Strength training or weight lifting can be intimidating for women, especially for beginners! Many women have never picked up a dumbbell or ventured into the weights section of the gym – often because of old, completely inaccurate ideas that it’s not the “right” sort of training for women, that it’s dangerous for our joints to lift heavy weights or that it will make you look “bulky”.

Our team is passionate about the incredible impact that strength training offers to women. Whether you’re looking to achieve fat loss, build strength, grow lean muscle or simply feel fitter and more capable in your daily life activities, then incorporating resistance training into your fitness routine is an absolute must.

A common mistake for women with these goals is do loads of cardio exercise. While this will help you to achieve a calorie deficit and therefore lose weight, it will not guarantee that this weight loss comes from fat, and it will not build muscle. Therefore, you might find yourself with a smaller body, but not a lean one. Lifting weights is all about shaping your body and creating strength.

No! Please don’t let this old myth bother you. Building a significant amount of muscle takes a lot of hard work and time! Adding weights into your fitness routine will not see you suddenly develop huge amounts of muscle. It takes time, commitment and a well-designed training programme that includes progressive overload and an effective nutrition plan.

While it’s certainly possible to add mass and grow your body through weights, that’s just one outcome. With proper programming, you can use weight training to simply shape your body and create a toned, lean look.

Thanks to hormonal differences between men and women, it’s much more difficult for women to get “bulky” when strength training. Men have between 240-950 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood, whereas women only have between 8-60. Since testosterone is a key driver of muscle strength, logic follows that men will find it relatively easier to pack on muscle mass. So, instead of worrying about putting on unwanted mass, focus on the fact that lifting heavy weights will help to strengthen your bones and give you increased muscle definition.

Finally, to build a really serious amount of muscle, you also need to eat a serious amount of food! Bulking up in a noticeable way not only takes time and heavy weights, it also requires you to eat a lot more. You would need to be in a consistent calorie surplus with a high amount of protein to put on serious bulk. If building mass that’s your goal – great, weight training can help you to achieve this. If not – no worries. Weight-lifting can be incorporated intelligently into your training to achieve a wide variety of goals.

If you’re completely new to strength training, working with a personal trainer is highly recommended in order to ensure you are lifting properly, with technique that is both safe, to avoid injury, and effective, to ensure you’re working what you actually want to work. The key is to build confidence and nail your form across the fundamental patterns of movement, before gradually adding load to increase the challenge and provide the body with the stimulus it needs to build muscle.

Depending on your goals and your training schedule, your trainer might choose to do full body workouts with you, or do a split for example alternate between upper body and lower body workouts.

When you first start resistance training, the key will be to learn and master the fundamental patterns of movement (e.g. squat, lunge, hinge, pull, push…) before gradually adding a weight load to these movements to increase the challenge. Effective weight training relies on the principle of progressive overload; in other words gradually increasing the challenge to make sure your muscles continues to receive enough stimulus to grow and become stronger.

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