Over the years I've trained many men and women as well as many celebrities. Each person has a different goal and a different vision of what the want or need for their body. Men want to be muscular and ripped and women want to be slim and hard.
Let's take women first. From what I've seen the biggest complaint is the fat on the side of the thighs or the butt.
I see trainers in the gym giving these women heavy leg presses which first of all is wrong. That will only build bigger muscle in the legs and make them look heavier.
Actually it should be very light weights with 20 to 30 reps. Also hours of cardio won't work either. What happens is after 20 min the body starts to burn muscle and not fat which actually makes you think you are getting fatter. Your mind tells you that you have to do more cardio but then you burn more muscle and so on.
You can do all this cardio and also and extended cardio weight workout and you will harden up with the weights. Weight resistant training gives you muscle shape and contour, and when you shed the fat, you then have an awesome looking body. But how do you do this? The secret is diet or maybe it's no longer a secret just the lack of motivation to eat right.
Your body will drop weight on a high-protein, low-carb diet which the bodybuilders of the 40s discovered and the first to try it without doing cardio. They were ripped on this diet.
Chicken and asparagus is the best for this but you have to be dedicated and it does get boring. The results in the mirror and the compliment from people is what keeps you going.
You can vary this with lean meats or fish but this is the basic way to lose the fat.
Men also come to me and want a SIX PACK OF ABS. They do SIT UPS till they're blue in the face and this is not the way to do it. They still have that lower belly fat.
As I have said so many times before that abdominal (abs) are a muscle or group of muscles and it you over work them they get this blocky thick look and make you look fat even though you aren't. They grow like any other muscle.
Working Abs too heavy with weights.
When I was in my teens I started doing sit ups in the house and my mom would hold my feet down. Sit ups made my abs blocky and big and when I'd wear a shirt, people would ask if I had a belly on me and of course I said no and showed them my abs. This is what you don't want.
My abs are okay here at 160 pounds but as I began to grow and gain weight so did My Abs. I decided to quit working them so hard and reduce to 100 leg raises a day for the lower ab not the upper. This worked better and kept them flat. These are jack knife leg raises and they work great with 100 reps daily.
So, in closing the only way to get those troubled areas down is to diet down. You cannot select an area and spot reduce it. You can firm up underneath the fat but in order to get that last final bit of belly fat off or fat around the hips is to completely drop out the carbs for weeks and it will disappear. This is what the pro bodybuilders do and those who really want to be lean.
This is fitness model Jennifer Henry who stays in lean hard shape and is dedicated to it.
Eventually when you reach your goal you can introduce some pleasure foods but keep it to monitored and if you see fat coming back then slow down on the carbs again.
This was a candid shot taken of me and my friends on Santa Monica Boardwalk in the '70s. It was strictly diet about 80% and at that time there were no cardio machines in the gym. No bikes, stair masters or treadmills. And we kept really lean and hard.
This is the best advice I can give you and I still follow it today in my 70s.
