A: First, don’t weigh yourself every week. You can make muscle gains as you lose fat, so your weight may stay the same or you may even gain weight while getting more muscular (muscle weighs more than fat, by the way). About the only way to really track progress is to take photos every four weeks or so. You should hit a variety of poses at your first session, keeping a list of the shots you took and the camera settings you used. Four to six week later, take photos again, and use the same poses and camera settings (put the camera on a tripod, if possible, at about waist height). Also—and this is important—be sure the lighting is the same. Take the pictures in a room with a fairly bright overhead light and don’t use a flash, or it will wash out your muscularity.

We had a specific spot in the IRON MAN Training & Research Center where we took our photos. Below are a few of our before and after shots that were taken one month apart in the same lighting. The befores were taken at the end of May, right as we began using X-Rep training. The after shots were taken July 2, about a month later. These shots, taken under the same light, convinced us that X-Rep training works better than anything we’ve tried in the past!

Be sure to take your progress-monitoring shots under the same lighting conditions. We took these at the same spot in the IRON MAN Training & Research Center about one month apart during our X-Rep experiment. They proved to us that X Reps can produce drastic changes in size and muscularity fast! We’ve never made such amazing progress in such a short period of time in our training careers.