Key Techniques for Achieving Common Women's Fitness Goals

Women share the common fitness goals of losing fat weight and toning up. Losing belly fat, shaping the hips and thighs, tightening flabby upper arms, and lifting sagging breasts are among the more specific goals that women frequently target.

Most women are clear about what they want to accomplish, but they are not always sure how to get the desired results. Identifying the true causes of problem areas and developing effective methods of attacking them are key steps toward realizing results.

Professional Advice

Before you begin any exercise program, you should see your physician to ensure that you can exercise safely. A physical therapist can advise you about any postural or other orthopedic conditions that you may need to accommodate in your exercise program.

Health and fitness assessments performed by experienced professionals are helpful baseline indicators of your starting fitness level. They can also serve as measures of your progress. Assessments may include body mass index, resting heart rate, hip and back flexibility, or blood chemistry levels.

Losing Fat Weight

Despite the popularity of numerous diets and products, losing body fat boils down to expending more energy than you consume in calories from food. It takes an excess of 3500 calories to gain one pound of fat, and that's exactly what it takes to lose it.

Losing fat weight involves increasing activity and reducing calories. A common guideline is to achieve a net loss of 500 calories per day to lose one pound of fat per week.

To estimate how many calories you can reasonable and safely reduce per day, do a web search for weight calculators. A basal energy expenditure (B.E.E.) calculator tells how many calories you need to function without additional activities. An activity calculator estimates how many calories you burn through activities.

Total up your estimated caloric expenditure per day. If you compare the total number of calories you are burning each day with the calories you are consuming, you will have a sound basis for designing and implementing a realistic, long-term weight loss plan.

If you try the fast-track methods, such as pills, meal substitutes, or extreme diets, you will gradually gain back any weight you lose just as soon as you revert back to your typical eating patterns. You also run the risk of experiencing the unhealthy yo-yo cycle, which makes it harder to lose weight in subsequent attempts. Adopt a healthy food plan that you can live with and maintain long term.

Toning the Body

Toning involves performing a total fitness program that includes both cardio and strengthening exercises. Muscles become toned as muscular endurance and strength improve as a result of a balanced program.

Cardio Workouts

Cardio activity involves sustaining submaximal exercise for extended periods of time. Cardio strengthens the heart and lungs and builds muscular endurance.

You should maintain exercise intensity at a target heart rate zone of 60-80% of your maximum heart rate. To find this zone, do a web search for a target heart rate calculator to estimate of your target zone in beats per minute.

Monitor your heart rate as you exercise. Regardless of the type of cardio workout you do, stay within this zone as you vary the intensity and duration of your workouts. A general guideline is to gradually increase activity to 30-60 minutes for less intense workouts, and sustain more intense activity for 10-30 minutes.

You can perform cardio activity 5-6 times per week. Also, warm up with at least 15 minutes of cardio activity and stretching prior to weight training or other types of exercise.

Weight Training Workouts

Weight training increases muscular strength and size. Increased muscle shape is more evident when you lose body fat. Choose exercises that best match your starting fitness level and are physical capabilities.

These tips are key to a well-designed program:

*Include upper body, lower body, and core (trunk) exercises.

*Include all three ranges of motion for core exercises in each workout (e.g., trunk flexion/extension, side bending, rotation).

*Include opposing exercises that promote muscle balancing (e.g., pushing vs. pulling, leg extensions vs. leg curls).

*Free weight training exercises involving multiple joints are generally preferable to single joint exercises and seated exercises on machines, but this depends upon your goals and capabilities. Free weights (e.g., barbells, dumbbells) and machines are often used in combination.

*Exercises should be performed smoothly throughout the full range of motion.

*To accelerate toning and shaping, build your program in phases with the goal of increasing strength. Start with a conditioning phase, an intensive strength phase, and a maintenance phase.

*Vary the weight loads, sets, reps, and exercises within each phase to prevent boredom and minimize plateaus.

*Lift three days per week. Allow at least 48 hours between workouts for recovery.

*Train with weight loads between 60-85% of maximum. Increase resistance when you can perform an exercise 15 times with good form, but not by more than 10% per week.

Losing Belly Fat

Losing belly fat cannot be achieved by spot reducing. You will lose the excess fat on your waist as your total body fat decreases. Stronger and shapelier abdominal muscles will be visible only after you lose the fat that has accumulated in that region.

"Hunching over" can cause the appearance of more stomach fat due to postural misalignment. Corrective strengthening and flexibility exercises may help restore normal posture, thus alleviating the bunching of fatty tissue at the stomach.

Shaping the Hips and Thighs

In addition to total body fat reduction, shaping the hips and thighs will result from performing lower body exercises through a full range of motion. Back squats, front squats, and lunges are ideal for targeting this region. Back extensions and stiff-leg dead lifts are also good exercises. The leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, and abduction/adduction hip exercises performed on machines also target these muscle groups.

Tightening Flabby Upper Arms

Strengthening the biceps and triceps adds size and shape to the upper arms. The bench press and bent rowing, and the overhead press and lat pull down, are opposing compound exercises that work these muscles. Upper arm muscles can also be isolated through variety of curling and tricep extension exercises.

Lifting Sagging Breasts

Postural deviations are a main cause of sagging breasts. Shoulder girdle protraction, a rounded upper back, forward head posture, and the weight of the fatty breasts all contribute to the problem. Building the chest muscles under the breasts alone has little effect on lifting them, and may even contribute to the problem if upper back exercises are not performed, as well.

In addition to fat loss, back extensions, bent rowing, external rotation exercises at the shoulder joint (opposite a forward throwing movement), and related strengthening exercises can realign the posture to lift the breasts. Stretching exercises with the arms extended backwards parallel to the ground with thumbs up can increase shoulder flexibility that facilitates to realignment.

A well-designed, balanced training program that emphasizes problem areas is key to long-term success. Be sure to evaluate your progress and make adjustments to keep you on track toward achieving your goals.

Sources:

McArdle, W.D., Katch, F.I., & Katch, V.L. (2000).
(2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.

Powers, S.K., Dodd, S.L., & Noland, V.J. (2006). Total fitness and wellness
(4th ed.). San Francisco: Pearson Education.