Weight vests are designed to be worn around the torso to provide more resistance on the body during movement activities or sports. According to BodyBuilding.com, the idea is that training or exercising the body at a higher weight will lead to improvements in conditioning, strength, power, speed and quickness. Training with weight vests can be especially beneficial for women, since the vest gives a weighted cardio alternative to consider instead of weightlifting. Dr. Joel Fuhrman, in an article on the website DiseaseProof, says that women who train with a weighted vest can burn more calories, improve balance and increase their strength.
Tricking the Body
According to BodyBuilding.com, training with the extra weight of a vest can trick your body and brain into thinking that you have this extra mass. The idea is that wearing the vest will force your body to adapt to the weight and when you take it off, muscles will still be trained into thinking they must perform for the extra weight. This tricking concept causes the muscles to adapt, grow and increase their ability.
Conditioning Level
Weighted vests improve your cardiovascular fitness level by overloading your body and muscles with more weight and forcing you to work harder to complete the same task. The harder work not only improves your strength and power in the muscles, but forces your heart and circulatory system to work harder as well to complete the same exercises. This can help lead to better endurance in the muscles and heart in addition to more weight loss. Peak Performance notes that your aerobic capacity will be higher due to the higher intensity of your workouts.
Strength and Power
The extra weight of a vest means that running, plyometrics, performing pullups or any other exercise that requires movement will be more difficult. The difficulty is because of the extra weight, which forces your muscles to work harder than they would work against just your bodyweight. The training is similar to what happens when you wear ankle weights, except that your core and torso get more of a benefit from wearing a vest. Muscles become stronger and more toned, so that when you remove the vest you will retain the benefits and increased strength. According to Disease Proof, weighted vests are also one of the best ways for women to treat and prevent osteoporosis.
Speed and Quickness
According to Peak Performance, a Texas Tech University study showed that runners who wore a vest in training improved endurance by 25 percent and increased speed by 3 percent after six weeks of working out wearing a vest. The body is forced to work harder to run and make up for the increased weight and resistance so that when the weights are removed the effect is that your body feels lighter. The lighter feeling due to increased strength and endurance means you not only run faster, you are also quicker and stronger.
Design and Use
Dr. Fuhrman says that you should look for a vest designed for a woman with the weights primarily in the back pack and upper chest of the vest. Dr. Fuhrman recommends avoiding vests that feel bulky and vests that have most of their weight in the waist region. Dr. Fuhrman says that the extra weight should be supported by the shoulders, which in turn forces the spine to stay straight and helps to strengthen the back. Women should start slowly in terms of the amount of weight and the amount of exercise they do with the weighted vest. Dr. Fuhrman recommends starting with six to eight pounds of weight and gradually working up to 10 percent of your bodyweight.
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