Women, weight and weight training
Patrick Dale dispels some of the myths associated with weight training for female athletes.
I have just returned from my daily trip to the gym. While I was there, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The gym I use is a big, open-plan, well-equipped room, but it seemed there was an invisible force field around the weight training area that only the female clientele could see. The whole time I was there, not a single member of the gentler sex came into the weight training area. Luckily for me, the force field did not prevent me from going into the cardio area and asking a few ladies why they did not come over to the other side of the gym. Their responses ranged from "I do not want big muscles" to "cardio is best for weight loss" to "it smells bad over that side!" After speaking to a few more women (in the name of science) I realised there was an awful lot of misinformation, confusion, and outright lies being spread about resistance training so in this article, I intend to dispel a few of those old myths and start a petition to get more woman lifting weights!
Myth number 1 - Weight training will cause big, bulky muscles and make women look masculine.
Most women do not have the genetic potential to develop big muscles. They lack sufficient amounts of the male hormone testosterone to build muscle mass seen in men. The dominant female hormone, oestrogen, is not responsible for muscle growth, unlike male testosterone. The only way for most women to develop large "male-like" muscles would be to ingest/inject extraneous testosterone to override their normal hormonal functions. This is not a common practice and is only seen in bodybuilding, and other pursuits where developing maximal strength is necessary.
Myth number 2 - To lose weight, I need to do lots of cardio.
Imagine a glass. In your mind fill this glass with three parts water and one part olive oil. As you know, water and oil do not readily mix so the oil will float on top of the water. This glass represents your total body weight; the water represents your lean tissue (muscle, bones, and internal organs), and the oil represents your body fat. Most exercisers are only concerned with what they weigh, not what that weight is made up of (correctly termed body composition). Using our glass analogy, it would be easy to pour off either liquid and reduce the glass's contents; however, the reality is we want to keep the water (lean body tissue) and ditch the oil (fat). Getting rid of muscle and keeping fat is just pure madness, but with someone who exclusively uses cardio exercise for weight management, that is what they are doing.
Cardiovascular exercise is essential for our health - it keeps the heart, lungs, and circulatory system in tip-top condition and burns energy (calories) when doing it. However, because your body is the master adapter and responds to the stress you put upon it, it will do everything it can to make cardiovascular exercise easier. The body lays down new capillaries to aid in oxygen delivery and lactic acid removal grows bigger/more cells called mitochondria to produce more energy-giving ATP, makes the heart bigger and stronger, and improves the function of the lungs to increase the efficiency of the cardiovascular system, and rids itself of any extra muscle not actively used in the chosen cardiovascular activity. Think about it. The muscle is vascular - it needs oxygen to survive. Even when you are running, the muscles of your upper body still require large amounts of oxygen. To increase the amount of oxygen available for the legs' running muscles, it makes sense from a survival perspective to get rid of some of the redundant muscle mass of the upper body. It is like trimming unnecessary weight off of a car chassis to provide further performance.
This is all well and good for runners wanting to run faster or further, but for someone who wants to control their body fat and look good, this is about the worst possible thing you can do. Muscle needs fuel (food). Less muscle = less food required. We call the daily amount of energy you need your Basal Metabolic Rate - or BMR for short. The resulting loss of muscle mass lowers your BMR resulting in an energy surplus that will most likely turn into fat when that energy is not used. A two-pound loss of muscle will result in an approximate 70 Calories drop in daily energy requirements. This means our aerobic-loving exercisers will lose muscle, gain fat and look worse than they did before starting their exercise regime.
What is the best way to maintain/gain lean tissue I hear you ask? The answer is "lift weights". It is a simple case of "use it or loses it". The body will maintain/increase its muscle mass if it is regularly called on to perform work.
A small increase in muscle mass will result in a higher daily BMR which means our exercisers will need more energy daily, and if they are under-eating, extra energy will have to come from body fat stores. So, the take-home message is that a combination of cardio and weight training is best for fat loss. Weight loss can occur when we lose muscle, but the reality is that it is the fat we need to lose and keep the muscle.
Myth number 3 - To tone up, I need to do lots of reps with a lightweight.
The lovely Jane Fonda did wonders by getting people exercising, but she also set us back years by promoting "the burn" and super-high repetitions for toning and inch loss. That burning you feel when you are exercising is not fat melting away. It is Lactic Acid being produced by your muscles as they run out of oxygen. Lactic acid does not cause spot reduction of body fat. If super high repetitions caused spot reduction of body fat, people who eat lots often would have thin faces from all that chewing!!! Spot reduction is a super-sized myth! Fat stores will disappear globally, not locally. It isn't kind, but it is the truth. Someone once asked me "what is the best exercise to make my stomach thinner?" I replied, "Push yourself away from the dining table sooner". Probably not the answer they were seeking, but it is a painful truth very few exercisers/dieters ever grasp.
