Usually the first comment I hear from women when discussing an appropriate method of strength training is “I don’t want to build big muscles”.

There are some female athletes who tell me the opposite, they want to know the fastest way to build bigger powerful functional muscles, but mostly women prefer to avoid looking more masculine and therefore feel they should avoid to much strength training.

 The fact is, although there are a few exceptions, it is quite difficult for most women to build large masculine muscles. On average men produce 10 to 15 times the amount of testosterone as women. Testosterone, being the body’s major muscle building hormone.

 If a woman were to gear her workouts toward building muscles, with the right nutrition, rest , exercises and intensity and generally optimize all the relevant factors , she certainly can build  muscle. But as you might imagine, it is not easy, and it is hardly likely that it will occur overnight. However it is not too difficult to achieve a great toned body with strength training. If your workouts are consistent results are quite fast. Some results are almost immediate, you will feel better muscle tone within a few workouts, although during the first 4 to 6 weeks the improvements are mostly neuromuscular. Your muscles are learning to do what they are capable of.

 Weights and weight loss.

Strength training will not directly help you work off much body fat. Indirectly it can have great effect. But with more lean muscle you will burn calories faster

 A couple of points to remember, first the average adult will lose about 10% of their  muscle mass between the age of 25 and 50. By the age of 80 it rises to about 40%.

Less lean body mass means a slower metabolism making it harder to keep of the pounds. Also although you burn more calories after cardio than strength training you metabolism is revved up for much longer after the strength training. . Let’s face it we all would like to look better, and even if it is not you main objective it doesn’t hurt to have  a toned body. Improving your muscle tone with strength training will improve the look of you body at least as quickly as loosing body fat. .

 Weights and bone mass.

The other obvious health benefit to strength training is the resulting increase stress on the bones helping to maintain and possibly even increase bone density.The human body will try to adapt to stresses placed on it. The forces  exerted on the bones by the working muscles, cause an increase in bone density. This is also effectd by  other factors, primarily  ones ability to absorb and retain calcium. But strengh training and weight bearing execises in general are important. 

Because of their fear of building muscle most females are using weights that are much to light to have any effect on muscle tone, they my as well be doing cardio. People confuse working hard with working heavy.  So here’s how to determine if you’re working at the right intensity. Obviously I can’t tell how strong each individual reading this is. Also the resistance will be different for each exercise you perform, you would not use the same resistance in the squat as you would for an arm curl. So I can’t tell you what resistance to use’ to use. But I can give you a formula to work by.

Note. Unless I am talking about a specific peace of equipment I will us the word resistance with regard to strength training. You might be using any one or combination of strength training methods, weights, a home gym a bow flex, resistance bands, or even your body weight. Different types of resistance but all strength training

Lets assume you want to build great muscle tone but not bigger muscles.

 Perform 2 too 3 sets of each exercise you’ve chosen.. Including an initial warm up set. This warm up should be easy. Around 15 to 20 repetitions, but you should feel that you could have done twice that number. Rest approximately 1 to 2 minutes between this and the next set.

This second set is the first of your two working sets, again you should be able to perform 15 20 reps but this time the resistance should be heavy enough that you feel like you could have done perhaps 3 or 4 more repartitions but no more.

This system should give you results quite quickly as you are working hard enough to build great muscle tone. But the high reps ensues that you are not taxing those fast twitch strength and size type muscle fibers to much.

If your are one of the few who is blessed or cursed with genetics that cause you to gain muscle just looking at weights  raise the reps up to the 25 range( the weight then has to be lighter).

Remember most people should be more concerned with losing muscle not gaining it. Even if you gain a little it will help you to burn calories and stay learn.