Butt Workout: Modified Bridge with a Ball

You probably have done the regular bridge. Here's my twist on "the bridge". You'll need an exercise ball. How to do it: 

• Lay on your back with your hands straight beside you. 
• Lift your knees and bring your feet closer to your butt. 
• Open your knees and put the exercise ball between them.
• Squeeze the ball tight and use that energy to lift your butt off of the floor. 
• Keep squeezing your butt as you hold your hips up. 
• Try to hold your hips up for about 1 minute. 
• Hold your core tight the whole time. Then release back down. 

The lift works your glutes but holding the ball adds in more tension and works your inner thighs. This should burn!

Cheers Eights & Weights!

April Booty Challenge Day 7

Today is Ball Leg Lifts! Hold the exercise ball between your legs (below knees), squeeze tight, and move legs up and down without moving your upper body. This works your core as well. The trick to working your butt and inner thighs here is squeezing as hard as you can. If you do not have an exercise ball, stack a few pillows or anything squishy and hold them tight between your legs. Do 5 sets of 20 reps.

Cheers Eights & Weights!

New to Yoga Series: Hip Openers

So hip opener poses are my favorite part of yoga. They tend to hurt because most of them focus on the inner thighs, but that feeling of looseness in my legs afterwards is amazing. I will show you a few simple hip openers to help you as you try to get a little stronger and more flexible.

Preparing for the Run for a Cure Africa Lagos Race: Strengthen your Legs

How do you train to run? Running of course! But did you know that to run better, you not only need to improve your endurance, but strengthen your legs to run further as well?

Runners tend to put a lot of pressure on their knees and ankles because of the constant pounding. This is especially true for women (something about the hips, I believe); we put a lot of pressure on our outer thigh muscles, which in turn puts pressure on our knees. 

To reduce the probability of injury, and to strengthen those legs to run further and endure more, it is important to do exercises that strengthen the inner thigh muscles. This video shows 5 great inner thigh exercises you can try:

Good luck as you prepare!

Cheers Eights & Weights!

Inner Thigh Workout

I shared this inner thigh exercise on Instagram, and wanted to share it with you as well. Whether you are trying to simply strengthen your legs all over, improve your balance, get a better looking butt, or crack a coconut with those babies, your inner thighs are a very important part of your lower body, but they are often overlooked.

For this exercise, follow these steps:

• Lie on your right side
• Hold your core tight
• Make sure you are not leaning backwards, but lying completely on your side
• Bend your lower knee (your right) 90 degrees
• Lift that right leg off the floor using your core. Do not lift your knee.

The strength of your inner thigh, your butt, and your core should be what is lifting your leg. Make sure your other leg is not lifting off the floor, and your body is not leaning backwards. Do about 4 sets of 15 reps.

When you begin, you may not be able to lift your leg that high, but the more you do it, the higher you can lift.

Cheers Eights & Weights!

Our Own First TribeSports Challenge!

You guys know about the affair I had with the TribeSports 12 days of fitness challenge last month, right? Yes, I loved it. And so how about we do our own challenge on TribeSports? The purpose of this challenge is to get you thinking about your inner thighs as you run and do other forms of cardio exercises. I always say it is important to protect your joints by strengthening your muscles. 

This exercise works both your inner thighs and your core as you are forced to work on your balance. What do you do? 

1. Stand on a Bosu ball or a disc (or anything unstable) and tighten your abs
2. Lift one leg in front of you till your knee is at a 90 degree angle to the floor 
3. Move the same knee back as far as you can keeping your upper body straight 
4. Do 30 reps on each side

Do this every day for 7 days and let us know how you did. Check out the entire challenge on the TribeSports site, register, and mark it off as complete when you are done!

Cheers Eights & Weights!

PS. I promised to share a tip every day this week to keep you on your toes as you work on your fitness resolutions for the new year. 

Tip #1: In doing a front lunge (lunging forward), always push back on your front heel before you get up. This reduces the pressure on your front knee. If you are not comfortable with front lunges, stick to back lunges (lunge backward).

