It seems simple but it’s actually super duper important for your body to rest. If you’re not giving your body significant time to rest, then your muscle growth will actually plateau or decrease and you won’t experience growth. In fact, research has found that your muscles can actually diminish if you are not giving them enough rest. According to research conducted by Stijn van Willigen,  “train too frequently, and the muscle will actually decrease in functional size over time, because you constantly stimulate before the muscle has completed recovery and adaptation.”

I get heaps of messages from girls who are just looking to grow their booties, but they don’t want to grow their legs. Although this blog post is about growing your glutes over your quads and hamstrings, you can’t have 0% growth in your legs and 100% growth in your glutes. It will just look a bit weird. 

Are you guys sick of hearing about my butt yet? Well too bad, I've become obsessed with all things glutes. Your glutes seem to be the most misunderstood part of all weight training. I'm going to attribute this to the fact that until recently weight training was left for the men, and not many men were too concerned with the state of their glutes.  I think because of this, the glutes were severely overlooked in training programs and studies. Now that booty is all the rage, the glutes are finally getting the attention they deserve! 

Having you been working out for 6-12 months and felt that your progress has begun to plateau? If you have, I feel you, I had the exact same issue last year, and it wasn’t until I started mixing things up in my workout that my body started to show rapid changes. The below image is after only 8 weeks of working out, from February 22nd to April 25th. I noticed the bigger changes because I changed and started including the following 3 variable.

You’ve probable heard that when performing an exercise at the gym you should use “slow and controlled movements”. But what does this mean? As a gym newbie, I was surprised to see so many people working out with rapid, fast movements. It can be tempting to go fast, the faster you are, the more reps you can do and the burn is definitely lessened. You can also smash out more sets, reps and exercises if you’re short on time. This is when it’s important to remember, quality over quantity. 

I do this exact workout once a week, on Mondays after my legs are nice and rested after the weekend. It's simple and easy to follow, but you may have some difficulties with the deadlift. It may be worth paying for a session with a personal trainer to teach you the correct way to deadlift as it's a complicated move that requires the correct posture and technique to gain the maximum results. I've been doing this workout for the past 4 weeks and have already seen an increase in the size of my legs. It is important when training for muscle growth, to eat, eat eat! You're not going to see gains without eating in a calorie surplus, so remember to fuel your body with the calories it needs to grow. 

Okay this is going to be a biggie! As some of you know, I got into fitness at the start of January 2016 when I made the decision to download the Sweat with Kayla app. If you don’t know what BBG or Sweat with Kayla is, I recommend you read my blog post over here. In short, BBG stands for Bikini Body Guide and was developed by Australian personal trainer Kayla Itsines. It’s a 12 week resistance training guide and has also been released as the Sweat With Kayla app (complete with videos).

One of the reasons I love having this blog is I can share everything I'm learning through my Personal Training course, and this is one of the coolest things I've found out about. Most fitness knowledge is widely known, drink more water, focus on tempo, time your rests, lift heavy etc. But this is something that no-one in our class of 20 knew anything about, it's like finding the hidden level on Crash Bandicoot. 

When I first saw people commenting on my photos with the words, “goals” and “she has the perfect shape” I was flabbergasted. I definitely do not feel like I have the perfect shape. I feel that my legs are too short, my thighs are too soft, my boobs are too small, my arms are too long, my shoulders are too broad and that my abs aren’t as defined as I’d like them to be!