If you want to increase your fitness and tone your muscles, weight training can be a valuable exercise. Some women may avoid working with weights because they’re worried that they’ll end up looking too muscular. However, this needn’t be the case. Great benefit can be achieved even using fairly light weights.

Weight training for women, as for men, can both build muscle and increase bone density. The ability to increase bone density is, perhaps, more important for women than men as women are more prone to osteoporosis - a disease which weakens the bones and makes them more susceptible to fractures - particularly following menopause.

If you’ve decided to go ahead with some weight training, there are a couple of simple rules you should follow.

A good warm-up is important before you start your weights session. Getting the blood flowing to your muscles will help to prevent injury. Once you start, it’s a good idea to exercise the larger muscle groups first.

When you’re lifting, you should concentrate on your posture and breathing, and also control the way you move the weight. It probably goes without saying that having good posture as you lift will make you less vulnerable to injury, as does controlling the weights’ movement. And exhaling as you exert yourself means that you will put more effort into the exercise.

Weight training for women doesn’t have to mean that you end up looking like a body builder. You can start out using light weights and, if you find that it starts to feel too easy, you can increase the weight if you want. You have control over how much muscle you build.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 8:52 am and is filed under Fitness, Exercise, Personal Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.