This a continuation of Part I with Dustin Maher where he shared some great starter information for moms post pregnancy. Remember it was that crunches can actually take you in the wrong direction as far as your stomach and abdominal region. If you didn’t catch that post, please go back and either listen or read that post first, you can find it here.
So now here is part 2 with Dustin where he talks more in depth about types of exercises that women and moms in particular should be doing. Why you shouldn’t be scared of lifting a few weights and how much time in your workout should be devoted to ab or core training. So read on or listen and enjoy:
ANTHONY: So now we know they should avoid the crunch, now what do you think maybe specifically they maybe should do?
DUSTIN: Well this is women in general but I don’t see it in enough women, they don’t weight train. I think there’s still that myth out there that hopefully will be broken very shortly in the next few years that weight training for women is OK to do. And I’m not talking lifting ridiculous amounts and becoming a power lifter, but I’m also not talking about lifting 3-4 pound dumbbells because you don’t want to get bulky. It is very, very, very difficult for women to put on muscle. They shouldn’t be afraid of it so you should pick a challenging weight to use. I’m also a big fan of circuit training, it’s incredibly efficient especially for moms you don’t have time to go to the gym and do an hour long workout. So you need to be the most efficient with your time and I found that circuit training is the best way to do that.
Whatever it is that you want to do, different exercises for total body training without very much rest so you can keep the heart rate up the whole time and burn a lot of calories but build some muscle as well.
ANTHONY: So just because the dumbbells are colored pink doesn’t mean that they’re for women?
DUSTIN: Exactly. I don’t know what those weights are for to be honest. Most women – depends on exercises of course – but most of the moms that I work with can use between 10-40 pound dumbbells depending on the exercise. So we’re not afraid to give them challenging weights. And my strongest clients are size 2s and 4s. Women think that when you lift heavy you’re going to get really big and bulky and that’s just not the case. The muscle is so small and compact and the most muscle I’ve seen a woman put on that I’ve worked with is 5-7 pounds of muscle. And when that’s distributed around your whole body that’s very little. So you just don’t have to worry about that.
ANTHONY: So it’s no 5-7 pounds straight to the biceps.
DUSTIN: Not at all, it’ll get evenly distributed everywhere. But also weight training is in my opinion the best way to increase your resting metabolic rate, which is something everyone should be trying to do. Burn fat while you’re not exercising and also the circuit training increases your metabolic rate for up to 48 hours after a workout.
If you take that compared to walking where you’re going to have the metabolism up during the walk itself while you’re walking but right after that walk is over you’re going to start burning what you do at rest. And you don’t get that residual effect, but when you do this high intensity stuff where you’re working muscle, tearing down muscle, and building up muscle, that’s incredibly metabolically active. So if you’re lifting every other day, metabolism is going to be higher because it’s going to be constantly recovering from the workouts and you’ll find yourself hungrier. It’s the biggest comment I get from moms is how much more hungrier they are and how much more they need to eat because their bodies are burning so much more fat than before, which they enjoy being able to eat more.
So that’s one thing the weight training and also increasing the intensity of the cardio sessions. Again I’m not a big fan of long distance cardio, most moms don’t have an hour – hour and a half to walk or run on a treadmill so these shorter bursts of activity are also scientifically shown to be far more effective. So I’ll give an example.
We’ll just say its outside and you want to get a quick 15-20 minute cardio workout. You warm up for a couple of minutes then for 30 seconds go as hard as you can, so maybe you find a hill and walk up it really fast, or run up it. Whatever it may be you’re going all out for that short burst of intensity and the heart rate will get up to its max heart rate, then you recover maybe a minute, then you repeat that again, maybe 4-6 more times, so you’re actually only exercising hard for 3-5, maybe 10 minutes on a longer day, but that type of training has been shown to be between 5-10 times more effective at burning fat than steady state cardio, so I don’t really prescribe any long distance training to my clients unless they want to run a marathon, etc. Then they’ll have to do a little bit more distance as well, but from a fat loss standpoint, long, steady cardio is not very good at all, at burning fat.
So those are the two biggest things that I prescribe and encourage moms to do is to get into a strength training program where they’re not just lifting those 3 pound pink weights and also to strengthen the intensity of those cardio sessions. Now walking is great, it’s good for the heart, it’s good for the mind, gets you out but unless you do it a lot and you’re going from a sedentary lifestyle to a walking lifestyle, the changes you’ll see in your body aren’t very much, and you’ll get frustrated so really try to increase the intensity of the workouts.
ANTHONY: Ok. So weight training and get rid of the long slow cardio. Which is also important because we’re talking about time, the amount of time that people spend exercising. If you’re in the gym for 60 minutes on the treadmill you can get a much better workout for 20 minutes of the interval training then you’ve got time to strength train all in the same day instead of splitting up your days which a lot of people do. They split the weight training days and cardio days and the next thing you know you have to go to the gym more and you don’t have enough time so then you’re getting rid of if all together. But I just wanted to see if you wanted to throw out – you said with weight training – a lot of what I see in the gym with women lifting the weights, you see them doing a lot of the spot training exercises, they want to lose fat on their arms so they’re doing bicep curls, triceps kickbacks and lateral raises. What kind of exercises might you recommend as an example circuit, or some of the exercises you use in your boot camps that really work, that get the most bang for the buck.
