The saying goes that summer bodies are made in winter. But if you didn’t get that memo don’t worry, you still have plenty of time available to smash your summer body goals. Whether you’re on a 30 day countdown to your next vacation, or you have a little longer before you bare all on the beach, here’s how to get a summer body to be proud of.
What is The Ultimate Beach Body Workout?
The key to smashing your beach body challenge is to send your metabolism into overdrive, and you ecan do that by going harder, rather than longer.
One of the best activities to blitz your belly fat is High-intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Studies have shown that this sort of exercise can actually increase your body’s ability to burn fat by 60% which will boost the effectiveness of any other workouts you complete.
If you’re already a weightlifter you’re on to a winner. Doing a total-body dumbbell session two times a week can add a huge amount of definition while incinerating fat. Targeting your entire body is key here: the more joints you move in your workout, the more muscle fibers you’ll build. This equates to more energy burned and an increase in fat loss. Incorporate moves like deadlifts, rows, and pull-up to hit all the biggest muscle groups.
Want to see more gains? You can increase results by making your moves explosive. Complete the pushing phase of your exercises in just one second, and limit your recovery phase to two or three seconds. The muscle tension that this creates is great for rapid results, and can actually increase muscle power 3.5 times more than regular training.
Aim to add some aerobic exercise into your summer body workout plan, too. Cardio such as swimming and running can improve your respiration which makes it easier to up your weight program, and can help shift the last of your stubborn fat.
Good and Bad Calories
The calories in vs calories out argument needs to take in to account the types of food that are making up your calorie intake. After all, there are approximately 3,500 calories in one pound of fat and 186 in a pound of carrots, which makes it abundantly clear that not all foods were created equally.
Even when the amount of calories is equal, there’s a significant difference in how they’ll make you feel. Take a portion of broccoli and two tablespoons of chocolate chips, for example. There are 100 calories in both, but they’ll affect your energy levels, mood, and appetite in completely opposite ways. How? Even though they’re delicious, binging on chocolate chips will leave you tired, hungry, and low. This can factor into how successfully you exercise, and therefore how many calories you actually burn during a workout.
If you’re focused on getting the most out of every gym session, healthy diet plans are the only diets worth paying notice to.
What is the Best Diet to Get a Beach Body?
A 4 week beach body diet is the perfect accompaniment to your summer body workout routine and will ensure that you see the best possible gains in the shortest possible time. Cutting calories is important if you want to shed fat, but despite what many people think, it’s not actually effective to crash diet. Eating too little can slow your metabolic rate and can result in a loss of muscle mass as well as a loss of fat. Aim to only cut around a sixth of your current calorie intake and you should only lose fat that way.
You should also make a few adjustments to your eating habits in the run-up to your holiday. Cutting out snacks five days per week can make a big difference to your body, as can curbing your carbs. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition also recommends upping your zinc intake to ensure that your performance during workouts is optimized, and your body is going to need around a fifth more protein than usual to deal with the additional exercise you’re subjecting it to. Steak is a great source of zinc and protein, as are legumes like chickpeas, lentils, and beans.
It should go without saying that cutting out processed food and fizzy drinks is a must, and it’s worth seriously cutting back on alcohol, too.
Summer Body Lifestyle Tips
It’s not just diet and exercise that create a killer beach body. You can also make some adjustments to your lifestyle that will help you achieve your summer body goals. Increasing your time spent in the sun won’t only get you a nice base tan, the vitamin D has also been proven by the University of Minnesota to increase weight loss. If you live in a place where the sun rarely shines, eating boiled eggs for breakfast will give you a healthy dose of vitamin D instead.
Getting enough sleep is also highly important for hitting your summer body goals. Not only will this leave you rested enough to go full force during your workouts, but studies also show that getting plenty of shut-eye can actually reduce the amount that you snack.
When you wake up, force yourself straight into a cold shower. Icy water is said to increase metabolism by increasing the energy used by your thyroid hormones. And, of course, drink lots and lots of water. It’s cliché for a reason: drinking plenty of water boosts your metabolism, helps reduce water retention, and acts as an appetite suppressant.
Conclusion
The key to losing weight and increasing definition is to create a robust plan that you’ll stick to. Incorporate these tips into a strict strategy during the entire run-up to summer and you’ll see that it’s totally possible to get the summer body of your dreams.
What’s your favorite way to get a beach bod for summer? Let us know in the comments.
Resources
- https://www.coachmag.co.uk/fitness/5353/how-to-get-a-summer-body-in-two-weeks
- https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/best-foods-high-in-zinc
- https://www.menshealth.com/uk/building-muscle/a747267/4-weeks-to-a-beach-body-537255/
- https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/aerobic-exercise-examples
- https://www.champneys.com/about-champneys/blog/ways-to-get-into-great-shape-for-summer/