Inner Thigh Lifts

There seem to be a lot of misconceptions when it comes to working your muscles. The body is made up of so many muscles, somewhere upwards of 640, and so it does take significant effort to work each one. Of course they are not all equally important.

When it comes to the leg and thigh muscles, there are also so many. However, where we choose to focus could affect our balance and how our bodies protect themselves from injury. 

There are several large muscles in our outer thighs, but because they tend to be bigger than the muscles in our butts and inner thighs, they compensate for a lot of the exercises we do. For example, although lunges should be working your inner thigh muscles and your butt, if those muscles are not strong enough to hold the position, or if the position is not done right, the outer thigh muscles compensate and cause a lot of tension in those muscles.

Before I blab on and on, the point I am trying to get across is that for the thigh muscles, we may need to do exercises that target individual parts of the thighs because these muscles are very important for balance.

Here is a video from LiveStrong that shows one exercise you can do to work the muscles in your inner thigh: Inner Thigh Lifts. These are difficult, but get easier as you do them more often.

As you do the exercise above, remember that your core is also the center of every exercise that you do, and it is the source of your balance. If you do not have a strong core, it is important that you work to build your core with every exercise. Keep your abs tight as you contract and relax your muscles and you'd be using your core strength as well.

Cheers Eights & Weights!

Photo credit: healthyliving.azcentral.com

10 Minute Workout: Buns and Thighs

Interested in those short shorts or just want strong legs and a tush you could bounce a quarter off of? Well, you'll like today's workout. Continuing with our 10-minute series, this workout is quick and effective. Don't be fooled by the short period of time; you will feel your buns afterwards. 

Exercise TV does have videos available for free in some hotels as well, so if you are ever travelling and don't have a gym nearby, check your TV.

Cheers Eights & Weights!

I Exercise But My Thighs Still Rub Together. What Gives?!

If you are a woman that isn’t super skinny, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of or experienced the “Chub-Rub”, which is a colloquial term for thighs rubbing together when you walk or run. (I didn’t make up the term; It really is called the Chub-Rub). So your questions probably are “Is this normal?”, “Can it be changed?”, “Why does it happen?”

On TV, you see all these skinny girls with their butts as tight and as high as their backs. And you begin to think that if you can’t get that way with all the exercise you’ve been doing, there is something wrong with your body. No, there isn’t. Our bodies accumulate fat in different areas. Trust me, I’m pretty bummed about this as well because we really can’t control how and where we store fat. Consolation? Folks like Beyonce who do exercise consistently, but still have this problem.

However, that said, we can still control our fat by losing weight all over and toning specific areas. To lose weight and tone your muscles, you need a combination of cardio exercises and strength training. The cardio (running, spinning, swimming, etc) helps to burn fat all over, while the strength training helps to define muscles.

Because our inner thighs aren’t used for a lot of the daily exercises we do, they need to be specifically targeted with strength training to get them toned. So besides the regular squats and lunges, what are a couple of great strength exercises for your inner thighs? There are very may, but I will highlight two amazing ones:

Plie Squats

Lying Ball Squeeze

Now, depending on what culture you come from as you read this, what you determine to be a beautiful body might vary as well. Some cultures love really skinny legs, and some want women to have some junk in the trunk (which also comes with junk in the hips mostly). So there also is the question of “What am I willing to give up?”. If you are targeting fairly large hips, it usually comes with some thigh friction. If you are willing to give that up for skinnier legs, you can do a lot of cardio to burn more fat all over, and that should remove the thigh friction problem.

Unfortunately, some people are more blessed than others in this department. I do know people who are fairly big, but do not have this thigh issue, and I also know folks who are skinny but this is a huge problem for them. So it all depends on what body you’ve been blessed with.

If you find that you are getting chaffed from walking or running, it may be time to find a temporary solution like powder, Spanx, or deodorant between your thighs so it doesn’t burn from the constant friction. But whatever you do, do know that you are not alone.

Cheers Eights & Weights!

Photo credit: Exercise.About.com, YouChoiceFitness.com, RealSimple.com