I’ve found that when I’m doing a lot of plank exercises, I get my most toned and ripped looking. They tone my tummy better than most other abdominal crunches I do, and they also help to tone up the flab on the back of my arms, as well as shaped my back up.

There are so many different variations of plank that you can do. There is the plank twist, which works your abdominal muscles, with particular focus on the obliques, which are the muscles on the side of the tummy.  They are the ones that you target when you’re doing side to side abdominal exercises.

Plank twists are simply putting yourself in the plank position, then bringing your knee up, toward the  opposite arm, so you are performing a sort of twisting motion the opposite side of the body. You should feel it in the side, or the obliques.

You can also do some great cardio in the plank position. You can do plank jumping jacks, lunges, mountain climbers, and plank pushups. Plank pushups are awesome to get the backs of your arms toned. You just need to do a really straight plank position, and hold your arms out in front of you. Then, bend down and do a very straight pushup, but with your hands only about six inches from eachother on the floor, so you can feel it toning the backs of your arms.

You can also do a simple situp in plant, bringing your knees to the chest, and squeezing the abs as tight as you can for several repetitions. Planks actually get kind of fun once you get used to them and kind of experiment. It’s really cool when you can start to do more advanced holds, because then you know you’re pretty in shape!

Buttttt….there are always things we can do to improve ourselves. And thighs that are a little bigger than you want them can be quite a challenge. Not only that, the thighs are one of the most common complaints of women, because they are so hard to target and they are so hard to pare down.

One of the moves you can try, in conjunction with some really good interval cardio to get the fat off sooner as well, is a curtsy lunge. The curtsy lunge is a great thigh toner, because it targets those dreaded “saddle bags” that you carry on the sides of your thighs. You know, those lovely things that seems to spread out enormously when you sit down?

A curtsy lunge is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You start off with your legs shoulder width apart. Then, you take your right leg first, behind your left, and bow into a sort of backwards bow, or curtsy. You will feel the sides of your thighs and your glutes tighten up when you do this move, and the better toned you are in this area, the more “pulled in” you will appear.

Now, don’t get me wrong, you cannot get rid of saddlebags just with exercise alone, you must combine this with eating right, because saddle bags are very stubborn. But you can definitely help tone and shape them by doing targeted exercises like the curtsy lunge. And they’re fun to do too!

This is where you make short, explosive moves that are high impact, but they also give results fast, and get your heart rate up very fast, so they are often included in these newer short but very intense and very effective workouts you see on DVD.

Another example of newer techniques in working out and getting in shape is a newer type of abdominal shaper that I love to do. Gilad actually introduced me to this one through one of his Fit TV shows.  It’s where you stand up, and using a weight or a medicine ball ( a medicine ball is probably better, it would just help you distribute the weight better).  You hold the ball between your hands in an upright standing position.

Then, you sort of a do a squat, and rotate your trunk to the right, then to the left, so you are working your obliques and lower abdominals at the same time. What I don’t like about these types of moves is that it’s very easy to do them with the wrong form, and therefore to be putting strain on your back. Also, you could be getting no results if you do the form wrong because you’re not really targeting those abs if you do this move wrong.

It is an easy move to mess up for your abs, so if you do it, you want to make sure you’re feeling it where you are supposed to, which is where your love handle area would be, and the lateral sides of the abs.  You should feel the squeeze there, and if you don’t, or you feel back pain, then you are probably doing it incorrectly and should seek help on how to handle the form properly.  When you do these stand up ab exercises right, you will really get an extra blast to the abs and feel that you are targeting the right areas, and you’ll be ripped if you mix them in with more traditional floor work abs.

Can you tell I hate my saddle bag problem!? Well, I was working out as I said on the elliptical machine, and I positioned my feet so that it looked like I was sort of walking like a duck, with my toes pointing outward, and as I pumped the pedals on the machine, my knees were also sort of pointed out to the left and right sides of the room I was in.

This actually targets the outer thighs better, because you are turning the work inward from your quadriceps muscles, which get pretty big on me if I don’t watch it and work them too much anyways. This motion allows you to specifically target the thighs and the saddle bag area and tone it. I also make sure I turn the tension way up on the machine, maybe to about a ten or twelve tension setting, depending on what your fitness and muscular strength level is.

Turning up the resistance and simultaneously pointing your feet outward are key to get those outer thighs working and toned up more, so that you can begin to see a difference in their size shrink down a bit (diet always helps too on this stubborn part of a woman’s body), because you are pulling them in by working those outer thigh muscles.

I love this exercise now. I usually do it for about 3-5 minutes at the end of my elliptical workout so I can get the extra toning benefit at the end and that also serves as a cool down for my heart rate since I’m moving slower, but still toning the muscles, which is a great combo for fat reduction.

You can actually help keep definition in your face and defy gravity as time ages your skin with facial exercises which is very cool, especially considering the fact that plastic surgery options are known to look fake and almost otherworldly scary so many time. I mean, who wants to get things injected, have their face sliced into and moved around, if you can maintain the integrity and lift of your skin naturally, through facial exercise?

Not that it’s a total catch all or that you won’t still naturally get some fine lines and wrinkles, but half of the reason your face looks more “aged” with time is simple gravity. It pulls it down and gives you things like jowls, less defined cheek bones and overall bone structure, nasolabial folds, which are those creases on either side of your mouth leading up to your nose, and a generally more slack, less taut look.

There are actually some good instructional videos for facial exercises, and there are also some great short books that you can read that will give you, step by step, the exercises that you need to perform on your facial muscles to help get rid of a double chin as well.

Double chins are caused by excess fat, yes, so many times losing weight will dramatically reduce their appearance, but what about after that, if it’s all genetics? Well, aside from having something like smartlipo, where the fat is literally liquefied with a laser and then sucked out, which is actually a minimally invasive surgery, you can do these exercises, and within a few weeks, you should start to notice a difference in your chin’s sagging and bulging.

There are also some little devices that you can use that exercise your facial muscles, if you look on Amazon, you can find quite a nice range of them which can help you do everything from lift your chin to define your jawline and help get rid of those jowls. After all, it’s best to go as natural as possible on your face when it comes to anti aging and preventive stuff – you just want to look like your best self – not some unnatural, alien version of yourself!

So of course I went out and googled them, and came up with a great instructional video of a man doing both exercises for several in a row. The squats were fast squats that were just traditional squats where it looks like you are going to sit down in a chair, and the push ups were a bit more challenging, because they were a combination of the chataranga in yoga, which is one of my hardest yoga moves since you use a lot of upper body strength for them, but yet you should be trying to force it to happen, since yoga is about gentleness and just “letting things happen” instead of forcing them to happen within your body.

The Hindu push up goes like this, and I’ll try to explain it as best I can without showing a picture. But if you want to see a video of a guy doing these exercises, the best one I found was here on Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v65uF0J0jDs.

I guess you start off in sort of a downward dog position, if you are familiar with yoga, but you have your feet spread wide apart as a solid base. You then lower yourself down into a sort of upward facing dog position, where you are looking up toward the sky, arching your neck backwards (be careful not to over do it), and then you wave back up to the starting position, which is downward dog again, so you end up again in an inverted triangle position.

These are great upper body strength builders, and they are also great for exerting yourself quickly and building up your lung capacity. Of course, they also look slightly erotic, just to let you know, so they might be something you only want to do in the privacy of your own home, but that’s just modest ol’ me talking