By: Chris Gates

If you’re interested in leaning out, building some muscle, and getting your body ready for a summer of fun at the beach and pool, then you’ve come to the right place! The ultimate get fit for summer workout plan is here to help.

In this article, I’m going to outline six specific strategies you can use with your workouts and diet to maximize your results and get fit for summer.

We’ll dive into everything — your training plan, your nutrition plan, and your daily lifestyle.

These are strategies I regularly use with my clients, and I’m sharing them with you so that you can make as much progress as possible.

Let’s dive in!

The Ultimate Get Fit For Summer Workout Plan: Get In A Calorie Deficit

Getting fit for summer typically involves burning body fat, so talking about a calorie deficit is the best place for us to start.

In order to burn body fat, you need to get yourself into a calorie deficit.

Plain and simple.

That’s how your body loses fat.

Being in a calorie deficit means that you’re burning more calories than you’re eating each day. And you can use these steps that I use with my 1-on-1 coaching clients to set up your own calorie deficit:

1. Track your nutrition for 1-2 weeks to get an idea of what your average daily calorie intake is.
2. Once you get that average number, subtract 10 percent from it, and use that number as your daily calorie goal for the next 1-2 weeks.
3. While you’re using your new daily calorie goal, you should monitor your bodyweight on the scale each morning.
4. You should also take waist measurements every two weeks, and take progress pictures every 2-4 weeks.
5. If your bodyweight is going down, or you’re losing inches on your waistline, or your body is changing in your progress photos, you’re in a calorie deficit and just need to keep doing what you’re doing!
6. If you’re not seeing progress with any of those measurements after two weeks, reduce your calorie intake by 10 percent again and repeat the process.

I’ve written way more in depth about how to know you’re in a calorie deficit, so check that out if you’d like to learn more about how to use a calorie deficit to make progress with weight loss.

Once your calorie deficit is in place, the rest of these strategies will help you maximize your progress and transform your physique!

The Ultimate Get Fit For Summer Workout Plan: Regular Strength Training

I’m gonna guess that the summer look you’re going for doesn’t involve you looking like a string bean at the end of the process.

You probably want to look lean AND muscular, so lifting some weights throughout the process of dieting down and burning body fat is going to be really beneficial for you.

Lifting weights is going to help your body hold on to the muscle mass you have, and potentially build new muscle, while you’re in a calorie deficit and losing body fat.

Without regular strength training, you run the risk of your body not only losing fat mass, but also muscle mass. And I’m guessing you’re not really interested in losing the muscle mass you have, so lifting weights is going to be a crucial piece to your workout plan.

I’d recommend that you lift weights at least twice a week. And when you’re lifting, focus on compound exercises like pressing, rowing, and squatting. Those motor patterns will involve the most musculature in your body and help you build as much muscle as possible.

The Ultimate Get Fit For Summer Workout Plan: Your Workout Routine

We just went over how you should lift weights twice a week, at minimum. Well, you should also be doing some cardio, too.

And to be clear, you’re not doing all of this exercise in order to burn as many calories as you can.

Nope.

Not even close.

You’re doing strength and cardiovascular training in order to build your body up throughout this process.

By combining strength training and cardio, you’ll be maximizing the amount of good you can do for your body. You’ll be improving how your body looks, while at the same time improving things that are far more important, such as:

• Your heart health
• Muscle function
• Endurance
• Mobility
• Stability
• Mental health
• Blood pressure
• Blood sugar
• Joint health

The list goes on and on.

There are a number of ways you can schedule your training while you’re getting fit for summer. Here are my top suggestions for your strength training routine, based on how many days you’re able to lift weights each week…

Two days a week:

Day:	Notes:
Day 1: Upper Body	Exercises that focus on the entire upper body.
Day 2: Lower Body	Exercises that focus on the entire lower body.

Three days a week:

Day:	Notes:
Day 1: Upper Body	Exercises that focus on the entire upper body.
Day 2: Lower Body	Exercises that focus on the entire lower body.
Day 3: Total Body	A total-body routine combining both upper and lower body exercises.

Four days a week:

Day:	Notes:
Day 1: Upper Body	Exercises that focus on the entire upper body.
Day 2: Lower Body	Exercises that focus on the entire lower body.
Day 3: Upper Body	Exercises that focus on the entire upper body.
Day 4: Lower Body	Exercises that focus on the entire lower body.

Five days a week:

Day:	Notes:
Day 1: Upper Body	Exercises that focus on the entire upper body.
Day 2: Lower Body	Exercises that focus on the entire lower body.
Day 3: Push Day	Focus on the pushing muscle groups (chest, shoulders, triceps).
Day 4: Pull Day	Focus on the pulling muscle groups (back, biceps).
Day 5: Lower Body	Exercises that focus on the entire lower body.

Within those strength training routines, you can do cardio on non-lifting days. But make sure you’re giving yourself 1-2 days of complete rest each week. If that means tacking some cardio onto your workout after you lift so you can get a full rest day later in the week, go for it.

And let’s not complicate your cardio. Do whatever form of cardio you enjoy, because if you enjoy it you’ll be consistent with it.

And if you’re consistent with it, you’ll do it for a long period of time. That means you’ll make a ton of progress!

The Ultimate Get Fit For Summer Workout Plan: Train Legitimately Hard

Before we transition over to your nutrition, I want to focus on one more aspect of your training routine.

Intensity.

You need to build muscle to get fit for summer and get that physique you’re looking for. And in order to do that, you need to be training legitimately hard.

