Anyone got example workouts for women?

[Bod]

Hello All,

Does anybody have any example workout routines for women? I am a qualified trainer (although not my profession), but only ever worked with men, so not entirely sure how to train a women.

My client wants to 'tone up' and shed some body fat. She is carrying too much body fat, and claims she has chunky thighs and legs, so is reluctant to do any leg exercises as she claims her legs are quite firm, and wants to make them more slender.

Obviously diet and cardio will form the basis of her routine, but can anyone advise how much weights/machine work she should do, or if you have any routines or advise (eg - how much weight / intensity on each muscle group), would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

Bod

 

[getswoll]

Yeah, I do. I kept a lot of the workouts I wrote when I was a personal trainer; I'll try to find them this afternoon. Firstly, though, you're going to have to get her off of the no legs thing and make sure she isn't caught up in the whole BDD thing. I'll get back to you later.

GS

 

[getswoll]

ok, so I was wrong, I don't have it, or at least I can't find it if I do. In general I have found a few truths that work well with many women in their workouts, provided they get over the whole "I don't want to be huge thing."

If she's got four days a week to lift weights, then let her circuit train upper body twice a week and lower body twice a week. This will give her the added benifit of some extra cardio while she is training. Keep her intense, give her sayy 6-8 exercises to do and make sure she keeps going. I did this for a friend of mine in college:

all for 12 reps, 1 min rest at the end:
db incline press
bent over bar row
db shoulder press
db curl
db lying triceps extension
db flye
standing db lateral raise


It looked something like that on upper body day ( I sent her an email this AM to see if she still has it so she can send it to me for you). Obviously she kept the weight low on her exercises and busted her ass going through them. At the end of it all she did about 30 minutes of cardio too. It worked excellent for her, but she did have one of the most hardcore work ethics I have ever seen. Hope this helps some.

GS

 

[Grizzly]

Truthfully, a good workout for women is the same as a good workout for a man. The problem is making those stubborn, uneducated bitches swallow the truth pill.

 

[getswoll]

Truthfully, a good workout for women is the same as a good workout for a man. The problem is making those stubborn, uneducated bitches swallow the truth pill.

agreed, however, for the most part, most of them have different goals that say.... you or I do. Plus you tend to have to cater to their stubborness or they will just say fuck it... unfortunatly.

GS

 

[Beefster]

My wife has been training for nearly 2 years now. She basically lifts like any man would. She has done the 5x5 and a modified DFHT (she can only work out 3x/week). She had the same initial worries as most uneducated women...."I don't want to get big". She trusted me and is happy with the results. She is 5'2", 115 lbs and is stronger than some of the Abercrombie wanna-bees in the gym while still looking wonderful.

If you have never trained a women, you will be surprised at how slow they build muscle compared to a man. My wife looks good after 2 years of heavy lifting, but it is nowhere near obvious that she trains like she does. The thing that I have had trouble with is getting her to injest enough protein on a daily basis.

 

[Grizzly]

"If you have never trained a women, you will be surprised at how slow they build muscle compared to a man."

This is why I roll my eyes, laugh and, generally, get really pissed off when a woman says she "bulks up too easily".

I understand they have different goals, Getswoll, but that still doesn't mean that the same workout won't make them attain them. They want to "tone" their muscles. That's translated to low bodyfat and hypertrophied muscles. They just don't know it.

 

[Beefster]

Seriously, I was really surprised at how slow my wife has put on muscle even though she is an educated lifter that is being trained by an expert. I knew it would be nothing like a man, but I was still surprised.

When my wife said she didn't want to be "big", my response was "if at any time you look in the mirror and think you are getting too big, all you have to do is stop lifting and it will go away". I promised her she would never say that. Needless to say, after a long time of heavy lifting, she hasn't come close to saying this.

 

[Grizzly]

Of course, she hasn't. Look at the pics of buffhottie in the pics section. She's been training and competing for years and years and years. still not particularly large. Sexy as fuck, but no one would call her big.

 

[buffhottie]

Why thank you Grizz
This kind of hits a spot with me cuz I hear it soooooooooooo much
I have to say that many eons ago I 'didn't want to get too big'. I just wanted to 'tone up' Whatever the F that means??
What a freakin' joke. Here I am YEARS later and trying like hell to put on some size.
I do DB presses with 55's for reps, squat ('real' deep squats) with 225 and I am a size 2. No joke. My 7 jeans are 25's.
Muscle is smaller than fat pound for pound. If you lose 30# of fat and gain 30# of muscle, you will be *smaller* when it's over.
There are literally a handful (out of billions of people in the world) of elite female BB's in the whole world and yet so many women think they are going to accidentally stumble into this group. It boggles the mind. I can't judge though cuz I was one of them. uneducated....
Women will say "I want to look 'toned' like you. I don't want to lift heavy weights and get 'big'. Then they shit when I start tossing several 45's on the leg press.
Muscle is hard, fat is soft. 'Toned' (as was pointed out) is the presence of muscle and absence of fat. Period.
We all have those women (or people for that matter)in our gyms that look exactly the same year after year after year and just fart around in the gym.

I hope know one is offended by this but when someone who is out of shape (or just untrained) male or female and says they are afraid of lifting heavy for fear of getting too big it reminds me of someone who weighs 700 pounds being afraid to go on a diet in case they become anorexic. It's just silly.
The best advice ever given to me when I was worried about 'getting too muscular' was "Don't flatter yourself sweetie, we'll cross that bridge IF we get to it."
Hasn't happend. I get harder and tighter and stronger but I am 'smaller' than a lot of my girlfriends that are much weaker and softer than me and don't work out.

