The Physique 57 Solution (15 page)

Repeat this stretch on the left side.

This stretch gives you energy and helps you to breathe better by expanding your entire chest and shoulder area. In addition to prepping you for your Thigh series, it helps you avoid a hunched posture—do it anytime your back and shoulders need perking up.

MUSCLES TARGETED:
Pecs, shoulders

Sit cross-legged on the floor with your abs pulled in and your spine tall.

Bring both arms behind your body and clasp your hands together, palms touching.

Now straighten your arms and extend them out and up, pressing your shoulders back as far as you can. You can lean forward slightly as you stretch.

THIGHS

N
OW THAT YOUR METABOLIC RATE IS STOKED, WE WANT
to keep you in the calorie-burning zone and take things up a notch. The next section of your workout is Thighs: the series where we blast away those saddlebags, knee flaps, and jiggly inner thighs and replace them with slim, toned, sexy legs that will make wearing shorts and miniskirts a pleasure. Our Thigh series is designed to get your heart muscle pumping and your thighs shaking, and that’s just the way we like it—anything less than that is not worth it!

Your thighs are made up of four different major muscle groups: the quadriceps (the anterior, or front, of the thigh muscles), the hamstrings (the posterior, or back, of the thigh muscles), the adductors (inner thighs), and the abductors (outer thighs). Together they make up the single largest muscle group in the body, and they generate by far the biggest caloric burn—in fact, your quadriceps alone burn more calories than any other set of muscles. Thus we spend a lot of our time on thighs because we feel that this is where you can really make your gains: With every new series of reps, you are breaking down fat to fuel the thighs’ major caloric burn, and sculpting the muscles themselves into powerhouses of lean tissue that will burn extra calories for you around the clock. Whereas most workouts tend to emphasize the quads and hamstrings—and the repetitive anterior-posterior movements that are the hallmarks of running, spinning, and aerobics—our moves
are specifically designed to target ALL FOUR of the thighs’ major muscle groups. Throughout our Thigh series, we’re constantly tightening and tapering every single one of those hard-to-reach muscles: firming them up, pulling them in, and wrapping them ever closer to the bone.

The series is broken down into three separate sections. The first two are performed standing up and use a rapid-fire sequence of positions and variations to isolate and target the different muscles. At just four minutes apiece, these sections are perfectly timed to work your muscles to their max and then give you a chance to recover; if you continued working much longer than four minutes, your form would get sloppy and you’d see diminishing returns. So we perform the two sections back-to-back with a two-minute series of stretches in between: We hit all four areas hard—quads, hamstrings, abductors, adductors—then stretch and change positions and hit them all hard again in a different way. These sections complement one another and incorporate a wide variety of angles and ranges of movement, all the better to engage those tiny ancillary muscles, as well as the muscles in the lower leg, especially calves. We also use a playground ball in many of the moves to spot-target the inner thighs whenever we can and make sure they don’t get overlooked. All in all, our thigh workout is kind of like a rotisserie: We’re getting every muscle all around!

The third section is Thigh Dancing, which provides a fun way to sculpt your waistline and hips along with your thighs. For Thigh Dancing, we get down on the floor and really move and groove to the music, which can feel like a welcome break after all that standing thigh work. But make no mistake—Thigh Dancing is hard! We engage the entire thigh in an isometric hold and then perform pulses, tucks, and other micromovements designed to overload your muscles one more time and finish the job. Thigh Dancing is like having one last cocktail—after that, you’re done and it’s time to move on!

When it comes to the stretches, we do two different sets for thighs, each of which serves a slightly different purpose. The first set is performed right after the first Thigh section and is all about the recovery interval—we want to keep you in the fat-burning zone, so we move right through a brief series of stretches, giving your muscles a quick chance to recharge so that you can start the second
Thigh section even stronger. The second stretch series occurs after Thigh Dancing and provides a bit of a deeper stretch—we take more time, breathe more deeply, and really lengthen and soothe those muscles as we round out the thigh portion of the workout.

You can use these moves to supplement your workouts, or to sculpt your thighs whenever you have a few extra minutes:

Thigh Dancing: 1½ minutes (
here
)

Kick Line: 1 minute (
here
)

Our Thigh series is definitely the most cardio-intensive part of our workout, and many of the moves include arm movements and other elements designed to get your heart rate up and provide a burst of aerobic intensity. Therefore it’s not surprising that many of our clients find this series to be their biggest challenge. But with great challenges come great rewards—and if you can do four minutes of Skier and Swivel Chair, or do one more set of Hip Tucks when your quads have turned to jelly, you’ll know you can conquer anything in the outside world!