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Exercises to Tone the Skin

Q & A with Expert Trainer Chris Powell

A member in Mesa needs toning to top off her surgery.

"Dear Chris,

I am having gastric bypass next month and my concern is about the excess skin from losing weight that quickly. I will lose about 150 pounds. What can I do to help tone during this time?"

Dear Ready to Tone,

I receive a lot of emails from viewers thinking about gastric bypass surgery, with concerns about the loose skin that may result. Let’s address a few issues about skin elasticity. The best part of this is that skin is extremely elastic. Skin has the amazing ability to expand and contract at a remarkable rate, leaving stretch marks in many cases. However, we also see cases of people who losing a significant amount of weight who end up with some loose and uncomfortable skin.

Believe it or not, you can gauge how much your skin may retract based on a few conditions:

• Your age – the younger you are, the more likely your skin can return to its previous state.
• Length of time you have been overweight – short durations of weight gain that can stretch the skin (like pregnancy), have few long term effects on the skin. In most cases, the skin returns back to normal with perhaps some stretch marks at most. If you have been significantly overweight for a longer period of time (more than 5-10 years), the chances of your skin returning back to normal are reduced, but definitely not unheard of.
• Amount of weight you have carried – the more weight your body has carried, the more fat has accumulated under the skin, stretching it to a certain point. Usually if the weight was gained quickly, you may also be more of a candidate for stretch marks.
• Rate at which the weight was lost – Quite often when weight is lost rapidly (like with gastric bypass), the skin just doesn’t have the time to retract at a normal pace, so loose skin can occur. When weight is lost at a normal pace (2-3 pounds per week), the skin tends to be more resilient, and reduce the tendency for loose skin afterward.

These factors will definitely come into play to determine the amount of loose skin you may have. In your case, to reduce the loose skin appearance, you will want to focus more on circuit training and actually maintaining and perhaps even growing your muscles so that your body can start to take its true shape and form as you lose the weight. This is very exciting!

Now don’t be scared of the word circuit training. This is simply referring to a specific way to train the muscles to burn a TON of calories, and stimulate all of the major muscles of the body. However, with the surgery you will be severely limited to the amount of calories you will be able to consume to actually ‘grow’ your muscles, so this will take some time. But hang in there - the results will be rewarding.

When you train, I would recommend you focus on weight training with moderately heavy weights. This means that you will be able to perform between 15-20 repetitions of each exercise until your muscle reaches a state of exhaustion (when you can’t do any more repetitions). To condition and tone your body, I always recommend a ‘Push-Squat-Pull’ circuit.

Each time you're ready to work out, just pick one of these exercises per category perform the full push-squat-pull circuit 3-6 times:

Pushing exercises: push up / bench press / machine press

Squatting exercises: squat / lunge / hacksquat / leg press

Pulling exercise: pull-up (assisted) / machine row / dumbbell row / lat pull-down

Check out my At Home Workout for instructions to do the pushup, squat, and lawnmowers to get you started.

~ Chris

Learn more about Chris

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