I have talked to so many women about weightlifting and it amazes me how many women think its only for men. There are many great benefits from weightlifting. I can think of three benefits right off the bat.
Benefit #1
Lifting weights builds strength. Women have been known as "the weaker sex". Prove them wrong! Women can be strong and self sufficient as well. The facts are, you will never be as strong as your male counterpart but it sure is nice to know that,as a woman, you can hold your own. Building strength makes it that much easier to do so many tasks that would typically be difficult...all part of being self sufficient ladies!
Benefit #2
This is a big one!It seems most women want to shed, at least, a few pounds. More power to ya, for those of you that are happy with your weight! That's awesome! But for the majority of you, weightlifting can help.The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn throughout the day. Building muscle will increase your metabolism.
As you gain muscle,your resting metabolism increases and you burn more calories. For each pound of muscle you gain, you burn roughly 35 to 50 more calories each day. Ok, so add in a good cardio workout and you are a calorie burning machine. Muscle burns almost 4 times more calories than fat in an hour. Wouldn't you want to have more muscle than fat? I think so.
Weight train 2-3 days out of the week at least. Do some form of cardio 3-4 days a week. Take 1-2 days off to rest your muscles. You can rotate these. Cardio day 1, Lift weights day 2 if you want. Just make sure you rest muscle groups for a couple days before you start again with the same group of muscles. But that's a whole other blog topic.
Benefit #3
Another great benefit that has been proven, is that you can lower your risk factors to so many different types of diseases.
You can reduce your risk of heart disease. Weight training has been known to decrease your LDL cholesterol, which is the "bad cholesterol",and increase the good cholesterol(HDL). It will also lower your blood pressure.
Might I add, that being overweight will increase your chance of heart disease. This ties into Benefit #2.
Weightlifting is crutial to diabetes! Being that 90% of consumed sugar is used up by muscle, the more muscle you have the more sugar you can clear from your body. Weightlifting increases the ability to metabolize glucose. The more you use your muscles, the more sugar you will burn or use up. Therefore, it's less likely for your body to store it elsewhere, which leads me to another point. As also stated in Benefit # 2, strength training reduces fat. The fat we are most concerned about with diabetes is "belly fat". It is a huge hazard to your health and it will also Increase insulin resistance.
There are so many more diseases(too many to list), cancer being one of them. Who would've thought? To wrap this benefit up, lifting weights will give you an overall healthier and more quality life by allowing you to overcome disease, plain and simple.
So there it is, my three reasons(but like I said, there are so many more) for strength training. I'd like to add that a lot of women have the misconception that lifting weights will give them these big huge muscles and make them look manly. Sorry to tell you, if you are a woman, building massive muscles will be almost impossible. Most of the women you see that have these big muscles are taking steroids. So unless that's in your future plans, I don't think you will need to worry about it, seriously. To add to that, there are a number of ways you can build muscle and alter the way they look. For example, working with a low weight(like 2-5 lbs) with high reps(like 15-25 reps) will give you more of a toned look. Whereas, working with a larger weight will give you a fuller look. Notice I said fuller, not huge. ;)
So pick up some weights and start pumping some iron!
