Its a New Year and its time to give you a new exercise to step up your workout and help you make this year YOUR year. Its another weight exercise for women who lift weights, to help you tighten and tone your body. This week’s exercise targets your lower body – ensuring that your legs will look great by the time you have to show them off!
This week’s flat stomach exercise for your flat stomach workout is one of my favorite for getting your heart rate pumping and the fat burning – the dumbbell step up.
The Step Up is a GREAT exercise to help you get tight, toned and sexy legs by working all of the major muscles in your lower body: quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes.
No matter your workout experience the step up is an exercise for all levels. If you are a beginner, start with a smaller step and no weight. As you become stronger, you can increase the weight or the height of the step to make the exercise more difficult. Another variation for this exercise, to increase its fat burning abilities is to time yourself. Instead of doing 10-12 reps, try taking a lower weight and doing the step-ups for a minute. See how many you can do in the minute, take a minute rest and repeat. This will have your heart rate pumping and the fat burning.
Everyone likes surprises – I know I do! In fact, your muscles need a bit of a surprise every once in a while in order to continue effective weight loss. Ladies, since you’re already lifting weights because the benefits of lifting weights for women are endless, you need to make sure that you keep your muscles surprised and working. You can change your routine completely or you can make minor changes to your current routine.
If you’re in the middle of a flat stomach workout, I have at least two ways to surprise your muscles that don’t require a whole routine change. Try one of these two methods to keep the fat burning and your muscles growing.
Slow Down – Changing the tempo of exercises helps to stimulate the muscles differently. Instead of just lifting the weight up and down – take a bit more time – push for a two count and bring the weight down for a four count. For example – when doing a chest press – count two when pushing the barbell up towards the ceiling and then count to four as you lower the weight back down. Or, if you are doing a squat count to four as you go down and two when you come back up. Slowing down the exercises makes your muscles work longer and therefore burn more fat.
Mix it Up with Cardio – Keeping your heart elevated helps you burn more fat. Doing cardio in between sets of weight exercises helps you burn even more fat calories during one workout as it keeps your heart rate up for a longer period of time. Instead of resting after a weight exercise, head to the treadmill for a one minute of sprint or if working out at home try jumping rope for 30 seconds or high knee lifts. This quick bout of cardio will help you burn even more fat and reach your flat stomach goals even faster.
So, next time you’re in the gym, try one of these two methods to keep your muscles guessing what you’re going to do and make sure that with every workout you are burning fat and building muscle. All to help you reach your flat stomach goals.
