Women typically have higher baseline calorie needs per kg of body weight than men, and much of this is due to the need to regulate hormone levels. I wrote last week about the need to fuel appropriately, and part of the reason for this is to avoid endocrine (hormone) dysfunction.
When I speak to patients about their exercise, a typical pattern I hear is that women tend to favour cardio – walking, swimming etc whilst men gravitate to weights. Of course there are exceptions and overlaps, but that is a more typical scenario. However strength training is actually far more important for women for a number of reasons.
Men tend to age more linearly, by which I mean at a steady state. For women, often by their 40s and early 50s suddenly things go wrong more quickly: they find it harder to lose weight, and accumulate body fat in the wrong places; they get more soft tissue injuries; sleep gets worse. Much of this is due to hormones. They have less oestrogen and progesterone, more menstrual cycles are not associated with ovulation. It is a lot of biological stress on her body! It is however possible to prepare for this – to train for the biological stress that is coming. Also, if you’re already this age or older, it is still perfectly possible to improve on where you are. What might this look like?
Let’s start with strength and resistance training.
I realise some people may see this line and think, that’s not for me. I hope to convince you it’s for everyone, but will look very different depending on your age, lifestyle, and what it is you want to achieve. Remember also that this sort of training makes your day to day life better. Being stronger makes carrying the shopping easier, doing household chores simpler, and there are additional daily benefits like improving mental clarity and focus. Also whilst I have put some suggestions below, even a small amount of training is better than nothing. Set a low bar in terms of personal goals, achieve them, then set some more.
There will always be exceptions, but I’ve tried to write some guidelines below. Please ask me or another professional if you would like advice specific to your circumstance.
For women <30, in an ideal world I would suggest 3-4 resistance training sessions per week, with an emphasis on movement quality (I hate seeing people in the gym swinging weights around with bad form – it’s not serving them, and massively increases injury risk). If you hate gyms, no problem, these can easily be done at home. If you’re going to do this, invest in a mirror to check your posture whilst exercising. I do this, and regularly spot adjustments I need to make, despite having spent 30 years in gyms at this point. Being able to do a compound movement well (ie using multiple muscles in different planes, as opposed to a simple movement like a bicep curl) is really beneficial, and guards against injury which is super-important. How hard to work? Women of this age should work to failure – ie the most lifting they can do before the muscle is too fatigued to continue that set.
For women 31-40, the focus should shift to heavy weights. 41 – 60, heavier still. This is no longer to failure, but leaving 2 ‘reps in reserve’ (explained in a previous post). Women in this age bracket typically find it hard to put on lean mass, and this approach will help.
Women >61, back to a real focus on movement quality.
Strength training better stimulates the central nervous system, improving the pathways between nerve cells in the brain. This is key to both stress and sex hormone regulation. There is also some evidence that working each side of the body at a time helps, presumably also by the way in which it stimulates the brain. Women who have never done weight training will not have had their central nervous systems stimulated in this way before, and are likely to make rapid progress. In fact I love it when I hear from patients who have started a strength program for the first time tell me how much better they felt so quickly, it’s really satisfying. They also needn’t worry about getting muscle bulk, as actually strength comes first and bulk later.
It’s fair to say I often get some strange and quizzical looks from women when I suggest these sorts of exercise, but there is simply such good science backing up the advice, I’m really passionate about getting women to try.