Using Bodybuilding for Weight Loss

Ok, ladies!  I need you to breathe and hear me out.  I know when most of you hear of Women Bodybuilding, this is what comes to mind:\


SCARY!!! Right!!  However, bodybuilding for women does not have to be synomynous to this picture above.  Bodybuilding can actual promote weight loss and stamina if used correctly.  You can actually easily incorporate weight traning and cardio exercises to achieve a bikini silhouette quicker.  Before I get any deeper in that, I would like to shed some light on some myths that you might have heard in the topic of women's bodybuilding.

1.     Weight training makes you bulky and masculine.  It is impossible for a woman to produce as much testostorone as a male.  Most of these women, unfortunately, use anabolic steroids (synthetic testosterone) along with other drugs in order to achieve that high degree of muscularity.  And then of course, they have to workout, workout, and workout some more!!!!  In reality, women who conduct weight training without the use of steroids get the firm and fit cellulite-free looking body that you see in most fitness/figure shows these days.

2.     Exercise increases your chest size.  Wouldn't that be the most awesome thing ever.  Sorry ladies, our breasts are made of mostly fatty tissue, so in other words we do not have any muscle there to build and make larger.   As a matter of fact, if you go below 12 percent body fat, your breast size will decrease.  Weight training does increase the size of the back, so this misconception probably comes from confusing an increase in back size with an increase in cup size. The only way to increase your breast size is by gaining fat or getting breast implants.

3.     Weight training makes you stiff and musclebound.  If you perform all exercises through their full range of motion, flexibility will increase. Exercises like flyes, stiff-legged deadlifts, dumbbell presses, and chin-ups stretch the muscle in the bottom range of the movement. Therefore, by performing these exercises correctly, your stretching capabilities will increase.

4.     If you stop weight training your muscles turn into fat.  For some reason, this is a statement that i thought was true.  However, that is not the case.  Muscle and fat are two totally different types of tissue. What happens many times is that when people decide to go off their weight training programs they start losing muscle due to inactivity (use it or lose it) and they also usually drop the diet as well. Therefore bad eating habits combined with the fact that their metabolism is lower due to inactivity, and lower degrees of muscle mass, give the impression that the subject’s muscle is being turned into fat while in reality what is happening is that muscle is being lost and fat is being accumulated.

5.      Weight training turns fat into muscle.  The way a body transformation occurs is by gaining muscle through weight training and losing fat through aerobics and diet simultaneously. Again, muscle and fat are very different types of tissue. We cannot turn one into the other.

6.      As long as you exercise you can eat anything that you want.  Believe this if you want to!!  Our individual metabolism determines how many calories we burn at rest and while we exercise. If we eat more calories than we burn on a consistent basis, our bodies will accumulate these extra calories as fat regardless of the amount of exercise that we do. This myth may have been created by people with such high metabolic rates (hardgainers) that no matter how much they eat or what they eat, they rarely meet or exceed the amount of calories that they burn in one day unless they put their mind to doing so. Therefore, their weight either remains stable or goes down.

And finally!...

7.      Women only need to do cardio and if they decide to lift weights, they should be very light.  First of all, if you only did cardio then muscle and fat would be burned for fuel. One needs to do weights in order to get the muscle building machine going and thus prevent any loss of muscle tissue. Women that only concentrate on cardio will have a very hard time achieving the look that they want. As far as the lifting of very light weights, this is just more nonsense. Muscle responds to resistance and if the resistance is too light, then there will be no reason for the body to change.

I hope that this cleared up some of your concerns of weight training as a female.  I have started back into weight training.  However, I can not take credit for this incredibly enlightening information.  I found it on:  http://bodybuilding.about.com/od/womensfitnesstopics/a/womenmyths_2.htm