Benefits Of Lifting Weights For Females

If you’ve ever been curious about the benefits of lifting weights for women, and if it’ll help you reach you build muscle, burn fat, and become more attractive, then this is the article for you. We cover 3 main areas: attractiveness, health, and lifestyle.

There are exceptions, of course, women who are pregnant need to be careful with lifting. Always talk to your doctor first before beginning any workout or nutrition program.

Below we’ll cover how lifting can improve your appearance, health, and life enjoyment. Some of the reasons will span across a couple of them. For example, building muscle will make you curvier and more attractive, but it does that because building muscle is very healthy, and we find healthy bodies the most attractive. So it’s technically both an improvement to your appearance and your health!

Women Can Improve Their Attractiveness By Lifting Weights

Build New Muscle For Ultra-Feminine Curves

Many women think muscle is a man thing—that if they build up their muscles, they’ll look like a man. And while it’s true that men will usually have more muscle than women, in a woman’s case, by building up a decent amount of muscle, they’ll look more feminine.

Women have a different hormone makeup than men, so the way your muscles look when they grow is different as well. Women have different fat storage patterns than men, so the fat generally goes to their hips and breasts. Their bony structure (the foundation that the muscles attach to) is different. And women have different desires for their body shape. These are just a few reasons why women who build up their muscles will have a body shape that looks radically different from a man’s.

Training Specificity—Lower Body Exercises

What you do during your workouts is a big part of this. The more work you put into a certain exercise, the more your body will strengthen and grow that certain place. Men have a drive for upper-body strength, so they feel a magnetic pull towards exercises like the bench press, rows, and bicep curls.

However, women might notice that they want to do more lower-body exercises that build up the glutes to round out their hips. They might realize that they’re good at those exercises too! Women have a lower centre of gravity, proportionally longer legs, and the hip bone shape allows the ability to bear children. Your hips are far more capable than a man’s, and this is especially true in the gym.

You can build up every area to be stronger, and in each case, it will probably make you look better. Stronger shoulders, for example, make your waist seem even narrower by comparison, giving you that top half of the hourglass shape.

Choose A Workout Program Designed For Women

So if you’re a woman looking for a good workout program, don’t grab one designed for men. It will have you doing lots of chest/back/arm work, and exercises to make your waist bigger and thicker (e.g. crunches). You’ll want to grab a program specifically designed for women, like ours. It emphasizes lower-body growth through exercises like glute bridges, goblet squats, Romanian deadlifts, etc. We still do wholesome full-body training to help your body feel and look balanced, but there is a focus on the hips.

Lifting Weights Causes Fat Loss Instead of Weight Loss

Most women want to lose “weight” and just care about getting smaller. They might already have a fair amount of muscle, but it’s all covered by fat. So they need to chisel the fat away to let the muscle create their ideal feminine body-shape. If they lose a little bit (or a lot) of muscle, they don’t care. 

But there’s a difference between fat and muscle.

Since you’re on this site, we know you’re looking to build up more shape and are likely ready to gain weight. You might be the skinny type with minimal fat who wants to lift weights to build muscle, and that’s great, and in this case, you can move on to the next section since you don’t need to burn any fat.

But there’s a chance you might want to build up curves and an even more feminine-looking body shape by building muscle, yet you might still have a few pounds of fat you wish weren’t there. You don’t want to get smaller by losing weight (fat and muscle loss); you just want to get more toned (fat loss), especially around the stomach area, while getting bigger in certain areas (glutes, for example). Sometimes this is called the “skinny-fat” physique.

If you just wanted to lose “weight,” you could get into a calorie deficit by eating less or moving more (or both). You’d lose both fat and muscle that way. But not only would you lose your muscular curves, you’d also lose a lot of strength.

But if you get into a calorie deficit while lifting weights (along with an adequate amount of protein, sleep, etc.) then you can hold onto almost all of your curvy muscle/strength while burning only fat. This is how you’d get leaner, not smaller, and maintain your muscular curves.

