Selena Deleon – THE WORKOUT IN THIS article I will respond to the second part of the question asked by a reader last week - "what is the best exercise to do at home to tighten my bottom/butt?"
Determining your body type is the first step to transforming your body, because it enables you to choose the best workout for you.
The principle behind fat patterning and characteristic body types (as discussed last week) is that any weight gained will be distributed to a region that is genetically predetermined. Excess calories are stored as fat at various sites on the body. When you burn fat from your body, it means that you are using up stored calories. For those endomorphs who would like to change the shape of their bodies, it can be frustrating to lose weight and notice that your upper body is doing most of the shrinking.
The thing to remember is that with the gynoid body type, weight will always initially be lost from the top down. It is important to persevere because as long as you continue to lose healthy weight, your body will call up all of the calorie reserves to supplement its energy needs, which means that you will use up stores from the lower body area as well. In this case, consistency will be your advantage.
For an endomorph who wants to tighten and lift the butt, the idea would be to target the major muscles in the back of the leg; the hamstrings (back of the thigh) and the gluteus minimus and maximus muscles, also known as the buttocks (top backside of the thigh).
What is important to know is that when trying to tighten and lift the butt, one does not literally lift the butt. You have to visualise the area just below the butt disappearing which will make the butt itself look higher in placement, but instead what you are really doing is displacing (or eliminating) the fat at the base of the butt.
Resistance training exercises such as lunges, hamstring curls and reverse leg lifts to name a few, target the abovementioned area very effectively and aid in "posterior displacement". Walking lunges are ideal to do at home because they can be done on any surface. They are aerobic in part, as they elevate your heart rate while working the major leg muscles. Just take a long step, one foot in front of the other, and bend the rear knee down almost to the floor, making sure to keep your front knee in line with the ankle. Keep repeating the move by alternating legs and lunging as you walk.
By working the hamstrings and the glutes in combination with aerobic training, you can lose inches from your lower body. If you are doing one without the other, you are not reaping the full burning capacity and benefit of your workouts. Alternate resistance training days with aerobic training days or do interval training in the same workout by working aerobically for 10 minutes and then strength train for 10 minutes (for a total of 40-60 minutes), and so on, so that you combine each type of exercise in the same workout.
My recommendation is to either do three to four strength training workouts and four to five cardio workouts per week or four interval workouts (combination workouts) and one to two days of straight cardio. It's okay to double up, doing a minimum of 25 to 30 minutes of cardio first and strength train afterward for about another 30 minutes on the same day.
Selena DeLeon is a certified professional trainer.
