You probably got into functional fitness to lose weight. The vast majority of new folks walking into the gym tell me they want to lose weight and get in better shape. They’re quickly hooked on WODs and metcons when they see some initial progress. However, these athletes can become disheartened when they stop losing weight, or actually gain weight due to increasing muscle mass. It can be even more disheartening for athletes that have been grinding away in the gym for years, and have yet to reach their ideal body. This functional fitness weight loss program is designed to get you on the right track, with everything you need to start dropping pounds. Keep reading for the full functional fitness program, nutrition plan, and downloads.
The first thing that you should know is that this program is not magic. I do not have any miracle supplements, nor do I have a certain exercises that will “melt the weight right off of you.” This program is the culmination of much research, and no small amount of trial and error on my part.
The most important part of any plan to lose weight is consistency, or adherence to the plan. When researchers examine people that are trying to lose weight, they routinely find that only around 60% of people stick to the plan (1). I find this statistic to be be roughly in line with my own personal experience as a functional fitness coach.
Less committed athletes in my gym can often stick to a workout program consistently for a few weeks. Participation starts to drop off after that. We are all adults, and we have many priorities pulling at us. If you truly want to lose weight, and change your body composition, you need to make this a priority for the duration of this 12 week weight loss program.
My goal for you is to stick with this program, hit your weigh-ins, macros, and all the little details that add up to success. Newer athletes can build both muscle and lower body fat. I expect my advanced athletes to maintain their fitness levels, and solely focus on dropping fat. Now let’s talk about some factors that will help you achieve your body composition goals.
Predictors of Weight Loss Success
The most important factor that predicts long term weight loss success is adherence to a plan. Notice I said “a plan.” There are a million diets, and they can all work, given the right circumstances. Check out this IG post that compares some of the most popular diets with how much weight the subject lost in the long term. You’ll notice they are almost all the exact same. Adherence is truly the only factor that matters.
This is where the art of dieting comes into play. While there isn’t a best diet for all people, there certainly is a best diet for individuals with their specific goals. This program is designed for a very specific population, trying to drop body fat.
I couldn’t just give this program to a 60 year old type II diabetic, with no training history, and expect her to succeed. In all likelihood it would kill her. This diet is specifically tailored for hard training athletes who want to maintain the fitness gains they have acquired.
Given this population of athletes, we need to talk about factors that will improve adherence, and thus increase the chances that you will reach your body composition goals.
Finding Your Weight Loss Motivation
Rest assured I’m not talking about yelling cheesy phrases or motivational posters on drab office walls. The motivation I’m talking about is the specific psychological motivation that will help increase your adherence to the program, and thus help you drop weight.
Some athletes are extrinsically motivated, meaning that having external goals, and praise from others gives them a sense of accomplishment. Other athletes are intrinsically motivated, meaning they do no require outside motivation to push themselves. These two types of athletes require different types of motivation. Here is the motivational method that you should use to keep on the right track.
Extrinsically Motivated Athletes
If you’re this type of athlete, then you will do best with external social motivation, and recognition. In fact, research indicates that weight loss programs that utilize social support increase adherence by 29% (2). The best thing about social support is that you already have a powerful support network in your pocket.
You should utilize the power of social media to help you on the road to your weight loss. You can do this several ways. Try joining weight loss Facebook groups or Sub Reddits that focus on this topic, or you can use your friends and family on Instagram or other sites to help keep you on the program.
I want you to publicly state your intention to drop some body fat, and you need to post regular check-ins with your preferred social media network. I don’t want you to post something like, “I’m going to lose thirty pounds in 12 weeks.” Instead, I’d like you to post your goal of following this program, and then regularly post your progress on a daily basis.
You could do this by taking screen shots of your weigh-ins, or take photos and videos of your workouts, including the healthy food you are eating. The content of your check-in doesn’t matter. It matters that you are following through with your stated intention and keeping yourself honest on a daily basis.
Now that we’ve covered how an extrinsically motivated athlete can succeed with this program, let’s talk about intrinsically motivated athletes.
Intrinsically Motivated Athletes
These athletes generally do not require external factors to motivate them. Things like personal goals, and feelings of competency, are often decisive in creating behavioral change. I find that these athletes are best motivated by meaningful personal goals.
First, you need to think long and hard about your number one motivator for losing weight. Is it so you can be more competitive in a local Crossfit Competition? Or is it something a little simpler, like wanting to fit into a dress you used to wear? Whatever your reason for wanting to change your body composition, you need to find a way to keep that in the fore front of your mind.
