Swimsuit Ready - How To Get Your Body Bathing Suit Beach Ready In Months

Time to get swimsuit ready. Winter is officially over. Spring is here, and Summer is on the way.

If you're reading this in December - where were you? Don't worry. Read on. It'll still help.

If you're going to get beach ready by the time the holiday season gets here, now is a good time to start. Here's the problem: you want to look good on the beach, but you've spent the winter months covered up and shivering and eating too much. You've put on some winter fat, which is good, because it kept you warm. But now you want to get rid of it so you look great in a swimsuit.

What's the answer?

- You could crash diet, and hit the beach looking like a famine victim.

- You could take some appetite suppressants and hit the beach looking like a speed freak.

- You could take some fat blockers and hit the beach looking for the nearest lavatory.

Or you could get a plan and work it.

Start with an honest assessment of the problem. Don't bother with the scales.Take off your clothes and check yourself out in a full length mirror. Don't - and I can't stress this enough - don't get too critical of your body. It's done a great job of getting you around up until now.
Anything you don't like about your body is never a reason to hate it or yourself.

I'm guessing you don't have a personal trainer or a dietician on staff, which is why you may not look like a movie star. You might have a job, which means you don't have time to work out every day in the superbly equipped private gym that you also probably don't have. In short, you're just like the rest of us. Maybe a little out of shape, but that can be fixed.

A simple rule is this: if you can grab a handful of fat anywhere, you could probably lose a few pounds. The good news is, it's easier than you think.

Whatever the extent of your excess fat, decide now exactly how you want to look when you're shut of it. Decide what constitutes success for you, and then you'll have a target to aim for.

Find a photograph that will help you keep your aim in mind. It could be a photograph of you at your svelte best, or it could be a picture of someone you want to look like. Warning: if your target picture is of a statuesque six foot blonde goddess, and you're five foot two and a chubby brunette, you're setting yourself up to fail. Get real. Set a target you can hit.

When are you going on holiday? Mark the date on your calendar and count how many weeks you've got until then, starting from today. Then divide that block of time into three equal parts. So for example, if your holiday date is 12 weeks from now, divide that twelve weeks into three equal blocks of four weeks.

BLOCK ONE: Start doing light cardio workouts, which is just making sure you go for a twenty minute walk every day. Get a little bit out of breath and sweaty, then cool down with some stretches. But you must do it every day. Rain or shine. Whether you feel like it or not.

While you're doing that, think about your problem areas and plan your strategy around them. Don't think of your body as a bunch of problem areas, each one with its own exercise fix. It's better to concentrate on the whole body with a group of five whole body exercises I'll tell you about in the last section, but for now, concentrate on deciding exactly what your problems are.

Here and now is also a great time to identify non-fat related necessary fixes. Your skin has been under cover in dry, artificially heated rooms for six months. Time to fix the dry spots. Moisturize and sand down the rough spots.

And now is when you decide - to tan, or not to tan?
Tans look great. Until you hit forty, when people who tan regularly begin to resemble a wrinkly leather handbag. Here's a one word reason why you should use sunblock and maybe not tan at all: melanoma. Spoilt your day? Sorry, but that's better than dying young while looking ironically radiant and healthy.

If you must look brown, choose spray tan. Which needs your skin to be moisturized and cared for. So in addition to your light cardio and problem area spotting, start an intensive skin care regime now. From the outside, using moisturizer. From the inside, making sure you eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and replace unhealthy fats in your diet with olive oil and oily fish. Start to cut back on alcohol too. It dries out your skin.

BLOCK TWO: After block one, if you've been doing some light cardio every day, and you've changed your diet, you should feel a little healthier and look better too.

Now is the time to plan your beach ready swimsuit strategy, based on your body shape.

Warning: Work with what you've got, not what you wish you had.

If you're short and broad, wearing a big bright floral print will make you look like an overstuffed armchair. Don't complain too loudly if shortsighted people keep trying to sit on you.

If you have big boobs, that tiny bikini top with no support is probably a bad idea.

