The One Change That Took Me From Five Years Out of the Gym to the Best Shape of My Life at 36

I quit the gym in the middle of a workout. When I was 27, I had a panic attack on the gym floor and I didn't go back until five years later.

Before that I was doing five workouts a week, eating chicken and rice four times a day, I skipped nights out or went and paid for it with a day of guilt. I was doing exactly the things I was taught back then.

And it worked.. I went from the low 60s to 76kg and from struggling to bench with an empty bar to benching 100kg.

"It worked. That was the problem"

I'd built a body I was proud of using a method that wasn't built to last. And when the method broke, my physique broke down with it.

In those five years I didn't train once and my bodyweight dropped back to the low 60ks. Then somebody made a joke about how skinny my arms were, and it hit me hard, because they were right.

So when I finally walked back into the gym in 2022 I weighed 67kg. I stood in front of the mirror and could picture exactly what I had looked like in that exact same spot.

What I felt wasn't sadness. It was stupidity..

"I'd quit instead of finding a version of this I could actually keep doing"

This time I had to do it differently.

I'd spent my twenties convinced I knew everything, and that was the first belief I had to let go off. I hired a coach who had competed at the highest bodybuilding stage possible and completed the J3U Physique Coaching Certification, one of the most respected qualifications in the industry.

The gym could never be 99% of my life again. Work, my partner and my friends came first, and training got whatever was left. So the only question that mattered was "how do I get the most ouf of every minute I spend in the gym?"

"I stopped trying to do more work and started making the work I was already doing actually count"

Instead of just moving the weight from point A to B, I started applying biomechanics to make muscles I want to target as much as possible. I learned how to train harder, so I could take each set genuinely close to failure without form breaking down.

For the first time I started growing faster with less time in the gym.

I now only train three times a week, an hour each session, with just six to ten sets per muscle group. I eat chocolate biscuits every day and takeout once a week, including through a cut. And more importantly, the tupperware containers stay in the cabinet.

I'm now 36 and I walk around at 80kg and roughly 15% body fat. I'm just as strong as I was back at my monk-mode peak in 2017.

"Better physique with two fewer sessions a week and chocolate biscuits every day"

The real proof came when I started using the same changes on the people I coached. Michiel reached the best physique of his life in eight weeks. Frederic had already worked with several coaches and had been stuck on a plateau for months, and it broke faster than he expected. Michelle and Aoife lost over 10kg in six months and told me they'd never felt stronger and more confident.

They applied the same method as I had. Fix the training quality first, then build the nutrition around the life they actually have.

2,200 hours coaching on a gym floor forces you to make things simple enough to explain between sets. That's where the four pillars in The IRON Method came from: Intensity, Recovery, Overload, Nutrition.

You don't need to hand your life over to the gym to get a body that looks like you lift. You need a system you can build around your life, and adapt it as life inevitably gets in the way.

"A program tells you what to do. It can't make you want to do it"

I kept seeing guys training consistently with the perfect program quit anyway.

The thing is that a program is just a set of instructions.

It doesn't care that you're bored of the same six exercises, that you had a rough week, or that you looked in the mirror on a Tuesday and decided three months of work has been a waste of your time.

It can be the best program on paper, but nobody sticks with training they find boring. And nobody stays disciplined on their own forever. Eventually you lose motivation, but what matters is what's still there when it does.

I'd much rather you follow what the self-proclaimed experts would call a suboptimal program for years, than a perfect plan you give up on after three months.

So I built the things any other program was missing.

You learn the system itself, so you can build the program in a way it suits your life. You get my support every step of the way, so by the end of the twelve weeks you can do it without me. You get an app that keeps adjusting your plan based on your progress, so you're not paying someone to do that forever. And you get access to a private community of doing this at the same time, so you're not doing it alone.

You only have to learn it once, you can then apply it for the rest of your life.

That's the IRON Method.

Let me show you exactly how it works.