The Truth Behind Getting a "Bikini-Ready Body"

Get your body bikini-ready in time for swimsuit season! Something along these lines will be plastered on just about every women's magazine from now until May. Whether they promise you'll be ready in six, eight or even twelve weeks, you need to be realistic about your expectations.

For instance, if you are overweight now, you can't possibly expect to look like the models in the magazine in six to ten weeks. Depending on how overweight you are, you might not be able to be bikini-ready until next year's swimsuit season. I don't say this to discourage you but to motivate you. If you set unrealistic expectations for yourself, you are only setting yourself up for disappointment and failure.

To make the most of the plans touted in these magazines, you need to be serious and committed to a fitness and diet plan. Don't let the word "diet" fool you; we are all on a diet. Whatever we eat is our diet, no matter how healthful or harmful it is for us.

Your diet needs to be sustainable, unless you want to immediately sabotage your plans by making it too drastic. A proven, effective diet plan is to include lean proteins at every meal. They have the same amount of calories per gram as carbohydrates, but they are slower digesting and they are needed to build muscle. Gaining muscle weight is a great way to lose fat, since each pound of muscle burns about 50 more calories per day just to sustain itself.

While on the subject of gaining muscle, don't fret that you'll look like a man if you lift weights. Even men have to be strict with their diet and weight-lifting regimen to get manly muscles. Unless you're ingesting testostorone or human growth hormone in addition to a high protien diet and heavy weight training you're not going to wake up with massive, vein-bulging muscles. Nor will you get "big" muscles from aerobics classes like Spinning or body sculpting. If anything, you're probably lifting way too light of weight when you are lifting, but we'll touch on that later.

Another factor to consider is your current fitness level. Do you work out at all? If not, by starting a cardio and weight lifting plan you'll see results quickly. If you've been doing workouts religiously for years you're going to have to really tweak your program to get results.

If you currently do cardio, but you don't do any weight bearing activities, add some weights. Even adding resistance band workouts will add muscle tone and definition. To reshape your body, you pretty much have to do weight bearing activities. If you are a plus-size woman with a "pear" shape and you lose significant weight you're still going to be a "pear" shape. So you may become a size 6 pear instead of a size 16 pear. To balance your features you'll need to create symmetry by adding muscle; you can somewhat determine where muscle gets added, but you have no say over where fat gets added or subtracted.

In a generic sense, apples will need to work on defining the lower body and adding some dimension there to balance out their top-heavy physiques. Pears will need to slim down their hips while adding a V-taper to their back; this will create more of an hourglass figure by balancing the top and bottom.

Back to lifting weights: remember that muscle size is relative. You may only be able to do 5 or 10 pound dumbbell curls; that doesn't mean that you should use 5 or 10 pound weigthts for everything. I generally use 15-20 pound dumbbells for bicep curls, 7.5-10 pound dumbbells for triceps exercises, and up to 35 pounds for dumbbell rows (which works the back). I often see women in the gym using 5 pound weights for all three of these exercises, even though the muscles are vastly different.

Another misconception women have is that doing lots of ab or "core" exercises will give them a small, flat belly or maybe even a six pack. Sorry, this just isn't going to happen. The biggest factor involved in getting a flat belly, or better yet, a six-pack, is getting rid of fat. Do two or three ab exercises three times a week and you'll get firm ab muscles. How much fat is layered over top of them is a different story. You may initially get a small dip in waist circumference, when your muscles firm up, but after that it's a matter of getting rid of the fat.

Another muscle that I've seen articles claim you can get ripped and showy is the biceps. While you may get a firm bump and reduce your arm's circumference when you firm up the muscle, you're not going to get a nice, noticeable peak until you get rid of your arm flab. This seems to be even more true with the triceps, since flab sticks to that area of the arm even more frequently. (The latest article was one online claiming that by doing a couple variations of bicep curls twice a week would give you arms like Michelle Obama; perhaps if you are as lean as she is already this is true. If you are overweight you're going to have to lose the fat in addition to building up the muscle.)

So, while getting ready to hit the beach in a tiny hot-mama bikini may be a great goal and inspiration, it is not necessarily something that you can achieve by starting a moderate diet and exercise plan. Another thing to remember is: no one is going to be able to airbrush your body before you hit the beach, so don't get too disappointed if you don't look just like the magazine models.

Calories Burned by Muscle- http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/calories/burning_calories/burn_more_calories.htm

Women and Weight Lifting-
http://life.gaiam.com/gaiam/p/Why-Women-Need-Weight-Training.html

Magazine Airbrushing of Models and Celebrities-
http://www.switched.com/2007/08/30/worst-airbrushed-celebs-of-2007-so-far/