While weight training has traditionally been a male activity, over the last twenty years women have taken to the weight rooms of gyms and health clubs, and to their own spare rooms at home, with increasing enthusiasm. The benefits of strength training for women should not be underestimated. Although large muscles tend not to be one of the acquisitions women get from weight training, increased strength, balance and bone density are.
Women Don't Get Huge Muscles From Weights
Strong Women Stay Slim was a best selling book for Miriam Nelson because she was one of the first authorities to make weight training a contemporary issue for women with promises of fat loss, strength increases and bone density benefits as a buffer against the onset of osteoporosis and other age and lifestyle related afflictions.
For men, these issues are somewhat different because men are protected to some extent by testosterone which tends to enhance muscle and bone growth. Yet even men suffer can from age-related osteoporosis and loss of muscle. Exercise, including strength training, is one solution.
Even though women produce testosterone as well -- it’s important for female sex drive -- they don’t produce as much as men, and that’s why women don’t grow big muscles under weight training stimulation or at any other time. Yet strength improvements and the stimulation of bone growth through weight training is not necessarily a product of muscle size -- one reason why weight training still works for women, and can work for you, even though huge muscles won't happen unless you take steroids. You can relax about that aspect.
Physical Activity, Weights, Protect Against Breast Cancer
One of the main risk factors for breast cancer is obesity. The American Cancer Society reported this in its January 2007 report. The report also found that physical activity protects against breast cancer and perhaps also the return of cancer after treatment. It‘s easy to see that slimming down with a diet and exercise program, including weights, could reduce your risk of breast cancer, notwithstanding inherited family risk. In fact, if you do have breast cancer in the immediate family, an exercise program may be one thing you can do to reduce your risk.
It's a Myth that women will bulk up from weight training
Due to the fact that women do not, and cannot, naturally produce as much testosterone (one of the main hormones responsible for increasing muscle size) as males do, it is impossible for a woman to gain huge amounts of muscle mass by merely touching some weights. Unfortunately, the image that may come to your mind is that of professional female bodybuilders. Most of these women, unfortunately, use anabolic steroids (synthetic testosterone) along with other drugs in order to achieve that high degree of muscularity.
It's also a myth that if you quit weight training your muscle will turn into fat.
You're no more likely to turn muscle into fat than you can turn brass into gold! The way a body transformation occurs is by gaining muscle through weight training and losing fat through aerobics and diet simultaneously. Again, muscle and fat are very different types of tissue. We cannot turn one into the other.
Long and short:
a. Muscle burns fat
b. Lower your body fat to show off your new muscle
c. Get a dog (he or she will force you off your butt and out the door everyday!)
d. Get a bike (get outside and get some fresh air and some exercise at the same time)
e. Winter exercise - even when the weather outside is frightful (like it is here in Michigan in the winter) you need to continue working out.
f. Get the kids outside. Pull them away from the tv, the computer, the Xbox or the Gameboy and make them get out and play everyday outside.
g. Get a good pair of athletic shoes and get off your butt everyday. Do something good for your body everyday.
h. There's no easy way out - we've all seen commercials for those easy exercise routines that involve not much more than breathing and stretching. Somehow in 7 minutes a day of this you too can begin to look like you belong on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. That is if you believe the bleached blond fully botoxed bimbo selling it (ok that was mean. I don't even know her. She can't be THAT dumb. She's made a fortune off of that!) But if it were that easy, again like the magic fat pills, we'd all look super models.
For decades, women were advised not to do weight training after breast cancer surgery. Doctors thought that lifting almost anything -- even groceries or a toddler -- would cause painful arm swelling.
But, new research, just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, completely changes all that. "Women who were doing the lifting actually had fewer arm problems because they have better muscle tone."
The study's author went on to compare this to similar mistaken beliefs about heart attack patients. "We told them not to exercise anymore... it was well-meaning. But it was the complete polar opposite of the truth."
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