Strictly plan
Ultimate Performance team, Gemma’s regime is a mix of cardio and short weight sessions. She trains four times a week, each session lasting between 45 minutes and an hour.
And she divides days between squats for the front thigh, or quads, and lifts to focus the upper body and posterior, or back, muscles.
Gemma’s exercises are in four or five sets, rising from eight repetitions in each set to 10 by the end.
On squat days she does split squats, starting from a staggered stance with the rear To achieve this body, Gemma has three eggs, half an avocado and coffee at breakfast, chicken and veg for lunch and dinner, two protein shakes and one Greek yoghurt per day. She will cut out snacks of nuts and dark chocolate during Strictly. Gemma will still rise at 4am to do her radio show but she needs six hours of sleep, monitored by diary. She will take magnesium to help her relax and eat carbs like banana, sweet potato and oats in the evening for serotonin. Her workout plan is a mix of weight training and cardio sessions where she trains four times per week with sessions of 45 minutes to an hour.
On top of up to 30 hours of dance training, she will have three workouts a week. They will include dumbbell presses, split squats and shoulder presses.
Trainer Mark, left, said: “Strength exercises will be important for the performance. Lots of compound exercises, like split squats, anything that is going to involve core stability, is going to help her with dancing.” foot elevated and front foot forward, and then pendulum squats. To focus on the posterior chain, she starts with Romanian deadlifts, also known as RDL, then upper-body dumbbell presses – lifting dumbbells one at a time from the thigh to hold in front of the body, at shoulder width, while flat on a bench. Those are followed by back extension exercises for muscle tone, and shoulder presses – raising dumbbells from rest to Gemma with member of training team She gets to grips with shoulder press shoulder height in alternate hands while seated.
Gemma said: “On paper you think, ‘That’s not very hard. I can do that.’
“Sometimes there might be only four or five exercises a session – but the repetition, overload and increasing weight toward the end make it difficult.
“So many people come into the gym and blast their whole body every day and wonder why they don’t get results.
“You can come in and do two hours and not get the same results as when you do 45 minutes.”
She also made tweaks to her diet, having breakfast of three eggs with half an avocado and coffee, chicken and pesto for lunch and chicken with veg for dinner. To that she adds two protein shakes a day and a greek yoghurt as an afterdinner snack.
Gemma said: “I used to snack on dark chocolate and nuts, which is fine, but I’d have two or three snacks a day, thinking, ‘It’s dark chocolate. It’s good for you’.”
Mark says: “She had good habits, but got a bit lost with her training. She’s in good shape now, that’s going to benefit her when it comes to dance – not only looking good in the dresses.
“The goal has moved from body composition to strength. That’s going to be important for the performance.
“Lots of compound exercises, anything that involves core stability, is going to help her when it comes to dancing.”
Strictly Come Dancing launches on BBC1 on September 9. upfitness.co.uk
halina.watts@trinitymirror.com
I love feeling strong and athletic, that’s how weight training makes me feel GEMMA ATKINSON ON WHY SHE ENJOYS HER GYM ROUTINE