DUSTIN: Exactly, and that’s the thing – I see women especially they do their arms and stuff but I see it more in the core training. They’re going to do a million crunches thinking that’s going to cause them to have a good stomach and the muscles of the abdomen wall are not very big and they’re not going to increase metabolism a lot so you want to get like you said the biggest bang for your buck, so what are the exercises that you can do to work the most muscle?
A couple that I really recommend and a lot of them are basic that you’ve heard of before, and they’re the most challenging exercises because they work the most muscle. Squats are great exercises, whether you have dumbbells holding them by the side or you have a bar on your back. Dead lifts, basically you’re picking up a bar or dumbbell from the front of your body on the ground and you’re standing up straight. Lunges are great for working the butt and thigh and hamstrings.
Don’t just use your body weight unless you’re very de-conditioned and you’re just starting out; you’ve got to increase the weight to these things. Step-ups –where you step onto a chair of if you’re in the gym, stepping on a bench is really good for the lower body. So those are some of my favorite lower-body exercises which really work everything.
Upper body-wise, any sort of rowing exercises, whether you’re using a row machine or you’re bent over, have your hand on a bench or you’re doing a one arm dumbbell row so you’re pulling the dumbbell from the ground to your chest so you’re working the back muscles. Most women cannot do pull ups, but there’s assisted pull up machines if you’re at the gym or you can do lat pull downs where you’re pulling a bar from over your head down below the chin, those are good exercises. Dips are either on parallel bars when you lower your body down 90 degrees and press up. Not too many women can do those – that takes a little bit to build up to so you can do the modified version where you put your hands on a 24 inch bench or step at home and you just bend your elbows and have your feet straight and you’re just bending down, hinging at the elbow, and pressing up to work chest, little bit of shoulders, and a lot of triceps.
Of course the push ups – and I have a theory with push ups, this isn’t scientifically based. I believe every woman should be able to do 20 good push ups on their toes, you train for it obviously but there’s no reason why physiologically every woman couldn’t do 20 push ups and I’ve got women up to 60-70 perfect guy push ups on their toes. It’s pretty amazing but if you train hard and train intensely it comes, so push ups are great, some sort of shoulder pressing, pressing dumbbells or straight bar over their head.
Those are the best for working the largest muscle groups but then also good core training is important, definitely important for overall health and safety, not just aesthetically. So I do crunches, but I’m not a big fan of them, for anybody. I don’t think they’re the greatest exercise ever. I think working those deep abdominal muscles are the most important so some sort of plank variation. I do planks on the ball. Some sort of back extension work in the lower back muscles. Then for obliques, a couple of my favorite exercises are side planks. Like a front plank but you just go onto one arm and you’re just kind of turned over on the side, keeping the hips up nice and high with your feet stacked. Russian twist which is where you balance on your butt and tail bone and your upper body is leaning back a little bit. Your knees are bent and your feet are off the ground, and you’re just twisting your shoulders side to side to that gets the obliques. Then just a standard crunch, twist, or oblique crunch which as you’re crunching up you twist a little bit to the side. Those are some of my favorite core exercises.
But again don’t spend too much time on core. Most of my clients would love to spend an hour working on abs, but I try to limit it to 5 minutes, 7 minutes maybe at tops because it’s just not very efficient at burning fat and that’s the biggest issue with the stomach. It’s not that you don’t have muscle there, it’s that you’ve got all the fat that’s over the top of it and you’ve got to burn that off, and come off evenly everywhere. Now you might be genetically pre-disposed to holding it in the butt or stomach area rather than other places. But I promise if you keep track of where you’re losing it, the pinches like when I take body fat, it’ll come off equally percentage wise, but if you’ve got most of it in your butt to start with, it’s going to be dropping, but you’re going to be holding most of it still. So that’s where I think a lot of women get discouraged is that they’re not losing any in their butt or stomach. But it really is coming off. If you have more of it to lose there, it’s not going to be as obvious. So those are some of the biggest exercises I’d recommend, again they’re the most challenging. I don’t have too many bicep curls or tricep kickbacks or even calf raises because those are just working small muscle groups there they get worked a lot with a lot of the other exercises so you don’t have to worry about not getting those developed.
ANTHONY: So even though you’re only spending say 5-7 minutes on the core your clients are still flattening that area, not a problem?
DUSTIN: Yeah, they’re definitely seeing tremendous amount of improvement and also every exercise we do, whether it’s a squat or standing shoulder press, requires a lot of core strength to stabilize your body so it’s getting worked in other exercises as well and that’s an important thing to remember. Your abs are always having to work to stabilize you. The biggest thing is working the transverse, those deep abdominal muscles. They run parallel to the ground so they’re like a corset that pulls the stomach in, so those are the ones that you really want to work. Those are the ones that I feel moms have the hardest time learning how to active, or reactivate, because the stomach is stretched out so much and those deep transverse muscles aren’t able to get pulled back in. But, once you’re able to fire those muscles, you’re going to be able to get that stomach a lot tighter. And from there it’s all about getting rid of body fat.
–Even after that there is still more to come! Next up Dustin talks about some great nutritional strategies, so stay tuned.
