BASED ON YOUR SURVEY RESULTS, HERE ARE MY RECOMMENDATIONS:
Our focus is to maintain and build muscle in the right places while cutting fat to create a fit and curvy frame while maintaining your vegan diet! Depending on your starting point, this can take at least three months to start to see real results, but of course all programs should become a lifestyle that you can maintain so you can maintain your new shape as well.
Here are a few main points to get you started to train for your body type & meet your unique nutritional needs. Your program goal is to have an Hourglass figure while living a vegan lifestyle! Here are a few tips from the program that I created just for your body type goal:
1) BUILD MUSCLE
Building muscle focusing on your posterior chain in your lower half to start to create shape on your butt and hamstrings while strengthening your lower back so you can lift heavier. Exercises should be specific to shaping an Hourglass lower half and not a football player looking lower half. This doesn’t mean don’t lift heavy by any means. I want you to lift very heavy once you perfect your form, but, you must be doing the correct exercises and none of the ones that will make you look blocky. Here are three of my favorite posterior chain exercises for your body type:
LOWER BODY
i) Deadlifts or Sumo Deadlifts
ii) Kneeling Cable Kick Backs
iii) Smith Machine Reverse Lunges
UPPER BODY
It’s also important to build your upper body so you don’t create a pear shape. You want to be a balanced Hourglass Shape. Here’s the trick for your body shape. Don’t focus on isolated movements for your arms, instead, stick to compound movements that will give you the feminine version of the v-shape back, lifted looking chest and shapely shoulders without looking boxy or stocky. Here are my three favorite moves for your body type:
i) Elastic Band Pull-ups (back)
ii) Seated Shoulder Press (shoulders)
iii) Incline Dumbbell Press (chest)
Recognize this girl? Hourglass girl Ada is modeling the moves from my workout program above and she had ah-mazing results in just 3 month! If your interested in the full workout program + Vegan meal plan CLICK HERE to learn more!!
3) CORE
The CORE is very important to create the illusion of an hourglass physique. Again, the movements you do are very important. My favorite exercises for creating a cinched looking waist-line are to include Pilates in your training. Pilates teaches proper breathing and cinching which will pull your waist in from the front and sides making your hips look wider by a natural illusion. It will also improve your posture and allow you to lift heavier. I don’t have any favorite Pilates exercises, they’re all great, but the important part of Pilates is that you are flexing and breathing correctly. This can take inches off your waist without even losing any fat.
3) HIIT
Cardio is part of the program, but you don’t want to get caught up in steady state, long duration cardio that will eat away at your muscle and leave you hungry and reaching for extra food. Learn HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). This style of training will boost your hormones a more youthful body, increase fat loss in a short amount of time, assist with muscle maintenance and more.
Once you learn HIIT, if you’re not already doing it, don’t overdo it. If you do it right, you’ll only need to do it 2-4 times a week for 4-20 minutes max per session. Here are some of my favorite HIIT styles:
i) Tabata – 8 rounds 20 seconds work/10 seconds rest
example exercise – Burpee Belly Flop
ii) Sprints
iii) Met-Con Drills
Met-con Drills are a mix of HIIT cardio and muscle exercises to get your heart rate going plus building muscle!
Go back and forth between your HIIT and Strength Exercises for 4 rounds 45 seconds per exercise!
Chose about 4-6 exercises and repeat the process!
One example below is HIIT: Booty Band Low Jacks w/ MUSCLE: Heavy Kettlebell Plié Squat
HIIT: MUSCLE:
4) FOOD
Food is a huge part of the process. As a vegan it can be challenging to get in the protein you need to build your curves! If you do this wrong, you could either not eat enough to keep your results of all your hard work or eat too much and not see any changes from all your hours logged at the gym. It’s easy to get this right if you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t, you could be keeping yourself from seeing all your amazing results (it really is that important). As a thicker girl, if you have a layer of fat covering your gains, you may never know that they’re there, and that’s a frustrating place to be. You could have a bad-ass six pack just hiding under the extra 5 lbs but never see it because you don’t want to address your eating, but if you do it, you may never look back.
Here are some tips to help ensure you see results:
i) Track Your Food Intake for 30 Days.
The tracking is not just to ensure that you stay within a macro count or calories, but to give you a better understanding of what you’re eating in a day. Are you over-eating, under-eating, the results might very well surprise you. This will also help you take time to see things like, are you getting enough protein to support your muscle gains, are you eating greens every day, drinking water, etc. Sometimes we assume we’re eating really healthy, but in actuality, we’re not. As a Vegan, it can be particularly tricky to hit your protein goal without going over on fats and carbs. Having a balanced meal plan will be key to meeting your goals.
ii) Try Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting (IF) is a very effective form of eating for fat loss for a large majority of the population and it’s very easy to do for most. The rule is to pick an eating window to eat within and you fast the rest of the day. Personally, I like the 8/16 model of eating within an 8-hour window and fasting for 16 hours (which includes sleep hours). An example would be to eat between the hours of 11am-7pm and fast from 8 pm to 10 am. If you’re a night eater or shift worker, this could help you quite a bit. It’s not for everyone and you should check with your doctor first, but there are many benefits to this style of eating.
iii) Have a Protein Goal 🏆
Many people worry about cutting carbs or not eating too much fat but don’t think very much about their protein intake. I say, look at your protein goal first. How do you do this? If you are very active, take in 1-1.2 grams of protein per lb. If you’re moderately active take in .8-1 gram of protein per lb. If you’re sedentary take in .6-.8 grams of protein per lb. For example, if you’re moderately active, and you weigh 150lbs do the math: 150x.8 = 120grams of protein/day. Protein has 4 calories per gram so you’d be taking in roughly 480 calories of your day directly from protein. Next chose your fat grams at approximately 20-30% of your food intake per day and whatever is left is your carbs. This works very well for this body type and goal, but we are all different. If you want to do a science-based test to see if you do better on high carbs or high protein, check out the book Metabolic Typing and take their test. I also offer a Sugar Cleanse that is tried and true by thousands of women and men that will focus on 30-40grams of sugar per day while increasing good fats and having a protein goal. This has worked 100% of the time for clients that have tried this plan.
If you want me to lead you through all these above tips and more and join my amazing support board of thousands of amazing women also doing the program, check out THIS LINK to see more and join the program!
Hope you enjoy!
Xoxo Lyzabeth
