How to Do Front Step Up Exercises

Many people want to lose weight, and despite claims for quick fat burning pills and powders, the best way to lose weight is still through proper diet and exercise. Exercise does more than just maintain physical fitness though. Working out can also help build healthy bone density, muscle strength, and joint mobility. It can also reduce your general health risks, boost the immune system, and help with depression and insomnia. Whether your reason for exercising is to lose weight, or improve muscle mass, working out is always a good idea to help promote the health of your body and mind.

In this free video series, our expert fitness instructor will focus on how to do leg exercises and general lower body fitness. If having lean, sexy legs is important to you, let our expert teach you how to do front and side step up exercises, dead lifts, stationary lunges and walking lunges. You will also learn how to do a variety of squats, bench lunges and reverse lunges. Achieve the muscular legs you always dreamed up with these easy and effective leg exercises that are sure to leave you feeling good about yourself and your body.

"ALICE MONSAERT: Our fist exercise in our Hot Legs series is step ups. We're going to do this facing front. What I'm on is a bench that is 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 inches high, so it's an advanced exercise. You can start with a lower bench till you progress and you could actually go up to about a 15- or 16-inch bench. A step-up is performed by placing your foot in the center of the bench, coming up on your back toes so your heel is off the floor, and pushing directly up, and then just tapping the toe back down to the floor. Let's just show that from the side. So I place my foot in the center of the bench, come up on my toe, and then lift straight up and tap down. So I'm targeting, again, quads and glutes of that supporting leg. I can use dumbbells as an added resistance, holding them in front of the chest, and now I've increased the amount of weight that I have to push up from this bench, or up from the floor onto the bench. Again, I'm coming down. I have greater than a 90-degree angle, so I could take this bench a little bit higher to get a little bit more lift in the glutes, and I'm not rocking and rolling back down to the foot. I want to keep all of that tension and intensity on that front leg to really overload the quads and the glutes in the step-up."