Simple Workouts Are Often the Best
I wholeheartedly believe that weight bearing exercise is vitally important for everyone baring a real medical condition. I don’t know how it has come to it that many women feel that they shouldn’t pick up heavy (for them) objects. Weight bearing is probably the single best thing you can do for bone health. Why would your body keep dense strong bones around if you never ever send it environmental signals by bearing heavy (for you) weight that tells your body it needs to do so?
Here is my brief workout from today. It wasn’t hard, it didn’t hurt and it didn’t take long. However, I moved a reasonable amount of weight and felt better and stronger when I finished then I did when I started. I’m going to post my workouts every time I do one from now on so you can see what it is I do and how I progress. Hopefully this will help you to feel motivated if you need it and to give you some ideas if you need those as well.
Turkish Get-Ups (TGU)
Warmed up with 1 x 16kg kettlebell TGU left and right. Then with my modified 37kg kettlebell I worked with the left arm from the roll to press then back down, adding each next step as the next rep sequentially until I hit the high hip position and back down. This was repeated on the right side. Then I finished off with a single rep up to the high hip position left and right, again with 37kg.
Kettlebell Bottoms Up Press (BUP)
I worked a single and then a double with 22.5kg left and right and then worked singles left and right in between deadlift singles, finishing with a double left and right, for 11 reps total.
Conventional Deadlift
110kg x 15 singles, with short breaks between singles – mostly occupied with BUPs.
Ab Wheel
5 second holds from the knees x 5 reps for 2 sets.
April 27th, 2010 at 9:40 am
It’s like most things they don’t do it because they fear something else. Women fear getting big muscles, but they have no experience of how hard it is to build up big muscles and hence how they wont with a little bit of training. They don’t think of the other benefits to this type of training either. Ignorance and fear, as with everything rules.
April 27th, 2010 at 10:47 am
James,
What you say is very common. I think I wrote a post about this once. Most people who want to be muscular must work extremely hard with a great deal of consistency, effort and dedication in order to build an sort of obvious musculature. This applies regardless of chemical assistance. Male or Female.
As far as I can tell there is no such thing as “toning”. There is only more muscles, less muscles, more fat, less fat. That is, there is only body composition - better or worse. At the end of the day, outside of cultural-social conditioning, the thing that is most attractive is health. And being strong is an integral part of being healthy. Basic physical human animal survival characteristics.
Hummm, I think I might put this in my next post. Thanks for commenting!
April 27th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
I find shapely women attractive but they all seem to want to be skinny. I think a lot of guys feel this way. I assume from an evolutionary point of view women with strength and fat reserves (less hunting for me to have to worry about) are better baby carriers, hence my attraction to those women. Whilst from their point of view if they are light they can more easily run away from me, lol, or that they will find such a great hunting male that they don’t need fat reserves. Though strength is always needed to fight of people wanting to steal your food or whatever, so the woman would need to be strong to protect herself whilst I was off hunting etc.
Strength is too some extent looked down upon these days, especially with all the weight lifters who had heart issues in the 80s, but they were far too large and used drugs.
But strength training has so many side benefits, from metabolism, confidence building, stress relief, internal structure, etc etc. The problem is people follow the latest fashion and drop everything for it. So they dropped strength training completely for mostly running then it went to yoga etc.
Balance with all things, balance of benefits and costs of all aspects of life is they key and if not that then at least balance of mind and soul.