Reasons Women Should Weight Train

When it comes to losing weight women choose diet or exercise, exercise usually consists of running or cardio machines in the gym. It seems that women generally neglect the idea of resistance training for fat loss even though there is scientific evidence to show this is the best form of training to lose fat.

How does this work?

When you complete resistance training your lean muscle mass will increase, this doesn’t mean you will suddenly look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, it just means that your body will carry a few extra pounds of lean muscle.

A female carrying out weight training will not gain the size a male does from lifting weight because women carry on average twenty times less hormones than males that cause muscle size increase.

Interestingly science has shown that on average a woman who carries out resistance training three times a week for a month will gain a pound of lean muscle but actually lose 1.75 pounds of fat.

What happens is that the body burns extra calories every day to carry out its normal functions for every extra pound of muscle a person weighs. The typical value of calories burned for every extra pound of muscle is roughly 35 to 60 calories per day.

This extra calorific usage is caused by your resting metabolic rate increasing as your lean muscle does.

One of the reasons women do get put off from weight lifting is because when they weigh themselves they are not losing that much weight, this is because if you lose 1.75 pounds of fat but gain 1 pound of lean muscle the scales will only show a loss of under a pound.

To combat this the best way to monitor your weight loss performance is to measure your body parts monthly, as long as your body is reducing in size your on the right track to achieve your goals.

Measuring your success

Get a tape measure and once a month (same date and roughly same time) measure the following:

Waist (Just below the belly button)
Chest (Measure under arm pits and over fullest part of bust)
Arms (Measure shoulder to elbow and use the halfway point)
Thigh (Measure hip to the knee and use the halfway point)

Keep a log of the measurements and you should see the measurements reduce in size and your clothes start to feel more baggy or even become too big!