Seven Tips for Women On the Go

Tim Wakeham

As a strength and conditioning coach for 300 female athletes and an experienced trainer of middle-aged women, I've listened to the wants and needs of a broad spectrum of female weight trainers. Their most common goals include weight loss, body reshaping, osteoporosis prevention, cholesterol profile improvement and sports performance enhancement. Each goal is possible if you follow these suggested tips:

1 Get off the copycat carousel. "Many women get their weight training information from sources that provide potentially unsafe and unrealistic programs," says Pat Taylor, a personal trainer from Lansing, Michigan. "A lot of my trainees started off adopting the programs performed on television or the workouts published in competitive bodybuilding magazines. Every program should be customized to fit the needs of the individual."

I agree. Each person has different genetics, goals, injury history and equipment considerations. A program that fails to examine these variables sets up a training environment more conducive to frustration and failure than health and happiness.

A good way to find a safe, customized program is to consult a qualified fitness professional. Look for such qualifications as an advanced degree in fitness and exercise physiology or certifications through the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the American Council on Exercise (ACE) or the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA).

2 Make your goals realistic and the program practical. Sherry Hughes, an apartment complex manager from Detroit, Michigan, who works over 50 hours per week, recognized the need to be realistic with exercise goals and practical with the program's creation. "I knew if I expected to reshape my entire body in a month, I'd be setting myself up for failure," she says. "I knew this because there was no way after a 10- or 12-hour day that I could spend more than 15 or 20 minutes lifting weights. I perform one set of each exercise on our clubhouse's weight circuit. The exercises include the leg press, shoulder press, bench press, seated row and lunges with dumbbells. I'm done in less than 20 minutes."

Hughes emphasizes it's important to acknowledge the constraints of daily living. Only then can you make a program that's both physiologically and practically optimal. Once that's achieved, then you can attach realistic goals and time lines.

3 Choose exercises that work the largest muscle groups of the body. Whenever possible, choose multi-joint exercises or lifts that involve multiple muscle groups. For example, the bench press exercise works the chest, shoulders and underside of the upper arms, while the front lunge works the hips, thighs and lower legs. Other multi-joint exercises include partial squats, leg presses, shoulder presses and pulldown exercises for the upper back. Training a variety of muscle groups using multi-joint exercises is a time-efficient weight training method for adding muscle. This is significant because the more muscles you develop, the greater your ability to burn calories, thus enhancing the potential to reduce fat.

4 Work the muscles systematically. The key to productive weight training is making the muscles work progressively harder over time. "This is the biggest lesson I've learned about how to tone my body," explains Emma Fernandez, a sales representative from East Lansing, Michigan. "I used to go to the gym and perform the exact same sets, repetitions and weights every workout without seeing results. When I forced myself to work harder each week, my body started to firm up."

A double progressive system is an effective plan to make muscles work harder. Start with a resistance you think you can lift 10 times. Each time the 10-rep target is comfortably achieved, increase the resistance by 5 percent (2.5 to five pounds on most exercises) during the next workout. Each number you successfully accomplish is called a repetition. Every repetition should take six to 10 seconds (three to five seconds to raise the weight and three to five seconds to lower it). Try to stay within two or three repetitions of the target. If you don't accomplish 10 reps after you increase the resistance, try to achieve a greater number of reps following each workout until you can do all 10, and then increase the weight again.

To monitor your systematic progress, record each day's results. Many of my trainees consider logs to be great motivators when they look back to see how far they've come. "You really are surprised and proud when you look back and see what you've achieved. I think it's a real confidence builder," says All-Big Ten volleyball player Jenna Wrobel from Michigan State University.

5 Slowly perform one set of 10 repetitions. The fundamental step to productively executed weight training is your performance of the repetition with as little momentum as possible. Momentum is always present while lifting weights, but the less momentum in each repetition, the more work the muscles perform. And the more work the muscles perform, the greater the gains.

Unless you're a competitive weightlifter, your concern is development of strength and muscular tone, not the demonstration of strength. By swinging the dumbbells while performing bicep curls, you will demonstrate greater strength but create momentum, which may inhibit the development of muscular strength. A good way to ensure you're lifting with little momentum is to watch whether the weight or machine arm floats or recoils. If this happens, there's too much momentum.

6 Incorporate variety into your regimen. Carrie Auger, a bill collector from Houghton, Michigan, says, "An exercise program of any sort without variety is one I'll be quitting!" Auger is not alone. According to Mark Nemish, director of strength and conditioning for the National Hockey League's Nashville Predators, to keep from becoming physiologically or psychologically stale, it's important to change your exercises, repetition targets and number of sets every four or five weeks.

7 Stay fired up! The best way to keep trainees fired up is to help them feel a sense of competence and control over what they're doing. To do that, learn how to perform correctly so you can demonstrate your skills consistently. A sense of control provides motivation through ownership. Ownership comes from playing a part in the design of your program and its implementation.

It's my experience that there's no one "best" workout for everyone. However, by learning from experienced people, acknowledging the constraints of your life, progressively working harder, executing exercises with discipline and enthusiasm and using variety, you'll find one of the many "perfect" workouts for you.

For Further Reading

Strength Training for Women by James A. Peterson, Cedric X. Bryant and Susan L. Peterson (Human Kinetics Publishers)

Building Strength and Stamina by Wayne Wescott (Human Kinetics Publishers)

A Practical Approach to Strength Training by Matt Brzycki (Master Press Publishers)

Fitness Weight Training by Thomas R. Baechle and Roger Earle (Human Kinetics Publishers)

Tim Wakeham, M.S., CSCS, is an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Michigan State University.

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