Weight Training For Women

There are many activities you can do every day, some of them being jogging, playing tennis, golf and so on. But when it comes to weight training, the best and usually the most convenient schedule is to work out three times a week. Your time is not completely taken up and by skipping a day between workouts, you ensure that you will not overtire yourself or grow bored with over-training.

The most popular schedule to follow is a Monday-Wednesday-Friday regimen. Yes, that works out to four days off. However, you can choose whatever schedule works best for you. Don't be afraid to have a two-day break to complete a seven-day time period.

When you weight train, you are concentrating on various sections of your body, the upper torso that includes the neck, shoulders, chest and arms, and the lower torso, which includes stomach and legs. You can set up your weight training so that you perform an arm exercise first, then a leg exercise, and alternate between the two. By doing this, you allow the muscle groups to rest and recover between sets. Remember there are many ways you can workout your body, this is just one of the ways you can do it.

For the average person, a workout consists of one "set" of each exercise, each set consisting of a certain number of repetitions or "reps". So let's say you're doing dumbbell curls. You perform ten repetitions of these curls, which is one set, and then move on to some kind of leg exercise. When you go back to do another arm exercise you're doing a different one, which exercises different muscles. For example instead of dumbbell curls, which exercise the biceps, you do a set of ten French curls, which exercise the triceps instead. Most weight lifters will perform two or even three sets of each exercise, to really give the targeted muscles a workout.

Regardless of whether or not you intend to become a serious weight lifter, you will want to know the names of the various muscles of your body, and you'll want to read up on the literature of the subject, so that you can choose which are the best exercises for you. You can never have too much knowledge. For example, the trapezium muscles are the muscles, which connect the shoulders to the neck, and these are worked on with a "lat machine" or a standing press.

The large muscle at the front of your arm is called the bicep; the muscle in the back of the arm (which prevents that bane of women, the flabby underarm) is called the Triceps. The butt is called the gluteus maximus, and so when you hear that someone is working on his or her "glutes," they are working on the muscles that give one a firm butt. The thigh is the long muscle at the back of the leg, the quadriceps are the muscles on the top of your leg (quad meaning four). The calf is the umbrella term for the two muscles at the back of the leg below the knee.

By acquainting yourself with the names of these muscles (and indeed, there are many more than I have listed here, all with long, Latin names) you will arm yourself with the necessary knowledge to ensure that your workouts target the exact muscles that you need to strengthen.