Doing Less and Getting More in Summer

Ways that I am trying to do less and get more out of my Fitness this Summer. 

Summer tends to be the time of year that gyms reach their lowest attendance rates. This is totally to be expected. The weather gets nice so people get outside more. There are a bunch of holidays and travel, and just overall, people don’t really want to spend any extra time in the gym when they could be out enjoying all that the summer has to offer. I as a trainer am no exception. So below I am going to outline some ways that I am staying in the best shape of my life while progressing in the gym and getting leaner, without spending a ton of time wasting away in the gym or doing endless cardio. Less can very often be more, I mean our slogan very much fits into that. We want people to train well so that they can live their life more(both day to day and long-term).

1 - Strength Train Full Body 2-4 Times Weekly for 45 Minutes

This is probably unsurprising coming from the owner of a strength training gym but it is nonnegotiable. The key here though is realizing how low it can take to really make a ton of progress. When we strength train we want to focus on training all of our major muscle groups with a variety of heavy compound movements, usually done in an unrelated superset fashion. That would look like training a set of barbell squats for 5-10 reps, taking a few seconds to get your breath, and then while your legs recover, doing a set of dumbbell bench press for 5-10 reps. Rest for a few minutes and repeat 3-4 times and you have trained close to 50% of the muscle in the body, very effectively in just about 10-15 minutes. Do the same with another 2 exercises to work the other side of the body and then end with 5-10 minutes focusing on the muscles we specifically want to grow(like the shoulders, arms, abs or glutes) and you have gotten a really awesome stimulus to grow muscle in 45 minutes or less. Ideally we repeat this 2-3 times more in the week and we have handled most if not all of our structured exercise in as little as an hour and a half or at most three hours out of the week. I follow this pretty closely, training the full body 3 times a week on Mon, Wed, Fri and then I will do a 30 minute strength/conditioning workout on Saturday Morning with our free community class. That means I only spend less than 3 hours in the gym every week.

2 - Move More Throughout the Day

We hear about “10,000 Steps” a lot on social media. But that number is really arbitrary. The key thing I have been focusing on is to just have a minimum of 2 walks everyday, one in the morning and one in the evening. It only takes a few minutes at a time and I stack this habit by going on each of those walks with my wife, giving us a really awesome time to get away from work and from the screens to connect at the beginning and end of each day. So instead of just going straight rotting on the couch after we eat dinner, we get those few extra steps in and feel a little better before we pull up netflix and rot.

3 - 3-5 Protein Forward Meals Everyday 

The last thing I want to do in the summer is track my calories. I have more time in the summer to cook and play with recipes so I don’t really want to do a ton of meal prep either. Instead we have just cut out all snacking and limited ourselves to only really eating during meal times, with a requirement that the thing we are eating has at least 30 g of protein for us to consider it a meal. We generally eat about 4 or 5 times a day with 3 big meals and 1-2 smaller snack meals.  

Most of the excess calories people eat tend to fall outside of their meal times. It’s cupcakes in the breakroom that we eat an hour after lunch or the chocolate we reach for at 9pm that start to really add up in the long run. So if we aren’t tracking, then it is important for the meals we eat to be satiating so we don’t run into so many pitfalls in between our meals.

4 - Join Some Kind of Group For Cardio

It is super important for longevity, health and wellbeing, but cardio can really suck, especially in the blazing heat of the summer. This is where finding some kind of community group can be a really great way to get outside of yourself and make the cardio you should be doing more fun and engaging. This could be a Run Club type group or a Rec Sports team, even just creating your own group that plays pickleball once a week is a great way to do this. 

I want to highlight 3 groups that meet in Greenville that together actually create the perfect cardio routine. Run Club GVL - Monday Nights, Sprint GVL - Wednesday Nights, Ruck GVL - Thursday Nights. Run Club is a 2 or 3 Mile run, which is perfect to work on your moderate intensity cardio, somewhere in Zone 3. Sprint GVL meets to do Hill Sprint Intervals which is perfect for that high intensity heart rate, somewhere in zones 4 and 5 with rest intervals to recover. And then Ruck GVL is a 3.6 mile weighted hike essentially which is just tough enough to put you well into Zone 2 without too much stress on your body. All of these together kind of perfectly hit all major heart rate zones. But even just on their own are worth pursuing. 

5 - Actionable, Minimalist Protocols for A Full and Healthy Summer 

• 2-4 Weight Training Sessions Every Week for 45 Minutes 

• 3-5 Meals a Day with 30g of Protein Minimum in Each Meal

• Daily Steps

• 1-2 Instances of a Group Cardio Activity