I recommend taking a photo of something that reminds you of your reasons for completing this challenge. You might take a screen shot of the local competition logo, or use a photo of a dress, or any personally meaningful photo. You should then put this on your phone’s lock screen or, perhaps the background of your phone. This will make sure that you regularly see the reminder.
Whatever your motivational style, you need to commit to following through with the whole program, and getting the daily details correct. It doesn’t matter if you can RX every workout, or if you eat a little too many carbs one day. It’s the day in and day out consistency that matters. Now, let’s cover the full program details.
The Weight Loss Program Overview
This program has three components: the workouts, nutrition, and outside of gym activities. I will provide you with several tools to make following these components a piece of cake. Once you download the fitness program, you’ll see that you’ll be in the gym 6 times per week, with a few days per week of activity outside of the gym.
These activities might be a running workout, or a simple walk. If I had to pick the most important piece of this program, it would be your nutrition. After all, you can ace all the workouts, and still not lose any weight if you don’t create a caloric deficit. Here is a flow chart of how often you will be doing each activity.
You will be weighing yourself each day, and logging your body fat progress each week. It’s important to weigh-in each day as you’ll find that your body weight will fluctuate (mainly due to water weight). Daily weigh-ins give you an accurate view of your weight loss trend. The once a week body fat checks, with a tape measure, will allow you to see exactly how much progress you’ve made. The scale is less important than what the tape says.
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For the nutrition section of the program, I will provide you with a research backed nutrition tool that I’ve created. It will calculate your ideal weight loss rate, your current body fat, and give overall caloric and macro nutrient goals to aim for. I will also provide you with lists of nutritious sources of carbs, proteins, and fats, as well as some websites you can use to help prepare delicious meals that follow your energy recommendations. Here are the downloads.
12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Downloads
- Click Here to Download Part one of the 12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program
- Click Here to Get My Ultimate Functional Fitness Nutrition Tool
Now that we’ve covered the broad strokes of this program, as well as methods to increase program adherence, let’s talk about the nutrition in a little more detail.
The Nutrition Program for Weight Loss
This is where most athletes mess up when trying to lose weight. As I stated above, it is incredibly important, and can’t be overlooked. You should ask yourself why you bother recording the weights you lift, or the times for your WODs, and yet you spend no time planning and recording your food intake. Putting together a nutrition plan for fat loss isn’t complicated, in fact you can read all about it here.
The Functional Fitness Nutrition Calculator
The first step for determining your nutrition plan, is to put your information into the nutrition calculator. Check out the read me tab, and then navigate through the various tabs, until you get to the fat loss nutrition tab. Once you input all of your information into red sections it will calculate your energy requirements.
I want to emphasize that this is a best guess, that will be broadly applicable to most athletes. If you find yourself doing well with a little less or more of a certain macronutrient then that’s fine. Your macro split is a starting point that should be pretty accurate.
In the fat loss tab, it will auto calculate the 500 calorie deficit for men, and 300 calorie deficit for women. It will also give you recommendations for training days and non training days. You want to start out with as small of a deficit as possible, and only increase if your weight loss stalls. Do not go maverick on me, and start off with a 1,000 cal deficit. This is a recipe for failure.
I recommend tracking your daily weigh-ins in MyFitnessPal, and your weekly body composition checks in the spreadsheet. The app is just a little easier, and the spreadsheet is good at showing you overall progress.
Food Choices
When we are talking about weight loss, food choice does matter. However, it matters less than many people think. The caloric deficit is the primary nutritional goal we are trying to create. We need to consider how to do this while making sure we are eating healthy, nutritious food. After all, we could just eat meal replacement bars, but that wouldn’t be very healthy, nor would it be appealing. Check out this list of healthy foods I’ve created. It’s broken down by macronutrient.
Obviously, this isn’t a complete list of everything you can eat. I compiled this list to give you a good idea of the types of foods that are the most nutritious in each category. It’s ok to eat food not on the list, but if you find a large portion of your food is processed (meaning something was done to make it) then you should aim to include more foods from the list. As you will see, there are some amazing dishes you can create with this food list.
One of the easiest methods of staving off hunger pangs is to eat more whole foods, that are less calorically dense. For example you could eat a whole potato, or one slice of potato bread. Potato bread is processed with other ingredients, and has a fair amount of calories per slice. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat a whole potato than one slice of bread.
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If you do want to eat bread, then try to find lower calorie bread. Most stores sell it, and it makes toast just as well as high calorie bread. The point is that you need to read food labels and pay attention to what MyFitnessPal is telling you to make sure you are staying on plan.
