Muscle Building for Women
If you’re looking for muscle building for women programs to start using, there are a few important things that you must keep in mind. For the most part muscle building for women isn’t a great deal different than muscle building for men, but since the female body is built slightly different, there are those few minor details that you will have to recognize.
Let’s have a brief look over the main factors to consider.
Reduced Workout Volume
The very first change you’ll want to make to a workout program if you’re a woman who is planning on doing it is reduce back on the total volume. Males tend to have far superior recovery abilities than females do and this is partly due to the much greater level of testosterone in their body.
While a man may have no problem going into the gym and performing a good 30 sets per session, a female may only be able to handle 20 before she begins to get very fatigued.
This isn’t a huge problem in terms of progress; all it means is that being a woman you have to know that you won’t do quite as much volume. Two to three sets of any exercise you plan on doing should be enough and typically speaking you’ll only want to perform five to seven different exercises per workout session.
This should help keep the volume under good control so that you aren’t experiencing overtraining at any point as you go about the program.
Body Specific Exercises
Second, many women do tend to have their ‘problem areas’, so those are parts that are often focused on when doing strength training.
The most common problem areas include directly under the arms, in the lower ab region, as well as the glutes and inner thighs.
To hit these muscle groups be sure you’re performing tricep extensions, lying leg raises (which are great for lower ab development) as well as lunges.
If you can do each of those movements twice per week using a weight that does challenge you, it shouldn’t be long before you’re noticing dramatic improvements.
Slower Rate Of Muscle Growth
Finally, the last thing that you must know about muscle building for women is that the rate of muscle growth is also much slower. Far too many women have this fear of building muscle very rapidly when in fact, the exact opposite occurs.
Males can typically generate about one to two pounds of lean muscle mass a month and a female will build about half of that if she’s lucky. So as you can see, those thoughts of getting very masculine looking after picking up weights for a few weeks are very incorrect.
It takes females years to build any significant amounts of muscle so rather than looking big and muscular you’re just going to look more defined and lean from incorporating weight training in with your workout program.
Overall, muscle building for women follows many of the same principles as it does for a male but you must take into account all of these factors with your program to have success.