Lifting Weights Helps Women Develop Better Posture

We all want to stand tall, and people often use cues in their heads. Cues like, “shoulders back, chin down.” There are even crowd-funded posture gadgets to help you maintain the “right” posture.

But it’s not that simple. Those cues are wrong and don’t work.

You can’t just will yourself to stand with a “better” posture, and a little gadget will just be treating a symptom at best and, at worst, could lead to chronic pain.

You need to strengthen the muscles that will hold your posture together, and to do this, you need to do the right warm-ups to help get those muscles into a more neutral and natural position. Then you want to do a hinging exercise that will work your spinal erectors.

Romanian Deadlifts Help With Posture

Not only is this natural-looking posture from strrength the best looking, but it helps to put your muscles in the right positions for moving and lifting things. Then you need heavy lifting to help strengthen that position. Following a weightlifting program developed with your posture in mind is the most efficient way to help with that.

Women Can Get Healthier From Lifting Weights

Bone Density Improvements for Women Who Lift

It’s well known that lifting weights has a direct and positive relationship with bone density (study, study, study).

But why does that matter?

Osteopenia, and its more developed progression, osteoporosis, are both diseases classified by “low bone density.” These diseases greatly increase the risk of bone fractures.

If you’re feeling healthy now, that’s great, but it’s important to consider the longer term too. Osteoporosis-related fractures can radically affect your quality of life by limiting movement, causing chronic pain, and stealing your independence, among other things.

Women are more likely than men to get osteopenia because they naturally have less muscle mass than men and because these risk factors go up after menopause. There are also some factors that increase risk (article):

• If you’re a slender and smaller-boned woman
• You’re Caucasian or Asian
• Those with lower levels of vitamin D

So if you’re a slender woman living in a higher latitude city who’s Asian or Caucasian, this can be pretty scary. But it doesn’t need to be, as there are a lot of factors you can control, such as eating well, lifting weights, catching some sunshine, eating wild fatty fish, drinking clean water, etc.

If You Suffer From Aches or Low Back Pain, Lifting Weights Might Help

Pain is an extremely complicated topic. Pain could signal that:

• There’s nothing wrong yet, but keep doing whatever is causing this pain, and there could be future damage.
• There is physical damage, and that’s why it’s registering as pain.
• You’re feeling pain for no apparent reason.

On the flip side, sometimes there is damage with no pain. Some people have slipped discs in their back with no pain.

While there are a lot of mysteries surrounding pain, lower back pain is something that 80% of us living in the modern world will experience at some point in our lives (study).

Resistance training has evidence behind it that it can help quite a bit with the relief of low back pain (study), and it could help with the relief of a variety of other aches and pains (study, study, study, study, study).

Even better, it can strengthen your back so that you’re less vulnerable to a debilitating injury down the road. On that note:

Build Muscle To Bullet-Proof Your Body

Non-lifters often mistake building muscle as vain (since it improves your appearance) or pointless (to them, it’s a waste of time and money). But it’s not just a way to improve your appearance or have fun—it’s healthy. Like real healthy.

If you think about fat being the stored energy on your body, it’s healthy too. It allows you to live during the day without needing an IV drip of glucose directly to your bloodstream. And if there was ever a shortage of food or some reason you couldn’t eat, you could still have energy for your body to rely on to continue living for a while. The problems only arise when you have too much fat on your body.

Muscle can act similarly, as it’s made out of very important amino acids that your body needs. You get these amino acids when they’re broken down from eating protein, and you can use them to build larger muscles. Your body also needs a certain amount of these amino acids to continually create new blood cells, regenerate organs, maintain your skin/nails/hair, etc.

If you don’t eat enough protein, your body will just take these amino acids from your muscles to do these daily processes. This is incredibly important if you ever, God forbid, get in a serious car accident and can’t eat, get a bad cold where you don’t feel like eating, or get a life-altering and life-threatening illness like cancer, etc.

