Why ladies should lift weights

​LADIES, IF YOU WANT TO LOOK TONED YOU SHOULD BE LIFTING HEAVY WEIGHTS
 
Somebody in the world once said that lifting heavy weights will make women big and chunky. This person was not smart. It’s probably the same person who said that vaccinations cause autism in children.
 
Lifting heavy weights will make you hot. Definitely. This is scientifically proven by science. Here is the thing. Most woman I know want to look “toned” which means shapely, nice curves in the right places, no wobbly, floppy, saggy bits. This is achieved through weight training, not running, not Yoga, not Pilates and not spin classes. All those things are great but for different reasons.
 
What you are doing by lifting weights is creating shape in the muscle. The weight you use needs to be heavy enough to elicit an adaptive response from the muscle, increasing the size of the muscle fibres. We are talking about lifting as heavy as you can, for the prescribed rep range (safely and with great technique) to get you looking toned.
 
This won’t make you bulk up because testosterone is one of the main hormones responsible for muscle gain, females don’t have a lot of that so unless you’re sneaking some into your morning coffee, you are not at risk of bulking up.
 
IN FACT, it will help you shed body fat because lifting heavy weights increases the number of calories your body uses each day, even when you are doing nothing BECAUSE muscle uses more calories than fat to sustain itself. Which is fantastic because you can burn calories while watching hours of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix.  Other shows I like to burn calories watching are: Archer, Flee Bag, Silicone Valley and most recently The Boys (on amazon prime). 
 
STOP - doing hours of cardio in an attempt to get toned (unless you love it, its specific to your sport or you are training for a zombie apocalypse and you don’t know how to use an axe)
START - lifting weights at the gym, preferably at my gym, with me because I know what I’m doing.