04 Jan Building The Ideal Female Body
It’s the new year and time to get refocused on your health and fitness.What are your goals? To lose some weight? Get a flatter stomach? Or to build your version of the ideal female body?
Everywomen has a slightly different version of the what the ideal female body looks like, and how close they can reasonably be to this. ButI bet 90% of the women I’ve trained have a pretty similar end goal: A leaner, athletic body.
With that in mind…
Here are the 5 Keys To Build The Ideal Female Body
- Strength Training
- Sculpting Exercises
- Metabolic Conditioning
- Healthy Nutrition
- Healthy Lifestyle
Let dive into each below:
Strength Training
Strength training is the most important factor to build a lean, athletic body. The best strength training programs are performed with free weights such as barbells, dumb bells, and other tools that allow you to challenge the muscles sufficiently. The reps, sets and other variables are very important, and good form is essential.
Some of the key moves that everyone should focus on are Squats, Deadlifts, Rows, Pressing and core movements.
You want to challenge yourself by increasing the weights on these exercises, and you probably have a lot of muscle that you could add before your legs or other muscles get too big. For most women, this takes years to get to this point, and when you reach that point, simply stop increasing the weight or back off the weight to find your ideal shape.
Summary: Building the foundation of lean muscle is important to have a high metabolism and get the lean, athletic look everyone wants. Start with the movements described above and progress each week. When performed with short rest periods, it is excellent for burning stored body fat because it elevates your metabolism for up to 72 hours after completion.
Sculpting Exercises
The big 5 movements (and their variations) recommended above are the foundational exercises we must be proficient with. From here, there are more isolation type exercises that are important to improvethe little muscles that prevent injuries or sculpt your ideal body.
Here’s some examples:
External rotation exercises for shoulder health and hip bridges (below) to strengthen the glute muscles. This provides a firm, round shape to this area.
Summary: Sculpting exercises help you sculpt your body to look and perform how you want.
Metabolic Conditioning
Metabolic Conditioning could be considered smart cardio. It’s proven to be much more effective than typical cardio for burning fat in much less time. Winning!
Performing sprint intervals, or circuits with burpees, jump rope, plyometics movements and other exercises with short rest periods will get you excellent results. MetCons can range from 2-20 minutes, depending on the challenge. Start with something manageable that you can progress so you can challenge yourself to get better every time.
Summary: MetCons will help you blast fat, improve endurance and is the perfect compliment to strength training.
Example: Perform a 10 Round Circuit where you perform 40 Seconds of Jump Rope followed by 20 seconds of rest.
Healthy Nutrition
Nutrition is most people’s limiting factor and we’ve found that the accountabilityof a coach is hard to replace.
In general, we’ve found that simplicity is the key to successful change, so don’t overload yourself with excessive information and try to adopt 5 habits at once.
Our recent blog post Eating For a Goal covers a brief overview of an excellent starting nutrition plan to get the ball rolling.
Summary: To look and feel your best, you must construct a meal plan with a goal in mind.
Healthy Lifestyle
Training and nutrition are the most important factors in achieving your ideal body, but living a healthy lifestyle can make or break it as well. It doesn’t matter how much you train and eat properly if you’re only getting 5 hours of sleep a night, your body can’t recover well from your workouts. Excessive alcohol intake and stress can hold you back as well.
Summary
Now that you have the 5 keys to build the ideal female body, but here’s the cool thing:You don’t have to adopt all of these habits at once, but they all are important to include in your plan at some point. Also remember, you don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to be pretty consistent. So set a plan to start integrating these habits into your life to achieve your goals.
At Faster Fitness, we provide a fun environment that makes achieving your goals easy. So if you want to get leaner and more athletic, then check outour Group Personal Training or Personal Training Program.
We look forward to helping you make this year your best!
