Jamie Eason. Muscular? Yes. Feminine? Yes. Sexy yet able to kick your ass? Oh hell yes.

Well look here. Fellow Belgian Mehdi from Stronglifts included “weight lifting makes women bulky” in his list of Fitness myths.

“Myth #5: Weight Lifting Makes Women Bulky. Those muscular women you can find in muscle magazines had to use steroids to get to that point. As a woman you can build muscle, get stronger and improve your physique. But you’ll never build as much muscle mass as men can because you have lower testosterone levels. You’ll always stay feminine unless you use steroids.“

He still assumes women take “bulky” to mean “gladiator woman”, whereas most women already freak out from going up a pants size. But he adresses  it without rediculising women’s fears, and doesn’t mock women’s potential for putting on muscle. The takehome message is both reassuring and to the point: you can be muscular and feminine. Good job!

Trading in the squat rack for something more idyllic

If you’re looking to get into hiking, I only have one tip for you: get someone experienced to tell you about the best locations!

Walking through dense forests, climbing over roots, rocks and branches, a pretty good workout!

Rather than just walk out the door into a random direction, I asked a coworker of mine who is an avid hiker. He happily gave us maps to the most beautiful trails in the country, explained where to park and what route to follow.

After a few 12-14 mile hikes, we’re ready to round off the summer in style. We’re packing up this weekend on a four day trip, walking our way through the Ardennes, a very rural and pretty area of Belgium. About 40 miles in total. Not bad for a couple of gym monkeys, eh?

We’re going in style, though: every night we’ll arrive in a village hotel that has been booked for the night. This serves two purposes:

1. We get some comfort for our trouble
2. We’d better keep walking all the way to our destination, or we’ll have to sleep in the grass!

We booked the entire thing through an agent, so all we need to do is show up and walk. When we get more experienced, we can start on making our own (cheaper) trips. But for now, we’re not going to get our inexperience get in the way of our hikes!

How's that for inspiration?

The New Rules for Women program was my first introduction to a real program. Hell, to real lifting. It really got me interested and in a matter of months I was reading everything I could find: books, websites, forums. One of my favorite topics was the mythical programming. Gradually I grew more annoyed at the NROL4W workouts. They were very long: some of them took 2 hours to complete. Some exercises hurt my knees. I longed to add in other exercises that would help strengthen my weak spots. But I was convinced that I could never make my own program.

This all changed when I stumbled on to the most important article on the internet: Program Design for Dummies. If the internet was a house on fire, this is the article I would rush to save.  It explains in clear language how to make a program that balances push- and pull movements, includes unilateral work, core, and everything. It even includes a template.

I played around with it and made a three stage program that I then put back on the shelf. Sure, I now had an idea of how to make a balanced workout, but I still didn’t know how to decide on reps and a periodisation of sorts. This all changed when:

• I did NROL’s 4×4 workout, and decided that low rep training was the coolest thing ever
• I went back on a diet, and decided I didn’t want to spend 1,5 hours in the gym for every gruelling session

So I made my program. It’s made up of

• one big lift (5×5),
• two smaller lifts (3×8),
• two accessory exercises (2×12)
• cardio: either 10 minutes of 70% HR or (once a week), 15 mins of intervals.

The program takes me 55-60 minutes. My numbers are going up. I look forward to every session. I don’t have to cancel fun stuff in order to train. Hell if I skip the cardio, I can do it on my lunch break. I couldn’t be happier.

And if I ever stop being happy with it, I know I only have myself to blame.

What does a foam rolller do? It rolls the aches out of your muscles in a painful but very effective way and give you more mobility back. Or, in the words of Tony: “With a foam roller, you will break up all those knots, adhesions, and scar tissue that tend to accumulate over time and not only will you improve range of motion (no more knots), but you’ll also improve overall tissue quality as well.”

That’s me baby, high quality tissue.

