Day: September 6, 2025

• Adam Collard went from around 44% body fat to 8% in three years.
• The personal trainer and former Love Islander said weight-lifting and learning about nutrition were game-changers.
• He started lifting progressively heavier weights and started tracking his macros, not just calories.

Adam Collard wasn’t always the shredded lothario viewers watched break hearts on “Love Island” in 2018.

As a teenager, he was overweight and had a pretty hard time at school because of it, he told Business Insider.

“I was always one of the biggest kids, both in height and in weight. So I stood out like a sore thumb,” Collard, who is six feet five, said. “I always carried a lot of weight and I just didn’t like it. I wasn’t happy. It made me very, very introverted.”

As a coping mechanism, he would binge on high-calorie treats, leading to more weight gain and more difficult feelings around his body image. “It was a vicious cycle,” the 29-year-old said.

When Collard turned 16, his relationship with his body started to change. A friend who also wanted to lose some weight convinced him to go to a local gym with him. He ended up sticking with it and falling in love with fitness.

“I just fell in love with the process,” he said. “The gym doesn’t require too much talent. You can outwork talent, and I like that you can see results, whether it be strength or fitness or body improvements, almost every single week.”

Over the next three years, Collard’s weight stayed around 200 pounds, but the difference in his body composition was “astronomical,” he said. His body fat percentage went from around 44% to 8%.

“It was completely different body types,” he said. “What I had to do was lose a lot of fat first and then kind of build back up from there.”

He has since gone on to become a personal trainer and gym owner in in Newcastle, UK, and compete in fitness endurance competitions, including Ironman and Hyrox.

“I think people undervalue how nice it is to just be fit for life,” Collard said.

Collard shared the three things that helped him build so much muscle.

Practice progressive overload

Increasing the weight or number of sets and reps you do over time is crucial for building muscle, Collard said. This is known as “progressive overload” and evidence suggests it is “one of the biggest drivers” of gains, he said.

In a small 2024 study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, 39 novice gym-goers between the ages of 18 and 35 did leg extension exercises for 10 weeks. During that period, the weight was gradually increased for one leg, while the number of reps done by the other leg was increased. The authors found that both legs built a similar amount of muscle mass and strength, suggesting that both forms of progressive overload were effective. They noted that their findings were limited to the early stages of building muscle mass.

Tracking your progress, whether using a spreadsheet or your phone’s notes app, can also be helpful for tracking how heavy you are lifting and holding yourself accountable.

“Tracking and monitoring progress is big. You would track progress at work, so why would you not do it with your body?” Collard said.

Focus on the quality of your workouts

Collard said that the quality of your workout, meaning how hard you work and following proper technique, is more important for building strength than the quantity.

“We have people who do four sessions a week, five sessions a week who train 45 to 60 minutes, very, very hard. But then we see people in the gym who come every day, but do not push,” he said. It’s the people who train with true intensity that Collard sees progress at his gym.

“And I don’t mean hard as in ‘hardcore, hardcore, break your body,’ all of that. It can be a smart way, but that will always trump the lack of effort,” he said.

Understand macronutrients

When Collard first got into fitness, he tried out a lot of fad diets, including cutting out carbs, but they were too restrictive to help him build muscle. For muscle mass to grow, you need to eat enough protein and be in a calorie surplus, meaning you eat more calories than you burn. To lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit.

“It made me lose weight, but it also made me lose muscle because I think I took it too extreme. I was massively under-eating for my size, height, weight, and age,” he said.

Through training as a PT and trial-and-error, he learned that it’s not just calories that count when it comes to body recomposition, what you eat is important too.

“I always say to people, the calories are what’s going to make you gain or lose, but macronutrients are what’s going to decide how you do that. As in, yes, you’re gaining weight, but are you gaining majority muscle, are you gaining majority fat?” he said.

The three macronutrients—carbohydrates, protein, and fat—are the nutrients the body needs in large quantities.

A 2022 meta-analysis found that eating 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight a day, in combination with regular resistance training, was optimal for strength gains.

“Macronutrients and actually looking at what you are fueling is very important,” Collard said.

• Flexible work is dwindling as more companies return to the office and crack down on underperformers.
• Working parents trying to save on childcare said they’re clinging to flexible arrangements, even if it means forgoing career growth.
• Childcare costs have steadily outpaced inflation for over two decades across the US.

Juggling packed lunches, bus drop-off, and logging on in time for work, Len Teceno, 37, and his wife jump through hoops every morning with their two kids.

The life of working parents is a battle against time and money.

Teceno’s wife worked part time on weekends as a nurse for years while their kids were toddlers. Paying for day care wasn’t really an option for the couple. On one full time pay stub, Teceno said, “Our budget was pretty tight for a while, but it was worth it in our opinion” to have their mom at home.

Teceno works remotely as a product director while his wife is now a full-time operating room nurse. He loves spending time with his children before and after school, which can sometimes mean logging on a couple of minutes late and making up that time later.

The New Hampshire couple is among the 67% of US families with both parents working full time. Business Insider spoke with nearly a dozen working millennial couples who are also trying to minimize hired help at a time when daycare costs are outpacing overall inflation. This can prove challenging as return-to-office mandates are on the rise and companies are going hardcore.

For now, parents are clinging to any flexibility they have.

“If I didn’t have the opportunity to work from home and have the flexibility to get the kids on and off the bus or from camp, I frankly don’t know what life would look like,” he said.

Patchwork schedules and flexible work

For many families, professional childcare simply isn’t in the budget, so they rely on a patchwork of relatives, afterschool programs, and flexible schedules.