Finding High Quality Meals
I personally struggle with this piece of dieting the most. I’m not a particularly good cook, and my meals have been known to be less than savory. The good news is that there are several websites, that I will link to below, that can help you prepare healthy high protein meals.
Some of these meals are going to require a fair amount of prep time; however, many of them are very easy to cook and can be saved as left overs. Some athletes prefer to do all of their cooking once or twice a week, and others like to cook almost every night. You’ll have to do a little trial and error to make sure that you have nutritious meals available.
This doesn’t mean that you always have to cook meals like this. You can have something simple like a Quest bar, protein shake, or hard boiled eggs, and some fruit. It doesn’t really matter what you eat as long you are eating mainly unprocessed foods, and hitting your energy requirements.
Using MyFitnessPal
This is one of the best tools you can use to achieve your weight loss goals. I’ve written a whole article on how to use MyFitnessPal, so make sure you read it. I find it easiest to figure out a meal I want to eat and then I put the serving sizes in, determining how much food I’m allowed to eat for the meal. You can also scan barcodes on items, and it will often be able to find exactly what you are eating.
I will also input the type of exercise I did and use the info from the activity calculator to track my energy expenditure more accurately. You can use data from a smart watch if you wear one of those as well. The main point of this tool is to make sure that you are eating the amount you should be.
Now that we’ve covered the nutrition plan, let’s move into the fitness portion of the program. If you want to learn even more info about functional fitness, then check out this ebook.
The 12 Week Functional Fitness Program for Weight Loss
The overall goal of this program is to lose body fat. We aren’t trying to set new PR’s with our lifts, or our benchmark WODs. It is possible for intermediate athletes to build some muscle and strength, while losing body fat, but that isn’t the norm for more experienced athletes. For advanced athletes, I expect you to maintain the majority of your strength, and fitness, while dropping body fat. Let’s take a look at week one.
12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Week 1 Programming
As I’ve alluded to above, each week is six sessions per week. There will be two primary lifts, a short break, and then you have a WOD or metcon. You will also notice that on a few days there is some cardio thrown in. The cardio can be done at a gym, or you can choose to run, and modify the workout. I recommend you read this article on scaling as there will inevitably be days that something needs to be changed for your individual needs.
If you want to focus on building strength, then check this program out.
Get the Program!12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Week 2 Programming
You can see that much of the strength work is percentage based. Keep in mind that I’ve purposely programmed this so you shouldn’t be going to max effort all the time. Most of these sets should feel moderately heavy and a few are listed as AHAP.
I’ve also included the acronym (RIR) which means reps in reserve. I use this term for lifts where you probably don’t have a one rep max. If you were doing a set of 10 with 2 RIR that would mean that you could actually do 12 reps if you really had to.
12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Week 3 Programming
The weights increase each week, but I’m still limiting you to less maximal work. Astute readers will also notice that I’ve increased the length of the WODs as we move through the weeks. This helps to burn a little more energy, and keeps your overall progress from stagnating.
12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Week 4 Programming
In week 4, I’ve changed the primary movements. Normally I stick with these movements for a few cycles, but the goal here is to work our muscles and maintain our fitness, not practice certain lifts. I also find that rotating exercises makes more sense when in a caloric deficit, as it keeps you from generating over use injuries.
12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Week 5 Programming
I’ve included both steady state long duration cardio and short interval style cardio. Research has shown that both types of cardio can be effective methods to burn fat. If you read our previous article on combining cardio and strength training, you’ll remember that interval training interferes less with strength and muscle gain. However, long duration cardio is still king for overall caloric expenditure, and it does improve aerobic capacity very well with little soreness.
12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program Week 6 Programming
This is the last week of the first 6 weeks of the functional fitness programming for fat loss. There will be a part two, where I provide the rest of the program. You can expect to see different movements and rep ranges, as well as a little difference style of cardio. So stay tuned!
What to Do if You Don’t Lose Weight
This is the million dollar question. In any diet there will come a time when you plateau. The best thing to do is panic, binge eat a whole pizza, and quit going to the gym right? Wrong! Haze yourself for even thinking that. Dietary plateaus simply indicate that some adjustments need to be made. The most common culprit for plateauing is inaccurate food estimation.
Focus On your Food Intake
If you are getting most of your food from unprocessed sources, you will find that there isn’t a great way to tell how much you are eating. Researchers have shown repeatedly that visual estimation is not a very accurate method of determining how much food someone is consuming (3).
