Strength training has come a long way in the last 40 years. It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a time when even football players were advised *not* to lift weights because it would make them “muscle-bound” and slow.
But good information has a way of getting out, and nowadays even baseball players, ballerinas and golfers embrace the idea of incorporating smartly programmed strength work within their overall training regimen.
Still, though, there are misconceptions that persist. And one training related misconception we’d really like to see go the way of the dodo is this: the notion that women who partake in serious weight training will become “bulky and manly”.
Wow, this one drives your Efficient Exercise professionals bonkers for sure. For starters, women simply do not have the hormone levels necessary to build and support the shear mass seen in men who partake in serious training — no matter how much time and effort they put into it. In particular, women lack the testosterone level required for ample muscle gain, *and* they possess high levels of estrogen to boot — making it nearly impossible to gain the type of muscle mass most women are worried about. Often, when one sees an extremely muscular and vascular female lifter, there’s a pretty good chance that there is, shall we say, a certain degree of “pharmaceutical intervention” at play.
In fact, Efficient Exercise trainer Lesley O’Neal is the poster-girl for the train heavy-and-hard female. Lesley looks fantastic, and you can best believe that there aren’t any tiny pink dumbbells or “toning” exercises to be found in her workout routines.
The following video is a clip from one of our recent Efficient Exercise “training the trainer” sessions. The topic of the day’s discussion — autoregulation as applied to exercise programming — is of interest only to the training geeks out there. However, we’d like to include this so as to show just how heavy and hard Lesley does train. In the video, Keith takes Lesley through a deadlift and dip session — and the girl does some seriously hard work in the process:
Bulky? Manly? Hardly. A fantastically fit, shapely, and healthy female? Most definitely. Lesley personifies the Efficient Exercise prescription, and is doing her part to eradicate the “women in the weight room” misconception for good.
Know any ladies who are skittish about serious exercise because of the “she-man” misconception? Make sure to send them Lesley’s way. One free consultation will ease their fears, and put them on a path for a healthier tomorrow.
How do female body builders get there chiseled, muscle tone. Can it be done by exercise and diet alone, or are their steroids, muscle enhancements drugs involved?
It really depends. Yes, performance enhancing drugs are present in female bodybuilding just like with their male counterparts. Most women are not genetically endowed with the ability to build lean muscle mass like men mostly due to natural testosterone levels. If a woman, or a man, wants to add muscle mass beyond their genetic ability proper training must be adopted. If they want to take it beyond that, then yes performance enhancing drugs come into the picture and often times this is where you see the “freaks”.