Treadmills; they leave you on the road nowhere

Gym weight rooms can be very daunting places for women, in fact you very rarely see any women in there at all. Occasionally a lady will walk in and start setting up weights, and the guys around the place will look at each other thinking exactly the same thing. There’s a stigma attached to weightlifting with women which I would like to address, and I’ll start with toning. 

Toning is a word used to describe a situation where fat is less evident and muscles appear more prominent and it is most commonly sought after by women. Examples include things like squats, lunges, press ups and shoulder and arms exercises using weights, body weight and resistance bands. It is very feminine and designed to make women slimmer but keeping a shapely look.
On the most part women will either supplement their toning with endurance exercise, treadmill, cross trainer etc. to burn more calories, or stick to the cardio machines entirely.

How do men differ, what do they need?

Mostly men want to increase muscle mass (hypertrophy) and reduce fat mass. They want to be faster, stronger and fitter. So what is recommended is exercise such as squats, lunges, bench press and things like shoulder presses and biceps curls for the arms. They use weights and body weight for different exercises. It is super macho and involves lots of shouting and throwing weights around but it is effective.

What I’m getting at, if you haven’t got there already, is that toning is hypertrophy for women. It’s as simple as that. Women can become terrified when weights are suggested because they believe they will become bulky and unattractive. The weird thing is that even though they perform a great deal of endurance training they never worry about looking like a marathon runner. Women have a physiology which means they can’t become excessively muscular without taking some kind of anabolic drugs. They don’t have anywhere near the same amount of testosterone in their system.



It’s common for women to reduce the calories in their diet and undertake a endurance training programme. Women who do this will lose both fat and lean mass from their body (which looks great on the scales). However their fat to muscle ratio doesn’t change much; they don’t ‘tone’ how they would like to and their metabolism stagnates or even slows down. Women who undertake the same calorie restriction and perform hypertrophy training keep their muscle but lose fat, this means they do ‘tone’ how they would like to and their metabolism gets faster. Meaning 24hrs a day women who do weights are burning more calories than women doing endurance training, with the main source being fat.

So what happens if you pair weights, with endurance for a balanced physique? Well that’s not really how it works, because endurance training blunts the positive effects of weight training, making it less effective. So for best results, and a great body, ditch the endurance training all together and hit the weights room.


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