Reasons Women Should Lift Weights

Your body will look better. A toned body is more attractive than a fat or emaciated one. If you want to have a low body fat % the only real way of doing this is to lift weights.

Stronger bones. The more muscle you have the stronger your bones are. This helps ward off osteoporosis in later years and prevent fractures.

You won’t bulk up. Females simply don’t have enough testosterone to bulk up. Female bodybuilders bulk up because they inject testosterone.

Your body will look smaller. If you have more muscle and you weigh around the same weight on the scales your body is going to look smaller and not larger as muscle is more compact then fat.

You will have less fat. Muscle burns 25 times more calories than fat, and is burning the calories 24/7. In fact, every pound of muscle uses 35 to 50 calories a day even at rest. So if you build 10 pounds of extra muscle, your metabolic rate increases by 350 to 500 calories a day. This is huge and a great way to lose the extra spare tyre.

If you are on a diet you lose more fat. By lifting weights whilst following a calorie controlled diet you are more likely to hold onto the muscle and mainly lose fat. This keeps your metabolism high.

It is motivational to establish your muscle mass before you start training, as a baseline. Some more sophisticated Tanita scales can give you this information. If you are training well, you can add ¼ pound to ½ pound of muscle mass each week. You need to be in calorie excess for this to happen though. I consider the following amounts of muscle good, average, and poor for most women:

• Exceptional– 7.7 stone
• Good – 7 stone
• Average – 6.7 stone
• Poor – 6 stone
• Awful – 5.7 stone