subject: Finding The Best Strength Training For Women [print this page] If you are a woman, chances are you have labored over the fact that it is downright tough to gain muscle mass and tone. For some reason, men achieve it so much more easily, while women often flounder in the need for more strength training.
This article suggests ways that you can take matters into your own hands, and gain the strength you need to stay healthy. First of all, you need more iron.
Not in your diet-in your hands. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a mere twenty one percent of women strength train two or more times a week.
What you don't know: when you skip the weight room, you lose out on the ultimate flab melter. Those two sessions a week can reduce overall body fat by about three percentage points in just ten weeks, even if you don't cut a single calorie.
That translates to as much as three inches total off your waist and hips. Even better, all that new muscle pays off in a long-term boost to your metabolism, which helps keep your body lean and sculpted.
Suddenly, dumbbells sound like a smart idea. Read on for more solid reasons why you should build flex time into your day.
Though cardio burns more calories than strength training during those thirty sweaty minutes, pumping iron slashes more overall. A study in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that women who completed an hour-long strength-training workout burned an average of one hundred more calories in the twenty four hours afterward than they did when they hadn't lifted weights.
At three sessions a week, that is fifteen thousand six hundred calories a year, or about four and a half pounds of fat-without having to move a muscle. What's more, increasing that after burn is as easy as upping the weight on your bar.
In a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, women burned nearly twice as many calories in the two hours after their workout when they lifted eighty five percent of their max load for eight reps than when they did more reps at a lower weight. There's a longer-term benefit to all that lifting, too: muscle accounts for about a third of the average woman's weight, so it has a profound effect on her metabolism.
Specifically, that effect is to burn extra calories, because muscle, unlike fat, is metabolically active. In English: muscle chews up calories even when you're not in the gym.
Replace ten pounds of fat with ten pounds of lean muscle and you'll burn an additional twenty five to fifty calories a day without even trying. If you've ever tried to ditch the saddlebags and ended up a bra size smaller instead, you know that where you lose is as important as how much.
As great as it might be to see the numbers on the scale go down, when you are on a strict cardio-only program your victory is likely to be empty. A recent study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham compared dieters who lifted three times a week with those who did aerobic exercise for the same amount of time.
Both groups ate the same number of calories, and both lost the same amount-twenty six pounds-but the lifters lost pure chub, while about eight percent of the aerobicizers' drop came from valuable muscle. Researchers have also found that lifting weights is better than cardio at whittling intra-abdominal fat-the Buddha-belly kind that's associated with diseases from diabetes to cancer.
Just don't rely exclusively on the scale to track your progress in the battle of the bulge. Because muscle is denser than fat, it squeezes the same amount of weight into less space.
Begin with three weight-training sessions each week. For the greatest calorie burn, aim for total-body workouts that target your arms, abs, legs, and back, and go for moves that will zap several different muscle groups at a time-for example, squats, which call on muscles in both the front and back of your legs, as opposed to leg extensions, which isolate the quads.
Ready to turn yourself into a lean, mean, calorie-torching machine? Then go get pumped!
