By Jennifer Petrosino
The same scene plays out in my local Gold’s Gym every single day and night. First, I’ll see dozens of “fluffy” women—you know the type—pumping and grinding their lives away on elliptical machines. Next, I’ll see a handful of extremely lean ladies poised like a pride of lions, waiting to open the door and race into the group weight training and plyometric classes. Finally, a bunch of women with a clear lack of upper body development—I’ll just call them bottom-heavy—will funnel out of spin class.
Meanwhile, I’m hiding out in the squat rack in the back room, doing my thing. I’m lifting weights, but I’m still being a girl—albeit one that competes as a powerlifter in the 97 and 105 pound weight classes. I train in a commercial gym, and this whole process takes place on a repeating loop, night after night.
What’s the Problem?
Let’s take a step back and see what this all means. What we’re seeing here is that all these women who focus on nothing but cardio lack muscle tone. They look more like a jar of marshmallow fluff than the bag of rock candy they think they’re going to turn into if they plug away for long enough.
Conversely, the women who regularly use the weight-and-plyos classes are all “jacked”—and I’m not talking about 18 percent body fat here. I’m talking low teens. And me? I lift as heavy as I can back there in the squat rack, and all I have to show for it is a really curvy booty, a small waist, and some muscles—but nothing that screams over-the-top jacked.
The Lies You’ve Been Told
Before I address why each group looks the way they do—and give you some sense of direction with regard to looking how you want to look—let’s talk about the number one myth that keeps women away from weights (and why it’s not true). Women stay away from heavy lifting because they don’t want to look like men. It’s that simple, but you know what? Lifting weights with NOT make you look like a man.
I know many of you read this last line convinced I’m not telling you the truth. That’s good. I want you to question this assertion, because I want to explain precisely why heavy weights won’t leave you looking like your older brother.
The reason? It all originates in hormones. These bad boys determine everything from muscle size to water retention to strength gains. The average male has 200-1200ng/dl of testosterone, while the average woman has 15-17ng/dl. Men have more than ten times the amount of testosterone as women. This is why men—even those who train for strength with minimal mass gain—look big and jacked, while women who train the same way look small with a side of serious curves.
Testosterone is anabolic. This means it’s responsible for anaerobic activities like building muscle. As you can see from the average female level, ours are so low that building muscle without ergogenic aids—read: steroids—is like trying to take your Corvette street racing with a half gallon of gas in your tank. It’s going absolutely nowhere, and in terms of getting jacked, neither are you.
A Step Further
People typically don’t want to hear about this, but there are even female bikini competitors out there who are on low doses of testosterone. And guess what? They don’t look masculine, because unless the dose they’re taking is a serious one, the added testosterone simply gives them decreased body fat and (mildly) increased muscle mass at the same weight.
So, there. I said it. It’s very, very difficult for women to get really big and bulky. I will, however, offer one word of caution: If you’re lifting weights and eating like an animal, then yes, you’ll get bulky because you’ll be putting on layers of fat over your muscles, making you look much bigger than you actually are.
Cardio Bunnies
Let’s get back to our elliptical crew and discuss why, after hours and hours of cardio, they never look any different over the years. Actually, most of them look worse. Why is this? With this group, their continuous hamster wheel workouts do a few different things:
1. Endless cardio suppresses the thyroid hormone T3. T3 is one of the biggest factors in fat loss—I’m talking the A-Rod of your fat loss team—and when you suppress it, you no longer have the ability to burn fat or calories optimally. In fact, you’re even going to have to work harder to burn calories, because once T3 drops, so does the baseline number of calories you burn each day.
2. Excessive cardio also leads to chronic parasympathetic overtraining, which in turn leads to elevated cortisol in response to the chronic stress of, well, being a hamster—and cortisol inhibits lipolysis (fat-burning).
So here you are, doing massive amounts of cardio throughout the year, and you’re going nowhere because you’ve tossed your hormones into the garbage. And to make things worse, in order to find your holy grail of leanness, you keep doing it while your body fights you and pulls you back with every single step you take.
Different and Better
What about all those lean ladies in the lifting and plyo classes? Well, they’re lifting in very high rep ranges (20-plus reps with barbell exercises), bypassing the traditional 8-12 range that, for some reason, everyone believes is the gold standard. The thing I don’t understand here is why, if they’re so afraid to “get bulky,” they’re working in rep ranges designed to build muscle.
When you couple this endurance rep range with the high calorie-burning effect of plyometrics, you’re left with elevated testosterone and IGF-1 levels—hormones that help drop body fat like a ShamWow on a dirty sink. These ladies are also decreasing cortisol because they’re not training for more than 45 minutes, giving their bodies a hormone profile that’s favorable for torching fat.
Then you have to factor in the “afterburn” effect—the calories they’ll burn after these classes. This is up to half of what they actually burned in class—and trust me, I’ve participated in these classes and watched my Nike Fuel Band light up and kill off calories for the rest of the day. This results in an extremely lean physique with a decent amount of muscle mass, which sounds pretty good to me.
Meanwhile, Back in the Squat Rack
Finally, there’s me. If you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t say, “Man, she must be a weightlifter.” Rather, your reaction would be more like, “Whoa, was that Shirley Temple with a track athlete’s body?”
If you’re confused about what I mean by this, I’m saying that my style of training has given me a big booty relative to my tiny waist, that I’ve got some muscles, and that I’m lean. I’m definitely not jacked. If I wanted to be, I’d go with the method described above (high-rep weight training with plyometrics).
Instead, I’m after strength and performance. When a female is lifting heavy with low reps (over 90 percent of your one-rep max for rep ranges of 1-3), your time under tension is minimal and can’t support much muscle growth. Factoring in a woman’s lack of testosterone, when you train with a lack of time under tension, you’ll get a girl who looks similar to what she was before she started training—but with some new curves and a lot more strength.
And you know what? Once you get stronger, it gives you the confidence to do anything you want—and to not take shit from anyone. Take it from me, that confidence, paired with some dangerous curves, is the formula that’ll transform you into a heartbreaking ballbuster—and who doesn’t want to be one of those?
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