“Hello, Miss, Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if you realized you are doing the leg press with no weight.”

“Well, I have different goals than you guys. I want to get tone not big, muscular, and manly.”

And so goes one of the biggest misconceptions in weight training. That if you’re a woman and exert yourself when weight training that you will turn into a freak of nature woman like those on the cover of Flex and MuscleMag.

If you believe this you are sorely wrong, so stop being lazy in the gym!

Most men and women have very different weight training goals but training drastically differently is ineffective.

Weight training essentially damages the muscle at a microscopic level. Your body, with good nutrition and rest, adapts to this stress by repairing the muscle stronger than it was before. There is only one way that a particular muscle becomes stronger and grows. Therefore there is no such distinction between “tone muscle” and a “big muscle”.

People talk about “tightening” in the same breath as “toning”, but what they really mean is losing weight. The only way to look tighter is to lose fat. And there is absolutely no such thing as spot training, it has been disproved many times yet infomercials still prey on those who don’t realize it. Doing triceps exercises will not help you with that lose fat around your arm more than running ten minutes, it does not burn fat from your arm more than anywhere else on your body. Women usually store the most fat around the hips and men around the waist so fat from those areas will come and go first. If you have 10 lbs of fat covering your abdomen no amount of sit-ups is going to show the muscles you are targeting, you have to lose the fat. The difference between a bodybuilder’s abdomen and an average man’s is almost all about fat not muscle. Emaciated anorexics have abs and do not have to touch the gym, Ab Rollers, or protein shakes.

Furthermore, weight training itself doesn’t burn as many calories as aerobic training. Some people might disagree with that. For length of time exercising (not counting rest) high intensity anaerobic exercise will burn more calories than say, the elliptical. However in a ten minute span, for example, people typically only exert themselves during weight training half the time if even that. For the woman in my example earlier in this post that time is nearly zero minutes out of ten minutes.

The real benefit of weight training to weight loss is that one’s metabolism rises with more muscle mass. It takes more food to support added muscle. If you are not working out to gain muscle then you are not helping yourself lose fat and so you are not helping yourself “tone”. And to reiterate, since there is no such thing as spot training and studies show that low intensity lifting does not optimally stimulate muscle growth you are better suited by an extra twenty minutes on the treadmill if your goal is weight loss.

Even with this knowledge most women, and a lot of guys, do not weight train with any level of intensity. They reason that don’t want to look like the cover of a muscle magazine so they will just take it easy. This is a huge misconception and a slap in the face to bodybuilders and fitness models.

A hundred out of a hundred women will have to work very hard, for a very long time, and maybe even with a little pharmaceutical help to ever have abs let alone buldging-veiny biceps. Women have much lower levels of testosterone, which is behind muscle growth so they will rarely even keep up with the average male let alone a professional bodybuilder.

Anyone weight training claiming they don’t want to work out intensely because they don’t want to have huge muscles and abs is like the average Joe who says he doesn’t want to jog more often because he’s afraid he’ll break the 40 yard world record and have to go through the hassle of the Olympics. It’s ridiculous and condescending.

I’d also venture to say the likelihood of a man getting “ripped” is nearly as low as women. I own a book called “How to Iron Your Own Damn Shirt” that sums the “statistically proven” likelihood that a man will achieve a “six-pack” that I agree with:

If anyone wants to incorporate weight training in their workout to help them lose weight you need to go about it the same way as those who simply want to gain muscle, with higher intensity. But by all means talk to a doctor if you question if you’re healthy enough to weight train and get assistance when just starting out to learn safe lifting practices from gym staff.

Just like aerobics you only get out of it if you put effort in. If you are not coming remotely near “muscular failure” when weight training you are going to have dismal results. The way I like to explain muscular failure to people is to imagine someone holding a gun to your head when you are doing an exercise. They say they’re going to kill you unless you do one more. Muscular failure is when they actually pull the trigger; you physically cannot do one more repetition.

There are many schools of thought on how high of intensity is required, that is how close to muscular failure is needed, for optimal muscle growth. At the low end of the spectrum I would say the general opinion experts have is that you need to at least feel a significant burn in the targeted muscle before stopping the set. I often tell people something like “as many reps until it feels like you can only do 1 or 2 more” then adjust the weight used to hit whatever target repetition range (usually 6-12) you are interested in. Personally, I feel like going to complete muscle failure is the most effective and efficient way to train but it does take a significant psychological commitment.

A book called The New Rules of Lifting For Women is dedicated to curbing the 1 lb dumbbell wielding women out there. I heard about this book from diet-blog.com which had a brief review on the book two weeks ago.

Regardless of what you take from this article, if you trust me or not, I hope realize that just because you see other people doing something in the gym or even a personal trainer tells you something does not make it correct or work. Do your own research and try to form your own opinion. Fitness is a bit of a black science and there are many conflicting opinions out there. In this article I have tried my best to stick to facts and will save my opinions on the characteristics of an optimal routine for another post.

My apologies if this article is a bit caustic, I tried writing it as confrontational as possible so that it might make someone so mad they actually break a sweat on the leg press at Bally’s this week! -Josh