Blake Lively's Diet and Exercise Routine: How to Get in Shape Like a Hollywood Star

Blake Lively, the actress and mother of four, is admired for her radiant appearance and fit physique. Many wonder how she manages to stay in shape while balancing a successful acting career and family life. This article delves into Blake Lively's diet and exercise routine, revealing the secrets to her stunning figure.

Blake Lively's Fitness Philosophy

Blake Lively's fitness journey showcases her dedication and hard work. While genetics play a role, her figure is the result of consistent effort and a well-rounded fitness regimen. Her trainer, Don Saladino, has been instrumental in helping her sculpt and maintain her physique for over a decade. Saladino, who has also trained other Hollywood stars, creates customized workout plans tailored to Lively's unique needs.

Decoding Blake Lively's Workout Routine

Blake Lively's workout routine is a mix of strength training, cardio, and functional exercises. She typically works out four to five days a week, with each session lasting between 30 to 75 minutes, depending on her schedule.

Strength Training: The Foundation

Strength training is the cornerstone of Blake Lively's fitness regimen. She focuses on building lean muscle and burning fat through a variety of exercises. Her routines often include:

  • Squats: A fundamental exercise that targets the lower body, including the glutes, quads, and hamstrings.
  • Bicep Curls: Strengthens the biceps muscles in the upper arms.
  • Shoulder Presses: Works the shoulder muscles, improving upper body strength and definition.
  • Walking Lunges: Targets the glutes, quads, and hamstrings while improving balance and coordination.
  • Push-ups: A classic exercise that strengthens the chest, shoulders, and triceps.
  • Planks: Engages the core muscles, improving stability and posture.
  • Kettlebell Deadlifts: Tones muscles and enhances her overall strength.
  • Split squats: Tones muscles and enhances her overall strength.
  • Farmer’s carries: Tones muscles and enhances her overall strength.

Saladino emphasizes the importance of proper form and intensity to maximize the effectiveness of each exercise and prevent injuries.

Read also: The Real Blake Moynes

Cardio: Boosting Endurance and Burning Calories

In addition to strength training, Blake Lively incorporates cardio into her routine to boost endurance and burn calories. She enjoys activities like:

  • Elliptical: A low-impact exercise that targets both the upper and lower body.
  • Power Walking: A low-to-moderate intensity activity that can be easily incorporated into her daily routine.

Even on busy days, Blake makes an effort to break a sweat for at least 10 minutes, using the elliptical or treadmill to keep her metabolism firing.

The 7-Day Workout Regime

Based on Blake's fitness routine, a detailed 7-day regime includes:

  • Monday: Whole body circuit with exercises like squats, bicep curls, and shoulder presses.
  • Tuesday: Focuses on legs and core with exercises like diagonal walks, butterfly steps, and lifted heel squats.
  • Wednesday: Either cardio or rest day.
  • Thursday: Whole body circuit with abs focus.
  • Friday to Sunday: Rest days to allow her body to recover.

Active Recovery

Don also prescribed me a full body workout. His reasoning is refreshing (and something we can apply to pretty much everything in the world of fitness): there’s no right or wrong. ‘If you don’t tend to suffer from DOMS, a full body workout is sometimes more beneficial. It depends on your goal and your fitness level as an individual. I’d advise exploring the different approaches and seeing what works for you - it should be fun, and a full body approach might be what you prefer.’

Blake Lively's Diet Plan: Fueling Her Body

Blake Lively follows a balanced diet that focuses on whole, unprocessed foods. She avoids restrictive diets and calorie counting, instead opting for a sustainable approach to eating.

Read also: Holistic weight loss: Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's story

Key Principles of Her Diet

  • High-Quality Foods: Blake prioritizes organic, nutrient-dense foods, including proteins, vegetables, fruits, and slow-burning starches.

  • Balanced Meals: She consumes balanced meals that include a source of protein, a high-fiber vegetable, and a slow-burning carbohydrate.

  • Healthy Fats: Her diet incorporates healthy fats from sources like avocado, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter.

    • She cooks a lot of her own meals.
    • She starts the day right. She always begins by drinking a glass of water when she wakes up.
  • Hydration: Blake starts her day with a glass of water and stays hydrated throughout the day.

A Typical Day of Eating

  • Breakfast: Eggs cooked in coconut oil with veggies and fruit, or gluten-free oats with fruit.
  • Lunch: Proteins, veggies, and carbohydrates, often including wild-caught fish or pasture-raised chicken with a salad and sweet potatoes or rice.
  • Dinner: Nutrient-dense foods to fuel her body.