In case someone also knocks on your door to unexpectedly give you a foam roller, you should know how to use it:

• Feel better for 10 bucks & Soft tissue work for tough guys , two excellent articles detailing the how and why of tennisball and foam rolling
• Tony G made a video of the foam rolling warm up at Cressey’s. It looks a lot like the warm up from Maximum Strength
• Mike Robertson put a self myofascial release handbook up on the internet for free.

That should get you started. Get rolling, folks!

Back definition coming along okay. 10 pounds less would really make it happen though. Sadly exam months means sitting on your ass burning bugger all calorie wise, making it rather unpleasant to eat in a deficit.
If only stress burned calories, eh? Eventually I would like to end up here (though not in yoga class).

Chicken satay – Very good, moist chicken. Good without the peanut sauce, but heavenly with it.
Hoisin Pork chops – Great chops with sticky sweet sauce.
Top drawer Chicken Salad – I eat this a few times a week for lunch. Great wrapped in a tortilla.
Baked felafel – Beans have lots of carbs with some nice proteïn. Since you’re baking the felafel instead of deep-frying it, it’s low-fat too. An ideal post-workout meal!
Ratatouille – If you’re not getting enough vegetables in, or are low-carbing, give this one a whirl.
BBQ Meatballs – You may want to go easy on the sugar in the sauce there, but otherwise a very nice midweek meal.

What I want: Strength and power, and the health benefits they bring. I’ve built muscle, now i want to use it to its full potential
What I don’t want:  Hypertrophy or fat-loss. I’m very happy with my body composition right now. Sure, a few bf% less couldn’t hurt, but if I want that I’ll skip the oreos.
I know my limitations:

• I want to train only three times a week
• I have imbalances and weaknesses. I want to work on them. I do not want my main goal to be accomplished at the cost of my body.
• I know I’m not an advanced lifter, and that there are siginificant gains for me to be had in full-body workouts.
• I know an experienced trainer will make a much better program for me than I could make myself.

So where does that leave me?

• NROL4W is great. It does a wonderful job at tackling my weak points (upper back, unilateral work, glute activation).  But it’s not a strength program, it’s a strength/hypertrophy/fat-loss mix.
• NROL itself has a strength program, but that one still includes hypertrophy, because, hey, all men want to be buff, right?
• Maximum strength looks amazing mobility and strength wise, but it is an upper/lower split program, and seems to be a program I want to do after a few years.
• Most other strength programs like stronglifts, etc. are very basic. They just include 5×5′s of the big exercises without regard to mobility and/or weaknesses.
• Having a trainer make a custom program for me sounds wonderful, but I just found out how much that costs, and I’m not prepared to pay prices like that.
• Finally, making my own program would be fun, but it would most likely be horribly ineffective until I got better at it.

So i’m at a loss. I’m considering adapting NROL4W’s two hypertrophy phases to a 1-8 rep range. It’d be a hack-job, and the periodisation of NROL4W would be affected… but it would get me everything I want. Or I can suck it up and do the hypertrophy parts at a deficit, the fat-loss parts at a surplus, and go on. But it seems absurd to me to not train for your goal.

I’ll need to give this more thought.

My complaint

Don’t get me wrong. I think women can get great benefits from weight lifting. I enjoy it immensely and hope I can motivate other women to get into it. But I do want them to be informed before getting into it.

It’s my feeling that they don’t do a good job at addressing women’s concerns. Worse, they sometimes end up lying to women, creating new misunderstandings, and insulting real female weight trainers in the process. They also make assumptions about the type of body women want to have that aren’t always correct.

Misunderstanding #1: Bulking

The core of these misunderstandings is the definition of “bulking”.

What bulking means for a man: “Going into a period of intense weight-training with a program specified to make muscle gains, while eating agressively over maintenance”.
What a man thinks bulking means for a woman:  “Ending up looking like a female gladiator”.
What bulking actually means for a woman: Gaining width on ANY bodypart.

You can see how this leads to misunderstandings.