Let me explain what I mean…

In order to build muscle, you need to convince your body that muscle needs to be built. You need to be challenging yourself consistently in your workouts to cause your brain to essentially say, “damn that was hard! We gotta build some muscle.”

It goes like this:

1. You lift weights at a high intensity.
2. Your brain recognizes how intense the workout was for your muscles.
3. It signals to repair and grow those muscles so that you can be in a better position to do those same intense exercises again.
4. Muscle growth occurs.

That’s a really simplified breakdown of how your body builds muscle, but I think it’s helpful.

And the point of me breaking that down for you is to illustrate that you need to be consistently challenging yourself and training legitimately hard to build muscle. And then you need to train harder and harder over time to keep that muscle growth going.

An easy way to make sure you’re training hard enough to build muscle is to think about how close to failure you’re getting in each of your sets.

If you’re lifting within 1-3 reps of failure on each and every set, for each and every muscle group, you’re going to be challenging your body and forcing it to grow.

If you’re not, you may struggle to see your body change as much as you want.

The Ultimate Get Fit For Summer Workout Plan: Take Things Slow With Your Nutrition

Alright, we’ve focused on your workout plan a ton. Now it’s time to talk nutrition, because any successful transformation requires that you do some work on your diet.

Most people treat getting fit for summer like it’s a race.

They want to make as much progress as possible, in the shortest amount of time possible.

And that’s why most people don’t see their body truly transform. That’s why most people aren’t satisfied with the progress they make, or they make no progress at all.

You’re not going to do that.

Slashing calories out of your diet in dramatic fashion will only lead to a diet that’s overly restrictive, unenjoyable, and unsustainable. And that combination always leads to burnout, and quitting the diet.

Think about it… If you’re currently eating 2,000 calories a day, and you slash those down to 1,000 a day, how long do you really think you can eat like that? How long can you last on such little food?

It’s never going to work.

Don’t fall into that trap of, “if I remove a little bit of calories and lose a little bit of weight, I should remove a TON of calories so I can lose a TON of weight!”

That’s not how it works.

Start slow with your nutrition. Once you figure out your average daily calorie intake, start by reducing just a few hundred calories to start. A simple 10-15 percent reduction in calories should absolutely be enough to start losing weight, and here’s the kicker…

You won’t feel starving every day.

If you can feel full, and lose weight in the process, why the hell wouldn’t you do that?

Weight loss isn’t a race. This isn’t about whether you can make the fastest weight loss transformation of all time.

This is about you getting fit for summer, feeling good in your own skin, and developing more confidence with your body.

Your process should reflect your outcome.

Structure your diet in a way that promotes long-term success, and you’ll end up making the most long-term progress.

Tip No. 5: Consider Using Calorie Cycling

A great way to create a sustainable calorie deficit is to use a technique called calorie cycling.

Calorie cycling is no different than any other type of diet strategy. At the end of the day, it gets you in a calorie deficit. And a calorie deficit is how you lose weight and body fat.

But calorie cycling is special because it allows you to allocate different amounts of calories to different days of the week, in order to have as much flexibility as possible while you’re dieting.

Here’s an example…

If you find that your calorie deficit is right around 2,000 calories a day, it means your calorie deficit for the week is 14,000 calories. You can take those 14,000 calories and divvy them up throughout the week however you please.

Here’s a great option:

• Monday-Friday: 1,800 calories per day.
• Saturday-Sunday: 2,500 calories per day.

You reduce calories just slightly more than usual during the week in order to open up a ton of additional flexibility for yourself over the weekend.

This is how you responsibly set up a plan that allows you to be flexible, live life, and still hit your goals each day and each week.

Calorie cycling can be applied in any number of ways, so think about how your daily/weekly schedule tends to play out, and allocate your calories in a way that will give you the most enjoyment and flexibility!

Tip No. 6: Prep and Log Your Food Ahead of Time

Yes, meal prep is huge.

Yes, it helps you stick to your goals.

And yes, you should do it.

I’m sure you know all of that. But I want to take this a step further…

When you meal prep for the week, take the food you plan on eating and actually plug it into whatever nutrition tracking app you use. So if you use MyFitnessPal, I want you to actually go into Monday-Friday of next week, and set up your meals.

Enter your breakfasts, and lunches, and dinners that you plan to eat.

This is going to be tremendously helpful on a number of levels:

1. It’s going to take a lot of the guesswork out of your daily diet. You’ll have committed to these meals, which makes it that much easier to eat them and not stray from your diet plan.
2. It’s going to show you how many calories and macros are accounted for, for the entire week.
3. Knowing how many calories are already accounted for is going to help you figure out how many calories you have left to play with. This will allow you to slide in a treat or two that you love, or address whether you need to make adjustments (for instance, you’ll notice if protein might be too low on a given day).

There’s not another nutrition tracking technique that is more effective than this one. It helps remove all of the grey area, confusion, and stress about how your week is going to play out.

Give this a try, and I think you’ll be amazed at how much easier dieting gets!

The Ultimate Get Fit For Summer Diet Plan: I Hope This Helps!

Thanks so much for stopping by and reading this article! I hope it helped 🙂

A few tweaks here and there, a lot of consistency, and a sustainable approach can absolutely help you to see progress in just a few months and get fit for summer.

If you have any questions about any of the strategies here, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask. I’d be happy to help!

And if you’re interested in getting coaching to help you build muscle, burn fat, and feel more confident in your own skin, that’s what I do! I work with people all over the world to achieve their goals with fitness and nutrition.

Check out my coaching page to learn more about how online coaching works. And if you’re interested, submit an application and I’ll reach out to you to talk more about your goals!

Have a great day 🙂

~ Chris