I’VE SPENT THE better part of 15 years telling other people how to do get in shape. Executives, founders, busy parents, people who’ve built careers and lifestyles most would envy, and quietly let one thing slide: themselves. I always knew exactly what to say to them. What I hadn’t done, for too long if I’m honest, was hold myself to the same standard.
I was tired of feeling sloppy. Tired of feeling uncomfortable taking my top off at the beach, or catching a photo I wasn’t proud of. I was stressed, sleeping badly, eating average, carrying no real confidence and putting my own health last, behind everyone else’s.
So I did the one thing I make every client do before anything else: I got honest about where I actually was. I got my blood work done at Suede Medical and I had my skin folds measured: 81.8kg and 26.4 per cent body fat.
That was my starting point, and I wasn’t happy about it. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was the person people came to for exactly this, yet here I was running on empty myself. So I stopped pretending, stopped making excuses, and made it deliberate. No dramatic overhaul, no six-week punishment plan. I’ve watched too many of those collapse the moment life gets busy. And my life was busy, the same way everyone’s is. I was coaching 60-plus sessions a week, building out the online side of the business, and averaging five to five-and-a-half hours sleep a night. If the plan needed perfect conditions, it was never going to work.
My approach was intentionally simple, because simple is the only thing that survives a full schedule. Three or four strength sessions a week, more when I could. I made sure it was built around the compound lifts, with enough accessory work to actually change how my body looked and a short finisher to keep my conditioning up. I ran a push, pull, legs split with direct core work twice a week. Nothing fancy, the same repeatable structure week after week. I wasn’t chasing the perfect program. I was chasing the one I’d actually do on a Tuesday after a 12-hour day.
Nutrition was where the real work happened – it usually is. I tracked my food for the first few weeks, just to get an honest baseline of where I was. From there it was simple: protein anchored every meal, kept high and non-negotiable, with moderate carbs and fats around it so it was easy to stick to. A bit of chocolate most nights didn’t hurt, either. I still ate out and still enjoyed myself. I just built those into the week instead of letting them derail it. That flexibility wasn’t a weakness in the plan; it was the reason the other 90 per cent stayed boringly consistent. Just enough structure to make the good decisions automatic, and enough flexibility that I could still have a life.
If one thing kept me honest, it was measuring my progress. That same skin-fold test that handed me an uncomfortable starting number became the thing I came back to every week, not the daily noise of the bathroom scale, but real data tracked over time. It’s the first thing I set up for every client, and running my own numbers again reminded me exactly why: it’s a lot harder to talk yourself out of a measurement.
And then the results came, though, not in the order I expected. My confidence came back first. I slept better. The brain fog lifted. Then the body caught up. Over a little more than ten weeks I dropped from 81.8kg to 73.4kg. But the scale barely tells the story. My body fat went from 26.4 to 11.8 per cent: that’s close to 13 kilos of fat gone, while I actually added around 4.5 kilos of lean muscle. Dropping fat and building muscle at the same time tends to get written off as impossible past a certain age. It isn’t, but only if your training and your protein intake are right, and you stay consistent long enough for it to compound.
The physical change was the obvious part. What surprised me was everything else. I was sharper through the workday, calmer at home, more present with the people who matter. It drove home something I’ve been telling clients for years without fully living myself: you can’t separate your physical health from the rest of your life. When your body’s off, your focus is off, your mood is off, everything is off. Fix your body, and it pays you back everywhere. That’s the real reason I do this work, and it’s why I stopped measuring it in kilograms a long time ago. The number on the scale is the least interesting part. It’s the confidence. It’s the energy with your family. It’s showing up better in your business. The kilos are just the receipt.
Doing it on myself also reminded me why most high performers fail at this, and it has nothing to do with discipline. These are some of the most disciplined people alive; they show up to things they don’t feel like doing every single day. The reason fitness doesn’t sticks isn’t due to character, it’s structure. Most plans are built for a life with nothing else in it, and real life isn’t like that. Build the system around the life you actually have, and the same discipline you bring to everything else finally has somewhere to go.
If you see yourself in any of this, here’s what I’ll tell you and it’s the same thing I had to tell myself: don’t wait until you feel ready. Ready doesn’t arrive on its own, you build it by starting. Start smaller than what feels impressive, small enough that it’s almost too easy. And use the standard you already set everywhere else in your life, because you’ve proven you have it. Watching your body catch up to the life you’ve built isn’t vanity. It’s the one thing you can’t delegate, can’t outsource and can’t fake. I left it too long. Most of the people I coach did too. The good news is that once the structure finally fits your life, the gap closes far faster than you think.
Matty Boland's upper-body workout
This is a sample 45-min upper-body session Boland used to build muscle and torch fat
- Incline DB Bench 4 x 4-6 super set with incline DB Row 4 x 4-6 (Rest 90 secs)
- Flat DB Bench 3 x 8 Superset with Banded Push Ups 3 x Max effort (Rest 90 secs)
Tri Set:
- Seated Shoulder Press 3 x 6-8
- Seated Lateral Raise 3 x 8-10
- Seated Front Raise 3 x 8-10 – leave 1 rep in reserve on each set (Rest 90 secs)
- Wide Grip Lat Pull Down 3 x 8; superset with underhand lat pull down 3 x 10-12 (Rest 60 secs)
- Hammer curl 2 x 12 superset with overhead tricep extension 2 x 12
Matty Boland is a Melbourne-based transformation coach and the founder of Thrive Coaching and creator of The Thrive Method. Start the 30-Day Thrive Method Intensive at https://thrive-coachinghq.com/30days, or follow him on Instagram at @matty_boland.
