is very simple: Train for strength on a few key movements and accept muscle growth as a side effect.

The logic behind it is much solid than you’d think.

Science shows that we cannot train for size. We can either train for strength or endurance and the increased size of our muscles will be a side effect of that.

If we train for strength, our muscle fibers will adapt by increasing in size so they can produce more force. On the other hand if we train with high reps and short rest periods, our muscles will grow to store more glycogen to better cope with future workouts.

Here is the key point: the amount of growth you can get from strength or endurance (high volume) is not equal.

We can very quickly max out the amount of fuel we can store inside our muscles. That’s why pump training (or high rep training) only produces a small percentage of the overall muscle growth.

How small? The best approximation would be 30%. The remaining 70% of the muscle mass a natural lifter can gain will come from getting stronger in a medium rep range.

I’m sure you’ve noticed this yourself. If a guy can bench 185lbs for 5 and another can bench 225lbs for 5 the latter will have a bigger chest.

It doesn’t matter if the first guy trains more, sleeps more, and eats better – if he is 40 lbs behind on an exercise he will have less muscle mass.

This leads us to a very important conclusion: The training program that will get you stronger the quickest (in the 5-10 rep range, not 1-4 reps per set) will also be the program that will you get you muscular the quickest.

Volume becomes more important when you get to an advanced level and you want to push your body to your genetic potential. However, we’re not after the bodybuilder look. To get a fitness model/Hollywood actor type body, you only need to get very strong in a medium rep range.

A Fast way to get strong

This is where the Greek God Program shines.

It strips away all the unessential and focuses entirely on strength gains on a few key movements:

Chest – Incline Bench Press
Back – Weighted Chin-ups / Pull-ups
Shoulders – Standing Press / DB Shoulder Press
Legs – Squats or Sumo Deadlifts

These are your indicator exercises. The progress you make on them indicates how close you are to your goal physique.

Of course you also do assistance exercises to grow your arms, calves, pump up your shoulders, and develop your abs, but the bread and butter of your routine are the indicator exercises.

As we said earlier, strength is so closely linked to muscle development in natural lifters that you can predict how you’ll look based on strength on these movements. For example, if you want to look like the guys below, get to their stats:

To produce rapid strength gains, the GGP routines use an A/B split, alternating each workout on non-consecutive days.

Hitting a muscle group only once a week is generally too infrequently to maximize strength gains at the intermediate level. The reason for that is because you can still make small strength gains almost every workout so doing an exercise more often means you get more opportunities to progress.

With the GGP you train each of the indicator exercises once every 4-5 days with low volume. Combined with Reverse Pyramid Training, this is the key to fast strength progression. 

RPT is a style of training that relies on very high intensity. No other training style allows you to lift as close to your limits as RPT. That is simply because you are performing your heaviest set first, when you are completely fresh and you don’t need to replicate that set for the rest of the workout.

Because of the high intensity used, you can create a complete training stimulus with very low volume (in fact, RPT works well only with low to moderate volume).

The progression model is also very well set up.

Most beginner-intermediate lifters can improve only about 1% from workout to workout on the main compound lifts.

What that means is that if we load the bar more than 1% from workout to workout  we’re usually going to lose reps. If you are lifting somewhere between 100 and 200 lbs, adding just 5 lbs to a lift would mean an increase between 2.5-5%. Or if you try to add reps with the same weight that is also very hard to do because adding a single rep to your top set usually increases the predicted one rep max by 3% or more.

So even if your training routine is excellent, you still need to track your lifts and load the bar at the right time with the right weight. You must increase the intensity by 1% or less so you can make continuous progress.

Nutrition for Muscle Gains with Minimum Fat

Staying lean while building muscle is essential for looking great year round.

The Greek God look is all about proportions and body fat is a HUGE part of that. Your waist must stay slim at all times so your shoulders and back appear much wider and give you a V shaped torso.

Obviously, to be able to lean bulk you have to be lean in the first place. But once you’re lean, gaining muscle with minimum fat requires a well designed nutrition plan.

The most important thing is to eat the right surplus of calories. You only need a few hundred calories above maintenance every day to promote lean muscle gains. Remember that nutrition is only permissive to muscle growth, the stimulus comes from getting stronger in the gym. 

Greg did a great job explaining the lean gaining protocol in the program.

Depending on how easily you know you gain fat in a surplus, you set the weekly calorie intake 1500-1900 kcal above maintenance.

The reason you set the surplus as a weekly average instead of daily intale is because you’ll be cycling calories on rest days and training days.

By doing this you may be able to improve nutrient partitioning a little because you’ll be eating the majority of your surplus around your workouts. We know protein synthesis starts to climb 3-4 hours after training, peaks at the 24 hour mark and then steadily decreases until it goes back to baseline 36-48 hours after training. We also know training depletes some muscle glycogen and carbs won’t be converted to fat until the glycogen stores are replenished.

So basically with this protocol you provide most of the caloric surplus at a time where nutrients will be used for recovery and growth, and less of a surplus on rest days when they are more likely to be converted to fat.

The result

When you combine a minimalistic training routine focused on gaining strength in the 5-8 rep range with a nutrition protocol that supports lean muscle gains you can an amazing result.

You’ll start building proportionate mass in your shoulders, upper chest, back, and arms while your waist is staying slim. This will lead to great waist-shoulder proportions and will give you the model type body you’re probably chasing.

So the question is:

Is your current training program working?

If not, I suggest you don’t do that anymore.

Give the Greek God Program a try. It has hundreds (if not thousands) of success stories to back-up it’s effectiveness and is also very easy to implement. I mean, I don’t care how busy you are, you can go the gym 3 days a week for one hour.

This is the page of the program. You can learn more about it here.

 

If you have any question leave a comment below. I appreciate all feedback and I read and answer every comment.