You’ve heard the myth before…. weight training makes women “bulky” looking.
Before we move on to the benefits of resistance training for women, we’ll make sure to completely dismiss the concept of becoming too muscular too fast with weight training.
Most importantly, women do not produce enough of the sex hormone testosterone to effectively build large amounts of muscle mass. As you might have seen in magazines, there are exceptions– most, if not all of these female exceptions are taking anabolic steroids or testosterone therapy to obtain the bodybuilding look.
Second, you need to eat a surplus of calories in order to gain weight. This makes gaining any kind of weight difficult due to the metabolic properties of weight training.
What are the benefits of resistance training for women?
- Increased metabolism
- Increased bone density
- Decreased body fat percentage
- Toning of muscles
- Increase flexibility
- Fight off hypokinetic diseases
- Decrease stress levels
- Improve quality of sleep
With all of these benefits, the answer that most women are looking for is the added potential for fat loss. Penn State University found in a 2009 study that by choosing weights instead of the treadmill 3 days a week women lost 40% more body fat than the cardio only group. The results are due to the fat burning properties of resistance training combined with the maintenance of muscle tissue on a calorie restricted diet.
The good news doesn’t stop there… by implementing weight training into your workouts, you can burn up to 70% more total calories! Intense resistance training can not only match the number of calories burned through traditional cardio work, but it also gives your metabolism a boost for the next 24 – 36 hours. This is due to the metabolism boosting effects of active tissue use and EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), which is the additional energy/calorie burn after you’ve stopped exercising. The best way for women to maximize EPOC is to add weight training into their programming 3-4 days per week and minimize the amount of rest between sets during those sessions.
