Results - That Women Want!

by Paul Chek (Respected Speaker & Exercise Fitness Consultant)

What's Motivates Women?

The media today bombards women with quick fix solutions to their aesthetic desires. Everything from pills, supplements and fad diets, to liposuction and plastic surgery. Those with a little more determination make valiant attempts to stay healthy and slim with aerobics classes and exercise programs.

It is unfortunate however, that many fitness centre staff are also caught up in the quick-fix mentality and undereducated in the best types of exercise programs for females: women suffer more orthopaedic injury than men in almost every sport in which them both participate. A chronic lack of strength and function in the lower abdominals & pelvic floor muscles is evident in the 47.5% of females at an average age of only 38.5 years who suffer from incontinence. Both these problems can often be helped with the correct exercise program.

Mostly, women are inspired to exercise for aesthetic reasons – weight loss, muscle toning, re-shaping of thighs, butt, stomach, arms and so on. One of the rewarding aspects of being a fitness professional is knowing that along with the results, you can also provide positive health benefits and improved function for your members. But, and this is a big but, an exercise program can just as easily break a person as build them up, especially women.

So what are the best types of exercises to help women reach their goals and also improve health and function at the same time?

PERFECT POSTURE MAKES PERFECT
The first goal of any exercise program for females is to correct the posture. More common to women are excessive forward head posture, increased first rib angle, altered shoulder girdle position and altered pelvic tilt. These should be addressed first for a successful exercise program.

Unfortunately social pressure also contributes to poor posture. High heels, breast enhancements and the seated workplace are all culprits. The best exercises to improve posture are those that activate postural and stabilizer muscles. Swiss ball exercises are ideal to enhance posture.

MUSCLE BURNS CALORIES!
Women tend to gravitate toward the machines, be they aerobic or resistance training machines. When they do perform weight training, they often use very low intensities, socialize between sets . . . and seldom build muscle.

Although cardio machines burn calories, the body also becomes progressively more efficient at cardio exercise. The result is more miles to the gallon when the aim is actually to become less fuel-efficient with fewer miles to the gallon. Aerobic exercise has also been shown to be associated with increased levels of glucocorticoid, hormones which are catabolic in nature and so do not favour increasing muscle mass; the very muscle you need to burn fat!

Even men have a hard time building muscle yet they have ten-times the amount of muscle building testosterone than woman. Combine the catabolic response of aerobic exercise with the naturally lower hormone, and you can see why few women get the results they are looking for with large amounts of cardio training.

This is why resistance training performed with acute exercise variables suitable for bodybuilding is good for females. Exercises performed at an 8-12 rep intensity, slow tempos, and short rest periods (1 minute) stimulate muscle growth and protein synthesis.

Hormones that step-up metabolism such as testosterone and growth hormone, are known to be more prevalent in the blood stream after exposure to body building protocols. This results in increased caloric consumption, often for some time after resistance training is completed. In fact, fit people always metabolise more fat, and can metabolise fat at higher intensities than the unfit. Suggested acute variable for resistance training are given in Table 1.

Interestingly, Australian researcher Robby Parker showed that after performing resistance training, obese pre-menopausal women used 50% more fat, even though total metabolic rate did not change. He also noted that resistance training appears better for reducing abdominal fat than aerobic exercise.

FREE WEIGHT TRAINING
Without contest, resistance-training programs based around free weights (dumbbells, barbells and cable machines) win hands down when it comes to training women. There are multiple reasons for this – most importantly, free weight exercise activate more muscle, which burn more calories.
A soon as the body is stabilized during any resistance exercise (i.e. sitting or lying on a machine), activation of the centrally generated recruitment patterns needed to activate postural and stabilizer muscles is reduced to almost nothing. This is not good if you want to burn fat! In addition it also means that you are increasing strength in prime movers without increasing the strength of the smaller postural and stabilizer muscles. Over time this can lead to postural problems, injuries and pain – none of which bode well for good retention figures for your club!
This does not mean that females should not use machines, it simply means that their program should contain 50% or greater of free weight exercises. Females should also perform their free weight training prior to machine training exercises, thus allowing more neural energy for activation of postural and stabilizer muscles.

Most females choose machines over free weights for fear of GETTING BIG! Here are several reasons why this is more myth than reality:

Females have about ten times less testosterone and far greater levels of oestrogen in their blood stream than males at all times.

Studies on hypertrophy using muscle-building protocols also show that females do not achieve the same hypertrophic responses in fast twitch fibres that males do.

