TARIQ MOHAMMAD
The women’s lib movement can now finally be said to be complete, the women of today right from the high powered corporate executive, to the college going Britney Spears wannabe to the soap opera watching housewife have all of a sudden started visiting gyms, and it’s not because gym memberships today cost lesser or the trainers are hunkier, but because the liberated woman of today realise that a gym is where she would acquire true physical strength and beauty.
The gym was always thought to be the domain of the bodybuilder and a woman stepping into the gym and that too for a weight training workout was almost unheard of. The fear of sprouting manly muscles or becoming fat if you ever stop training and other such false facts kept women away from the weight training area. But today’s women use weight training as a tool to not only sculpt the body of her dreams but to also improve her health and simultaneously the quality of her life.
Men and women both possess more than 650 muscles and more than 200 bones. The primary difference between Adam and Eve is hormonal. Men have a greater amount of testosterone which gives them their hairy backs, baritone voice and more importantly the capacity to drastically increase their muscle mass. Women on the other hand possess a larger amount of estrogen, which gives them their feminine features and greater tendency to gain fat, plus their extremely low levels of testosterone give rise to a very low potential to gain muscle. All you women need not be too happy. The inability to build muscle, which has a capability to burn calories, makes you carry more fat as compared to your male counterparts.
So, weight training is an invaluable tool for women to increase whatever little muscle, and with it their calorie burning capacity. It will not only make you lose the ugly body fat but keep it off as well.
One more little known fact is that a muscle is something that gives shape to the body. Once the fat comes off, if the muscles are not developed, the body will simply weigh less but not be ideally shaped. The female form will be enhanced and a woman will be deemed as well shaped only if her muscles are developed.
Even after all this a woman will still have doubts of whether to embark on a weight-training regime or not. This stems from the following
“I do agree that building muscle is the best way of ridding the body of fat…But I am a woman and won’t an increase in muscle make me larger and more masculine?”
This message goes out from me loud and clear to all women…
“You’ve got a hope in hell in building muscle like men… it won’t happen even if you want it more than anything in the world…WAKE UP to the fact that nature just hasn’t given you enough of the muscle building hormone testosterone to be able to build the kind of muscle that would be visible or make a substantial difference in size or girth of the body.”
At best you can hope for muscular hypertrophy in fractions of millimeters…if you do everything correctly…but the very process of building a millimeter of more muscle will elevate the BMR so much that you will lose fat in inches.
That’s the fantastic trade off that women can hope to get from weight training.
A millimeter increase in muscle will lead to an inch of fat loss. Thus successfully reducing dimensions and at the same time giving it an awesome shape and tone.
After I have convinced you that weight training and building muscle is as important for you as men, I am sure you’d want to ask this- “Do I need to train intensely or increase the weights that I lift? As I simply want to tone my muscles and not increase my muscles.”
The minutest increase in muscle requires as much effort from a woman as a male body builder who just wants bigger muscles…the poundage’s might differ tremendously between a housewife and a male bodybuilder but the effort level remains the same.
If you just want to be a thin woman then just running round your block and starving yourself will do the job, but if you want to be the epitome of feminine grace and be considered as the possessor of an aesthetically pleasing athletic body that is firm and toned then you better hit the gym to lift weights.
Women have for long been termed as the weaker sex, this was mainly due to a lack of physical strength while performing day-to-day tasks, but this too is subject to change. Weight training is bound to make women more attractive but the other beneficial effect is that they will get stronger too. Thanks to weight training, the weaker sex is weak no more.
