Transforming The Female Physique
About a hundred years ago it was rare to find a woman exercising, let alone being concerned with how to optimize her physique to be stronger. Today, we see a more balanced approach to the maintenance of women’s health and along with that, a growing desire to experience fitness methods that speak to the requirements of the female body.
The Female Perspective
The need to maintain physical health and well being in today’s fast paced and demanding lifestyle has often been met with a more male oriented approach. But as we’ve seen over the last little while, the fitness industry has begun to evolve. Women want to work with fitness programs that are built for them, with methods that understand the female psyche and the female form, which is exactly what we do here at MUV. Our belief in health and function goes beyond a person’s body composition. Whether overweight or striving to gain more muscle mass and strength, investing in health and function is about more than just achieving quick physical results. It’s about exploring how to be the best you can possibly be while setting practical goals that empower you to exceed your own expectations.
Fitness Is Personal
While women don’t necessarily require a drastically different approach to fitness when compared with men, they respond well when employing quality intense exercise with better nutrition habits. They respond best when a fitness program is assigned based on their individuality. In other words, a fitness program is personal to a woman. It’s not about the latest trends in muscle building techniques or the ab exercises that promise the best results on the cover of a women’s magazine. Although this may seem like it’s common sense, many people are taken by trendy exercise programs and begin adopting them, unaware of how little they have to offer to their actual fitness and health goals. Often times new programs are followed without consulting a professional fitness expert, which can lead to wear and tear of old injuries or joint issues that accompany aging. And most importantly, exercising alone doesn’t solve the problem of overall health and fitness. We need to eat well in order to see the physical progress our body makes when we implement a fitness program.
What It Takes
First, if you want to develop a tight and firm body you need to exercise with weights, whether you work best with free weights (e.g., dumbbells), cable machines or selectorized machines (e.g., leg press) - the resistance that weight provides is what pushes your body to work harder. Next, two things we need to address are the issues that come along with lifting heavy weights and the possibility of building too much muscle. We often avoid having our clients lift heavy weights (there are times for lifting heavy, but typically doing so is avoided).
Fundamental to muscle development is the creation of a sufficient amount of muscle fatigue under intense conditions. This requires using moderate weights, moderate to higher repetitions and while working toward muscular fatigue, which is when you get to a point where you can no longer complete repetitions in good form. Hard work performed in a controlled environment is the best way to achieve your desired outcome, but heavy weights aren’t always necessary and for most women they are counterproductive. This also lowers the risk of injury or potential problems encountered through exercise drastically.
MUV’s Special Focus
Women who train with MUV work their upper bodies very hard, since typically (pound-for-pound) women have weaker upper bodies than their male counterparts. However, we also have our female clients emphasize intense leg training for a number of good reasons. First, in order to shape and sculpt the legs, they need to be trained directly. Second, several lower body exercises, such as squats, lunges and leg presses develop and tighten the gluteal (bum) muscles, which also means producing a ‘lift’ to the glutes. Third, those big lower body exercises (squats, lunges and leg presses) work the largest muscles in the body, and that means producing the biggest energy expenditure and metabolic spike to accelerate fat loss.
You may think that you can do these exercises on your own or at your neighborhood gym, but we have developed unique programs and strategies not found elsewhere in the fitness industry that target and emphasize select areas of the lower body based on proper exercise combinations and unique performance applications that produce the biggest change in the briefest time possible – after all, why work for a year to achieve what is possible in half that time?
Let’s MUV.
