By Ron Harris
Summer is coming up fast, and that means you’ll be able to show off all your hard work in the gym as you display your physique in shorts at the beach, lake, pool party, or wherever you go when it’s roasting hot and the sun is shining bright without a cloud in the sky.
But is your body ready to show, or is there still a little blanket of body fat obscuring those sculpted muscles of yours? Only when you’re lean can your physique be truly appreciated in all its glory.
Because the clock is ticking, let’s get you on the fast track to shreds with these five things you need to get moving on ASAP!
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1. Forget About Eating to Gain
Aside from continuing to eat foods that don’t belong on a shredder’s menu such as fast and junk foods, the number one obstacle in the way of getting leaner is refusing to accept the simple concept of calories in versus calories out.
The reason most people never get into the caloric deficit required for fat loss is that they’re still hoping or trying to gain muscle. Ridiculously simple math will show you why you need to forget about gaining muscle mass for just a few weeks here.
Gaining muscle requires that you be in a caloric surplus, eating more calories than you’re expending. This gives you the raw building blocks needed to synthesize new muscle tissue. That’s going in one direction.
The other direction would be fat loss, which requires that you be in a caloric deficit or expending more calories than you take in. It should be obvious that you can’t do both at the same time, yet that’s what many people attempt to do.
Your goal should be to maintain your existing muscle mass while eating cleaner and, more importantly, fewer calories to allow the fat-burning process to take place.
Also Read:Â The Best Bulking Diet for Skinny Guys
2. Eat Only Measured, Prepped Meals
A lot of people make the very basic mistake of eating clean but still eating too much. Most of us underestimate portion sizes and wind up eating more calories than we expend.
As we just went over, without the scales tipped in the direction of a caloric deficit, you won’t lose fat. Unless you’re a ninja at eyeballing food portions and knowing exactly how many ounces or grams you’re looking at, you need to weigh and measure everything that goes in your mouth and keep track of it.
It’s 2023, and you have access to a wide variety of nutrition and food-tracking apps to download and start utilizing. I strongly suggest you make it easy on yourself and do all your meal prepping with precisely weighed and measured portions in individual glass or plastic containers.
For example, you could cook a huge batch of chicken and rice, then portion out exactly the right amount into each container, perhaps something like 8 ounces (cooked weight) of chicken breast and one cup of rice.
Eating out should be minimized for these few weeks, because it’s impossible to know exactly how much you’re eating and it would be very easy to err on the side of too much.
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Knowing precisely how much you’re eating gives you the ability to make adjustments if you aren’t seeing the results you should be.
How could you reduce your calories if you really have no idea how many you’re eating?
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3. Eat Carbs Only as Needed
Although I still want you to stay focused on the total number of calories you’re eating daily, it stands to reason that carbohydrates are the macronutrients that most of us need to reduce our intake of when the aim is to bring the calories down.
You don’t want to cut back much on your protein because you need that to hold on to your muscle mass. As a bodybuilder, you probably don’t eat much fat anyway aside from healthy sources such as salmon, egg yolks, raw nuts, and avocado.
You certainly can and probably should reduce those to about half of normal just for these few weeks, but it’s carbs that are the easiest macro to manipulate. You could go full keto and not eat any carbs, and that would be one way to lose weight fast.
For those of you like me who have tried it and didn’t care for it, you can keep carbohydrates in your diet. You just need to eat them only when you really need them. Those two times would be in the meals before and after weight training. That’s it!
You don’t need to include carbs in every meal, and most people won’t be able to lose much body fat if they do. On days you don’t weight train, just have carbs with breakfast. All other meals should be just protein and fresh vegetables such as broccoli, green beans, cauliflower, cucumber, or a green salad (not loaded up with croutons or calorie-heavy dressing!).
Low-carb diets have worked perfectly for millions of men and women who got ripped using them for decades. You probably won’t feel as big and full when eating lower carbs, but this is how you get ripped.
You give the body what it needs to fuel workouts and recovery, and no more. Amounts will vary depending on factors such as your size, age, and metabolism.
4. Learn to Love Cardio
I say this all the time, but it never gets old. As bodybuilders, we didn’t sign up to do cardio. We love pushing and pulling prodigious loads of cold iron, pumping up and getting bigger and stronger. Riding a bike, climbing stairs, or walking a treadmill to nowhere?
Not so much. But if you want to get shredded fast, you must make cardio your friend. It’s the absolute easiest way to get into that caloric deficit we keep talking about without cutting your actual calories down too far. For example, let’s say your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is 5,000 calories.
To lose fat, you need to take in less than that number. Burning calories via aerobic exercise is the other way to tip the scales further into deficit so you can rip up nicely. You all have smartphones where you can access music, movies, short video clips, podcasts, your emails, text messages, etc.
Cardio doesn’t have to be boring! You can use that time to get things done on your phone or set yourself up with a playlist that fires you up to move faster.
How much cardio you will need to do depends on the individual and how much body fat you’re currently carrying, but it’s very safe to say you must do cardiovascular training to get your body beach-ready by June!
5. Give Your Weight Loss a Boost with Supplements
I saved this one for last because supplements are what the vast majority of the general public seek out when they want to lose fat but lack the discipline and drive to eat better and work out.
Used in conjunction with eating in a caloric deficit and regular cardiovascular training, these products can definitely help you see superior results. MuscleTech has had one of the most effective products of this type, Hydroxycut Hardcore, for many years now, and more recently introduced Burn iQ, the next-generation weight-loss product, which I can personally attest to in terms of effectiveness.
Summer will be here before you know it. Are you ready to strut your stuff shirtless and in shorts, rocking a sweet six-pack and looking lean and mean? If not, start today on the five tips we went over and you can be looking righteously ripped by June.
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