This best way around this is to purchase a cheap scale like this one from Amazon (Affiliate Link). It costs less than $15, and has over 100,000 positive reviews; however, you can use any scale you like. Scales are great tools to keep you honest, and make sure you are following the nutrition plan.
Are You Recovering Enough?
This is another area that athletes sometimes have issues with when losing weight. You need to make every effort to prioritize your sleep. There is ample research that shows that even one night of sleep deprivation can cause increased feelings of hunger (4). This isn’t good when you’re trying to lose weight.
I find the easiest way to increase your sleep duration is to gradually change your evening schedule 10 minutes earlier every few days until you reach your goal. Most athletes need between 7-9 hours of sleep per night, and erring on the longer end of that spectrum will help with your dieting.
If you find that you’re sore very often, you can add in short walks or easy cycling to help your body recover from the hard work you put in at the gym. The key is that you increase your whole body circulation, without incurring more damage for your body to repair. Don’t turn a recovery walk into an actual workout!
Adjusting Your Caloric Intake
There’s a very real possibility that you are doing everything correctly. In this case, you may need to lower your caloric intake slightly to allow continued fat loss. You’ll want to lower it as little as possible to continue losing weight.
If you’re eating 2200 calories per day, and you’ve plateau’d, try eating 1900 calories per day for a week and see what effect that has. If you lose weight, continue on at this level until you stop. If you haven’t, you can try dropping it another 200-300 calories.
I caution you not to eat less than 1500 calories a day for men, and 1200 a day for women. At these levels you are getting into starvation, and your body isn’t likely to allow further fat loss. At those energy levels the lack of weight loss is likely due to more complex reasons, such as under recovery.
We’ve covered a lot of info so far, so let’s finish this portion of the 12 Week Functional Fitness Weight Loss Program.
Final Thoughts
The best advice I can give you is to be patient with yourself. Make sure you execute each workout to the best of your ability. Track your food, and accurately log your progress, but don’t lose yourself in the minutia of each piece of this program.
You need to constantly remind yourself why you are doing this, and use the motivational tools to help achieve your goals. If you have any troubles you can alway post your questions in the comments section, and I will do my best to get you an answer. Now get out there and get training!
The opinions and information expressed in this article are solely those of the author and are not affiliated with any corporation, group, public or private entity. This web site is not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by Crossfit Inc. All product and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.
Great article Jake., thanks for sharing.
We’ll see how my BF% is after I finish your 12-week muscle builder, which I am using for fat loss. I might do a few weeks of this before jumping into your 8-week premium muscle builder.
One thing that has been helping me with fat loss is still enjoying the foods I like. I’m still getting 80-90% of my calories from whole foods, but every few days I might make pasta or a homemade burger and just make sure I include all the ingredients in my daily caloric intake. Also, air fried sweet potato fries are a serious life hack.
One question Jake, at what BF% would you think I should be at before looking to put some size on?
Pat give me your height weight and current body fat. I can give you a good idea then.
Thanks Jake. 183cm 84.7kg 19.3%BF
Awesome article Jake!
I’m wrapping up my 3rd round of the 8 Week Functional Bodybuilding Hybrid Premium Program, and definitely gonna jump into this one.
When do you anticipate part 2 coming out?
Should be two weeks.
Jake. Nutrition spreadsheet suggests to only count activity from the weight lifting and the WOD. How about the green section e.g. tabata, easy cardio , walking?
I’m going to add this into my current program for the last few weeks.
Cheers,
Pat
You’re right Pat it’s more geared towards lifting and the WOD as other calculators don’t really take that into account. You can add those minutes into the calculator but for very easy things like walking it might over estimate.
Thanks Jake much appreciated. What method is the spreadsheet calculator based on, I couldn’t see that anywhere in the article about it.
Good morning Jake.
Just finished up the first 6 weeks of this program. Just curious how things are looking for the next 6 weeks. For now, I am just going to repeat the first 6 weeks.
Great content on your site. So far I’ve lost 15 lbs, so only another 45ish to go. Sure appreciate you putting all this content out for free. Have bought items from your affiliate links so that I feel better about using your stuff. It really is great to find someone who is knowledgeable about this stuff, and shows the sources. I’ve had many a conversations with coaches that give me the ole that’s the way it is. I’ve shown a few your articles and used some of your sources and I get a shoulder shrug and an eh.
Keep up the great work sir.
Thanks for the kind words Chris. It means a lot. The next 6 weeks should be coming out in about a week so stay tuned. I think repeating part one will work well. It should allow you to compare your performance which I bet has improved after your weight loss. Keep working buddy!