The Correct Weight Training For Females Can Get You a Body Like This
Ladies – listen up!!
How many times do we have to tell you that correct weight training does not make you “bulky”?!
Using weights/resistance in the gym is just a tool to help us achieve a specific goal and very much like any other physical activity the actual act of doing is less important than the “how” you do it. Weight training for females is not the sole preserve of the aspiring bodybuilder!
Confused by this statement?
Think about how you move 500 metres. You can shuffle along like a little old lady. Or you can stroll. Or you can jog. Or you can run. Or you can go hell for leather, then pause, and then go hell for leather again. Regardless of “how” you do it, you will travel the same distance. This seems to be the prevailing mindset for many women and how they use the gym. In other words, they lump all “weight training” into one category and think that all types of training will generate the same result. I hope that you can now see the flaw in this thinking.
Going from point A to point B is NOT the point. What is the point is HOW you do it.
Weight training for women (and men) is the greatest tool we have at our disposal for controlling, manipulating and overhauling all our body composition (fat loss/muscle building) requirements. The list of goals that we can adapt our gym workouts to encompass is very long and includes bodybuilding (hypertrophy), fat loss, endurance, relative strength, maximal strength and rehabilitation. It is beyond the scope of this short post to explain exactly how to train for each goal (and no you cannot train for all goals at the same time – you’d be like the proverbial fox chasing ten different rabbits!) suffice to say that the loads that you use (20-100% of your maximal one repetition load) will have a profound effect on the training stimulus as will tempo of movement, rest intervals, and of course repetitions (that should be dictated by load and vice versa).
If in doubt please scour this blog as I have a lot of very relevant articles, perhaps the most appropriate one is this one on the best cardio training programs. And as ever if you have any questions at all please feel free to ask them in the comments section below or visit me on social media, or (even better) pop across to our UP Personal Training Forum where lots of smart and very helpful people are just waiting to answer any question large and small.
I will finish today’s post with an incredible video that really prompted me to write this today. This slim young lady is lifting a weight that only a very strong man could ever think about shifting. It is a weight that pretty much no untrained man in the world could ever get close to. And the amazing thing to some of you is that this isn’t some massive behemoth who looks more like me than a “real woman”. This is a slim, petite looking woman who has been trained with weights in such as way that she is incredibly strong and yet looks nothing like a bodybuilder.