A lot of our clients come to us with knee pain and are unable to do squats and lunges, so this week we’re here to supercharge your life with this NO SQUAT booty & inner thigh workout.

Do you have knee pain?

A common cause of knee pain is due to weak glutes aka the booty. Try these booty strength training moves that are all on the floor in this week’s video and give the Free 7-Day Bootcamp Challenge a try if you want to keep going!

If you want to slim down your lower body and sculpt strong, sexy curves then the following thigh toning, NO SQUAT lower body workout is for you!

Challenge a friend to try these moves with you, and see how many rounds you can do.

Make sure to do a 3-5 minute warmup before you begin. In general, for your lower body workouts, you always want to keep your core engaged and make sure you’re properly using the glutes.

How & Why to Engage Your Glutes

Lots of people, women especially, forget to use their glutes while exercising. Either they haven’t built up the awareness of those muscles yet or they haven’t spent long enough reinforcing proper movement patterns to continually use the glutes in lower body movements.

It’s extremely important to use this large muscle group though, so don’t skimp on this point! If you’re having trouble feeling your glutes engage, simply focus your brain on that part of your body to help build up the neural pathways that activate the muscle fibers you’re trying to engage.

Continue to focus on what you think it WOULD feel like if you were to squeeze those muscles tightly.

Over time you will develop what is known as proprioceptive awareness, or the mind-to-muscle connection, that is necessary in order to properly and fully “flex” a muscle. This process can take anywhere from 8-12 weeks, and sometimes longer.

But anyone can start practicing it today!

Using your glutes during lower body exercises will vastly increase the safety of every movement and should help alleviate knee pain over time.

By focusing and centering the load into these larger muscle groups, which are better equipped to sustain heavy loads as opposed to the smaller, less stable joints like the knees & ankles, you will avoid stressing your connective tissues (i.e. tendons, ligaments, etc.) which are not designed to bear such loads.

By doing this in every exercise, you will be more effective at protecting your body and preventing injury so you can keep on movin’ and groovin’ towards a leaner lower body.

Benefits of Strength Training

Wondering why strength training workouts like this one are so important? Well, first let’s take a look at what strength training really means…

Strength training is the use of resistance to muscular contraction in order to build the strength, anaerobic endurance and size of skeletal muscles. Strength training helps to build lean body mass (LBM) which is crucial to a healthy, functional body.

Think about it… if a person weighs 130 pounds she may appear to be healthy, but if we analyze her body fat percentage and it is over 30% that would mean she is technically considered “obese.”

This might seem absurd, but we’ve seen it happen!

Instead of focusing on “taking more fat out,” strength training specifically helps your body focus on putting more lean body mass IN.

This will automatically help your body balance itself out over time and reduce its own percentage of excess stored fat.

Contrary to popular belief, building more muscle in your body through strength training won’t make you “big and bulky.”

Instead, it will help increase your metabolism and enable your body to burn more calories in a day (even while resting). Strength training can easily make you leaner, tighter and more “toned” looking overall.

If you want to:

Rid your body of unhealthy excesses of body fat,
Increase your stamina,
Improve your heart health, overall strength, bone & joint function,
AND decrease your likelihood of injury, osteoporosis, fractures, falls and other ailments…

You MUST properly build your lean muscle mass through strength training exercises. Strength training like this becomes especially important as we age and our metabolisms slow.

Remember — An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! So let’s be smart, stay safe and get strong so that one day maybe we can add those squats back in. 🙂

Feel free to add this on at the end of a workout or for a quick workout while you’re watching TV tonight, or Pin the image below so you can save this workout for later.

See you next week!

Your trainers,
Liz & Sara

P.S. Want MORE free workout ideas and Trainer Tips? Subscribe to our YouTube channel for a weekly Trainer Tip Tuesday video and submit your questions to us via Twitter.