I am long overdue in writing about this, but my husband got me an Everlast boxing equipment punching bag (the long kind), which hangs from a self supported stand in our basement. I wanted the stand instead of attaching this huge 80 pound heavy bag to our rafters in the basement.

Something about that just didn’t sit right with me. I imagined my whole house collapsing, which of course I know is completely ridiculous and far-fetched. So he bought both the stand and the bag I wanted.  He also got me a new pair or red punching gloves. They work pretty well, but I’ll warn you, your wrists have to get used to it because my wrists were sore the next day after the first time I used it simply from the shock absorption of hitting the bag over and over again.

Another tip I would like to give if you’re in the market for a punching bag and the accompanying accessories needed, is to buy the most padded gloves you can find. The bag is not by any means very giving, especially if you do squat punches like I do and are punching the bag near the bottom where the sand settles and makes the surface much more firm.

All of that being said, my punching bag is pretty freaking awesome. I love to use it when I’ve had a bad day at work, or if I’m feeling particularly ornery or like I need to get a lot of anxious, nervous energy out.  It does help you to build sculpted, lean muscle on your arms pretty fast too. It helps with that flabby arm syndrome that me and many other women suffer from for sure.

I also love that you can get a really good cardio workout in on it.  I like to do fast punches, combined with slower ones.  I also like to use it for roundhouse kicks. You can’t do many of them, because they do hurt and they do get the heart rate way up, but they are excellent both for your muscle tone as well as for your heart conditioning.

One thing I’ve learned how to do is to release the tension in my neck and shoulder area as I’m punching. This was something I also had to learn the hard way. If you happen to have a lot of neck pain in your every day life, you likely tend to really stiffen those muscles up when doing this exercise.

So make sure you concentrate and focus on loosening the neck up. Don’t tense the neck muscles, make sure instead you focus on tensing up your core (your abs), and use this as your center for strength and your stabilizing force instead of focusing on the neck area too much.

I really love this piece of exercise equipment though. I love using my punching bag for stress release.  I feel tough and powerful when using it, and I actually feel like it helps to train me for self defense a bit too because it teaches me how to use force with my own body weight. LOVE IT!

One thing that I’ll admit I don’t work out often enough, is my back muscles. I don’t do it as often as I should because quite frankly, I don’t think about my lower back needing to “look good” so I often forget and instead do things that are really major problems for me, like my outer and inner thighs and upper arms.

Hey, a woman’s got priorities, and while I love to feel great and be healthy, I’m also very cognizant that the primary reason I started working out was because I wanted to shape and whittle my body into something that appeared sexy and desirable.

One back exercise that I’ve done before, which always makes a difference in my lower back strength are Supermans.  These are literally where you lay with your belly on the floor, and your arms outstretched like you are flying like Superman.

You then extend one arm and then extend the opposite leg at the same time, and keep it up in the air for a few seconds. This actually does a couple things, not just your back. It helps tone the backs of the legs, including the hamstrings.  It also helps to tone the butt, although this is very secondary.

Strengthening and sculpting your lower back helps you in a few ways, and it’s not all just about strength. It can make your back look a lot more attractive, more sculpted, especially when you are wearing a low scoop neck dress. It also helps you to strengthen this delicate part of the back which rarely gets worked out.

This helps to strengthen your belly, and also helps you to improve your posture. Improving your posture without even thinking about it is paramount in how the body looks when you are standing. It can make you look much leaner and taller.

This is probably a main reason why celebrity trainers have their clients do this particular exercise. It can help you to stand taller, and look more graceful, more balanced, and a lot more toned and lean.

Let’s face it, these celebrities aren’t paying their trainers just to help them get healthy and feel better - they wants (and need) to look HOT and screen ready!

We have created a new page (and new section, all for various trouble areas!) on how to get thinner outer thighs, something for which so many women struggle.  We explain, detail by detail, how to do these outer thigh exercises, and we also tell you how they burn that area, and how to get the most out of each one.

Women, including myself, struggle very hard with the outer thighs, because they do seem very tough to get smaller. The saddlebag area is one of the most fretted over in the female mentality (again, including mine). But these exercises, when done correctly and diligently, will get your thighs smaller, more scultped, and much more toned.

Here is our new page on outer thigh exercises : OUTER THIGH EXERCISES.  Enjoy!

UPDATE : We now also have a whole page dedicated to another huge problem that many women complain about, but this one also can happen to men. It’s the flabby upper arms (the tricep area, which is the stuff that hangs down unattractively when too much fat accumulates).

There are multiple names for this, the least flattering being “lunch lady arms” and “batwings”.  In fact, a lot of women have liposuction and laser assisted fat removal to get these flabby lower arms sucked out.  But diet and exercise can effectively downsize this area.

We’ve put together a page of the most effective Flabby Arm Exercises that we know of that will help you sculpt and minimize this bothersome trouble zone!

Sometimes, taking vacations and staying in hotels with gyms, no matter how small they are, is a really great way to either take your workout in a whole new direction because you may not have all your devices at hand that you usually do, or to try a new piece of equipment, gadget, or fitness accessory.

We recently went on a tiny little getaway to Pittsburgh, and stayed at a Doubletree Hotel, where there was a pretty decent little gym. It even had that nice new tile that minimizes impact on your joints laid down, and smelled or new rubber – not at all like dirty socks and sweat like most gyms end up smelling!

So, needless to say, we enjoyed the one time we got to visit it on our two and a half day stay.  One of the pieces of fitness equipment this particular hotel gym had was a Bosu ball. A Bosu ball is something I’ve seen in other gyms and seen in ads, but I had never had the opportunity to try it.

I literally had no idea what I was doing because there were no directions on the exercises you can do posted in the gym.  So, I figured I’d wing it. I ended up flipping it, ball side down, flat side up, and using it as a balance board for me to stand on and do my squats. 

Boy, let me tell you, the Bosu Ball added a whole new dimension of difficulty to my squats. You really have to focus on balancing your body when you’re standing on the small flat board, and you don’t realize it until you get up on it. 

I was quivering and shaking the whole time. I only did twenty squats, and that actually seemed like an eternity to me, so I know I got a totally kick butt, different workout on the ball. I also know that I was utilizing muscles I rarely use since I was out of breath and shaky after only twenty slow squats, which I figure would help shape my butt and thighs and maybe even firm up some of my cellulite.

There is actually a lot more you can do with the Bosu ball that I didn’t try.  You can use it as an ab cruncher, by sitting on top of the ball part of it with your butt planted in the middle and your legs coming up to your chest, then back out and extended for an extended crunch.

You really work and tone the abs and stabilizing muscles a lot more, and your butt, because you are trying to keep yourself balanced the whole time, not just working the abs by doing mechanical crunches. I’m a fan of the Bosu ball, and will use it again when I have the opportunity, especially now that I know more ways to use it!