The best way to improve a muscle or muscle group's condition is to overload it - in other words, ask it to do more work than usual. This means working it harder, not longer. Think about it. You do 30 side leg lifts to tone your glutes (your butt). When that gets easier, you do 35, then 40, and so on. After a few months you are doing five sets of 50 per leg, and your entire exercise routine consists of nothing but side-lying leg lifts because that is all you have time for. It sounds like madness. Indeed, it would be better to increase the workload, overload the muscles more, and not spend an hour on the same exercise? To improve a muscle's condition, it must be exposed to progressive overload, i.e. asked to do more than it is used to regularly. Only then will we see the adaptation (increase in tone) we are seeking.
A repetition count of 20 or less is best in terms of effect and training time economy. Any higher than that is just a waste of your valuable time. This 20 repetition rule applies to all muscle groups, including the abdominals. Super high reps do nothing but waste time. Find ways to make exercises harder rather than do hundreds of unnecessarily time-wasting reps.
Myth number 4 - Free weights for men, machines for women.
This is one of those old, sexual stereotypes from the 70s that never went away. Old fashioned gyms used to be the reserve of manly men, but that stopped in the 80s when commercial gyms came into being. The thing is, in many cases, the free weights area is still off-limits to women. Why is this? Do the men intimidate the women with all their unnecessary grunting? Is it because the exercises seem "too manly"? Are women concerned that they might get big muscles like the guys? (We have covered this now). Is it the aroma? (Cannot help with that one - too many protein shakes are the probable culprit there I think). Whatever the reason, the free weight area contains some of the best tools a girl can use to give her the body she always dreamed of.
It is interesting to note that some exercises and machines are deemed male or female when the reality is that our bodies are so similar, that pretty much all exercises are beneficial to both sexes. Some exercises considered very "masculine" are virtually essential for any woman wanting to work on the traditional female "problem areas" of the hips, butt, and thighs. I refer to the squat, deadlift, stiff-legged deadlift, and to a lesser extent the lunge and high step up. With enough weight, these exercises will give most guys the "killer wheels" they are after. still, with moderate loading and a rep count of 15-20, they will carve any woman an awesome lower body in much less time than endless sets of hip abduction, hip adduction, or standing leg curls.
Any woman who wants a good lower body should learn to squat and deadlift.
Myth number 5 - Muscle turns to fat when you stop training - I do not want that to happen to me!
Go back to our water and oil in a glass image. Is it possible to turn water into oil or vice versa? Of course, the answer is no (Unless you are Jesus - then you would probably do the water into wine thing anyway.) The same is true of muscle and fat. They are biologically different and cannot turn into each other. However, it is possible to reduce fat stores and increase muscle mass, thus turning one into the other.
Because muscle is biologically active, it needs energy (calories from food) to sustain it. However, suppose our subject stops exercising for an extended period without reducing their calorific (food) intake. In that case, their muscles will shrink (correctly termed atrophy), and their fat stores will grow (hypertrophy) again giving the impression of one turning into the other.
The easiest way to avoid this happening is to:
- Do not stop training
- If you do have to stop training for an extended period, e.g. illness or vacation, try to reduce your food intake so that the excess energy that would usually be used up by your exercise will not be stored as fat.
Myth number 6 - Weight training makes muscles short and bulky - I want long slender muscles like a dancer, so I do yoga instead.
I have heard this one so many times now that if I had a pound for every time, I would be a rich man indeed. I had a huge argument with an ex-girlfriend about this very subject - needless to say, I stuck to my guns and am now single! It always amazes me how common this misconception is.
Muscles are the shape they are because of where they are attached to your skeleton. These attachment sites are referred to as Origins and Insertions. A muscle is attached to the skeleton by tendons. The point at which the tendon meets the skeleton dictates if a muscle will appear long or short. These attachment sites will not move regardless of whether you engage in vigorous weight training or endless yoga and stretching. It is just genetics, pure and simple. Some people are blessed with long muscle bellies and short tendons, giving the appearance of long, flowing muscles. Other people have shorter muscle bellies and longer tendons, giving the appearance of short "bunchy" muscles. There are no special exercises that will magically change the length of a muscle belly. Do not waste precious time doing weird and wonderful movements alleged to lengthen your muscles. We can make our muscles bigger, firmer, and improve their condition, but their length is predetermined - if you do not like the length of your muscles, blame your folks, not your weight training routine.
