Even though the female fitness world is ever growing, for women, the first contact with the gym can be quite hard (for men too, but they don’t admit it). Unfortunately, this industry still encourages some myths and even the people have a tendency to indulge in these myths, which are everything but true, we’ll have you know

Mistake nº1 – Obsession with toning and being afraid of the “iron”

For many women, their goal is to tone their body. This search has led to the appearance of many programs that consist of light weight utilization in exercises that are a bit odd, to say the least. This is not the best way to achieve this goal.

In order to become toned, you need to lose excess body fat and increase muscle cell size. This way you can improve your body composition (that means the shape of your body).

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Solutions?

The most important factor in toning is your diet. Starting a flexible diet can be a great advantage, since it focuses solely on ingested energy, calories and macro-nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats). This will allow you to manipulate your weight and consequently the appearance of your body, maintaining a healthy balance between fat loss and muscle mass increase.

After good nutrition comes training. And don’t fool yourselves, “weights” are not just for men. Even though an olympic barbell, with many plates on each side, doesn’t fit in most make up kits, it should be used just as often. The weight might be intimidating, but it’s a good way to increase resistance in specific movements, especially in the correct amounts. If it isn’t hard, you should increase.

It isn’t the weight of the dumbbells that makes men be men, but their hormones. So there’s nothing to fear regarding the “weights”, because it won’t change your gender…

Mistake nº2 – Not adjusting rest intervals during training

During physical exercise, our body is highly stimulated, it suffers tears, burns resources, etc… So, the frequency and duration of rest intervals are two very important factors in a workout’s “drive”. It’s during these times that our body recovers.

Adjusting rest interval duration between sets can make all of the difference in order to have a successful workout. Especially in our mind, which makes this control a bit harder thanks to procrastination. Who doesn’t like those extra 30 seconds rest?

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Solutions?

Rest time will ultimately depend on the exercise performed (volume and intensity). Various studies show that athletes, during strength workouts, achieved better results by resting between 3-5 minutes. But, better hypertrophy results were achieved by resting between 30-60 seconds! You can see this information in the following link:(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19691365)

So:

• For strength exercises or big lifts use 2-3 minutes rest, especially if you’re trying maximal loads.
• You can also use the exercise-rest ratio 2:1, meaning that a 1 minute exercise should have 20-30 seconds rest.
• When you’re performing high intensity workouts, you can use supersets, by performing consecutive exercises with only 10-30 seconds rest.