Beach ready: Bünda workout for your rear
Forget your tum this summer. For best results, focus on achieving a wonderful taut bum, says
IF you have just weeks until you must bare your body on the beach, then now is the time to focus on getting a bikini-worthy bünda. In Los Angeles, the spiritual home of the A-lister, fitness obsessions have shifted from achieving a tabletop-flat stomach to attaining taut and tightened buttocks, and queues are forming at bootygyms that promise such transformation via specific training for your bünda — a word that is Portuguese slang for bottom.
Celebrities are flocking to studios such as Bünda Training in West Hollywood, which bills itself ‘home of the better butt’, where the kick-ass classes held by Katie Lunger, a former instructor at the global high-end chain Equinox, are glute-burning in the extreme.
It’s a trend that Lunger and other trainers believe is long overdue. Your buttock muscles don’t just look better when they are worked hard, they aid everything from posture to weight loss. Strong gluteal muscles are also crucial for faster walking or running and make it easier to perform any kind of movement.
“For so long there has been too much focus on the core within the fitness industry that the glutes have been overlooked,” Lunger says.
“Yet they are the most powerful and important muscles when it comes to fitness.”
Comprising three muscles, the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus, they work together to enable us to perform every movement from squatting to running, but also to stabilise the body and protect it against injury.
“In most workouts, people will only train the gluteus maximus muscle with movements like squats and lunges,” Lunger says. “But the medius and minimus are important stabilisers, providing stability for the knee, back and ankle joints as well as the hips and pelvis. In order to have a well-rounded rear, you must train and target all three.”
She says her clients are astounded at the speed with which their bodies change once they start bünda workouts. After years of core and arm workouts, they quickly realise that a bikini body is best achieved through gluteal firmness.
“Lower body training engages the largest muscles in the body, including the glutes, and triggers a huge metabolic response. More calories are burned, and you engage your core muscles as you do them so will get a flatter stomach anyway.”
Others agree, enthusing about the latest fitness fixation, suggesting that working the gluteal muscles creates such extra high metabolic demand that calories are gobbled up.
“By using the glutes properly, you will really drive up levels of natural growth hormone that throws the body into fat-burning mode,” says Zana Morris, a trainer from Dundalk who founded The Library and The Clock private members gyms in London.
“They are second to none when it comes to improving all-over leanness.”
And Jamie Myerscough, chief executive and founder of Educogym who has worked with the likes of Robbie Williams and the golfer Darren Clarke, says that butt workouts are key for rapid results.
Morris and Myerscough are fans of the full squat, a lower body exercise that primes your bum muscles. “Squats are a compound exercise, using many different muscle groups, and involving lots of muscle fibres,” says Myerscough.
“They recruit a huge amount of muscle fibres in a short time and are very effective.”
Bünda workouts have also seen the re-emergence of the StairMaster, a retro cardio machine that was an icon of the 1980s fitness scene, as a fitness aid of choice. With a revolving staircase that requires you to walk or run at varying speeds or intensities, it is supreme at targeting the gluteal muscles.
Lunger is a huge fan, instructing her clients to spend up to half of each 50-minute session on the StairMaster.
“The most effective cardiovascular activity is that which entails your foot leaving the ground, like running, jumping and skipping,” she says.
“But they are also high impact and incredibly stressful on the joints. The StairMaster allows you to work at a very high intensity, but at a low impact.”
If you don’t have access to that gym equipment, running upstairs or sprinting up a short hill is an option. Anything that targets and works the butt so that it looks its best in that bikini.
Five steps for a perfect rear
Climb for 8-10 minutes three times a week: Use the StepMaster if you can, or run up and down a flight of stairs for the same time.
A favourite of the lithe Californians who head to the bünda gym and of Lunger, who describes it as “absolutely the best thing for your butt”.
Lie on your back, bend your knees and position your feet about shoulder-distance apart.
Place your arms to the side or across your chest.
Raise your hips as high as possible while keeping the knees over the toes.
Repeat 8-12 times and perform 2-3 sets.
Do this twice a week.
An express butt-regimen for when you are short of time.
Morris says these work the entire bikini body and will firm your glutes in the process.
Stand with feet flat and slightly wider than hip width apart.
Make sure your heels are pressed down and your toes turned slightly outwards as it takes the pressure off the knees.
Hold your arms directly out in front of you for balance.
Keeping your chest up all the way, bend your knees and lower yourself into a deep squat that takes your bottom as close to the floor as you can manage while keeping your heels down.
Push yourself back to the starting position by straightening your legs and then swiftly lower again.
Repeat as many times as you can for 20 seconds.
Repeat daily if you can’t do anything else before you go away.
Heavy weights are not recommended by Lunger who says that using them “tend to recruit only the gluteus maximus whereas we want all of the glutes to be worked” adding that “it’s a myth that you need to shock the body with extra heavy weights for it to respond and build strength”.
So grab a kettlebell or dumbbell of no more than4-6kg and perform weighted squat.
Stand with feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart, holding the end of a dumbbell with both hands, in front of you.
Lower your body into a squat by bending your knees.
Push your knees out slightly.
Push back up to the standing position.
Your upper body should barely move — the idea is to use legs, hips and lower back as a unit.
Do this 10-12 times, recover, then repeat for 2-3 sets, twice a week.
It’s optional to hold a weight in each hand — you can do it without — but perform this move by taking astride forward with your left leg.
Squat down by flexing the knee and hip of the right leg.
The right leg should almost touch the floor.
Push back to the start position.
Do it 10 times, then repeat on the other side.
Take a 60-second break before doing a second circuit.
Try to do this once or twice a week.
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