My first post (finally)! I'm pretty excited to be back in the blogging world; you might remember Skinny Fat Fitness if you're into fitness and health blogs and I was part of that team. So something finally fired me up enough to actually create a post. I'm going to try to leave my opinion out of this as much as possible and keep it fact and research-based, but it's probably going to creep in involuntarily. So! What's the topic? Women and lifting.
I'm a trainer, therefore all day every day I'm in the gym atmosphere. And I will tell you there is nothing more disconcerting than having a woman tell you how they want to look (and sometimes use your body as the example) but then turn around and tell you they don't want to lift heavy because they don't want to get big. News flash: it doesn't work that way, if it did I would be a hulking 300 pound woman rather than a diminutive 135 pounds. Okay, rant over, now on to the facts.
Even Men Have a Hard Time "Getting Big"
If you look at the typical gym setting and ask most men what they are trying to achieve they usually have the same answer: "get big." In the gym, you will see men working and working HARD to layer on muscle and it is a slow process. And here's the thing: they're at a physiological advantage for gaining muscle mass because their testosterone production is much higher than that of an average female. Testosterone is one of the main hormones involved in gaining muscle mass. Now the main sex hormone in women is estrogen (not a main hormone in muscle production), and the two have a counterbalancing effect, meaning: more estrogen equals less testosterone. "As a result, female bodybuilders can do the same amount of training as men, and with the same intensity, without achieving the same results. In other words, women work just as hard but get less bang for their buck. Talk about frustrating." So if you already have less testosterone than men who work really hard to get big, what makes you think you're going to? (1, 2, 3)
What About Those Professional Bodybuilding Women?
Unfortunately the awful truth of the matter is most of these women have "pharmaceutical help" with gaining the amount mass they do. The prevalence of anabolic steroid use among female bodybuilders is rampant (although an exact figure is unknown due to the secretive nature of its use). The amount of muscle these women gain is, and I don't mean it in a derogatory way, unnatural. Even with the use of anabolic steroids these women have to follow a strict diet and spend hours every day in the gym; think you're gonna be doing that? Yes, some women are blessed genetically and able to bulk up faster, but for the most part female bodybuilders are quite literally working against their bodies to gain that amount of muscle and be that lean (estrogen not only inhibits testosterone production, it also makes fat loss more difficult). So ya, you might gain some muscle but you're not going to get that crazy hard physique either (what some women fear as well as muscle gain). (3, 4)
Gaining Muscle
Here's the long and short of it ladies: it takes a lot of intensity and consistency in the gym to gain even a little muscle and in order to gain mass of any kind there's another important factor: calories. You can't just gain weight and get big by touching weights. Since most women aren't going to eat the literally thousands of calories it requires daily to gain muscle mass, the fear of getting big is a misconception at best. "There are critics who have considered weightlifting to be, well, unfeminine. This idea has been perpetuated by a bunch of old myths which have stood the test of time. The biggest is simply that lifting even the lightest weights will turn a woman into a manly, muscle-bound she-male. But, in reality, no amount of weightlifting would create super muscle mass in the average woman. Strength, definition and tone -- yes. Big, bulky muscles -- no. Women don't have enough natural testosterone for that to happen. But this image-related public-relations disaster is likely traceable back to the three decade-long heyday of steroid use by Eastern European countries at the Olympics in the 1960s-'80s, especially by the former East Germany, whose women's teams became comical references/stereotypes for a masculine-looking female athlete. They won tons of medals, but the dude-like ladies were all anybody remembered." (3, 5)
So there it is ladies: gaining muscle isn't as easy as people think, lifting heavy doesn't mean you're immediately going to turn into a she-man, and, as a matter of fact, building lean muscle will help you look more feminine and toned (by changing your shape and helping to burn body fat) rather than a shapeless blob. So stop with the excuses and just lift!
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