Lifting For Pretty Girls
This my retro 2016 throwback post
This one is for the ladies
I became a personal trainer back in 2010, and my first client was a lady.
She was mom in her late 30s with a young daughter. My next three clients after that were all female as well. This set the tone for my training career.
From 2010 to 2017, the majority of my clients were women. Ironic given that my online audience would end up being 80% men.
Training for women is not vastly different from training men, but there are obvious strategic and tactical differences. The primary differences being
Women want lower body development over upper body
Women have less skeletal mass and muscle in their upper body, as well as different limb, torso, and hip dimensions. This affects both how exercises look, and how exercises can be progressed
The underlying principles of training are the same, but how they get applied is not.
Most of my programs over the years of being a “Content Creator” have been written for men, but I have created a few for women, which is the program you are reading right now.
The title comes from a conversation years back with a young female client of mine when she first started training, she was only 17 at the time.
She wanted to show me various women on Instagram who she followed, and could she train them like them.
I told her that most of them simply looked like they did some squats, lunges, hip thrusts, and their training was quite basic.
“I want to do a pretty girl program then, they are SO pretty”
We both laugh, and I often characterized the workouts I would with my female clients as “pretty girl” workouts whenever they would complain or be fearful of “getting too big” or some other fitness myth.
This was in response to them complaining that they were training “like men”, which is of course absurd. Strength training is universal for everyone.
Story aside, this is how this program works:
Building muscle, and especially training women, it gets needlessly overcomplicated. Most women could train three days weekly and be immensely satisfied with their results.
This is not a “hardcore” train 5-6 days a week program. I have those programs, but I wanted to write something accessible, for women that are looking to lift around 3 days a week, and presumably have other activities they may be doing. So that is what this program does.
It’s not a “beginner” program, but a program for a Woman that knows her way around the gym, and wants an effective program that delivers results with a reasonable time investment.
You train three days weekly, lift some weights, and hopefully look shapely for the time spent.
It works very simple
-You train three days a week, for about one hour
-You train lower body twice, and upper body once
-Extra back work is done on all days to strengthen the back, reinforce good posture, and to strengthen the arms
You could repeat this program for 8-12 weeks before really needing to change it. If at the end of 12 Weeks you are pleased with the progress, you could conceivably keep doing it, although it would only be maintenance at that point.
