STRENGTH is a rare commodity to many women who are conditioned to think that weak muscles are normal. They’re not normal. What they are is an insult to a woman’s potential. We wrestle with a cultural bias that has pounded into many heads that women, hampered by some built-in biological handicap, shouldn’t get strong and that those who do not get strong do it at the risk of their health and sexuality. Yet women need strength as much as men–perhaps more.
Today doctors, trainers, and physical therapists advise women to build strength.
I purposefully avoided the phrase build your body, complete with its connotations of bulging muscles, because women don’t develop big muscles. Your hormones and genetic makeup won’t allow it. So what explains those bulging, greased women you may have seen on magazine covers? Extraordinary workouts, with perhaps some help from steroids. No woman needs such a workout and no man does either.
Build strength selectively
To build strength, exercise anaerobically. More commonly known as weight lifting or resistance exercise, this is also the best exercise for firming flabby areas of the body.
There is no such thing as spot reducing. Exercising specific muscles doesn’t chew up the fat around them. But strengthening muscles, which slightly expands them, will firm flab by stretching the layer of fat so it’s not as noticeable.
When you focus your weight lifting–arms, chest, back, lower body–depends on your goals, but first strengthen your entire upper body. Most women are frightfully weak there. Then as you get older, focus on specific areas.
Women in their twenties and early thirties, for example, generally want well-formed shoulders, front arms (biceps) and legs. As women move into their late thirties and early forties, the emphasis switches to their abdomens and back arms (triceps).
Later in the forties and beyond, breast form and support becomes foremost. Always keep in mind however, that balance is important. Too much energy devoted to one particular area will create an imbalance, and that can lead to injury.
Focus not only delivers more dramatic change to what you consider a problem spot on your body, it also adds motivation to your weight lifting by giving you a goal. Often the goal is a certain look. But that’s not the only factor that should motivate you; the increase in strength itself pays other dividends. You might think that strength building is primarily an upper body activity; it isn’t. Resistance exercise also improve your lower body.
Many women and men for that matter, think these are unnecessary. They think their aerobic exercises, which do exercise the lower body, should suffice. But sometimes extra lower body strength is needed. If you want better leg definition, build your calf muscles with resistance exercises. If you want to protect your knees, build your quadriceps.
Women are more prone to chronic knee problems than men are. The reason: men have stronger muscles around their knees. Weak muscles combined with an off-center knee cap is a recipe for pain and even swelling when a woman takes part in high-impact exercises, walks down stairs, or just stands after being seated for a long time. Fortunately, the cure for most cases isn’t drugs or surgery; it’s exercise. By strengthening the inside of the thigh muscles, the sufferer can stop the painful shifting and grinding of her knee cap.
If this sounds like a hard sell of resistance exercise for women, it is. Resistance exercise is something all women should do because so many consume far less calcium than they need. Low calcium intake creates porous and fragile bones.
Adding age and hormonal changes to this plight makes it even worse, and women know it. In recent years you have been bombarded with warnings to bolster your bone density. But many of these warnings have been aimed at increasing calcium intake.
Few women know they must also do resistance exercises.
The younger you start weight lifting, the stronger your bones will be by the time you reach menopause. Continued weight lifting after menopause helps to keep your bones dense, preventing the onset of osteoporosis, the dread disease that deteriorates bones, leaving them easy to fracture in later life.
There is enjoyment in weight lifting or resistance exercise. For most women weight lifting is entirely new and exciting because of the distinct changes it brings. The absence of flab, the smoothly contoured muscles, the vibrant feeling of being strong , all keep its enjoyment fresh; it’s hard not to enjoy seeing and feeling such progress. And weight lifting can be a social activity too.
Done at a gym, you can meet exercisers with a variety of backgrounds, some of them staunch weight lifters and some of them cross-trainers, building strength to improve their performance in other sports.
The enjoyment of stretching
Another aspect of muscular fitness is flexibility. Women’s hormones preserves flexibility. What that means is that you are naturally more flexible than men. It doesn’t mean that you are naturally flexible enough. All women need to stretch especially after menopause when hormonal changes put you on the same inflexible plane as a man.
Flexibility is contrary to the rule that allows you to maintain muscle condition by doing less as you get older; in this area age means more. But you won’t mind doing it because stretching feels so good. Do them only when your muscles are warm. Make it a favorite pastime. Stretching the body is like stretching the mind; you feel as if you can go anywhere and do anything.