She should train her whole body with a variety of movements and as her strength and recovery improve she should move to a more advanced split where she can focus more on the individual muscle groups.
Once she sees herself start to errrr... 'tone up' (shhh...build muscle) she will be shoving you out of the way to get to the Free Weights.

A hard body is a sexy body

BuffHottie

 

[Preacher]

Would you suggest 5x5 routine or a more ballanced workout, targeting individual muscles? My wife likes working out (at Curves she works there) but is afraid of free weights. So I have tried many times to get her to try them and she will for a little bit then say its too much for her... BAHhhhhhhh

 

[buffhottie]

You know... there are very few consistant 'weight trainers' in the world. Lots of people join the gym but there are very few 'keepers' and it is even worse with women.
I really think that if she KNEW that she had a lot of control over how her body looks she would be more inspired. Some women just dont think it is in the cards for them. She may work her way into the free weights. Give her some time. The thing is that when you first start training, you need to pay alot of attention to form and your recovery is very poor so you can do your whole body or several body parts per session but as your experience and tolerance gets better, you need to increase the workload. Your muscles adapt to the stress put on them. Once the muscles have adapted, the stress (ie: workload) needs to increase. At that point you can customize your workout to accomodate gentically lacking bodyparts or whatever but you still have to train the whole body. One thing women should know is that they are consistantly losing muscle starting as early as 20. So you have to do some form of resistance excersise just to keep what you have let alone build extra. Thats why Grandma might weigh the same as she did in high school but it just doesn't errr.... look the same.
Your wife should do the same workouts that you do assuming she has good form and has been training awhile. We are not a differant species May seem like it sometimes but we have all the same muscle groups that you do. Women who train like men will NOT look like men though and I'll tell you why. Because weight training enhances your natural muscular proportion and woman are distinctly differant then men this way.
It will make what you have more obvious. Men will look more manly and woman will get curvier in all the right places.

At least she works out. So many guys (even hot, muscular, in shape guys) have wives and girlfriends that are totally out of shape
Good luck

BuffHottie

 

[Beefster]

Would you suggest 5x5 routine or a more ballanced workout, targeting individual muscles? My wife likes working out (at Curves she works there) but is afraid of free weights. So I have tried many times to get her to try them and she will for a little bit then say its too much for her... BAHhhhhhhh

What does she mean by "too much for her"? Too much weight? Volume? complexity? I suggest starting off extremely conservative from a weight standpoint. Spend the first week or two getting her body acclimated and proper form by doing full body workouts, single set per body part, 2-3x per week. Then you can transition her into a split. My wife initially did the 5x5. The only exception was no squats on Wednesday and added accessory work. After spending 6-12 months with the 5x5, she transitioned into more of a DFHT workout.

 

[Bod]

Thanks for the replies people, is especially nice to have a female chip in here as my question is about training them (..or with them as I am currently doing).

It's kinda funny as I have already told the girl I'm training with that she is banned from talking about 'toning' and must refer to it as her fat loss and muscle building program

She's off to Austrailia for a year in 20 weeks time and wants to look good on the beach when she gets there. I've written her a diet program which will probably produce a lot of the results she wants, but have given her a scaled down but higher rep version of the program I'm currently doing. I can see a difference in her already over the last few months I have worked with her on a very casual basis (She does cardio, then joins me later on the weights). I'm not saying I'm making the difference for her, but she REALLY wants results from her training, so I have no doubt she'll get the results she's after.

Thanks again for your replies, and BuffHottie, I'll copy your posts and email them to her, she'll be pleased to read those

Cheers

Bod

 

[PrairieDragon]

This was an interesting forum to read...so I thought that I'd add my two cents too.

From my experience, very few women "bulk up". however, I am one of the few. I was a competitive track athlete for 6 years; my diciplines were hammer throw, discus, shotput and javelin. When i joined my college team, I weighed 160lbs with 19% body fat (at 5'9). After my first eight months, I weighed 175lbs with 16% fat. I was squatting over 350lbs, benching over 200, and power cleaning over 200 as well...but I looked great....you never would have guessed that I was 175lbs.

I was one of the few women that puts on muscle mass easily. Every other girl on the team spent as much time in the weight room as I did. Even my fellow throwers never put on mass like me. In my 6 years as a compettive athlete, there was only 2 other girls that were in my club, or on my teams, that were the same as me: a mass builder. One was a runner, and the other was a heptathlete. Because extra weight would greatly affect their speed, they had to limit their time in the weight room and spend more time on the track. Since I threw, extra weight wasn't as big of deal for me, but my coach was careful to keep me under 175lbs because there comes a point where too much hinders you...you have to be able to "wield" what you have.

My point is that I am a freak. Very few women hypertrophy the way that I can. My husband envies my ability to be able to develop mass and strength easily....chalk it up to chucking bails on the farm, or just a genetic lottery....I don't know, but from my experience, most women can train like a man and not get huge. It's all about finding out your "combination". Now that I train for triathlons, extra mass is highly inconvienent so I limit my time in the weight room, and study yoga to balance my strength training.

Most women are terrified of "bulking up", but from what I have seen and experienced, it's not common for women to have the same muscle growth as men. Even me, a freak as far as chicks go, never looked like a man....not even close. I was, and still am, a hottie.

Lifting weights just made me look better...and it still does....it just improves upon what nature gave me. What I gain in muscle, I have lost in fat. Women have to get it out of their heads that lifting weights is going to make them into men...it's not...not unless they are taking roids or growth hormones on the side. Weight training has so many benefits....from a higher bone density to a great ass (like buff hottie's).

Women can greatly benefit from weight training. Let them know that their chances of being like me are slim to nil. I have only known 2 others: and they were hot too, so don't worry so damned much about it. If you do end up being a "bulker", then you can always tweek your training to accomodate it. Don't be so short sighted that you miss the big picture: weights training will improve you.