Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Workout for Women simplified - Myths and Facts

It’s an immense pleasure writing this article because it’s one of the most talked and a myth kind of subject. It’s a well known fact that everybody cannot gain muscle mass to the same degree as any other person comparatively, because we all are different in terms of our body make up. Now we always see women either hesitant or confused on whether to train with weights as they think, training with weights can make them muscle bound. Ladies I got good news for you! Weight training doesn’t make you muscle bound; yes you heard me right, matter of fact it can be counter-productive if you train smart enough.
The reason I say women have a less tendency to become muscle bound or gain muscle mass is simply because it’s to do with hormones. The key muscle building hormone is testosterone, this hormone is found in men at a much higher levels compared to women, where as women have higher levels of estrogen. Now lack of testosterone in women to a considerable degree makes it difficult to gain muscle, so becoming muscle bound is literally not possible until unless you are training like a professional bodybuilder. More over the presence of estrogen makes women more susceptible to gain fat. Women have a higher percentage of body fat and loose fat slowly compared to men, this higher percentage of fat in women helps them to have a healthy body during pregnancy. Women find it difficult to stay leaner for a longer period of time compared to that of men and this is due to the lack of testosterone comparatively, thus the possibility of women becoming muscle bound without high intensity workout is ruled out.

Now that the theory is ruled out let’s talk about the way women should train. The most important thing in women’s workout is to include lots of cardio, so as to not only burn off fat but also burn off fat at specific areas. Women have different problem areas when it comes to burning fat like hips, thigh’s and waist. As I said earlier women should include lots of cardio training along with weight training and also initially when they start their workout they should do circuit training. Circuit training is more like a perfect combination of weight training and cardio, even though no cardio exercise is done, the reason I call it cardio is because you are constantly moving. You move from one place to another to perform one exercise after another; however I am going to discuss the topic of circuit training in my future article.
So I would suggest women to do say 40 percent of cardio and 60 of weight training with light weight and high repetitions, that should be the ratio of cardio and weight training in their workout program. The light weight and high repetitions with cardio will aid them to achieve fitter and leaner toned physique. So, spice up your workout keeping these details in mind and you would see great result.
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