More than losing weight or being a specific size, several clients have shared with me that they just want to feel confident enough to wear those jeans or that dress. Well great legs are certainly within everyone's ability to attain, and you don't even have to sit on those ridiculous machines working your legs in and out for 1000 reps at a time.

Whether you're trying to lose weight or become a stronger athlete, to do either you have to move your legs more. And to move your legs more, there are certain exercises  that everyone should do to tone, strengthen, and most importantly, decrease risk of injuries that often occur with a sudden increase of activity.

If you want to skip all the nerdy Personal Trainer Speak, skip below to the video to see my entire butt workout. But if you have a specific issue that may be butt-related, read on to see how adding these exercises to your routine will help you!

Love Your Butt!

Your derriere is not just for balancing a glass of champagne - it is a collection of muscles that work together to help the rest of the leg move to propel you forward and up. Any movement that requires hip extension, that is to move the legs from a bent to a straight position, requires the engagement of several muscles that hang out back there.

To strengthen and shape, a combination of resistance exercises that target the biggest muscle, the gluteus maximus, and the smaller underlying gluteus medius can help the butt maintain that rounder, lifted look. But here's the thing: no two bodies, and therefor, no two butts are the same. Muscle size does not dictate strength so not everyone's muscles will look the same, even if they can perform exactly the same way. Still, doing these moves will definitely help prevent that dreaded "pancake butt" that no one wants to have!

The first page of a fresh calendar year is symbolic of so many things in life. There are 365 blank squares before us, waiting to be filled. And before the pages get cluttered with school events and doctor's appointments, we have an opportunity to schedule something for ourselves first!

Our resolutions may be big or small, vague or deeply personal, but they all share one common fault: Without commitment and accountability they are just empty wishes, vanishing into the air. How are some people so successful in achieving their goals, while others never make it beyond posting their resolutions to Facebook?

I am not anti-resolution, but for some time I have taken up an issue with the inflated importance placed on the changes we wish to make... just once a year. In reality, it's winter, it's cold, and we are under the same time constraints with the same limited hours of daylight on January 2nd as we had on December 21st. It's easy to make really big plans for ourselves in the midst of winter break. But then we're thrown back into the mix, probably still feeling the effects of New Year's Eve, and wondering, "Wait, so just how am I going to do this?"

So while there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a New Year's Resolution, I want to help you re-think how you approach your goals. Because it's not enough to just say "I want to _____ in 2015," you need a plan with concrete steps to follow and complete at pre-determined intervals. It is the same approach I encourage clients to take when beginning or making a change to their workout routines, and can be implemented any time of year.