Do either of these sound like you?
- It’s May and suddenly beach season seems imminent. Unfortunately, you realize you’ve been skipping workouts and eating poorly for the last four months. Now you are scrambling to get in shape as fast as possible. Although you start off strong, your efforts are derailed as summer arrives and you find yourself enjoying drinks with friends at your favorite rooftop bar and stuffing yourself at weekend barbecues.
- You decide you want to lose 20 lbs so you start a new diet. However, things are getting very crazy for you at work. Between the chaos of business travel, lack of time to prepare healthy food, and large amounts of stress, you soon find yourself giving up your attempts to get in shape.
Many people fail to live up to their eating and exercise aspirations because they choose unrealistic goals that don’t mesh well with their daily lives. Rather than attempting to overhaul your entire life, it’s best to look for ways to incorporate training and healthy eating into your current routine. You will certainly have to sacrifice and make changes to get in shape, but that doesn’t mean you need to force a square peg into a round hole.
One of the easiest ways to set yourself up for success is to modify your routine based on the seasons. Even in places without true seasons (I’m looking at you, California), most of us have alternating periods of grinding and relaxing throughout the year. Different seasons are filled with activities that influence your eating, activity levels, and stress. It makes sense to plan your training around these factors.
This blog post provides a few ways you can use the changing seasons to help you plan out a year of training and eating. At the end, I explain what to do if your personal schedule doesn’t fit with my general recommendations.
Winter/Spring
Many people begin the year with a diet after a holiday season filled with various indulgences. There aren’t many holidays in the first few months of the year, which makes it easier to cut back on eating out or social obligations involving food or alcohol. This is also a time when many people are the busiest at work. For these reasons, the winter is a great time to focus on fat loss.
Although diet is the main driver of fat loss, your training plays a role as well. You should always aim to retain as much muscle as possible when dieting. Keep pushing yourself in the gym and strive to make progress even as you get leaner. Although you may want to add in some extra cardio or high intensity interval training to your training during this season, weight training should remain your top priority.
No matter what type of training program you follow, keep a close eye on recovery. Dieting is stressful on the body and compounding this stress with too much training volume or intensity can lead to burnout, injuries, or chronic fatigue. High intensity interval training can be especially draining, so start with just one session per week and increase only if fat loss progress stalls.
Summer
Most people want to have fun and relax during the summer. Between summer Fridays (which are huge in Chicago where I live), family vacations, and weekends by the beach, there is a lot going on in our lives outside the gym. Summer is the time to maintain your performance and physique while still allowing some flexibility to enjoy the seasonal activities.
Training time can be cut back in the summer to get you out of the gym faster. You can also move some of your workouts outside to get in some extra sunshine and Vitamin D. Hill sprints, track workouts, or bodyweight workouts in the park are all great options during nice weather.
Fall/Winter
The last four months of the year are filled with holidays, feasts, and parties, most of which involve lots of food. Rather than stressing out about gaining weight during this time, harness those extra calories to seriously crush your workouts.
Fall training should be intense enough to promote muscle or strength gains. Lift some heavy weights, set some new records, or challenge yourself with a high volume hypertrophy-focused program. Although anyone can lose fat with diet alone, hard training is necessary to stimulate strength and/or muscle gains. Chasing these goals at a time of year when eating supports them ensures you will keep getting better year after year.
Plan Your Training Around Your Year
Many people will find the above recommendations are a perfect fit for their year. However, your schedule may not follow the seasons. If this sounds like you, look at your yearly calendar and determine when you will be more or less stressed. This could be influenced by busy times at work, planned vacations, family obligations, visitors staying with you, or many other things. For most people, stressful periods tend to fall at more or less the same times every year even if they don’t line up with the seasons.
You can use this information to inform decisions about your training. For example, a three-month stretch filled with travel is a bad time to diet. However, a three-month stretch when things will be more relaxed at work could be an ideal time to try to lose fat. This can also work in reverse: a period when you will be hosting lots of visitors may be a good time to focus on building muscle or strength since you know you will be eating some extra calories. Above, I explain how these periods can line up with the seasons. However, if your year looks totally different feel free to move these blocks around. The goal is to set up a plan that works with your unique schedule.
As we move into December, take some time to sketch out what your next year of training will look like. You don’t need to train with the same intensity, frequency, or programming all the time. Scheduling a year of lifting based on the seasons or big life events will keep things fresh and put you in the best position to be successful. Better planning leads to better results.
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