Trainer Tips: How To Get Michelle Obama Arms

THE arms have taken on a life of their own. They have provoked controversy, envy, a bit of backlash, even bad puns about the right to bare them. But enough debate and deconstruction. Now women are talking about construction.

"I want Michelle Obama arms," Julie Eich told her trainer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan two weeks ago, uttering a request echoing off many gym mirrors these days.

In recent months, the first lady has bared her toned biceps, triceps and shoulders at the Inaugural Ball, on the covers of Vogue and People, at her husband's first televised address to Congress and in her official White House photograph. She does not have Madonna's sinewy muscles popping out of paper-thin skin. Nor, with her solid 5-foot-11 frame, does Mrs. Obama, who is 45, have a typical runway model body. That makes her image even more admirable to many women, and perhaps even attainable.

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