Couch potato turns into body-builder in one year with punishing gym regime… it’s not just his body that’s transformed
A former fitness novice has dramatically transformed his body in one year, shedding fat and packing on muscle thanks to a gruelling training regime.
In a YouTube video viewed 3.5 million times, Bradley Nippard exercised five times a week not missing a session over 12 months.
Before the trial began he underwent tests on his heart, muscle mass and body fat percentage with a team of scientists at McMaster University, Canada .
At the end of the experiment results showed that he had lost over six per cent of body fat, gained five kilograms of lean muscle and significantly improved his heart health.
The results of the experiment were ‘astounding’.
Bradley said it was not just a physical improvement that he saw—his debilitating social anxiety also disappeared.
‘Sometimes I would go to a store and turn around and think not today, but now I don’t have that,’ he explained.
Pictures of Bradley, who admitted to never exercising, at the start of the experiment show clearly that he is overweight.
Bradley had never been to the gym before taking part in the experiment
In the film, he appears alongside his body builder brother for Jeff, who is a personal trainer and designed the programme that they followed.
The duo followed the same intense regime for a year to see how it would affect their bodies differently.
They hit the gym five days a week, starting with training legs and upper body on day one, followed by a dedicated leg day, then a rest day, before finishing the cycle with upper body and more leg sessions.
Jeff said they pushed themselves to the limit on the final set of every exercise, choosing movements specifically to build muscle.
They also kept track of how much weight they lifted, to measure their progress over time, and consumed 3,000 calories a day to help ‘bulk up’.
In the six weeks leading up to their final weigh-in, they reduced their intake to 2,200 calories a day as part of a ‘cut’—a phase in body-building regimes where calories are lowered to burn fat while trying to maintain muscle.
By the end of the experiment Brad, who had previously never been to a gym, had dropped from 36 per cent to under 30 per cent—a level considered average.
Jeff was unsure whether he would see a significant difference as he had been a bodybuilder for 15 years.
The research team at the University predicted that he had improved his heart health by four years, meaning his heart is four years younger than it was before he shed the pounds.
His brother Jeff, who thought he may have reached his body’s upper limit of muscle growth also saw a dramatic transformation.
He managed to cut his body fat percentage to 14.5 from over 15 and gained 1.2 kg in muscle mass.
‘This may not look like a lot to some of you but it is the equivalent of putting four or five huge stakes of tissue on over the course of the year,’ said Jeff.
‘At just under five feet five, adding that much tissue across my body is going to make a visual difference.
‘I definitely see the biggest difference in my chest and my back but I see some gains in my shoulders and hamstrings too.
‘I did retain most of the gains [from the bulk] while cutting down. I kept more than half the lean mass that I put on which I think is pretty solid. I’m also leaner now. I started the experiment at 15.8 per cent body fat and now I’m down to 14.5 per cent body fat.’
Commenting on the studies findings Jeff said: ‘Natural ceiling theoretically probably does exist but you can push it up with optimised training and diet.’
