Personal Training for Women.
How should personal training for women differ from personal training for men?
How can women turn their relative ‘weakness’ into a strength?
Here are five of my top tips on how females should adjust their training sessions and ‘train differently’ from their male counterparts.
Put more emphasis on strength work and less on flexibility.
Women are generally more flexible than men, but not as strong.
Many men spend too much time on strength training and not enough on flexibility work, and many women are guilty of the exact opposite.
Spend the majority of your training sessions on strength work, such as weight training, kettlebell training or body weight training.
If you practice yoga, then try to replace some of your pure flexibility work with balancing and strength based poses.
Strength training will boost your metabolism and aid fat burning.
Personal training for women should be based around strength exercises such as: squats, lunges, rows, cleans, deadlifts, press ups, overhead presses, dips, bicep curls, calf raises and crunches.
Train legs every session.
Women tend to recover better than men from tough leg workouts.
Females can usually train the legs 2-3 times a week without suffering the ‘burn out’ that a typical male lifter would experience.
Take advantage of this and include squats, lunges, calf raises and deadlift variations in all your workouts.
Total body strength workouts are a great way to force oxygen to and from different muscle groups, creating a fat burning, post-exercise oxygen debt.
Regular rounds of ‘big’ exercises like squats and deadlifts will turn your body into a fat burning machine!
Train with a higher volume and intensity.
The superior recovery of females mean they are able to work well with high volume and intensity.
During heavy lifting, women tend to ‘lose strength’ faster than men, which means that less strain is put on the central nervous system of a female lifter.
This means that you can often recover quicker than men between exercises, so use this to your benefit and include super-sets, complexes, mini circuits and mini tabatas in your training sessions.
Working multiple rounds of strength exercises with fairly short rest periods can be a great alternative to traditional cardio training for women.
This is because this type of high volume personal training for women preserves muscle mass, keeping your body in the optimal metabolic state for burning fat.
Use more arm isolation exercises.
Differences in testosterone levels make it easier for men than women to build strong arms without much direct arm work.
For many men, just doing upper body exercises such as rows, bench presses or chin ups will be enough to build strong arms.
If you are a woman who wants shapely arms though, you will probably need to include some direct arm work.
Personal training for women should include arm exercises such as bicep curls, hammer curls, dips and french presses into your workouts.
Women tend to have smaller upper body muscles than men, and smaller muscles recover quickly, so once again take advantage of your great recovery and train your arms at least twice a week.
Do more abdominal work.
Many men can build decent abs indirectly by way of heavy squats, deadlifts and presses.
However, the lower testosterone levels of females make it harder for women to build strong abdominals without doing a decent amount of direct ab work.
Personal training for women should include ab training at the end of every workout using crunches, roll outs and active plank variations.
You don’t need to do thousands of crunches though!
Keep the rep range between 8-20 and as you progress over time, add extra weight, reduce the rest times or move to more difficult variations.
Best of luck with your training!
121personaltraining.com – personal training for women.
