Surely you have heard of Jennifer Lopez and her infamous rear end?! She is lovingly known as J. Lo. You may like large rear ends you may not, we all have our preference. Me? I think you can work on your entire body, have perky breasts, smooth face, golden tan and the most fantastic drop dead jewelry and clothes, but if you have a flat butt you have nothing.
Really? Really!
Women would kill for a nice rear end, a nice high, round, tight set of glutes, ones that protrudes out toward the back, not the sides (in other words, no dreaded saddlebags!)
I have always devoted a great deal of time to my glutes, they respond quickly and that means just as quickly they can fade away...
One day of weight training is devoted to glutes but they are trained with legs too, and nothing is better for your butt than squats, which I do religiously.
Since I am deliberately trying to add some weight, and hopefully it is mostly lean mass, I have increased food and need to take advantage of those extra calories by training smart.
For the last two weeks I have been running stairs at work during my lunch time instead of at home afterward, as often I was too tired or busy to fit it in. I figured I had already been at the gym for an hour and a half in the morning, so skipping the evening training session would be ok....wrong!
I change into my clothes and jog through campus, weaving my way through all the students until I get the the Event Center. It's a fairly large building, it holds 4,600 people for basketball and 6,000 for concerts, it's sizable!
I get to the Arena Entrance that you see above and I run up the stairs, there are 25 of them. I then jog across the top of the building and back down those same 25 stairs.
I do this 12 times. That's 300 stairs up, and 300 stairs down, not to mention the 12 jogs across the rooftop!
This is no steady state cardio, this is intervals and it gets your heart rate racing! I don't think there is much better for your butt than running up and down stairs.
Which brings me back to my butt. I went over my friends' house on Friday, he sent a text and asked if we wanted to have margarita's after work. Well, I hadn't had a margarita since February when I was in Mexico on vacation, and it sounded great on a sunny warm Friday.
As I sipped my (one) margarita, I was telling them about my glute training and how successful it has been, and that my butt has gotten so round and hard, that if you stuck a pin in it, it would pop like a big balloon!
We all laughed and I had to demo the look, and that's when I got the nickname K. Lo!
Here are a few stair running tips I have found that seem to work:
Use your whole body. running and climbing are whole-body movements. Engage all your muscles – not just the legs.
Use the quads. Climb stairs by pushing with your thighs. Make sure not to completely extend your legs – this puts too much strain on your knees. Instead, run by keeping your legs semi-flexed throughout.
The role of the posterior chain. The muscles of the back of your legs – calves, hamstrings (back of your thighs) and glutes (your butt) are responsible for most of the movement that occurs in running and jumping. Don’t make the mistake to push through your knees only. Instead, try to use your posterior chain and extend your hips.
Run on your toes. Just a quick note here – when running try to step on your toes or more specifically the place between your toes and your mid foot. That’s how all animals run – they step on their paws and on NOT their heels.
Use your arms. Make sure to use your arms to help you with the movement. Keep your elbows in, shoulders down (not shrugged) and your arms semi-flexed (like a sprinter).
No comments:
Post a Comment