When it comes to sports teams, TV sitcoms and politics, everyone has a differing opinion about what's best. Same goes for training advice: Gather five people and each will tell you something different on how to correctly do a given exercise. To clear up some particularly deep-rooted confusion, we've asked Beth Horn, a top-ranked amateur fitness competitor and professional trainer from Chicago, to address some of the common training errors made by women. She offers advice on how to both avoid and correct these errors to get the most out of your workouts.
1. Fear of Muscle Gain
Many women fear that weight training will make them look too muscular, perhaps like a bodybuilder, and so they avoid weights altogether or at least some of the better muscle-builders such as the squat, lunge, bench press and deadlift. When you first begin to regularly perform these exercises, yes--you might see some changes in muscle mass and definition start to take place. That's because your body probably hasn't been taxed that particular way before. You won't, however, keep adding pounds of muscle every month. "It's hard for women to put on a large degree of muscle mass, period," Horn says. "Women who weight train run no risk of accidentally looking like men, who have far greater amounts of the muscle-building hormone testosterone in their body." In fact, Horn stresses that increasing muscle mass from these compound movements will actually accentuate the shape of your physique and make you appear leaner.
2. Improper Training Ratio
To train efficiently, you must strike a balance between cardio and weight training. Many women focus on cardio work, de-emphasizing (or excluding) weight training in the mistaken belief that more cardio will help them achieve their goal of burning fat to attain a leaner physique. Yet you can spend hours on the stair-stepper or treadmill and not effectively reduce your bodyfat percentage, because weight loss is commonly at the expense of lean muscle tissue, which actually stokes your body's metabolism. "The best way to burn fat is to add muscle to your body," Horn notes. Adding a few pounds of muscle through resistance training will help increase your metabolic rate and burn bodyfat. To do this, women should spend at least half of their training time working with weights.
3. Lack of Cardio Intensity
Many people use their time on cardio equipment to read the newspaper, mindlessly watch television or make idle conversation with friends. "When you turn cardiovascular training into a passive activity, you're not getting the most benefit you can from it," says Horn. Sure, you'll burn calories, but you very likely won't push yourself hard enough to elevate your heart rate to maximally burn calories or achieve a higher level of fitness. Increase the intensity of your cardio training (working up to 80% of your max) to more fully engage the working muscles, and burn more calories and more bodyfat. Mind you, you don't have to train at a level of intensity that's unpleasant, but you do need to focus on what you're doing.
Here's Horn's favorite training tip for building cardio intensity: "I like to have my clients do three minutes on a stair-stepper, followed by three minutes on a stationary bike, followed by three minutes on an elliptical machine. You don't rest in between and you do each at a fairly high intensity. Repeat this nine-minute circuit three times for a total of 27 minutes of cardio work."
On some occasions Horn incorporates short intervals of high-speed work followed by a recovery period. You train at a very high intensity for as few as 10-12 seconds, then quickly reset the machine's speed to a slower pace for about 45 seconds. This 10-20-minute workout is great for elevating your heart rate and burning calories, she says, while keeping you mentally stimulated.
4. Lack of Weight-Training Intensity
When you just go through the motions with weights to complete a predetermined number of repetitions (say 10 or 20), you don't get nearly the benefit you would from actively engaging your muscles. "The last 3-5 reps should be challenging," Horn explains. In addition, the negative portion of the rep is often overlooked: Many people allow gravity to take over instead of using their muscles to lower weights slowly against the resistance. In reality, lowering a weight should take at least as long as it took to lift it. Even better, work with an explosive contraction and a slow negative that takes up to twice as long as the contraction. As a general rule, use moderately heavy weights (with which you can do 8-15 reps), which should give you much better results than using weights that feel fairly light.
5. Using Improper Form
Men may be more guilty of this than women; they tend to err on the side of using too heavy a weight, twisting and cheating to lift it. Women tend to err by not focusing intently enough on the target muscle. "It's crucial to think about what you're trying to develop when you perform a particular movement and focus on the motion to achieve that," Horn explains. If you do biceps curls with a light weight, for instance, it's easy to use the leverage of your joints instead of the strength of your muscles to complete the lift. This cheating tactic won't develop your arm muscles, but may place unwanted stress on your joints. In addition, when performing pull-downs, try to concentrate on keeping your shoulders down as you pull the bar into your chest while squeezing your back muscles. Learning the correct form on each and every exercise you do will not only reduce your risk of injury but help you achieve your goals faster.
6. Over-Reliance on Scales As a Measure of Success
Our society has helped program us to focus excessively on bodyweight, but that isn't a good measurement of fitness. In fact, some top fitness competitors who have a higher degree of muscle mass and overall bodyweight actually test close to the marker for "obese" on traditional weight-to-height ratios. Bodyfat measurements are a far better tool to assess health and fitness.
Similarly, scales can give women a false indication of their level of fitness. Extreme diets preferentially reduce muscle weight over bodyfat, making you lighter but reducing your metabolic rate. A weight-training program may actually cause you to add weight while improving the appearance of problem areas and simultaneously burning bodyfat, yet the scale might not show any change at all. Horn states, "Visual assessment, fit of clothing, feeling of well-being, compliments from others on your improved appearance and measures of bodyfat are much better guides than scales."
7. Skipping Your Warm-Up and Stretching
Don't think warm-ups are important? Just a 6-10-minute investment in a total-body warm-up before each workout can not only reduce your risk of injury but actually improve exercise performance. Good choices include a ride on the stationary bike while doing various types of arm circles or basic calisthenic movements.
"I like to have my clients do a modest amount of stretchingright after the warm-up," Horn adds. "This sends blood to the muscles, preparing them for exercise. I see too many people who don't stretch at all, or who stretch cold muscles in place of their warm-up. Lengthy stretching sessions are better as a workout themselves, or at the end of a cardio or weight-training session. Also, you can stretch the muscles you're working during a given weight workout between sets as a way to keep them warm and pliable, and improve recovery."
8. Poor Exercise Selection
In her personal-training business, Horn emphasizes compound movements for overall body development. "Oftentimes, women focus too much on working a problem area such as arms, abs or thighs, and don't work on their body as a whole, excluding such excellent shaping exercises as shoulder presses, deadlifts and bench presses." When you choose exercises such as abduction and adduction machines and leg extensions, you do work the target area (in this case, outer and inner thighs and quads), but you also need to focus on larger exercises such as lunges and squats. So-called compound (or multijoint) movements work far greater degrees of muscle mass and require more energy (think calorie-burning) as well.
9. Ingnoring the Cyclical Nature of Your Body
In some respects, men have it easier: They don't need to worry about the continual ebbs and flows in hormone levels the way women do. During the monthly cycle, women naturally gain and lose weight with changes in estrogen levels. If you're training harder and still adding a little bodyfat, that may be due to hormonal flux. "A much better strategy is to chart your progress and compare your current state of fitness to the same point in your previous cycle," says Horn. Don't get discouraged by relatively minor changes in bodyfat and/or bodyweight, but keep sight of the larger picture and maintain your focus on fitness.
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