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A woman executing a push up or press-up.
A woman executing a push up or press-up.

Pushups! Nothing gets the job done quite like a pushup.


We're talking about an exercise that requires zero equipment, yet challenges our chest, triceps, shoulders and core muscles in a way that no other exercise can. Almost every culture in the world uses traditional pushups as a way to assess upper body muscular endurance, and for good reason. It's also great for causing hypertrophy, aka creating lean muscle tissue.


Pushups are challenging, and that's what makes them such a great exercise. Every able-bodied person should be able to complete at least a dozen pushups within a minute. People sometimes try and fail to complete a few pushups, and then decide (or are coached) to do the pushups on their knees. This can be good for teaching the person what it feels like to have flexion in their elbows. It can also teach them what it feels like to support their upper body with their triceps, and it can build some muscular endurance in the triceps as well.


However, knee pushups are an entirely differently exercise to pushups. The trainee does not have to support a significant portion of their bodyweight. With their knees on the ground, the trainee cannot fully engage all of their front core muscles, aka their anterior chain. What ends up happening is trainees will do several dozen knee pushups -- sometimes 30 or more repetitions, but still cannot complete a handful of real pushups. That's because there is no actual progression between the two exercises. The most direct way to get better at pushups is to execute pushups.


The most important element is learning to support yourself in a plank position with the arms extended. Individuals who struggle to maintain a straight spine and midsection in that plank position will struggle to complete a pushup. The struggle has nothing to do with their triceps and chest if they are able to complete several dozen knee pushups. The struggle is actually their core strength and core endurance. Specifically, the trainee typically has weakness in their transverse abdominus, or the lower part of their torso. That portion of their core is being asked to support the weight of their lower body, and that's what presents their greatest challenge in completing the pushup.


One way to get a stronger core for pushups is to start with your body flat on the ground, and learn to contract your core from there. Now, think of your core as every single muscle between your armpits to your knee pits. They all work in unison to stabilize your body in many positions. Squeeze your inner thighs together slightly. Feel your glutes contract. Use your midsection muscle to tighten up, as you imagine your muscles contracting like the wringing of a towel. Contract the upper back muscles, as you feel your shoulder blades shifting down into a locked position. Then, you can place your hands just outside of shoulder width and press yourself up until your arms are locked out. Maintain that tension on your entire core, then lower yourself back to the ground and relax. Reset and try again. This variation of pushup, sometimes called floor pushups, will directly lead to you being able to do real pushups!


Another variation for getting better pushups is to do partial pushups. Start in the upright plank position, arms fully extended. Tighten all of your core muscles, as you did in the floor pushups. Start from your legs and work your way up to your back and chest. Maintain that core tightness, and then bend your elbows to lower yourself as low as you can comfortably go. Don't be afraid of falling! Then press yourself back up to the upright plank position. Aim to do 12 partial pushups at a time. Every 3 to four days, try again. You can even use your phone to record yourself and see how low you're going. Go lower and lower until those partial pushups because full pullups!

 
 

Now that you have the big-picture view of how I get women to lose stubborn belly fat, I will give you a closer look at the first step in the process -- their nutrition. Whether we're using the "FREE" formula or the "FRESH" formula (see the previous article), they both start with FOOD. This doesn't just apply to women who want to lose weight. Having a nutrition plan for achieving fat loss is the single most important element for every single demographic, whether you're a 45 year old woman or a 28 year old man. (Side note: there actually is ONE demographic who can out-train a poor diet -- teenage boys. Don't tell them that. It's our secret.)

Eat well. THEN exercise!
Eat well. THEN exercise!

You've heard it a million times, it's "diet and exercise". You've heard them so many times that they lose their meaning, if one ever understood what they meant in the first place! And because they're said in tandem with one another, it gives people the incorrect impression that they are equally important. Worse still, most people overestimate how well they eat and think, "Oh, I just need to exercise more", without realizing that their efforts are pointless.

