This is a great article published that we all can follow, men and women. The principals are the same as far exercising is concerned. If you’re serious about your commitment, take the time to read this and ask any questions in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer as soon as possible. I’ve included a link to the ACSM site which has many articles and is a great resource to have on hand.
http://www.acsm.org
WOMEN AND RESISTANCE TRAINING
The Right Program Brings Results for Females
Who Train
by Gary R. Hunter, Ph.D., CSCS, FACSM
Feature
Women can gain a number of very positive benefits from participating in a well-constructed resistance training program. Many women, however, do not put enough effort into their training.
They mistakenly believe that training with low weights for high repetitions (greater than 20) will achieve optimal increases in energy expenditure and body composition. The main advantage
in resistance training over other forms of training is the ability to progress the resistance. To achieve optimal gains in muscle size and strength, women must train at a relatively high resistance (usually somewhere between 65-80 percent of maximum) for six to 12 repetitions during two to three workouts each week. At least some of the sets each week must be to exhaustion or near exhaustion. Resistance should be increased when a repetition goal (somewhere between six to 12 repetitions) for an exercise is reached. Although women can definitely increase muscle size, it should be understood that there is little chance of a woman
becoming a behemoth and ending up with a body like Arnold Schwartzenegger. Without drug use or some very specialized training is undertaken for many years, women who resistance train normally just become very fit looking. During maturation, women develop much less muscle mass than men. This means that an untrained woman has fewer muscle cells than an untrained man.
This is especially the case for the shoulders and arms. Most if not all muscle growth in an adult occurs through increases in size of existing muscle cells, so the total potential for growth in a woman is less than in a man, especially in the arms and shoulders. Other factors may
contribute to a slower increase in muscle size in women following a resistance training program, but they are largely unknown. On the average, a woman can expect about a 10 percent increase in muscle size for a muscle that has been resistance trained for three to six months. Strength will normally increase between 30-50 percent.
Quite a bit of variability in how much a woman can expect to increase in strength and muscle size exists, with some women increasing in muscle size very little and others increasing as much as 20 percent. Factors such as genetic predisposition, nutrition, general health of the woman and effort put into the training probably contribute to the variation.
Even though women may not have quite as much potential for strength and muscle size improvement as men, they actually may have more to gain from a functional standpoint. Women are much weaker than men. When matched for body size, the average untrained woman is 35-45 percent weaker in the arms and shoulders and 10-25 percent weaker in the legs and hips than untrained men. Consequently, untrained women generally experience more difficulty in doing daily tasks such as walking, climbing stairs, and carrying children or groceries. Recent research suggests that difficulty in doing these tasks predispose individuals to decreasing free-living physical activity. A reduction in physical activity has two very important negative outcomes. First, low levels of physical activity are associated with increased likelihood of weight gain, and second,
the decrease in physical activity can cause a further decrease in muscle mass, fitness and increase in difficulty during physical activity. The problem is complicated with the further increase in difficulty for moving a heavier body that occurs with weight gain and the loss of muscle mass and fitness that naturally occurs with age. By the early 50s, and certainly by the 60s, most sedentary women experience increased difficulty during physical activity as well as decreased quality of life. Research has demonstrated that ease of performing tasks such as carrying a child or bag of groceries, standing from a chair, and walking can be improved by 40-60
percent following a resistance training program, improving the function of a 65-year-old woman to a level similar to that of a sedentary 30-year-old woman.
The Aging Issue
The amount of energy that we expend decreases as we age. This is partly due to a decrease in muscle mass, but it also seems to be partly due to an independent aging effect. Muscle
tissue is about three times more metabolically active than fat tissue. It is not unusual for a woman to gain two to four pounds of muscle following four to six months of moderate resistance
training, causing energy expenditure at rest to increase 100 kcal or more/day. Further, modest increases in total energy expenditure may occur because of the energy expended during training
and increased participation in a more active lifestyle. This may be important for women, especially older women, in maintaining body weight as they get older. It is important to point out that little increase will be gained in muscle or energy expenditure unless intensityand effort are sufficient. Although increases in muscle and strength occur quite easily during the first eight-16 weeks of training, continued increases are normally more difficult to achieve. The more “trained”
an individual, the greater the training stimulus needs to be to create changes in strength and muscle size. Maintaining a sufficient resistance and effort that will cause a muscle to fatigue
in six-12 repetitions is important to achieve optimal progress. Although progress can be made in the early stages of training on only one set/ exercise, both empirical and research data suggest continued improvement for the “trained” individual is not only dependent on maintaining a high
relative resistance but on multiple sets. in other words, continued improvement is dependent on a combination of maintaining sufficient intensity/effort and volume of training. Gains in strength, muscle size, ease of being physically active, and energy expenditure as well as fat losses occur
with resistance training. However, it is important to maintain a relatively high intensity and effort in training to achieve these benefits.