Myth number 7 - Weight training takes too long, and I have to go too often - I do not have time!
When I hear this one, it is safe to assume that this woman has trained with a man who fancies himself as a bit of a bodybuilder and has been exposed to the multi-day split system of training. With the split training system, different muscles are trained on other days e.g. Monday is legs, Tuesday is chest, Wednesday is back, Thursday shoulders, and Friday is arms (ready for a weekend out in town wearing a T-shirt 2 sizes too small!). This type of training is fine for bodybuilders, but it requires way too much time in the gym for the majority of exercisers.
The average exerciser should seldom adopt a split training programme and instead stick to whole body weight training sessions where the body is exercised as a single synergistic unit. Whole-body training is time-efficient, easy to plan, and requires only 2-3 hours of gym time a week, leaving lots of time to do other things.
Using exercises that are deemed to be "compound," i.e. there is movement at more than one joint, we can work multiple muscle groups simultaneously. By way of an example, to work the lower body effectively using isolation exercises (an exercise where movement is limited to one joint only) you would have to perform 6 exercises - leg extensions, leg curls, hip extensions, hip adductions, hip abductions, and calf raises. Or, we could do squats. Weight training can be simple and straightforward.
It is possible to train the entire body using just six exercises and still have time to perform some cardio or core work and be finished in an hour or less. Organise the six exercises into a circuit, and you have an amazingly effective fat burning/cardio workout.
So ladies, leave those split routines to the bodybuilders. A smart woman does whole-body workouts.
Myth 8 - I cannot weight train because I have back/knees/shoulder pain.
Which came first - the chicken or the egg? It is the same for this myth. Is your back/knee/shoulder pain because you do not weight train? Once a doctor has given the all-clear and confirmed that any pain is not due to musculoskeletal or neurological injury, it is not uncommon to find that after a few weeks of corrective weight training chronic aches and pains start to disappear. The body is an amazing machine - far more complex than an automobile.
To run at optimum efficiency, it needs to have all its parts working in balance. By balance, I mean our muscles (which are generally arranged in opposing pairs on either side of a skeletal joint) need to be equally toned. If muscles on one side of a joint are stronger than those found on the opposite side, a dysfunctional joint will develop and pain may well be the result. Many of our day-to-day tasks are unidirectional requiring the use of muscles on one side of a joint only. This means that within a pair, one muscle may be stronger than the muscle that opposes it.
We can rebalance the muscles on either side of a joint and return that joint to full function with prescribed weight training exercises. Strengthening the lower back can cure lower back pain, strengthening the thigh muscles (the quadriceps and hamstrings) can prevent knee pain, and strengthening the muscles of the upper back can improve posture and prevent neck pain.
Some time ago, I had an email personal training client. The deal was I would write a programme, and the client would take it to her local gym, and the resident instructor would then teach her the exercises. This client was suffering from some lower back pain attributed to muscle weakness, so we agreed that she needed to improve her back strength, and I prescribed deadlifts. On hearing about the client's bad back, the instructor removed the deadlifts from her programme and replaced this great exercise with the leg curl machine. Needless to say, when I heard about this, I was aggrieved! The instructor failed to realise that the client had three grown children who regularly needed to be picked up and carried and she needed to prepare her back for the rigours of this frequent occurrence and the fact the kids were getting heavier all the time! She NEEDED to deadlift! Weak muscles should not be favoured or ignored but challenged so that they cease to be vulnerable.
Summary
I am sure many more myths are still yet to be busted, so if you know of any others, please feel free to drop me a line to expose them to the world! You can now see weight training is an essential form of exercise suitable for almost everyone - young and old, male and female. The huge benefits that can be gained from lifting weights (improved strength, bone density, muscle tone, joint stability, posture, fitness, etc.) far outweigh any perceived risks, so I strongly urge you to take up weight training and reap the rewards. Your body will thank you for it!
Before undertaking any new exercise programme, always consult your doctor and seek professional instruction as a faulty exercise technique can result in serious injury.
Article Reference
This article first appeared in:
- DALE, P. (2007) Women, weight and weight training. Brian Mackenzie's Successful Coaching, (ISSN 1745-7513/ 47/ November), p. 8-10
Page Reference
If you quote information from this page in your work, then the reference for this page is:
- DALE, P. (2007) Women, weight and weight training [WWW] Available from: https://www.brianmac.co.uk/articles/scni47a6.htm [Accessed
About the Author
Patrick Dale has almost 15 years of fitness industry experience. He has a wide and varied sporting history, having participated at a high level in athletics, rugby, rock climbing, trampolining, triathlon, weightlifting, and bodybuilding.