Women's training: because they never get better in the gym

Curated by Gerolamo Cavalli and Gabriele Gualandris

Biological function of women: splendid clinic naturally equipped for procreation, therefore for the survival of the species.

Is it weak sex? Everything to see ... the weaker sex is a myth to debunk because the woman, if seriously convinced and followed by a good trainer or athletic trainer is more practical

of man and as soon as he verifies the results in terms of well-being and physical form, he immediately reveals tenacity and excellent endurance of work volumes and resistance to fatigue. To confirm this, it is enough to look at the competitive teams, the women follow the same training protocols as men, often even the women's and men's teams train together.

But what happens in our gyms? Unfortunately, female workouts are more focused on science fiction than on the physiological characteristics of women.

In the gym: as soon as you enter the obvious thing is surely that men and women train differently and, at least in the gym, there are pink training cards for women, and blue for men. We see men training with heavy weights, doing few repetitions, and women training with very light weights, with an infinite number of repetitions performed quickly and without control.

Women's training is often considered as a part of man's training, a series B training even by some experts: in short, a situation managed with enough and not always with the due level of professionalism that instructors and trainers should always give. Women, always pretend to be followed in your training as well as a man!

Hypertrophy: (increase in the volume of an organ, specifically in the muscles) is one of the most misunderstood concepts regarding the effect of weight training on women, in fact it is easy to hear phrases in the gym or in the most fashionable beauty centers. of the genus "The weights swell ....... you lose weight just by running .... the buttocks become firm with free body exercises ... I don't do weights because I don't want to get fat" are really ridiculous phrases. The buttock is the strongest muscle in the human body, why should we train it without load?

A load (weight ) is deemed to be training when it is at least 60% of your ceiling ( the maximum weight is concui you can only make one repetition ), vice versa, below this load there are no physiological adaptations and consequently there is no they will not even be the results you are preparing.

On the part of women, with regard to hypertrophy, there is commonly a dogmatic and diffident attitude, for this reason we will still see women with few results in our gyms for a long time despite their commitment. There is an approach to training where everything is left to chance, or to the advice of people without any expertise in the matter.

Women who train in the gym for the most part have no idea what benefits they could have, in terms of weight loss and physical well-being, from a well-developed and tonic muscle; and by development it is not meant to be big, but simply to give strength, tone and shape to a muscle that you already have.

In a woman, proving consistent hypertrophy is not at all easy, in fact, there is no hormonal supply that can cause significant muscle hypertrophy. The amount of anabolic hormones is less than that of humans 10 to 30 times, don't be fooled by the body builder women you see on TV ... theirs is another story.

All this does not mean that a woman is less strong but rather that equal training stimuli are identical to the male counterpart. Let me explain better: if we take a woman of the same weight as a man and with the same percentage of fat (the percentage of body fat is greater in women than usual) the ability to develop strength is the same, only that women are on average larger small and like a man of smaller than average size, they develop less strength.

I want to remember that hypertrophy and strength are two distinct concepts; there may be increased strength without increasing muscle volume (muscular hypertrophy). Normally sedentary people do not use more than 60% of their potential for strength, so its increase occurs by stimulating the nervous system to recruit the maximum available muscle fibers, those you already have.

If you ask a woman in what period of her life she has felt fit, she will answer, "during the legendary 20 years ..." when her muscle mass and hormone levels are at their maximum ... if you train high intensity muscles and hormonal levels will tend to increase ...... It is possible to be 20 for many years!

Second part, the word to the science of training »