Why Women Should Avoid Doing Pushups and Squats

               I felt compelled to write this article due to the recent popularity of pictures like this:

Not exactly.

               Most people believe that body fat distribution is 100% genetic—were you blessed with breasts? I disagree with this notion. I believe nurture plays a bigger role than genetics, and by this I mean more than just diet. Nurture also includes how a person expends their calories, which I explain in great detail in my article “Energy Expenditure.” To summarize it, every muscle of the body has some degree of muscle and some degree of fat. Thus, there are 4 extremes: no muscle and no fat (e.g. the butt pictured on the left), high muscle and high fat (e.g. the butt pictured on the right), high muscle and low fat, and lastly, low muscle and high fat. And then there’s everything in between these extremes. I argue that it’s possible to train specific body parts into any composition of fat and muscle desired. Women, for example, would want a chest and butt that is high in fat, or fat plus muscle. Achieving the ideal body requires knowledge of how different fat + muscle compositions come about and applying this knowledge in a workout routine.

                How do today’s women typically work out? Women are “trying to not look too manly” so they go with low-resistance and high-repetition. This means lifting light weights for many reps. Low-resistance/high-repetition exercise will burn fat and build a bit of muscle—most knowledgeable people consider this to be scientific fact. This is great and all but most women want to retain the fat on their chest and butt. So they should avoid exercising the chest and butt with low-resistance/high-repetition. Doing pushups on your knees is an example of a low-resistance chest exercise. If a woman were to do these until exhaustion (i.e. high-repetition) for many months, her breasts would shrink and shrink until they’re nonexistent. Similarly, doing squats with no additional weight is a low-resistance butt exercise. If a woman were to perform squats with just her body weight for 10 minutes every day for months, her butt would get leaner and leaner until it is fat-free. This is why low-resistance/high-repetition chest and butt exercises are not the answer for women seeking the “ideal” female figure.

On the left is a butt composed of fat (and some underlying muscle), as demonstrated through animation.

On the right is the fat-free butt of a typical female fitness competitor.

Many believe that flat breasts/booty are an unavoidable consequence of working out. Women who have been working out for years are proof of this. But here’s the catch: every single workout program, exercise routine, instructional DVD, etc. puts the chest and butt to work. Even jogging engages the chest muscles as the jogger thrusts the arms forward with each stride for extra propulsion. A two-hour light jog is what I would consider very low-resistance/high-repetition—cardio. Cardio exercises for the chest or butt will result in even less muscle development and even greater fat loss, compared to low-resistance/high-repetition training. Full body cardio workouts are not the solution.

So what’s the solution to achieving the “ideal” female body? Contrary to what 99.99% of the population believes, it’s not doing a man’s workout with lighter weights or no weights at all. That is, it’s not simply low-resistance/high-repetition. I’ll propose two slightly different solutions because there are two slightly different body types that most women desire. One solution is working out the entire body (at any resistance/repetition desired) except for the chest and butt. This means no pushups, no bench press, no punching, no wide squats, no hip thrusts, no taekwondo side kicking, etc. What’s acceptable? Leg exercises that do not engage the gluteus maximus would be leg extensions, leg curls, flutter kicks, front kicks, and roundhouse kicks. As for the arms and torso, some good exercises are jumping jacks, sit-ups, crunches, pull-ups, calf raises, dips, plank, bicep curls, triceps extensions, shoulder press, shoulder fly, etc. The chest and butt are never targeted so they will remain/become full of fat. But lack a muscular foundation.

The second solution is for women who want big breasts and booty with underlying muscle to prevent sag. This is working out the entire body (at any resistance/repetition desired) and doing high-resistance/low-repetition chest and butt isolation exercises. For example, a girl on this workout routine would be bench pressing and hip thrusting with very heavy weights, like a powerlifter. This is just a few minutes of heavy lifting, but a very gruesome, exhausting few minutes. The high resistance will give the chest and butt a muscular foundation and the low number of reps will ensure that fat is not burned off—a thick layer of muscle and a thick layer of fat. This is body part “type B” on my chart in the article “Energy Expenditure.” As for the rest of her body, if she desires limbs with slight muscle tone and low fat then low-resistance/high-rep exercises are the solution. The predicament she now faces is that traditional cardio exercises, such as jogging, will burn fat from the chest and butt.