Time to get beach ready!

April is here! This means if your body's not beach ready, its time to get on it! As of today, I'm about 198 lbs at 12 % body fat. In my opinion, you need to be below 10 % to be beach ready, which for me means losing 5-6 lbs. However, I prefer keeping my body fat percentage very low, so this means I have about 10 lbs to lose over the next 2 months and having done this many times before, this is easy.

However, to make this easier on myself, I usually switch to a carbohydrate cycling based diet called Ultimate Diet 2.0 by Lyle McDonald, the famous founder of the ketogenic diet system. Why is this diet easier?

• The athlete stays on a very low carbohydrate, high protein diet from Monday to Thursday.
• Thursday night(after the workout) until Sunday afternoon, he gets to go on a High carbohydrate, high protein diet, which means eating all you want(keep it healthy though).
• Workouts are 3-4 days a week(Mon-Tue-Thu-Sat or Mon-Thu-Sat).

This means, you still get to have fun and eat out with friends and family over the weekend. This is usually such a big problem to most people on a diet. They tend to feel miserable during social occasions where they constantly have to worry about breaking their diet. No more of that! Again, the low  carbohydrate + high protein diet during the weekdays are not so hard if you stick to a meat + egg + fibrous vegetables based diet as they tend to leave you satiated.

I highly recommend people read the Ultimate Diet 2.0 book, I read it once every time right before I go on the diet as it helps me plan my program.

So thats as far as my training and diet go, now onto the question which I get asked the most. What supplements will I use over the next 2 months?

1. Pro Complex protein - Why? Because its a perfect mix of high quality, slow digesting protein which means the body has a continous supply of amino acids. This is good because the body will not lose muscle.

2. Carlson's Fish oil: This is an important part of the Ultimate Diet. I use about 5-10 grams of fish oil per day.

3. NO-Xplode: I use NO-Xplode before my workout because its a good mix of creatine, Nitric Oxide and stimulants(fat burners) so its much easier to train hard on a low calorie diet.

4. ZMA: ZMA is combination of Zinc, Magnesium and Vitamin B6. I use this before I sleep as it helps maintain a healthy immune system, tissue repair and promote sleep quality. It also helps increasing testosterone levels.

5. I also recommend using a good multi-vitamin. I use this one.

Thats it! I hope everyone has a plan to get beach ready! Remember, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.