If you have, shall we say, a generous behind, then bright horizontal stripes won't help.

Somewhere out there is a swimsuit that suits you. Take a little time now to decide exactly how it should look, then go out and find it. And don't just buy it - try it on first.

If you're really stuck, and your nearest and dearest aren't exactly being helpful, go to Google, type 'picking swimsuit styles' into the search box, and check out the answers.

Meanwhile, your light daily cardio probably isn't much of a challenge anymore. Time to up the pace. If you have some running shoes, dig them out. Wear them on your walk. Break into a trot now and then, just fast enough and just far enough to get out of breath and raise your pulse rate. It's not a race. You're just trying to raise your metabolic rate a little, and running is a good way to do it. Running is a great way to achieve healthy weight loss.

Walk a little, run a little, slow back down until you get your breath back, then repeat until you're back home again.

And now we introduce some light resistance training.
Relax. This stuff is easy. After your cardio, when you're warmed up, lie face down on the ground and put the palms of your hands flat on the floor below your shoulders. If you can manage it, do ten press ups, lifting your body weight off the floor, with only your toes and hands touching it. If you can't, leave your knees in contact with the floor and try it that way. Easier, isn't it? The press up works your upper arms, especially the triceps. Which will easily sort out those bingo wings.

After that, stand up with your feet shoulder width apart, feet slightly turned out. Squat as if you're about to sit on a chair, until your thighs are parallel to the ground, then stand back up straight. Repeat ten times. The squat, even without extra weight, works the quadriceps in your thighs. Chunky thighs? Work on this.

Work some stretches and flexibility training into the mix too. Resistance exercise can leave you stiff, so remember to stretch and keep flexible. If you have a cat, watch the way they act. They stretch when they feel like it, and enjoy doing it. So should you.

BLOCK THREE: If you've followed the routines, you should see a difference by now. Fat deposits should be melting away. Your skin should have benefitted from weeks of inside and outside care. You have a swimsuit, or several, in your size and in styles that suit you. What's left?

Getting even lovelier. How are you sleeping? I don't know what's going on in your life, but getting the sleep you need is at least as important as any of the stuff we've covered so far. It's going to be doubly important when we ramp up the resistance training for these last few weeks.

Cut back on the evenings out. And go to the gym two nights a week. If you know what you're doing, concentrate on these five whole body exercises:

The squat
The deadlift
Bent over rows
Bench press
Shoulder press

If you don't know what you're doing, ask the gym staff to show you how to get on.

DON'T MAKE IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG; that's a recipe for all kinds of trouble. And only lift as much weight as you're capable of lifting.

These five exercises work your whole body and keep burning calories long after you've stopped working out. Don't worry about getting muscle bound - it's really not that easy. What they will do is work muscles all over your body, which will respond by growing. Muscle mass a) burns calories, and b) looks good.

If you do these five exercises, you won't have to worry about any problem areas. You'll notice I haven't even mentioned sit-ups or crunches. If you do whole body compound movements like these, they burn off excess body fat in ways that no amount of sit-ups or crunches can touch. The bench press, like press-ups, will target your upper arms and tighten them up. The squat will tighten your butt and thighs and make them shapely. The deadlift works your whole body. If you do these exercises twice a week, three sets of six repetitions for each exercise, you'll be in the best shape of your life by the end of the last month.

Ready to knock them dead on the beach. And that's what all the effort was for.


That's it. My three part guide to getting swimsuit ready/ beach ready in time for the holidays, which breaks down into a handy ten point guide you can follow easily.

Here are the steps:

1 - Do some light cardio every day.
2 - Take the naked mirror of truth test and find out what needs fixing.
3 - Set a target. Don't make it a number, make it the way you want to look and feel.
4 - Start the skin care regime now. Today.

5 - Pick the right swimsuit.
6 - Do a little running.
7 - Start resistance training, and add some stretches to the mix to keep from getting stiff.

8 - Go to the gym
9 - Get some sleep
10 - And generally look gorgeous.