Top 5 Critical Female Fitness Pitfalls
1. Gender neutral fitness: men and women were created equal, but also different. Women have better strength endurance, recover faster between sets of exercises, and better stamina. Women also have smaller wrists and less upper body muscle mass. What these differences mean is that women can and should do more total volume of exercise in their workouts, and should approach plank-based exercises differently than men do. (Should women workout like men?)
2. Trying to bio-hack fitness: after 27 years as a fitness professional, I can confidently tell you that the very best hack is to stop looking for hacks. There are no hacks (short cuts or secret advantages) to be had. Everything is a trade-off, and the time spent looking for or reading about hacks is time spent motionless on your phone, which is time you could’ve spent exercising, walking, or doing something that would actually benefit you. Not a good trade. The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.
3. Avoiding heavy weights/fear of bulk: long, lean muscles come from having long limbs and low body-fat levels. If you are an adult, then your limbs are as long as they’re going to get. However, you can work on reducing your body-fat levels, which usually involves weight loss. Lifting heavy weights helps you keep your muscle mass while you are losing weight.
Lifting weights that are heavy for you also burns more calories, and helps maintain or increase the size of your calorie burning engine (your muscles). It’s also crucial for bone health, and much, much more. Bulk for men and for women is primarily the result of having too thick of a layer of fat over your muscles. Muscles grow very slowly, and have a built in stop-growing mechanism that ensures (without drugs) they can’t get “too big.”
4. Trying to act your age: by “act your age” I mean “exercising in the manner society thinks you should at whatever age you find yourself.” Dr. Kenneth Cooper said is best, “we do not stop exercising because we grow old, but grow old because we stop exercising.” Keep up your female fitness routines and stay strong!
At some point the “take it easy” mantra (because you’re “old”) becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the abilities you lose by avoiding harder activities force you to take things easier and easier. You can reverse the cycle, but it is much easier to avoid the trap. (Here’s more on exercising with age here.)
5. Obsessing over recovery and over training: if you exercise intensely for 30+ hours per week, then your recovery is something needing substantial attention. For everyone else the worry should be about moving and exercising too little. We move less and eat more than we ever have, and we have the poor health to show for it.
Should you eat enough protein to help your muscle recover from your workouts? Yes(!), but that’s not remotely similar to being worried about exercising too much or not having enough rest days. As a society, we are continually at rest, and the hard part is avoiding over-resting.
Remember these 5 female fitness tips to avoid critical pitfalls!
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Welcome to True 180 Personal Training for Women—Charlotte, NC’s most effective and supportive personal training studio for women since 2016. We do things differently here.
You’ll work toward your personal goals with a customized plan, in small-group sessions alongside women just like you. Every session is around an hour long and designed to give you a full-body strength training workout—every time you walk through our doors.
Josef Brandenburg—bestselling author, co-owner, and coach at True 180 Personal Training—and Gregory Clifton, our head coach since 2016, together, they bring decades of experience and multiple certifications to every conversation, offering real, practical advice on multiple topics, not just female fitness pitfalls, to help you better understand your body and fitness.