Rethink the Weights, Ladies

Pick Up a Dumbbell, Gain 10 lbs

You walk in the gym, proceed to place your things in a locker or cubby hole, walking past all the weight machines and dumbbell racks (twice), and then toward the treadmill where a casual stroll (at best) is performed while watching an old episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. This stroll lasts anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour (for the dedicated).

Then comes the dilemma: to walk past the machines and dumbbells without doing a single rep, yet again in order to get your things. Most don’t give it a second thought. “Those are for men who want to get BIG.” Not knowing that a solid resistance-training program could do far more than a 20-minute stroll listening to the latest 20 on 20 countdown (that’s been the same for the last 6 months) ever could.

If I’ve described your gym routine, and excuse me for my beating around the bush but,

YOU’RE WASTING YOUR TIME!

If you can carry on a conversation without missing a beat, you might as well be walking around the mall or grocery store because you certainly don’t need a gym membership to burn 100 calories in twenty minutes.

Let me outline a good rule of thumb real quick:

So, that thirty-minute mossy into TBS will burn 150 calories at best. Perhaps, a new episode of the big bang theory will come on next (given it is Thursday) and you can burn 150 more.

That brings your total to a whopping 300 calories. Not the best use of an hour if you ask me.

Getting to the gym is not enough. What you do at the gym is what’s important.

Weight training will, most likely, fall into the medium exercise so you’re already a step ahead.

Let’s spice up your hour workout!

14 Exercises. (Broken down but in no particular order)

3 sets of 15 reps.

To make this simple, one rep will equal one second of work.

3 x 15 = 45                                        45 sec

45 x 14 (# of exercises) =                630 sec           or        10 ½ minutes

It boils down to 10 ½ minutes of total work time. But you’re not going to perform the exercises back to back with no rest. Let’s assume you rest no longer than 30 sec in between sets.

30 sec x 42 (# of sets) =                  1,260 sec        or        21 minutes

So far we’re up to 31 ½ minutes and have burned 189-252 calories (assuming that rest is burning calories in the light exercise range) and you haven’t even thought about a treadmill. I know what you’re thinking; “the numbers are about the same as if I would’ve walked for 30 minutes. What’s the big deal?”

EPOC.

Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption. Probably one of the most important aspect of weight loss, especially fat. However, I’m sure a lot of you are reading this with a blank expression on your face. No worries. It’s simple!

Once you leave the gym, your body is going through various processes to accommodate the recent stress you’ve put on it through exercise, assuming that your exercise was intense enough to do so. (Hence the importance of weight training).

Walking on the treadmill at a leisurely pace isn’t going to induce a lot of increased oxygen uptake during or after your workout. The trick is to have an intense workout to increase the length that your body is requiring more oxygen after exercise. The longer the requirement for more oxygen, the more calories burned. These calories are fat calories.

So the weight workout is over with. Now what?

Cardio. And only if you must. (Whole different blog post).

So now that we have our resistant training done and our EPOC in gear, we can expect to burn more calories on the cardio machines. Even if you’re walking you can expect the calorie expenditure to be at the higher end of the scale at the very least. I’d bet that it would probably fall into the lower end of the medium exercise though and maybe even higher. So you’ve gone from around 150 calories to around 200 in the same time frame!

I used the higher end of the light exercise to show the maximum caloric expenditure and the lower end of the lower end on the medium to not manipulate the data into my favor. The 89-calorie difference may not seem like much but think of it this way: you’re walking for a solid hour on the treadmill while you’re working time is only 10 minutes with resistant training. So let’s break it down like this:

So you’re working harder not longer and burning 89+ calories more along with the priceless caloric burn from our newfound friend, EPOC.

Cardio at the end?

Yes, and only if you must, cardio after weight training.

Why?

The barbell gods will bury you under the squat rack if you don’t. Just kidding. We tell them to go to Planet Fitness. Seriously, you want to be at full strength capacity when weight training. Cardio will affect muscle strength far more than weight training will affect the cardiovascular system. Which brings up another point. How much weight do I use?

Well, the rep count is high so the weight should be low but not low enough to squeeze out a few yawns during a set. The last 3-4 reps should challenge you a bit. Not enough to lose form but to give your muscles enough resistance to grow.

Disclaimer: this is an absolute beginners regimen to illustrate a point. I am a huge advocate of heavier lifting among women. Think you’ll get big on heavier lifting? Please… By all means… Continue reading…

Grow?? I don’t want to get big and bulky!

This is probably the most common excuse for women not to use weights. However, most women want to “shape” and “tone.” How can you expect to shape and tone muscles that aren’t working? Good question! There are multiple reasons why this is invalid and, practically speaking, laughable.

• Women do not have the testosterone levels to significantly increase muscle mass
• 80% of women don’t have enough protein in their diet to promote extreme muscle growth or any at all for that matter
• Women who are extremely muscular (to the point of where you don’t see the need of wearing a bikini top) are being enhanced by performance enhancers.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the ability of women to gain muscle. I’m just saying that it’s more difficult for them to do so. It can and should be done naturally.  If this is the case, no woman has to worry about becoming ‘too big.’

The sexy fitness models that most women idolize, LIFT WEIGHTS.

Why??

Muscle is sexy!

Bottom Line:

It’s not about the time you spend in the gym. It’s about how you spend that time in the gym. Get the most bang for your buck and grab some weights!

About weight loss you can read more from CoolSculpting EDU. 

What are you putting in?

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