How Fitness Models Get a Tiny Waistline

I hope you guys are having an awesome week so far! I had a fantastic conversation just this morning talking about waistlines.

It started off talking about belly-fat and moved on to how to get a tiny wasp-like (is the term they used) waistline.

A while ago, I did a workshop called The Swimsuit Body Solution (which I might do again closer to the summer), where I talked through a bunch of secrets the professional swimsuit models use to get their figure. You know, other than Photoshop… 😉

One of the things we covered was, what I called, body sculpting. It’s the illusion they create by their overall shape. If you just took their silhouette, for example, you’d notice they go in significantly at the waist. And that’s probably exactly what you’d note.

But what you might not notice is they do that because they also deliberately go out at the hips and shoulders.

So here’s a little secret… Fitness models (specifically bikini fitness) are obsessed with their shoulders and glutes! And mostly because, you’ve guessed it, it makes their waist look smaller.

The same applies to men. In bodybuilding classes of competition, they wear a tiny thong, but in the ‘fitness’ class (like the guys you’d see on the front of Men’s Health, for example), they wear long board shorts that cover most of their legs. The main focus is on the upper body, specifically the broad shoulders and small waistline.

Now, I know you probably don’t want to go to the same kind of extremes that fitness models do with your lifestyle, but you’d still benefit by giving these two forgotten areas a bit more attention.

Here’s 3 moves we do in our Personal Training sessions that you can do at home. You’ll need a pair of dumbbells:

1) Dumbbell Lateral to Front Raise

  • Hold a dumbbell in each hand, and stand upright.
  • Keeping your arms straight, lift the dumbbells out to the side.
  • When at shoulder height, still keeping your arms straight, bring the dumbbells together in front of your shoulders.
  • Lower the dumbbells down, then repeat the other way around (lift to front, open arms out to the side, lower).

2) Side Plank with Pyramid Toe Tap

  • Start in a side-plank position, then lift the top leg up
  • Pointing the toes on this leg towards the floor, tap the toe down in front of you
  • Bring the leg straight back up to the top, then tap down behind you and repeat

3) Contra-lateral Split Squat with Overhead Press (mouthful, right…? 😉 )

  • Take a big step back into Split-Squat position, and hold a dumbbell up at your shoulder in the same hand as the leg you stepped back on.
  • Keep the dumbbell at your shoulder, then squat down into a Split Squat.
  • Stand back up, and when you reach the top, press the dumbbell overhead.
  • When you’ve done a full set, repeat on the other side!

I’d aim for a weight where you can rep out for 30-45 seconds for 3-4 rounds. It should be pretty tough going by the end! If it’s not, put the weight up next time.

Do the exercises in that order too if you’re doing them in one routine as they’ll work together to make each of them more effective. Here’s the science bit: We’re using a principle called the inter-dependency of muscle groups to create a synergistic effect where the sum of the exercises is now greater then the individual exercises.

Now we’ve got the boring wordy bit out of the way, I’ve also knocked up this quick video to demo each exercise for you:

Comment below with any questions! 🙂

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