Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Sexy In Action - Staying Fit and Limber

Part 1 of this series:  Sexy Is A Long Term Thing, Not Something You Spray On In The Morning

Part 2 of this series:  How to Start Thinking Sexy 24/7

Part 3 of this series:  How to Start Looking More Sexy – Body Appearance

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You can’t make love all night if you’re unfit.

You can’t have sex up against a wall if you can’t get your legs around your man’s waist because a) he doesn’t have one, or b) you don’t have the necessary muscle strength to hang on while he does the deed, or c) — worst case scenario — he can’t lift you up in the first place because you’re too heavy (see Part 3 of this series How to Start Looking More Sexy – Body Appearance).

Even plain old missionary position can feel like the torture rack if your hips aren’t used to being spread too far apart, or your heart can’t stand the pressure.

And all of the above is once you’re in bed.

What about getting a man to bed?  Dancing takes muscle strength and cardio endurance.  You’re not going to look too sexy if you start hacking your lungs up after a couple of energetic dances because you smoke too much.

Just plain walking (or walking away so he can check out your ass) takes good muscle tone to pull off, if you want it to look sleek and lean and toned.

While vampiric, death metal looks appeal to some men, you can still achieve the look by simply staying out of the sun, but do yourself a favour: stay fit anyway.  The limber lines of your body won’t be at odds with the wasted, children-of-the-night look, and you’ll enjoy yourself in bed much more when your body is in peak shape.

The older you get, the more reasons you have to keep fit and stay limber.  It’ll offset the aging process, and maintain your confidence.

Weight Training

Weight training is essential for women, but it scares the crap out of most women, and it shouldn’t.  The very people who should be in the weight room are the ones most notably absent.  It’s guys in there grunting and flexing their muscles, when it should be something like 99% women in there, instead, because women stand to gain the most health benefits from weight training.

Lifting weights will not turn you into Arnold Schwarznegger.  It can’t. You just don’t have enough testosterone.  Even guys have a hard enough time building bulges and they have something like five times the amount of testosterone women do.  The men that do get the super-sized results are usually taking steroids.  So freaking out about getting “big” is lunacy.

Weight training is one of the best ways ever of peaking your metabolism and losing a whole lot of body fat really fast, and making your body look long, sleek and sexy.  And, oh yeah, making you stronger.  And I’m not talking about those dinky little pink five pound dumbbells either.  I’m talking about getting into the weight room with the guys and grunting with the best of them, and pushing serious amounts of weight around.  Really shock your muscles.  Do the exercises the guys are doing:  bench presses, squats, flies, shoulder presses, chin ups, leg presses.  None of these are gender-specific or impossible for women to do.  If you must use the weight machines, use them, but you’re better off using the free weights (dumbbells and barbells) because they force you to stabilize the weight for yourself.  A coach can help you get started, but the Body Building.com site has mountains of information about body building that will get you started, and it’s very gender neutral, so dive in.  There’s all sorts of great inspiration stories there, too, including some astounding before and after pics.

Flexibility

Make sure you include some sort of stretching program in your daily or weekly routine.  It’s crucial to a sexy body, and to general health and agility, especially as you age. (Sexiness and aging are inter-related.)

This could be a simple series of stretches you do after working out, or you could go for more formal types of stretching, like Yoga.

Again, the all-inclusive Body Building.com has some great stretching exercises you can use to build a regular program of your own.

Cardio

I left this one almost for last because most women, when they think of physical fitness, almost always think of cardio fitness only.  For about the last twenty years we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that just piling on more and more cardio-whatever will keep us fit and help us lose weight. So they rush off and do aerobics, treadmilling, stairmaster, running, you name it.  And it will help…to a degree.  But you’ll lose muscle along with all the fat, and your metabolism slides into the gutter, and your weight loss starts to…slow…..down….  Pretty soon you get fat just from looking at a danish, and can’t figure out what the hell is going on with your body….well that’s why.  You just killed your metabolism because you did too much cardio, and didn’t keep your muscles active at the same time.

I know I don’t need to explain what cardio is or what you need to do.  Women are pre-programmed for cardio.  Say “get fit” or “lose weight” and they go into cardio overdrive.

I’m just saying that while you’re knocking yourself out on the treadmill, or whatever, do just as much — if not a little bit more — work in the weight room.  Don’t kill your metabolism and slide back down into the Danish Trench again.

Stop Smoking

If you’re a smoker, your eyes are already glazing over, I know it.  But bear with me.  There’s two sides to this.  Health and appearance.  Let’s get the health issues out of the way, because I know every man and his dog has been yammering at you about the health issues for years, and they haven’t yet been able to convince you to stop, so I won’t waste my time.

Smoking kills.  It gives you cancer at something like about at 70% rate of probability, once you add up all the long term and short term types of cancers you can get, and the second-hand cancers you’re passing onto your loved-ones, so if you want to court those sort of odds, knock yourself out.  No problems.   There.  Done.

Let’s get to the not-so-superficial appearance reasons for giving up smoking.

A woman smoking a cigarette is not sexy. The last time a woman managed to make cigarette smoking sexy was about three years ago, when Sharon Stone was smoking in Basic Instinct II, and she was fucking nuts anyway — she had a death wish.  Also, every time she brought a cigarette to her mouth, it was choreographed and orchestrated by a director, shot by a cinematographer, and the scene lit by professionals, giving her just the right about of light to make her professionally made-up face look beautful as she sucked on that filter.

You don’t get those props and that set-up, and if you’re like most of the world these days, you don’t get Sharon Stone’s “fuck -you” benefits of being able to smoke indoors, whenever she felt like it, despite by-laws and the protests of anyone else in the vicinity.

I have not seen a woman in public smoking a cigarette that looked anything but ugly.  The pursed lips, the eyes slitted against the smoke, and the general smell of nicotine and smoke hanging around her are the least sexy things I think a woman can do.

I happened to dislike the habit in men just as much, by the way, but this article is about sexiness in women.

Just to make sure I wasn’t being biased and harsh about my own gender, I checked in with Saul, and his feelings about women and smoking, and he in turned did a casual straw poll amongst some of his friends.  The survey response was interesting:  Smoking men will fuck a smoker if they get the chance, but all things being equal, they’ll take the non-smoker over the smoker, any day.  (There’s hypocrisy for you!)  Non-smoking men feel even more strongly than that.  They’d rather walk away from the smoker.  Depending on how long ago they quit, they’ll run away.

In other words, regardless of whether the man is a smoker or not, more men prefer women who don’t smoke.  Granted, this was a very casual poll, based on a very small sample of men.

Next: Figure Out Your Own Sexy Standards

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