Body Building For Women
By Ingrid Schaefer Sprague
As noted in our recent article on Womens body building the history of competitive body building for women has advanced significantly in the last 20 years.
In this article, you will learn proper and productive techniques for body building for women.
Let me clarify, if you are reading this and you want a lean, muscular physique, then you are interested in strength training, and not body building for women.
The difference is that body building for women emphasizes muscle mass and clear delineation of the musculature in order to participate in competitions.
In addition to the workout we describe
- Proper nutrition.
- Diets and supplements.
- Hydration.
- Rest.
- And stretching.
All are necessary to maintain health and prevent injury.
Two invaluable supplements include creatine and whey protein.
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To emphasize the importance of rest.
You should know that muscle is built during rest and recovery not during the workout itself. Although a few workouts place the rest days back to back, most routines specify a rest day after working a major muscle group.
Your gains may not be as dramatic as a man’s, since you do not produce testosterone, and to supplement it with anabolic steroids and HGH is verboten in competitions.
Additionally, women do need to maintain a cardio regimen, since women put on fat more readily than men due to estrogen. However, as noted in men’s routines, too much cardio can be counterproductive to building muscle mass.
Various bodybuilding workouts are described here, since you will need to vary up your routine every 4 to 6 weeks to break through your plateau in order to achieve greater muscle mass (periodization).
In addition to the number of sets and reps, it is important to pay attention to the duration of the rest period. Some workouts will emphasize very short breaks or even no breaks between exercises or sets to maximize intensity and calorie burn, but other regimens specify breaks as long as 45 seconds between sets to allow recovery from very intense sets with heavier weights or from exercises involving large muscle groups.
As in men’s body building, the principle of progressive overload is needed in body building for women to break past your maximum effort to gain mass.
The use of a spotter is recommended
Form is especially critical for those who are adding more weight to their workouts. So to ensure form and protect you when lifting heavier weights use a spotter.
To begin, we must emphasize the importance of stretching. The following routines are attributed to Marika Johansson.
Routine One:
Each day a specific muscle group of the body is worked with rest days following every 2 days of workout. Two warm up sets are performed first. A final set with slightly less reps rounds out the routine. The circuit is fast, requiring only 45 minutes in the gym.
Routine Two:
In this workout, three or four exercises of each muscle group are performed with no rest between each. A rest period of 45 seconds precedes a giant set. (Rest days come after workouts involving large muscle groups.)
Routine Three:
Drop sets involve lifting to a weight to the point of failure, then decreasing the weight and reps incrementally. Each set is performed to the point of failure.
Routine Four:
Perform the maximum amount of reps with the heaviest weight, and then add weight and perform 10 less reps. After that, add weight, and perform 10 less reps until you get to 5 reps. Repeat that and start up the ladder again, increasing reps and lowering the amount of weight.
Routine Five:
This routine utilizes pyramid training (another variation of this is reverse pyramid training). This workout goes after the high-twitch fiber muscles to produce mass. Each set is performed with increasingly heavier weights and lowering the reps until the last set has only 4 reps.
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Although the majority of routines have been previously geared to men, most of the same rules (and exercises) apply to body building for women as well except for a few gender-specific caveats outlined above.
