Lower testosterone levels in women can make strength training and gaining muscles harder for them than it is for men. However, women need to train drastically differently from men. A complete strength-training program for a woman has minor differences, but should focus on the same three key areas of diet, weight training and aerobic exercise.
Arms
Arms can be a challenging area for some women to trim down, particularly underarm fat. The best way to attack your arms and build up muscle is with traditional free weights like the bench press and biceps curls. Female bodybuilder Marika Johansson says that you must "attack the weights" to get real results. This means lifting your sets until you reach to or near muscle failure. Triceps extensions are a particularly good exercise for building muscle in your underarms. Perform an equal number of biceps and triceps exercises each workout.
Abdominals
Building strong core muscles can improve your overall shape and endurance. The stomach is a trouble area for many women, so regular abdominal exercise is needed. Sit-ups and crunches alone are not enough to build a strong, sexy stomach, however. You also need to perform lower abdominal exercises like reverse crunches and leg raises to build your abs evenly. Side crunches will tone your obliques to give you an hourglass figure. Because your abdominals recover from training quickly, they can be worked up to five times a week without worrying about over-training.
Legs
Squats are the best leg weight training exercise a woman can perform because they work your quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes and calves all in one exercise. Whether you choose to perform squats with a large amount of weight for a few repetitions or many repetitions with a lighter weight, you must work your legs to exhaustion to build new muscle fiber. It is also critical that you go all the way down into the squat until your butt is a few inches off of the ground. This will cause your muscles to be fully engaged. If squats are too challenging for you initially, begin training with bodyweight lunges or jumping squats.
Trouble Areas
Cardiovascular exercise is essential to a woman's strength training routine because no matter how many weights you lift, high estrogen levels will cause your body to store fat on your body. This can hurt your motivation to keep strength training because you may feel like you are not making progress. Adding two to four cardiovascular workouts a week to your routine will increase your metabolism and help you shed fat to reveal the muscles you are building from weight training. Each session of aerobic exercise should be 30 to 40 minutes long and have variety between high- and low-intensity exercise.
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