Misunderstanding #2: Your dream body

As far as the internet can tell me, Angelina Jolie is considered to be the most attractive woman in the world. This means many women will have *this* as their dream body:

Not this (Sorry, Rachel! I worship you, you’re my musclespiration!):

For many women and just as many men, Angelina Jolie’s body is preferable to Rachels. I know this stupid, and that it’s clearly Rachel who should be worshipped as a goddess, not miss stickfigure. You know this. But the rest of the world disagrees. As the song goes: “You can’t argue with popularity. Well you can, but you’d be wrong”.

Can you really promise your target audience that weight training will make them look like the underfed waif they want to look like? Because that’s what your doing when you say ‘picking up the weights will get you your dream body’.  The body that men will swoon over? Because last time I checked, a woman with visible muscles still gets an audible “eww” from most men.

What’s being said

Once again, all these people have the best of intentions, and don’t meant to mislead anyone. But they do, and I want to point them out.

From Elite Female fitness:

“Seriously, if one more woman says to me, “I don’t wanna lift cause I’ll get too big,” I’ll lose it! Look, if you think all you have to do to get huge is to step into the weight room and lift a few weights; you’re insane. It takes years of hard, heavy training, plenty of food, and testosterone, which women do not have enough of to get that big. When you see female bodybuilders, they are a product of steroids.”

This picture accompanies the argument.

This is an “argument from the extreme”. The woman is afraid of bulking (i.e. gaining an inch) and the article responds with ‘don’t worry, you’ll never gain 50 inches, it’s impossible”. I imagine this isn’t very reassuring. It’s like me saying “I’m afraid of sewer spiders” and someone reassuring me by saying “Don’t  worry, a 40 foot spider will never fit through your drains, it’s impossible”.

From Figure Athlete:

“But Wet Wolf, I can ‘muscle up’ very easily. I mean, my quads and glutes are really thick and muscular. In fact, I think I need to lose some muscle from my quads. They’re just too big.”

No. The password is… fat loss! Your legs aren’t too muscular, they’re just carrying too much fat. Show me one single Figure Athlete who’s drug-free and under 10% bodyfat, who possesses legs that are too muscular. You can’t do it.

Under 10% bodyfat? Granted, FA is not a site who caters to women who are currently swinging their pink dumbells around. But imagine a woman who has been lead to believe that pumping iron will give her her dream body. And who then gets told “yeah, of course you don’t have your dream body, you’re too fat! Your going to have to go on hardcore diets to drop yourself down to a very low bodyfat% that your body will continually struggle to get away from. Suprise!”.

Strange how that didn’t get a mention, isn’t it? Picking up the weights will give you ‘that nice toned look’, but who’s going to drop your bodyfat by 10 percentages?

Tony Gentilcore on FA (don’t hate me, Tony! I love you!):

Lifting heavy weights will not make you “big and bulky.” Eating bagels and drinking Starbucks (aka: liquid McDonalds) for breakfast everyday makes you “big and bulky.”

The take home message is, again, if you’re bulky, it’s because you’ve been taking too many dips into the cookie jar. Diet down, fatty. Funny though, before you started lifiting, you fit into your jeans fine. Now you need to diet down to compensate for the muscle width you gained. They didn’t tell you that before you started, did they?

Ok, let’s lift

So, a women wants to put down her pink dumbbells and start training weights. Chances are, she’ll start with the New rules of lifting for women. The programme starts with 12 to 18 weeks of 8-12 rep exercises with a low to no deficit. Women reported busting out of their pants in phase one and posted on the forum. They weren’t on steroids, they  were doing three fullbody workouts a week and having a shake afterwards.

The response they got was very different from those initial promises:

Matt from AmpedTraining:

“Sounds like your legs/butt were just un trained and responded how they were supposed to. Some women have hangups about the size of that area. If you’re one of those that prefers the skinny lower half, then building muscle is going to ruin that for you. Accept the changes or stop doing what you’re doing.”

