When lawyer Andrew Steinberg, 41, moved from walk-everywhere New York City to the Washington, DC area, he noticed himself feeling lethargic and heavier. When he started working out smarter, not harder, everything changed in just 16 weeks. He went from 190 to 165 pounds and dropped about 7 percent of his body fat. Here, in his own words, is how it happened:
I WAS LIVING in New York City for a long time. At the beginning of last year, my family moved down to the Washington, DC area, and I realized that I was starting to be a lot less mobile and active than I was. I was walking everywhere in New York and just out-and-about much more. In DC, I was in the car a lot and just sitting around in an office or at home. I just started to feel more lethargic, and to feel kind of just heavier all over.
One day, I was driving by the Ultimate Performance gym in Bethesda, and I saw photos in the window of a fitness transformation. The “before” guy looked a lot like I felt I looked at that time, and the “after” was kind of “Wow, what I would give to possibly look like that!” But I didn't think it was necessarily possible on my own. So, I was like: “If these guys can take somebody like that and turn them into what he looks like, you know, maybe they can do the same for me.”
For about 15 or 20 years, I had been kind of working out on my own with varying levels of success. But I was never able to actually dial in everything to get the physique that I wanted. I’d hit one of those plateaus where I just felt like I wasn't making any progress. The gym was something that I did just every once in a while, but not with any regularity or on any kind of program. I just needed to kind of tighten everything up and get some guidance. I began a 16-week transformation journey with my trainer, Dan May, that completely changed my life.
In the beginning, I kind of felt like I’d done it before, and knew how much I could lift, and that it was pretty heavy. Ego-lifting, basically. Once Dan and I started working together and focusing on tempo and form, I quickly realized that weightlifting and just moving heavy weights are not the same thing. Dan and I really started to focus on hypertrophy workouts. Dan had me slow down my movements, and be more thoughtful and specific with my lifting.
My training program was a four-day split. I trained full body on Monday and Friday, and upper body on Wednesday. On Saturdays, I would train arms and rear/side deltoids on my own at home. For the goal physique I had in mind, Dan gave lots of emphasis to my chest, shoulders, and arms. To maximize the intensity and time efficiency of my workouts, nearly everything I did was supersetted in series with roughly 60 to 90 seconds of rest (sometimes taking more rest as needed for sets taken to deep failure).
Outside of the gym, I kept to a strict target for daily steps. Additionally, I completed zone 2 cardio sessions of my choice—jogging, cycling, or elliptical—on rest days. This increase in activity, combined with his attention to detailed calorie and macronutrient tracking, created the calorie deficit I needed to completely transform my physique.
I just was willing to do whatever Dan told me to do and do it with maximum effort. My feeling was: This is going to be a job for me for the next three or four months. And I'm going to put my whole self into it and I'm going to do every exercise, do every rep, do every extra rep, do every drop set that Dan puts in front of me and give it maximum effort because I want to get the results that I saw other people get.
My diet also changed. Before I started training with U.P., I was eating what I thought was healthy. I was eating lean meats and rice and potatoes. Ultimately what I realized is you can't out-work a bad diet. It doesn't matter how hard you work in the gym–if your nutrition isn't dialed in as well, you're kind of rolling a ball up a hill and you never quite get to the top.
In the beginning, I really cut back on carbs significantly. We were a lot more specific in the macros I was eating and weighing my food for every meal, and tracking everything in the U.P. app. And all that accountability really kept me on track because I knew that Dan was watching me and seeing everything that I was eating. And so, in the same way that I wanted to perform what he asked me to do in the gym, I also wanted to show that I was sticking to the program outside of the gym.
In 16 weeks, I lost 35 pounds, and my body fat dropped from 16 percent to 9 percent.
Before I did this, I was tired of working hard but not getting any results to show for it. I think if you’re working out in the gym, and you're just not seeing the results that you want, it's not necessarily that you're not working hard—but maybe you're not working as smartly as you could. I honestly couldn't have done any of this without Dan and the U.P. program.
Going through this process has changed the way I approach everything–not just for me, but for my family as well. The overall changes to all our lives are like the receipt at the end of the journey and the real payoff. It's true that if you put in the work and you're really willing to devote yourself to it, you can get amazing results.
