Michelle Obama's Arms

First off, I must say I am happy to see arms with muscle mass considered stylish and goal setting for women. It wasn't to long ago that many women were pursuing skinny Paris Hilton or Angelina Jolie starved down arms. I remember a few potential clients coming up to me asking about Halle Berry scrawny arms. I gave them the best way to get that. Starve yourself by day and go for the Celebrity Champagne-Cocaine diet by night and you should be headed in the right direction. Needless to say none of them signed up for my training.

Getting back to Ms. Obama. I was very happy today while watching the Today show and seeing a segment on her great arms. It was very good to hear that women want... well... muscle mass on their arms. So I stopped what I was doing and watched the segment of what her personal trainer is doing with her. Well my friends, my gleeful smile soon changed to a stoneface grimace. What I saw was a trainer (I think) telling the viewers of Today show Ms. Obama picks up cute little paper weights and curls one way and then another. Then she goes to the cable machine and does tricep extensions one way and reverse the hand grip to really isolate, stimulate, antioxidate the triceps. Teeth clenched I walked away from the tv and sat down to vent in my blog. I'm not going to go off on the toning and sculpting muscle comes from superlight flourescent weights is absolute bullshit. Nope not gonna do it. I am just going to state how I believe a woman would get a physique like Michelle Obama (deep breath). Keep in mind this is my humble opinion after training a few female clients here and there to get the "Oh My God I am Fucking Hot!" results.

Michelle training by Ty:

- First off our dear First Lady has pretty good posture. You need this to look good. No one likes a defeated looking posture of the insecure. Flaunt your health lady! Good posture will help keep up what we "health and science book readers" call the kinetic chain. Before you can have proper functional movement you MUST have proper posture. A HUUUGGEE bonus is good posture keeps the "core" (starting to really hate that word) active and strong. I constantly cue proper strong posture checkpoints so much that, we changed all the music in my training studio to just my voice saying the following again and again:

" All work and no play make Jack a dull boy"

Just kidding, really these are my cues:

" Keep your head back with chin slightly tucked..."
" Keep shoulders back and down as if you are squeezing your shoulder blades together..."
" If you are unsure if your "core" is strong and ready, simply cough...feel that mid torso contraction?....now replicate that tight feeling in the core and breathe normally with it held like that (Ninja'd from Stuart McGill).

- For the main event, the arms are quickly trained up in comparison to the rest of the body. By default you can check out your arms to see how much the body is changing. If you have flabby waving good bye amplifiers attached to your triceps, then you probably have the same deal with the whole body. It is because of this isolating exercises such as a curl and tricep extensions are kept to a minimum. We want more caloric burning and metabolic driving points per exercise. We want as much muscle going to work in a single exercise as we can get. So go for the gusto. Let's get primal baby! Pushups, dips and chinups. If you can't do the exercises, not a problem. These primal monsters are easily regressed:
1. Pushup becomes a plank (not the sissy plank on your forearms...a real plank on your hands). There are plenty of ways to progress from a plank to pushup. The easiest being placing a cushion under you and slowly lowering your body onto it. Get up however you want. Oh ya, don't even think about those sissy-chicken-baby pushups on your begging knees.
2. Dips become dips off of chairs or any elevated surface. If that is still to hard bend your knees until it is manageable.
3. Unmerciful chinups become squirmy kicking chickens as you convulse to pull yourself up. Please don't really do that instead you will get yourself to the top position and hold yourself there. Better yet, lower yourself down slowly. It is absolutely amazing how quickly the body adapts and you will be able to knock out serious chinups. Oh ya, if you really have to you can use the assisted lame chinup machine ( I really hate those things).

The quoted trainer's recommendation was some generic crap like three sets of fifteen. My recommendation to really get you there is the following:

- If you are a newbie in the battle to look good naked, then simply do one set to form failure per exercise. Take as much rest as you need and hit the next exercise. That's it....just one set. When I say form failure, I mean you can no longer properly do the exercise. Now write your results down and because I like kidding around a lot I lied about one set.. so do another set to form failure with attempts to beat your last score and lower your rest breaks and that is one session your done.

- If you have been in the trenches of training for a while and can handle this, go for a circuit. Rest breaks are active so do active stuff in between (jumping jacks, jumprope, squat thrust etc). Complete one circuit take a minute or two and do it again. Keep going in circuits until you no longer can pop out a decent amount of reps per exercise. Mop up all your sweat and your done.

Just to reiterate I am very happy about the movement for more healthy and muscular arms for women. Hopefully my advise helps. If you need additional help or have crits/comments go to my forum and let me know. If you don't trust me because I am a guy, here are some women who can get you going in the right direction:

Cassandra Forsythe

Rachel Cosgrove

Goodluck and train hard