“Some” women have hangups about that area? SOME? Are you kidding? How about “inform people properly or never try to debunk the bulking myth again?”

Or maybe she’ll mail tony about it, and he’ll say:

“ Ummmmm, 10-12 reps is notheavy, low rep training. It’s HYPERTROPHY training. The reason you can’t fit into your clothes anymore is because you’re probably doing too much volume.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had mentioned that in their “hey, women, drop the pink dumbbells article?” and had saved you a 16-week bulking cycle?

If weight-lifting will make me hot, why are your blog posts and articles covered in skinny fat girl pictures?

Because that’s what turns your male audience on, and part of what keeps them coming back. We’re not stupid. You may talk the talk, but your pictures don’t walk the walk. Or are these the toned, healthy weightlifting women you’re talking about?

What should be said

The take home message should be a little more detailed than: “pick up some weights, you won’t bulk’.

• It should take the ‘pink dumbell woman’s point of view into account. No matter how much you hate it
• It should provide realistic information about what you can expect to change about your body when you weight train.
• It should explain that weight lifting alone is not enough to lose weight, and that dieting will still be the order of the day.
• It  should explain what kind of weight training has what kinds of effect on body composition, so they can make an informed choice.
• Perhaps you need to ditch or tone down the “you will look hot!” argument alltogether. It’s what you use to get men into the gym, isn’t it? Work hard and girls will want to have sex with you. Since most men prefer a skinny fat girl over a toned one anyway, maybe you need to make your selling points a bit more serious.Gubernatrix:
  “Likewise there is potentially more mileage in teaching women that weight training is good for them, than in trying to persuade women that weight training will make them look hot. It will – but most women will only be persuaded of this after it actually happens, not before! In the meantime, the argument that they need to do weight training for health could bear more fruit.”

When you’re training, you have to put a lot of effort into planning your meals, ensuring they have enough protein, calories, fiber, and making sure to spread them over 6 meals a day. Some days I leave for work with six or seven tupperware boxes filled with tiny prepared meals. Preparing them is a lot of work, and planning them is even worse.  Fasting, in additional to being good for its own sake, is a way to simplify all that, and give you back some of the time and mental space you gave up.

So how does it work? Well, there’s two fasting camps: One camp likes to fast for 24 hours a day, no more than two times a week. The rest of the week they eat normally. They use it for weight loss and/or maintenance. The other camp seems to consist of more bodybuilding types, who want to go into their workouts fully fuelled. They do a daily fast – and make sure to eat before and after their workout. Martin Berkhan (interviewed by Leigh Peele here) belongs to the latter camp, and advocates 16/8 fasting. That means a daily 16 hour fast and a 8 hour eating window in which you take care to get your planned amount of calories. So you don’t eat any less or more than you would normally do. How is this going to help with fatloss or muscle gain?

Well, first off, 16 hours is enough to get most of the physiological benefits from fasting. When you fast, your body goes through a lot of changes, a lot of which are very positive. Be sure to read the six part series What happens to your body when you fast. Even more important: the bad effects you fear are not going to happen:  your metabolism doesn’t slow down, your muscle doesn’t break down, you won’t starve.

Psychologically, the effects can differ. Some people overeat before their fast, suffer through their fast horribly, then overeat again once it’s done. Some people fast and use their eating time to eat junk food because ‘they’ve earned it’. For me, it’s very freeing. I’m very susceptible to the “oh a little bit of x can’t hurt” or “oh, I’ll just have one for the taste”, or “oh, i haven’t had that in 10 years!”  type of argument. Little cheats. But when I fast, i have a solid reason to abstain from even the smallest cheat. So fasting saves me a lot of cheated calories, and in my eating window I get to eat real meals that make me feel full and satisfied. These days I can go to work with one big tupperware box instead of 6 (!) smaller ones. It’s a mental relief, and it helps!

If you’re looking to get started with intermittent fasting, be sure to check this article out first.