Blake Lively Lost Her Baby Weight by Training for 'The Shallows' : 'It's a Nice Advantage'

Blake Lively credits her training for The Shallows for losing her baby weight after daughter James

Photo: INFPhoto

Need to lose the baby weight quickly? Do as Blake Lively did and sign on to a surfing movie!

The Shallows star says filming the movie, which required Lively to be in a bikini ten months after giving birth to daughter James in Decemeber 2014, was “a nice advantage” as she worked to drop the weight.

“That movie was an athletic event as much as it was an acting job because they didn’t hire a stunt double until the last two weeks, so it was just insane underwater stunts,” Lively, who is now pregnant with her second child with husband Ryan Reynolds, explained on Live with Kelly Wednesday morning.

“I don’t look like that in real life. That’s not me,” she added. “That was an eight-week period of my life. I’m luck to have an amazing trainer, this guy Don Saladino, who just kicked my butt.”

Saladino spilled his secrets to Lively’s amazing bikini body, telling PEOPLE he immediately upped her workouts from once or twice a week to five or six times a week.

“We would do an upper body workout Monday, lower body Tuesday,” he explained. “Wednesday was a playful pool workout where she would do laps. Thursday was upper body, Friday lower body, and Saturday we were focusing on the accessory movers: the arms, the shoulders.”

But if Lively – who was breastfeeding at the time – wasn’t feeling up to an intense workout, Saladino would alter the exercises.

“I told her to listen to her body,” Saladino said. “When you feel great, get on it. When you don’t feel great, shift down a gear. And when you feel like complete crap do really minimal work.”

He also set her up with a nutritionist, who advised Lively to have a protein, a vegetable and a slow-burning carb with each meal for balance. And the actress, whose love of food and cooking is well-documented, made most of her meals herself.

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“This is not training a fitness competitor or a model,” Saladino said. “This is about feeding a woman who’s got a child who’s got to have certain nutrients in her body. She’s got to take care of herself. She’s got to eat healthy. The way that we did it was the right way, and it wasn’t through starving her.”

Saladino emphasized that Lively wasn’t doing some crazy get-slim-quick diet – she was doing what any new mom can.

“She’s not doing these triple session workouts,” he said. “It should encourage people: Here s a woman who had a baby in December, and she’s got her bikini body back already. That’s pretty spectacular.”