Accentuate Your Natural Shape with Exercise

When it comes to exercise, misconceptions like spot reducing or lightly sculpting specific areas can create confusion especially if you're working out alone. A personal trainer is expensive, so you may not have help to take aim at your trouble areas. Over time, you've learned to love your legs and hate your butt or love your arms but wish for broader shoulders and want to develop these areas. To create a workout program that works, it's important to decide on the shape of your body beforehand. Spot reducing is not possible so you must create a weight training program that produces a streamlined and more symmetrical body image. This will also allow muscular development and burn calories while working out.

What is your shape?

You will hear the terms pear or apple shaped when it comes to body image but H-O-A-X is a realistic way to describe your body. Each letter has a correlation to your shape. You will realize which exercises to incorporate to build muscle in specific areas once you've decided which letter best describes your shape.

Straight up and down

A body shape that is straight up and down is the best way to describe an "H" shape. You may be broad or narrow, but your midsection and lower body runs straight down with your upper body.

Round through the middle

Are your arms and legs slim? Do you carry most of your weight through your midsection? If you continually stay slim through the arms and legs, but gain weight through your torso, toosh and midsection then your shape is an "O."

Heavier on the bottom

Unfortunately, women carry more fat in the lower body because women naturally have more to begin with in these areas. This sets off the need to try to spot reduce an "A" shaped frame with exercise.

Symmetrical from the top to bottom

There are some people who have the "X" frame naturally. Broad shoulders, small waist, proportional legs and buttocks to match the upper body.

Full Body Exercises

Change your workouts and nutritional program to reduce fat from your entire body and create better symmetry to change your shape. Fat from the entire body must be lost before the abdominal area will become smaller or flatter. Create a program that engages all of your muscles to do this.

For instance, add exercises that develop more muscle in your front, lateral and rear deltoid if you have naturally round bone structure in your shoulders. Changes within your program to develop specific areas is not the same as spot reducing, which is the misconception of training one spot to size reduce and not training anything else.

Source: Talbots Guidelines
Source: Experience