Lifting weights and having lots of muscle also helps fight off heart disease, diabetes, sarcopenia, etc. If you want to dive into this topic further, one of my all-time favourite health and fitness papers is available for your reading on the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition website: The Under-Appreciated Role of Muscle in Health and Disease.

Sleep Better & Feel More Energized

Sleep is wonderful. And if you get enough of it, around 8 hours a night, you’ll be:

• more fat-resistant (study, study, study)
• you’ll have more willpower to make smart decisions and manage your mood (Willpower, 2012)
• your skin will age slower (study)
• you’ll look better (study)
• you’ll learn better (article, study, study)
• reduce the risk for a ton of diseases (study, study)
• and you’ll have a stronger immune system (study, study)

Wow. Chances are you already know that sleep is amazing, though. The problem is getting enough sleep and getting good sleep. If you wake up a lot, have trouble falling asleep, or can’t get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night, exercising should help.

One study compared athletes who did lots of exercise throughout the week to regular people who didn’t exercise, and the athletes had better quality sleep, and woke up less during the night. Those who didn’t exercise regularly often complained about their sleep quality (study).

We have a whole article dedicated to improving your sleep that you can read here, but one huge factor to sleeping well is exercising (study, study).

Women Can Enjoy Life More By Lifting Weights

Developing Confidence & Independence

Getting strong as a woman means you can haul more groceries to your home. It means you can lift your heavy luggage at the airport. You can lift your carry-on up over your head and put it into the spot by yourself. Or throwing heavy bags into the car.

It’s always put a smile on my face to see my wife help other women or older people by lifting heavy things into their car and seeing the look of surprise on their faces. Or the way she’s able to carry around heavy grocery bags while wearing our little one in a baby carrier.

Being strong is a huge confidence boost. You can do whatever you put your mind to.

There are even studies confirming this, such as this one titled “Effects of weight training on the emotional well-being and body image of females: predictors of greatest benefit“, where 60 females lifted weights twice a week and significantly improved their emotional well-being compared to those who didn’t exercise.

If you feel like life is tiring, doing some lifting 3x a week is difficult in the moment—yes, but I find it makes daily living feel so much easier in comparison.

Running errands, moving furniture, carrying bags, putting awkward stuff in storage, running up the stairs—those things become super easy.

Lifting Is Fun, Relieves Stress, and May Help With Anxiety

Lifting can be tiring the first few weeks. But after you adapt, it becomes an incredibly fun activity because of its progression. You can continually compete against yourself, improving how much you can lift, how many times you can lift it, how good your form is, how round you can build your butt, how athletic and nimble you can become, and on and on.

If you struggle with anxiety and stress, weightlifting and some cardio might help with mental improvements, such as helping with anxiety, depression, and overall mental health (study, study, meta-analysis). There still needs to be more research done in this area, but some of the studies are showing promising results.

Objections: I’m Scared of Lifting Weights Because…

As A Woman, I’m Afraid Of Becoming Bulky

Building muscle is hard work! Unless you’re naturally very muscular, it might take 10+ years of hard and intense training and possibly pharmaceutical help, to reach the size that you consider bulky in your head. If you are naturally thin, then even then, you are less likely to look bulky and more likely to look fit, healthy and active.

For example, here’s “PantryStaple,” one of our members after lifting for 18 months and gaining 17 pounds. She didn’t become bulky. She just became more feminine.

To continue to build size, you’ll need to get stronger and stronger progressively. You’ll need to keep lifting heavier weights, lift those weights for more reps, lift them for more sets, lift them with more frequency, etc. So it’ll take you years and years of hard work to get to “too bulky.”

Worst case scenario, you get a muscle to a size that you’re happy with, and you just stop making it stronger. Actually, that’s the best-case scenario.

I don’t want to go to the gym

We hear this a lot from people who are afraid of being stared at in the gym or who feel embarrassed about not knowing what to do.

Most people are minding their own business in the gym. They’re there for a reason—to lift weights and go home. And if you are worried about being inexperienced, pick up a program like ours that will help you learn how to begin from the very start, with simpler variations that are easier to master (and safer and more effective for a beginner).