Avoiding Processed Foods

Blake's diet excludes processed meals, sugar, and wheat. She focuses on organic, healthy foods, incorporating fats such as grass-fed butter and avocado.

Read also: Shelton's Transformation

The 80/20 Rule

Blake follows an 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of her diet consists of nutritious foods, and 20 percent is reserved for indulgences. She enjoys pasta, pizza, and desserts in moderation, allowing herself to splurge on occasion.

Supplements

Blake takes supplements such as magnesium, omega-3, multivitamin, and probiotics to fuel her body.

The Importance of Breakfast

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A study showed that people who skip breakfast may miss important nutrients. And Blake lives by that nutritional wisdom. Blake’s trainer, Don Saladino, told Cosmopolitan that her breakfast might look like a couple of eggs cooked in coconut oil with some vegetables, sometimes with gluten-free oats and fruit. As for the rest of Blake’s diet, Saladino focuses her on eating balanced meals with proteins, vegetables, fruits, slow-burning starches like sweet potato, and healthy fats like avocado, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter.

Personal Trainer Insights

With advice from a celebrity trainer and a focus on maintaining a caloric deficit, she balances her diet to manage blood sugar levels and sustain her energy. Lively’s commitment to fitness, including extra minutes of exercise, underscores her dedication to achieving an athletic body and handling weight post-pregnancy with the help of Don Saladino. Saladino emphasizes the importance of consistency, balance, and a focus on overall well-being rather than just aesthetics.

Blake Lively's Refreshingly Simple Fitness Principles

Turns out, everything Blake and Don do is surprisingly simple. Here's everything he taught me.

  1. Use food to help you feel better (and achieve any goals)Don swears by the Lumen tool. ‘I train the metabolism of all of my clients,’ he explains. ‘The Lumen indicates the type of fuel the body is using to produce energy - fats or carbs. Using this, clients can then adapt what they eat on each day, in order to improve their “metabolic flexibility”, and therefore how well they perform in each workout.’ This is particularly effective for clients with a fat loss goal, so says Don.
  2. Figure out how ‘ready’ you are for a workout, and decipher whether you’re tired or burnt out ‘I always ask my clients for their temperature,’ Don explains. ‘It gives me an idea of how they’re feeling that day, and so how hard we should go in the workout.’ As mentioned, we opted for a lighter, bodyweight workout for me, but my question for Don was how to know whether you’re just tired, or if you’re burnt out and should avoid working out altogether. He cites a few factors to consider: How are you feeling? Are you stressed out? Are you working a lot? How is your sleep? ‘These are all indicators to your readiness for exercise,’ he explains. ‘Exercise can add stress and mess with your mood.’ So, if you’re feeling considerably more stressed than normal, if work is extra busy, or your sleep has been suffering, that’s probably your sign to go easy.
  3. Think about your goals - if you have one As much as it’s good to have a goal, there’s no harm in exercising purely for the fun of it. For me, my goal when working out with Don was to recover from the previous few days of crushing it in the gym, and an active recovery approach was Don’s solution. Why? ‘By keeping the heart rate slightly elevated and moving in a multi directional way, using all of the planes of the body - the sagittal, transverse and frontal, the amount of lactic acid (the stuff that builds up in your body during exercise and causes sore muscles and DOMS) will reduce, so it’ll help your muscles to repair.’
  4. Incorporate active recovery days to boost energy levels While complete rest days are a no-brainer for recovery and progress, active recovery on days when you feel slightly lethargic but still want to get moving can work wonders for your energy levels.
  5. Make active recovery days dynamic My typical active recovery day would involve a 40-60 minute walk, but Don says doing something more dynamic could be beneficial. It’s about the plane of movement you do. ‘Walking is very linear - you do it in a straight line,’ he explains. ‘But by covering all planes you’re less likely to develop weak points. If you were to run in a straight line all the time, for example, you’d need to practice more lateral (sideway) movements.’ So, by covering every direction of movement in the workout Don and I smashed out, I was training every muscle in my body which would help to reduce any potential strength imbalances.
  6. Plan your workout splits for youWorkout splits - dedicating a single day to a single muscle group - are a popular approach with plenty of trainers since it means each muscle group is able to recover before they’re put to work again. What was interesting for me was that Don prescribed me a full body workout. His reasoning is refreshing (and something we can apply to pretty much everything in the world of fitness): there’s no right or wrong. ‘If you don’t tend to suffer from DOMS, a full body workout is sometimes more beneficial. It depends on your goal and your fitness level as an individual. I’d advise exploring the different approaches and seeing what works for you - it should be fun, and a full body approach might be what you prefer.’