So I start with a woman's height, weight, body composition (i.e., how much body fat she has) and age. Then, I use three different formulas to calculate what her total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is. Her TDEE tells us how many calories she requires to maintain her current mass. It will vary depending on how active she is. Does she exercise once a week or does she exercise six days a week? Once I know that figure, I typically have women start with a modest 10 - 15% deficit. This means they will consistently eat about 15% fewer calories than their bodies requires to maintain their current mass. The key for them is consistency, and this is where people tend to fail most often. People sometimes treat their diet the way they treat their job -- it's a thing to focus on during the week, but then they ignore it on the weekends. The problem with that approach is that it not only takes the person out of the deficit, it typically comes with blood sugar spikes that accompany the indulgence in their favorite high calorie foods. Worst of all, it teaches their body to not adapt metabolically to a new size, and to cling to their old, heavier body size instead.

I expect my clients to lose around 2 pounds of fat per week, when they stick to their program. After a few weeks, we re-assess their body fat and consider increasing their daily calorie deficit to 20%. The deficit can be larger if the individual is in the morbid obesity category, though I tend not to exceed a 24% calorie deficit. I want the shift to be modest, but sustainable and to not feel like torture.


 
 

Let's get right to it!


I love lists and easy-to-remember acronyms, so I developed two acronyms to help women understand our priorities for losing fat quickly and healthfully. The first acronym is FREE, and the second, more updated acronym is FRESH-CC.


FREE stands for food, rest, exercise and effort. Food specifically stands for being in a caloric deficit for a consistent, continued amount of time (at least 90 days). This is the first item on the list because it is by FAR the most impactful element to losing fat. You could do nothing else on this list, and still succeed in losing fat if you just stayed in a modest caloric deficit. Rest specifically means getting adequate sleep on a daily basis to help regulate hormone production and allow your body to naturally cycle through several metabolic processes. The third and fourth letters are exercise and effort. Almost any form of exercise will aid your fat loss journey, so long as it's done safely and consistently. That could be walking, jogging, resistance training, strength training, or any other number of activities. Effort means the degree of work or intensity related to those workouts. This would be sprint interval training or High-intensity interval training versus walking. Exercise and effort level are the two elements where a personal trainer can help a client achieve their goals in the gym, or online via workout plans, exercise "homework", and regular check-ins. The FREE formula applies to any adult at any age who wants to lose extra fat.


FRESH-CC makes the formula even more specific to women in perimenopause and post-menopause. The list is still in order of precedence, meaning the first letters are significantly more important than the last ones. FRESH-CC is food, rest, and exercise (strength training, hypertrophy training, and cardio + core training). Food and rest are still the two most powerful elements, so I typically spend the first three to four days working on that part with a new client. Strength training is absolutely critical to helping a woman build stronger bones and stronger muscle fibers and has an immediate, positive impact on her metabolic wellness. Hypertrophy is a fancy word for building larger muscles, and this also improves metabolic wellness, as your body will retain less fat as you ask it to build muscle. By the way, building larger muscles doesn't mean looking like a bodybuilder. For the majority of women, it just means you look healthy and capable. Finally, cardio + core is a great approach to really targeting belly fat, where we typically spend 29 minutes doing steady-state cardio followed by 16 minutes of abdominal exercise (yes, that part is intense)!


The challenge for a lot of women is that when they try to lose fat on their own, they wind up executing this list backwards. Specifically, they will self-assess that in the food category they "eat pretty well" or "I eat okay", and they will self-assess in the rest category that "I go to bed around the same time and I get up in the mornings", so they skip to the exercise and high-intensity elements. This frequently leads to no meaningful results or a mild injury, which sets them back even further from reaching their goals.


Real, hard numbers: for women between 40 and 60, exercise alone can account for roughly 2.8 pounds of fat loss in 6 months. Diet alone (consistent 20% deficit) can account for roughly 8.5 pounds of fat loss. Diet and exercise combined leads to 10.8 pounds of fat loss in the same amount of time. Many women think they're in the last category (diet + exercise), but unfortunately the numbers on their scales say otherwise.


After years of training people, I have come to learn that "I eat pretty well" roughly translates to "I don't eat like a glutton, and there are people in my life who eat worse than I do." That is usually completely true, but it is not the same as eating in a consistent deficit of at least 10 - 20% of your maintenance calories. When you're in a deficit, you absolutely feel it! Most people feel a serious struggle for three to five days, and many wind up quitting within that time frame or "taking the weekend off because they earned it". Part of my job is to empathetically guide clients through that part of the journey by reminding them of their end goals, and redirecting them when stress, fear of failure, or life events cause them to deviate from their path to success.

 
 
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