Female Weight Training

If you belong to the gym for the purpose of using the step class, maybe a bit of swimming or racquetball to help your figure, you may have walked by the weight room from time to time. When you look in there, what's the one thing you notice right away? For me it's that it's a room full of men. This is one room that women seem to have fled in favor of more "feminine" exercises. And the reasons that female weight training has not taken off is largely grounded in misunderstandings and fears that are simply not based in fact.

Female weight training can do a world of good for the female body as much as it does for men who give themselves to the discipline. When you looked in that weight room, the guys who have developed their muscles to the point that they are huge muscular "supermen" are the ones that get your attention first.

But if you look past those guys, you might not have noticed dozens of everyday guys that you might encounter anywhere in life using weight lifting to define tone and build muscle, not to lift a car with their teeth but to be fit for everyday life. And women have the same physical demands on their bodies during everyday life as men if not more.

So to, weight training can benefit everyday normal women just like you and I and it doesn't have to transform our bodies into massively bulked out behemoths that would scare off husbands and boyfriends alike. The truth of the effect of female weight training on the female form is that the typical outcome of a well designed and faithfully followed weight lifting discipline is the opposite of that image of the superwomen we see in Olympic competition or on the covers of weight lifting magazines.

That image of the bulked out women is an aberration to how the female body works. To achieve that look, those women have to subject to themselves to a very carefully crafted lifestyle of weight lifting, diet control, chemical supplements (yes THOSE chemical supplements) and scientific and technically complicated programs to make their bodies look like that.

The truth is the female body is not designed to look like that. Instead, a program of weight lifting that a trainer can put together for you can give you new muscle tone and "core" muscle strength that will simply make the daily physical demands of life less difficult and less prone to give you aches and pain at night. And as you grow stronger, your shape will not become masculine and disfigured. Instead the new muscle tone will enhance your posture and put you at ease "in your own skin" in a way that will make you more shapely and feminine than ever.

So let's stop running from the weight room and discover the good that the men have so carefully kept to themselves. It will benefit our daily lives, the way we react to change, aging and even pregnancy and it will even fight common feminine problems such as osteoporosis that can be so debilitating in older women. These benefits all dictate that we run TO the weight room and not away from it so we can learn the secrets of weight training for good help today and for all of our lives.

Exercise top Tip #1

Build up slowly. I know that most of us leave our exercise to the last minute, you leave it until you only have one month until that huge party and you need to lose some weight and get in shape for it fast. You then rush into it, doing nothing properly and pushing yourself too hard which inevitably leads to you getting injured and/or giving up. You need to ease into the routine and build the level up over time.

Exercise top Tip #2

Don't be self conscious. This is the hardest tip to follow! When you first start off you are probably not in the best shape, so you body and the amount of exercise you can do may leave you slightly self conscious. This is dangerous as it can kill your fitness ambition before you even start. Put a big smug smile on your face when you get there and just remember, in a month or two you will be exactly as fit and trim as them if you work hard, then you can lose your worries, but if you let your doubts get the better of you and give up then you won't ever get to be the slim trim star of the gym!

Exercise top Tip #3

Each workout aim to improve ever so slightly. If you improve by staying on the exercise bike for just 10 seconds longer each time you go then after just 6 visits that will be a whole extra minute that you are on there for but you only have to deal with it 10 seconds at a time! This way you push yourself every time, have goals to aim for and will be constantly improving - go for it!