The Don Saladino App

Train like Blake. This is the exact style of training Blake Lively uses to build lean, strong muscle and sculpt the screen-ready physique you’ve seen in her most iconic roles. The focus? Fat loss, functional movement, and serious attention to lower-body sculpting.

Training Split:

  • Day 1. Full Body - Glutes & Hamstrings
  • Day 2. Full Body - Abs & Core
  • Day 3. Cardio Day (Low-Impact, High-Sweat)
  • Day 4. Full Body - Abs & Core
  • Day 5. No subscription or reoccurring fees for the Don Saladino app. The app is FREE.

Program Structure

  • Day 1: Full Body -Glutes & Hamstrings

Start the week with glute-focused lower-body strength, targeting the hamstrings, glutes, and quads for lean muscle development and fat burning. Includes explosive movements like glute bridges and dead bugs, along with compound lifts like goblet squats and DB leg curls for building power, strength, and muscle definition.

  • Day 2: Full Body - Abs & Core

Target your core with a dynamic mix of core stabilization exercises and full-body movements to strengthen the abs, obliques, and lower back. Focus on high-intensity core movements like cable crunches, side planks, and bird dog rows for a sculpted midsection and functional strength.

  • Day 3: Cardio Day

Keep your heart rate high and body burning fat with interval-based cardio circuits designed to test your endurance and maximize fat loss. Includes intense rounds of "Pick Your Poison" cardio intervals, combining various modes of training for full-body conditioning and cardiovascular resilience.

  • Day 4: Full Body - Abs & Core

Revisit core and functional training with a focus on strengthening the entire body and improving mobility. Incorporates exercises like hollow holds, wall handstands, and bird dog rows to enhance core stability while building overall strength.

  • Day 5: Full Body - Strength

Finish strong with a full-body strength day, combining compound movements like RDLs, incline chest presses, and Arnold presses.

Blake Lively's Weight Loss Journey

Blake Lively's weight loss has garnered attention, particularly after her pregnancies. She gained over 60 pounds during her second pregnancy and candidly shared that it took her 14 months to shed the weight. She emphasized that it required dedication, hard work, and a positive mindset.

The Role of Diet and Nutrition

Blake Lively's weight loss journey was centered around a healthy and balanced approach to diet and nutrition, under the guidance of her trainer, Don Saladino. Instead of focusing on calorie deficits, Blake emphasized eating high-quality foods that nourish the body.

The Importance of Moderation

Blake also believed in moderation rather than deprivation. She didn't shy away from enjoying dessert at a party or indulging in her favorite foods, ensuring that her diet remained realistic and sustainable. Saladino highlighted that Blake’s approach was about enjoying delicious, wholesome foods while maintaining balance. This focus on quality, rather than strict restrictions, allowed her to shed the pregnancy weight in a healthy way and maintain her overall well-being.

Workout and Routine

Blake Lively’s workout routine was a balanced and flexible approach, tailored to fit her busy lifestyle as a mother of four. She was in the gym four to five days a week, with the length of her workouts varying depending on her schedule and the demands of her children. Some days, Blake had the luxury of working out for an hour, while on busier days, her sessions were shortened to just 20-30 minutes. When time was tight, she often had to fit in workouts on her own, demonstrating her commitment to staying active.

Six Healthy Habits of Blake Lively

  1. Sober Curiosity: Blake doesn’t drink alcohol, leading her to create her line of non-alcoholic mixers, Betty Buzz.
  2. Breakfast is Key: Blake incorporates protein into each breakfast, such as eggs, a protein shake, or almond butter on her toast.
  3. Hydration: Blake starts every morning by drinking a glass of water.
  4. Listen to Your Body: Blake begins each workout by talking through how she feels, how she’s been sleeping, and overall what her body is saying. And based on how she’s feeling that day, he’ll tweak her program accordingly.
  5. The 80/20 Rule: Blake follows the 80/20 rule and makes room for not-as-healthy foods that she loves.
  6. Rest and Recovery: Since Blake crushes her workouts up to six days a week, rest and recovery are just as important as the workouts themselves.

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