A bikini body 3-part plan

Recently, our newest client EK, signed up for a little over 3 weeks of intensive training before her beach holiday in Crete. With her visible abs being a fond memory, our client wants to tone up as much as she can before her flight. At this late stage what can her Muddy Plimsolls trainer, Matt, do to help?

The challenge for her trainer is to combine a strict regime of exercise, diet and healthy living quickly and safely, without the adverse effects of exhaustion, poor sleeping, overtraining, injury or dizziness.

The nutritional plan

There is always a conflict between reducing calories to lose weight, and fuelling increased exercise levels with calories. There’s no one-size-fits-all diet plan but Matt should ask his client some in-depth questions to really help construct a workable solution. Questions like:

What diet/nutritional plan are you on know?

Is it working?

What has worked in the past?

What elements of your diet are you ignoring?

How can we get you to stick with a good diet?

What are your food ‘weaknesses’?

We encourage clients not to hold back and to be honest about their food habits. For the short, sharp blast that client EK wants, the obvious culprits such as processed foods and alcohol are going to go first. Which leads us nicely to our next tip…

Ease up on the social life for a few weeks

Yes, holidays are there for rest and relaxation. But an impending vacation often gives people a reason to hammer their social life, in the run-up to their trip. If you want that hot Instagram selfie, you need to think again. Spending nights at home, away for alcohol and cooking from scratch will definitely help you with your beach body plans.

See the experience as a health spa at home for three weeks. Drink water, get to bed early. You can party when you’re on holiday.

An intensive exercise plan – that sticks with the basics

Any progressive and balanced exercise will get you great results. But with just a handful of weeks to go before your beach holiday starts, you can’t take chances.

The one mistake we see with clients wanting to tone up quickly is the belief they should weight-train the small, ‘t-shirt’ muscles. They focus their workouts on exercises such as bicep curls or triceps extensions, shoulder presses or crunches. These exercises are all typically small movements performed for a few reps. They may feel effortful because they use a heavy dumbbell or perform a hundred reps – but they don’t attack the overall fat level of your body by burning calories. Our island-hopping client needs tho focus on revealing the muscle she already has, whether she’s training 2, 3 or 4 times per week.

Our solution is to put clients through BIG movements. Compound exercises, performed at a quicker than average pace will use pectoral and latisimus dorsi muscles of the chest and back, quadriceps and hamstrings of the legs, all the deltoids (shoulder muscles) and the core muscles. That means push-ups, pull-ups, deep squats and standing, core moves. Multiple repetitions plus a full range of movement of each muscle gets much better toning results.

Visit our online shop for our Training Plans to help you prep for a beach holiday.