As a Sydney bootcamp and fitness trainer, I get a lot of questions regarding “What exercises are best for lower body definition and toning”. This makes sense as one of the most common areas of concerns is in fact the lower body, specifically hips  butt and thighs. So, today I decided I’m going to share my personal favorite lower body exercise and all of its awesome variations. It’s called the Rear-Foot Elevated Lunge Variation (a.k.a. Bulgarian Split Squat). This exercise is so effective that you’ll pretty much make your body thunder-thigh proof once you master it! It will literally transform before your eyes if you train it properly!

We all know how beautiful Sydney is on a clear blue day..And admittedly I enjoy hanging out and relaxing with some descent chow and a coldie on occasion..And that is exactly why we need to rain hard to “stop the rot” so to speak

Before we get right into this, one thing I definitely don’t want to do is feed into the idea of individual body part training and spot reduction on certain areas of the body. I am a fervent believer in total body training, meaning that we train the upper body, lower body, and core during every single workout. By training the whole body at once we maximally stimulate lean muscle gain and metabolism and promote total body fat burning in order to effectively eliminate the body fat that is hiding those areas that people are having trouble seeing; yep the stubborn fat areas that prevent a good body from becoming a great body. Plus, a diet high in lean protein, fiber, and green veggies and low in unnatural fats and refined sugars and starches is of course a pre-requisite if you want to see your muscles pop in a good way. It is also important to know that you lose fat in a genetically predetermined way. You can do all the crunches you want but without total body training, proper eating habits, and enough time to get to those stubborn fat areas you will never get rid of your gut, jiggly arms, or the junk in the trunk.

Moving onto the main event: the world’s greatest lower body exercise (in my humble opinion ). My favorite leg exercises are any sort of lunge variation because I prefer single leg exercise in lieu of their double leg counterparts for many reasons. For any person with back issues, single leg exercises allow them to safely perform lower body exercises without putting their lower lumbar spine in jeopardy of hyper flexion or excessive rounding that can cause back spasms in the short run and herniated discs in the long run. Furthermore, I feel there’s often such a strength and/or flexibility imbalance between one leg and the other for most people that it’s critical to address one leg at a time to really shore up the weak links from the start.

My favorite lunge variation is called the rear foot elevated lunge. So basically we’re going to elevate the back foot on a chair, bench, box, or any other sturdy foot support, usually about 30-45 CM high. You’ll put your front leg well out in front of you in order to make sure that your front knee and ankle are lined up. In general, I tell people to exaggerate how far you put your front leg forward so that the front knee is almost slightly behind the ankle as this really helps reduce sheer force on the knees. Initiate the exercise by loading the front heel and dropping your hips as low as you can in a pain-free range of motion while staying really tall up top with a proud chest and shoulders down and back. When you finish the rep  explosively drive through your front heel to return to the top of the movement. You can start with body weight only in search of front thigh parallel to the floor or lower depth and then progress by adding speed of movement or by adding dumbbells. You can even incorporate some very cool combination movements with this lower body exercise like adding a curl to press at the top of the movement or even by raising dumbbells overhead to really challenge your core and single-leg balance and stability.

I have yet to find an exercise that hits the legs as hard as this baby does. In particular, it really helps strengthen your vastus medialis muscle, that inner quad muscle that looks like a teardrop, that’s heavily responsible for tracking your patella and keeping your knee caps in line. So if you have a history of overtraining or patella-femoral issues this exercise is phenomenal for keeping your knees as bulletproof as possible.

Also, what’s great about it too is that it provides a very good stretch for the hip flexor of your back leg, an area that is often very tight, especially for guys. Any exercise that allows you to simultaneously stretch and strengthen your body is a real keeper. Don’t waste another moment with the useless adductor machine (a.k.a. the sex machine) and get off your butt and crank it with the world’s best lower body exercise today!

If you feel like dropping in and doing some single leg work drop me a line and come down to Sydney bootcamp at Pyrmont

Tags: boot, bootcamp, bootcamps, camp, camps, exercise, fat, legs, loss, lower body, lunges, personal, Sydney, trainer, training, weight

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2010 at 10:42 am and is filed under Boot Camp News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.