In Jacksonville, Florida, Austin Bader, 41, an aircraft examiner, and his fiancée, Shawna Townsend, used to lean on Townsend’s mother and niece to care for their young son. They also paid her mom $650 for one summer. They used the city’s free summer camp and after-school program — a huge relief in a state where childcare for a four-year-old can cost nearly $10,000 a year.

Now that their son is in school, they don’t rely on family anymore. Townsend works from home for a hospital and drops their son off at school in the morning, while Bader is out the door and driving to work before 5:30 a.m., and then picks up his son after work. Job flexibility allows them to tag-team the mornings and afternoons.

Remote jobs have become rarer in recent years. Since the pandemic boom, companies are asking more employees to work in-person or hybrid schedules, sometimes to the dismay of parents who want to be more present with their children.

Alex Kovalenko, 44, is able to work remotely one day a week, which he said has made a huge difference. Plus, his employer is flexible when it comes to family responsibilities and understands the struggle of balancing a successful career and a happy household. That support “lets me see my kids off to school and be there when they get home,” the father of three kids in Toronto said.

He and his wife, Virginia, manage childcare without any help by swapping duties throughout the week to get their kids to hockey practice and school and make dinner each night.

“We did have a babysitter before, but it just ends up costing a lot of money,” he said. “Three, four hours, that’s like a hundred bucks. Sometimes it’s just easier to take one hour off work.”

Splitting the load

In Orange, New Jersey, Jeff Benvenuto, 41, an adjunct professor, and his wife, an intelligence analyst, feel fortunate to have family nearby. Jeff’s wife’s aunt comes over almost daily to watch their toddler. “That was probably the most important source of help,” Jeff said.

Even with support, parents often feel the hidden work of childcare — the constant scheduling, anticipating, and planning — falls unequally. Jeff admitted he worries his wife carries more of the mental weight.

“There’s no way to measure it,” he said, “but emotionally, I can’t really let go of that. I want to make sure I’m doing enough.”

Experts say that tension is widespread. “We’ve got two parents generally needing to work in order to provide for their family, but then we have the complexity of gender roles,” said Rachel Tomlinson, a registered psychologist focused on child development. “Mothers often still shoulder the invisible load, even as fathers take on more day-to-day care.”

Katelyn Denning, a life coach for working mothers, added that time — not money — is the hardest hurdle. “The financial piece is part of it, but the bigger question is: How do I fit everything on my plate?”

Dads who spoke to Business Insider said they are trying harder to reach parity in terms of care, and working from home has aided that effort. Millennial dads are really trying to “have it all” in the office and the house. A 2016 Pew Research study found that fathers are spending three times as much time on childcare as dads did in 1965.

Reshaping careers to fit family life

Other parents agree that it’s worth investing more time in their kids than spending that time working a grueling job. In addition to increased return-to-office, some jobs are indeed getting more demanding as companies look to keep costs low and weed out underperformers. Big Tech, in particular, has been leading the way on increasing emphasis on performance metrics and flattening management layers.

To make it all work, many parents are rethinking what their careers look like. Matt Anderson, 35, a software engineer who’s fully remote, and his wife, Daphnie Tuvi-Lang, a teacher, both work full-time in the greater Toronto area and tag-team childcare duties for their 3-year-old in the morning and evening after work. Matt said he wouldn’t trade his role because of his flexibility.

“I don’t live to work,” he said. “I obviously shut myself out of some probably way higher-paying positions that are just going to be a bit more grindy, but I’m kind of OK with that. I think it’s healthier for me overall.”

The couple said they pay for day care, which totals $1,500 a month for their daughter.

Teceno, similarly, wants to work from home so he can support his family best.

“If I ever had an inclination to look elsewhere, it almost stopped me from doing so because the flexibility overrides whatever benefit I might get from the different position elsewhere,” he said. He just got a new role and has a third more work to do since he has direct reports. “I might get paid more elsewhere, but I obviously wouldn’t be home as much. So for me, I wouldn’t trade it.”

Denning said several clients have left jobs that refused flexibility, unable to manage commuting plus childcare.

For some, a workable solution is one parent stepping out of the workforce entirely.

Marcus, 30, and Hannah Ward, a Montclair, California, couple with three young kids, made that call when their first child was born. Hannah freelanced in media production for several years before becoming a full-time stay-at-home mom. “It was hard at first, but it was a no-brainer,” Marcus said.

They’re among over 5.8 million families in the US in which only the father works, a little over a quarter of families. The share of families with both spouses working has increased by 4% since 1992.

In Chicago, Ben McChesney, 41, and his wife juggled multiple jobs and side hustles during their early parenting years. Now with three school-age kids, Ben says the costs haven’t gone away. “We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to figure out how to pay for college.”

In Kalamazoo, Michigan, Thomas, 39, and Meg Whitener, a couple raising two, said even though Meg’s job provides subsidized on-site day care for their 2-year-old son, costs still pile up. Their 6-year-old daughter also uses an after-school program — the two total to $340 a week.

Thomas is an elected county treasurer and said he speaks to taxpayers daily.

“Everybody that has kids that I see is struggling with childcare because unless you can afford to have one parent stay home, there’s just not enough hours in the day.”

In New Hampshire, Teceno said he’s been lucky to still be remote after the pandemic. While his wife is out the door before the kids get up, he is getting them dressed, fed, and packing lunch boxes before the bus rolls in.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to be that traditional checked out dad,” he said. “I’m not leaving for work, I’m working from the house, and my wife is leaving. So I have to be, and I enjoy it.”

Are you a parent struggling to find your way through the economy? Contact this reporter at bdelk@insider.com.