Photo Credit: S Buckley / Shutterstock
The article in Women’s Health outlined her workout, including four of the best butt movements *ever*, with 10 second descriptions of each. I think these moves are so great that they warrent a deeper look, so lets dig in.
The Fast and the Furious movies have a special place in my heart. And Elsa Pataky, who plays the Brazilian Cop who teams up with The Roc in Fast Five, and then gets dumped by Dom in Fast Six, is not only a super hottie, but she does smart workouts too.
So I loved the article in Women’s Health about Elsa Pataky’s butt workout, with a commentary from her trainer Fernado Sartorius.
Here’s the upshot on the workout – Elsa does strength training two times per week, and interval training two times per week.
The butt specific part of her workout is a mixture of butt activation exercises and big fat burning power moves with a butt emphasis. The Women’s Health article just listed them, but we’ll take a more in-depth look at each one:
Front Foot Elevated Split Squat – The article called it a “Step Lunge”. First off, I would call this a front-foot-elevated split squat. Basically, if you move your feet it’s a lunge, if you don’t move your feet, it’s a squat. Hence the name “split squat”.
That being said, we always hear about *Rear* Foot Elevated Split Squats. Rear Foot Elevated (RFE) Split Squats are great because they really put the emphasis on one leg. Mike Boyle has popularized them for sports training, and they’re his squat of choice (even above, gasp! the barbell back squat!). But we’re not talking about RFE Split Squats.
We’re talking about Front Foot Elevated (FFE) Split Squats – and Elsa Pataky’s trainer uses these for a very specific reason: They emphasize the butt.
Where Rear Food Elevation puts more emphasis on the quads, Front Foot Elevated puts more emphasis on the glute max – your butt! It’s kinda like putting you in the bottom of a really deep squat. And the deeper the squat (the lower your butt goes in a squat) the more butt work you get.
We always love squats because they are a powerful, full body fat burning exercise. So Elsa’s trainer has taken what’s an excellent fat burning exercise anyway, and added a little butt emphasis.
See the exercise here: http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/womens-health/fitness/galleries/photo/-/17682420/elsa-patakys-butt-workout/17682424/
and that brings us to Elsa’s next exercise:
Low Squats – First off, we love squats because they are one of the most powerful fat burning exercises we have in our workout toolbox.
If you’ve read any of the articles here about celebrity workouts, two thing they always include are squats and lunges. This is not an accident.
So, like how the FFE Split Squats above have been maximized for butt work by elevating the feet, normal squats can be maximized for butt work simply by squatting lower. Again, the lower your butt goes, the more work your butt does in this exercise.
***Back Safety: If you are going to load the exercise with weight (barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell) you can only safely squat as low as you can maintain a neutral low back. If your low back rounds, you are setting yourself up to blow out a disc.
Here is a workaround – if you *aren’t* going to add weight to deep squats, it doesn’t matter if your back rounds at all. For people who are strong but have tight hips, you can do weighted squats first, to what ever depth you are capable of doing safely, then finish with unweighted squats where you go the full butt-to-ankles range after.
***Knee Safety: If you are too weak to squat deep, or if you have some sort of an orthopedic injury to your knees, it can hurt your knees to squat deep. So – assuming your knees are healthy, but too weak to squat deep, you will need to spend some time working on strength, and slowly building up your range of motion.
*****Last thing – if you haven’t sorted out the whole keeping your knees on the same line as your toes thing in squats, work on what ever flexibility issues you need to first. If your squat sucks, going deeper will make it worse.
See the exercise here: http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/womens-health/fitness/galleries/photo/-/17682420/elsa-patakys-butt-workout/17682423/
Single Leg Glute Bridge – Flex your butt, drive your hips up to the sky. This is a great exercise for really hitting your butt hard, in a really safe, but really powerful way.
Glute Bridges have been a staple of both fat loss workouts and physical therapy workouts forever, but have recently gotten some traction in strength training circles also. I always used them at the end of my kettleblel bootcamp classes because they are a unique combination of being hard as hell, a great butt workout, a great core workout, and also being a great way to bring people’s heart rate down at the end of the workout.
The biggest mistake people make on a single leg glute bridge is not tightening up their core and keeping their hips square to the floor. Don’t miss the awesome anti-rotational core work of keeping both hips up.
See the exercise here: http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/womens-health/fitness/galleries/photo/-/17682420/elsa-patakys-butt-workout/17682422/
Low Lateral Band Walk – This is an awesome exercise that is completely missunderstood. In the rare case that I see someone doing it in the gym, it’s done incorrectly 110% of the time. One of the up-sides of having worked in a physical therapy office is that we were big into Glute Medius work – it’s an important hip stabilizer and sort of a “forgotten core muscle” insomuch as the hips and core need to work as a team to protect your low back, knees and hips.
In fact, even the picture on the website/in the magazine isn’t really very great: http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/womens-health/fitness/galleries/photo/-/17682420/elsa-patakys-butt-workout/17682421/
***Here is the trick – if your toes turn out at all you’re going to hit the TFL instead of the Glute Medius (the butt muscle we want to hit).
You really need to do this facing a mirror, and make sure your feet point totally straight, and that you step out from your heels and not your toes. If you feel it in your butt you are doing it right.
Interval Training – Elsa’s trainer has her do strength training 2 days per week and interval training 2 days per week. The intervals she does are:
30 seconds of work
and
45-60 seconds of rest.
You’ll notice that she has a positive work to rest ratio – there’s more rest than work. This allows for better recovery, and allows you to work harder in each interval. The majority of the time, this is how you want to set up your interval workouts.
Your Butt Workout – What You Should Have Learned
I wanted to take a few minutes with each exercise that Elsa Pataky does, and see if I could teach you something that you could apply to your workouts.
Always remember that fat loss workouts are full body workouts, requiring a push, a pull, a squat, and a hip hinge.
One thing we are starting to see a lot more of in 2013 is people starting with big full body fat loss exercises like Low Squats and FFE Split Squats, and then moving to more isolated movements like Single Leg Glute Bridge, and then finishing with super isolated movements like Band Walking.
The last takeaway is that she gets most of her results from two short strength training workouts and two itnerval training workouts. She mentioned she does a lot of other activities, but this is the core of her fat loss workouts and what got her athletic butt.
Last but not least – always remember that if you eat a ton of crap and have a layer of fat on top of your ass, then no amount of exercise will spot reduce that. You need to clean up your diet AND get the workout right.
Enjoy!
by Josh Hillis
Josh is the Chief People Officer and Fitness Content Lead for One by One Nutrition,
the author of Fat Loss Happens on Monday,
and writes the Habit Coaching System column for Strength Matters Magazine
Great ideas here Josh! Would love to see it all put together in a full body workout!