If you don’t like the gym because it’s not practical, or you have a bad experience with creeps hanging around you, waiting times, or you’re grossed out about the germs, you can work out perfectly well at home. You don’t need anything fancy. Just two heavy adjustable dumbbells and a bench is all you need to get amazing results. You can tuck them away in the closet.

I’m too tired or busy

This comes down to priorities. We all have the same amount of hours in the day and a finite amount of energy. Some people choose to prioritize a thriving career or business; some people choose a social life instead—whatever it is.

There are noble reasons for being too busy or tired. We know of women taking care of sick relatives, women who are raising kids, and women who need to work 2 or more jobs to make ends meet. We’d make the argument that these people will burn out eventually if they don’t take care of themselves, but we know for some, it is impossibly difficult to find 3 hours a week to lift.

But we also know that the average person in the US watches 2.8 hours of TV per day (article).

So there is time—the problem is energy. Most people choose watching TV over exercise because they’re tired. If you’re too tired, it might be time to evaluate your sleep, nutrition, and exercise habits. It’s counterintuitive, but exercise is an activity that will pay you back with more energy. The energy you put into it, you get back—plus more.

Another thing to try is to lift weights when you wake up. It becomes the first thing you do, making it less likely that you’ll run out of time or energy before getting around to it.

Working out at home can help too. No travel time. You can also work out more often for a shorter time. For example, you could work out 5x a week for 20 minutes.

There are lots of solutions. Don’t let this be your hang-up!

I don’t want to get injured

Lifting is one of the safest physical activities you can do. Even for people with injuries, those in pain, and the elderly with strength and balance issues, there are many safe options, such as machines, resistance bands, and occlusion training.

Of course, nothing you’ll do in life will be risk-free. Personally, I find the risk of death and injury from driving a car shockingly high, and no one gives that a second thought. And weight-lifting is not even a high-risk activity! You’re more likely to hurt yourself gardening.

Even if you get injured, the most common injury in the gym is dropping a weight on your toe. That’s something that you can largely prevent by being aware of it.

One final thought: not doing any exercise is a guaranteed way to have your health decline faster, and it may cause you to accumulate more injuries, aches, and diseases later on. Dr. Brad Schoenfeld wrote, “You can either choose exercise now or choose disease later. Really not much of a choice…” We wholeheartedly agree.

Take it slow, start with beginner progressions of the lifts, get an evidenced-based program or trainer who can walk you through everything, always add weight slowly, stay away from total failure, and watch out from hitting your toe with weights!

I don’t know what to do or how to get started

Chip and Dan Heath write in Switch that the easiest way to dissolve resistance (or laziness) is with clarity. If you don’t know what to do, it’s hard to get started, right?

This is why we developed the Bony to Bombshell program. If you buy the program, go through it, and watch the exercise videos, you’ll know everything, have a crystal clear plan, and thus have the confidence to get started. Plus, if there’s one big thing that’s preventing you from getting started… just ask us about it. The program comes with coaching, after all 🙂

Once you’ve started, you’ll see results come in as consistently as the work you put into it. Our program is designed for both the beginner who has never lifted weights and the intermediate lifter who still has room for improvement.

Conclusion

Women should be lifting weights if they’re healthy enough to do so and they’re not pregnant. If you’re pregnant, you should talk to your doctor about whether or not you should be lifting weights, as there are many more variables to consider.

There are just so many benefits; you were made to lift!

• You’ll look more attractive by building feminine curves through muscle
• It will make it possible to burn fat more quickly and without losing muscle (if that’s something you’re trying to do)
• You’ll build up strength in the muscles that’ll help you develop a natural and better-looking posture
• Your bone density will improve, which will help lower the risk of fractures and bone density issues as you get older
• It could help with pain relief, including back pain
• Puts you in a better position of health in the chance you need to fight minor and serious illnesses and injuries
• Your sleep and daily energy levels will improve
• It’s a fun way to challenge yourself and relieve stress
• Being strong gives you confidence and independence, and makes regular life easier