In this article, Why Women Should Lift, we make it easy to understand why women need never fear lifting weights ever again!
Many women take regularly to the gym with the goal of losing weight or more specifically, losing fat. On a mission to reach their goals, some spend hours repetitively working out on the same old cardio machines: usually treadmill and elliptical trainer trying to achieve results.
What many people are unaware of is that there is a much more effective and quicker way to achieve their goals of improving their physique: weightlifting.
While cardio will help you lose weight, it can also break down muscle mass as well as fat when carried out for prolonged periods. Muscle is key for developing a toned and shapely physique, and helps you to avoid the ‘skinny fat’ look that occurs when there is a lack of muscle.
Combining a session of weight lifting or strength training with a smaller amount of HIIT cardio (High Intensity Interval Training) at the end of a weight lifting session is a much more effective and quicker way of blasting fat whilst retaining as much muscle as possible.
High rep strength training (doing a high amount of reps of an exercise eg. weighted squats) can elevate your metabolism for up to 38 hours after a weight training session. Similarly, your Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) will be increased, which means your body will be burning calories at a much faster rate than it would had you just done cardio and will continue burning calories even when you are resting and sleeping!
The Benefits of Weightlifting: Myths Debunked!
One of the main reasons women are hesitant to add weight lifting to their training program is because they are afraid of becoming too muscular or ‘bulky’. There are several reasons though, that this is NOT going to happen. Firstly, women do not possess a high enough amount of the male hormone testosterone in their bodies in order to suddenly develop a huge amount of muscle. Even if they do have more than normal, it still won’t be as much as a man’s.
Secondly, building muscle is simply NOT an easy to do; you are NOT going to gain a significant amount of muscle mass just by doing a couple of weighted squats or curling some dumbbells. Building muscle requires a specific nutrition plan and in order to develop muscle, your protein intake must be significantly increased (between 0.5-1g of protein per pound of body weight for most people looking to gain muscle).
Even when a woman eats this amount of protein, and combines it with weight training, they are going to see some very lean definition in their body, which will simply give that ‘toned’ look that many women desire. Which woman wants to look like a man anyway?