Weight Training Tips and Articles

Weight Training For Women

Weight training is something that many men do to gain muscle strength and size and get into better shape. Because of this, weight training for women is often overlooked. The problem is that most women are afraid that if they weight train they will become too muscular and manly. However, it’s very unlikely that a woman will build huge muscles unless they take steroids and other bodybuilding drugs. Weight training for women can be very beneficial for losing body fat and getting a more shapely body.

Since building some muscle mass will boost your resting metabolism, weight training for women is great for helping to lose fat or maintain your body weight. You don’t need to build a lot of muscle, just a little, and you will be burning more calories even when you aren’t doing anything.

A weight training for women routine should include some exercises for each muscle group, with most of the focus being on lower body exercises. The legs and butt should be train more, as building some muscle in these areas will give the ladies a more eye pleasing shape. Some upper body exercises should be included though. Just do a couple of light sets for the muscles of the chest, back, shoulders, and arms. Squats, leg presses, leg extensions, leg curls, and calf raises are the exercises you’ll want to do more sets for as part of a weight training for women routine.

A weight training for women workout should also be made up of sets done with lighter weight for more reps. If you do this, it’s highly unlikely that you will build muscles that are too big. Doing a set or 2 of some light barbell or dumbbell curls isn’t going to cause your arms to explode with growth. Just look at how hard some men have to work to build muscle.

Doing some weight training for women just a few days a week after or before you do some cardiovascular exercise will be enough to lose body fat and improve your shape without getting too big. You’ll be surprised at how good you look.

Deadlift Techniques

Though the deadlift is known mostly as a lower back exercise many other muscle groups such as the quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, and even the upper back assist in lifting the weight. Since you have to hold a lot of weight in your hands when you’re deadlifting you’ll also build grip and forearm strength.

How you grip the bar is very important when you’re doing deadlifts. The best way to do it is to use an overhand grip with one hand and an underhand grip with the other hand. If you try to deadlift with both hands in an overhand grip you won’t be able to hold near as much weight and you won’t get the full muscle building benefits of the exercise.

To deadlift heavy you’ll also want to assist your grip with wrist straps or chalk. This will greatly increase the amount of weight you can handle when you deadlift. If you’re planning on competing in a powerlifting competition you’ll have to use chalk instead of straps, so you’re better off training with chalk assisting your grip. On your first few warm up sets of the deadlift, do the exercise without any grip assistance to help improve your natural grip strength.

When you deadlift you can either place your hands on the bar either inside or outside of where your legs are. Placing your grip outside of the legs is the preferred way of doing the exercise. Some weight trainers prefer to place their grip inside with a wide legged stance, which is known as the “sumo style” deadlift. Do whichever style you’re comfortable with.

When you start a deadlift rep you’ll want use your leg muscles as much as possible to get the weight off of the floor. Using too much of your lower back to get the weight started upward could cause an injury. You’ll want to keep your lower back arched instead of bent as much as posible.

Once you get the weight off the floor when you’re doing a deadlift rep you’ll want to straighten your body as you lift the weight. This is the part of the lift where you’ll use more of your lower back strength. Some powerlifters will put baby powder on their thighs to “slide” the weight up their upper legs when they are maxing out on the deadlift. This can be messy, and you don’t really need to do it unless you are a competitive powerlifter testing out your strength.

At the top of a deadlift you should lean back a bit and contract your back muscles. Try to not drop the weight or let it fall too fast when you lower it back to the starting position.

The deadlift is one of the best weight training exercises for the entire body. Using all of those different muscle will give you a nice boost in testosterone. If you follow these deadlift techniques you’ll be able to take full advantage of this great strength and muscle building exercise.

Weight Training For Bigger Calves

  One of the toughest muscle groups to build through weight training are the calves. How big your calves are depends a lot on genetics as you’ve no doubt seen people who never exercise with huge calves and people who exercise constantly with small ones. Take an elite athlete like Evander Holyfield whose calves weren’t more than 13 or 14 inches around when he was in his prime and that should tell you how much of a role genetics plays in how big your calves are. Despite this you can certainly increase the size of your lower leg muscles with intense calf workouts.

  The calves are a very fast recovering muscle group (you use them constantly while walking or running) so you can train them more often than other muscles. This means that while you may do your calf training routine on your leg day, you may also want to train them during another workout as well. Depending how your weight training routine is split up you can do some calf exercises every other day or once every 3 days.

  Another key to building bigger calf muscles is to do high reps on your calf exercises while using as much weight as possible. Since you are always using your calves you need to train them with as much intensity as possible to get an effect. When you start a calf exercise do 15-20 reps with good, full reps where you stretch them at the bottom of a rep and get as high on your toes as possible to finish a rep. Once you get to a point where you can no longer do any more full reps do as many “bouncing” reps as you can stand before finishing your set.

  To gain calf muscle size you need to do both standing and seated calf raises. The standing calf raises will build the gastrocnemius muscle, while seated calf raises will build the soleus muscle. If you want you can throw in some sets of calf raises on the leg press machine. If you focus on training both of major muscles of the lower legs during your calf workouts you’ll get more of muscle size you’ll be on your way to building bigger calves.