Many women think that lifting heavy weights will turn them into some kind of bulky bodybuilder. This is hardly surprising when the media suggests that women should be doing gentle, ladylike exercise and using weird and wonderful exercise gadgets to tone and sculpt their bodies. This means that a lot of women tend to believe that they should stick to bodyweight exercises or very light weights to avoid bulking out.

People hugely underestimate just how hard it is to build muscle. Men have about 16 times more testosterone than women and even those who train ridiculously hard at the gym five days a week find it challenging enough to build the muscle they want without using anabolic steroids.  So women should really not be worried about building too much muscle! Even women who spend their whole lives lifting weights don’t get too large because they physically don’t have enough testosterone for that to happen.

Lifting weights has massive health benefits. Firstly it will increase lean muscle – muscle is far more compact than fat and so the more muscle you build, the more fat you lose and the smaller you become. As a result your basal metabolic rate will increase and consequently you’ll burn fat more easily and at a faster rate, even at rest. Resistance exercise using weights is also beneficial as it increases bone density and reduces the risk of osteoporosis.  A recent study found that women who engaged in at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week along with at least an hour’s worth of muscle strengthening activities cut their odds of developing diabetes type 2 by a third.

Many of my female clients have initially been very against using heavier weights in our sessions especially for their upper body, as they feared that they would develop huge arms and shoulders. After persuading them to give them a go, the heavier weights gave them faster results in terms of muscle tone and weight loss and none of them have returned to using little or no weights in their workouts – who wouldn’t want lovely slim, sculpted arms and shoulders to show off for the summer?

Lifting weights definitely does not create a bulky masculine body but instead creates a lean, healthy, athletic and elegant looking one.