Stereotyped Weight Training
Competitive female body builders train approximately three hours a day, performing 5-12 sets per body part trained. As any competitive female body builder will tell you, getting big is no easy task for a female. It requires a significant time commitment and serious commitment to nutrition and supplements – often the hard-core supplements like steroids. It is unfortunate that the images of the female bodybuilders have become the stereotypic model for women and weight training.

If your female members are sure that they are gaining size when on a weight training program, then prove to them that they are not. Take circumference measurements at the mid-point of the upper arms, chest, waist, and mid-thighs. Every four weeks, re-measure. If your clients truly are putting on more muscle than they want, you can make the following changes to their program.

Reduce the number of sets and/or exercises targeting the area of concern.

If using a station training approach (not circuit training), increase the rest time between sets to between 2:30 and 3:30

Lower the intensity of the exercise to the point that they can perform 20 repetitions each set and then only perform 12-15 reps with that load, for a toning, not body-building response.

Perform aerobic exercise after resistance training to encourage aerobic adaptation, which will retard anaerobic adaptation, reducing their chances of putting on muscle mass

Perform the exercises targeting the muscle(s) of concern no more than one time each six days

Mix free weight training with short bursts of aerobic exercise in a circuit format, keeping the heart rate elevated, work volume high and lift intensity around 50-60% 1RM. This can be added 1-2 times a week along with 1-2 station training workouts, if desired.

AEROBICS, FREEWEIGHTS, OR BOTH?
It is common practice for females to come straight out of an aerobic class and lift weights. It is unsafe to lift weights in a state of fatigue unless you are an advanced lifter with at least three years supervision by a trained conditioning coach. Innately, many females find they have a hard time with free-weights after such classes, and therefore choose machine training. If this pattern persists, the female loses all the benefits of free weight training that support female physiology, including fat loss.

IF YOU WANT TO DO BOTH …. Keep aerobics classes (particularly those with complex dance moves) separate from free-weight training and machine training.

If members demand both on the same day, perform two free weight lifts, two machine exercises and / or exercises targeting one region of the abdominals, followed by an aerobic activity. To prevent injury, the aerobic activity performed after resistance training should be low in complexity, for example rowing, cycling, steppers and step mills, or elliptical trainers.

Due to stabilizer fatigue and potential joint instability, any form of running should be avoided after performing leg exercises such as lunges, squats, box step-ups or dead lifts.

BONE HEALTH

Osteoporosis and dowagers hump has been something females didn’t begin thinking about until they hit the post-menopausal years. Not anymore! Research has found that females are showing up with significant bone loss and early-onset dowagers hump as young as 35 years of age! Poor nutritional habits and over exposure to exercise were cited as major contributors to the problem.

Clinically, I have treated many aerobic exercisers and distance running females for stress fractures secondary to the very same things. In fact, studies on soldiers indicated that females are 5-10 times more likely to develop a stress fracture than males, and often develop them earlier under the same conditions.

To have healthy bones, females need to do two things:

1. Follow a healthy eating plan – I recommend The Metabolic Typing Diet by William Wolcott and Trish Fahey, as a good starting point.
2. Use exercises loading the long bones of the body. Exercises that do this very well are exercises like squatting, lunging, bench press, and the dead lift. To avoid over-exposure to these exercises, it is best to only do each of these exercises no more than two times per week. For those with more lifting experience performing these lifts above 80% intensity, one time every 4-5 days should allow your muscles and bones to recover effectively.

CONCLUSION:
Although men and women are unquestionably very different, most females would be better off if they were encouraged to train like men instead of being led to believe that they will get big if they do so. Getting big is not even easy for men to do with their favourable anabolic hormonal profile! If a woman can lose 5-10 pounds of fat in trade for a few pounds of muscle, she will look better, feel better, and burn more fat, even when she sleeps. Women, who train with a male training partner, or using a program designed for a man, must listen to their bodies when premenstrual, so they can prevent unwanted injuries.

Use of compound exercises that load the long bones of the body and activate stabilizer muscles will help with increased bone mineral density and improve joint stability and posture.

Finally, be very aware of the latest quick fix diets and fad exercise programs, so you can discourage your female clients and members from using these and encourage them to adopt an exercise program that will truly enhance both their aesthetics and their health.

About the Author
Paul Chek HHP, NMT is an internationally respected speaker & consultant in corrective and high performance exercise kinesiology, Paul Chek has produced over 50 videos, books, seminars and educational courses for the health and fitness industries. For more information on Paul’s videos, correspondence courses or certification programs, contact the C.H.E.K Institute at (800) 552-8789.
Visit www.chekinstitute.com.