Female Bodybuilding

The benefits women—female athletes in particular—reap from strength training are well-established. A new study shows, however, that drinking milk after lifting weights enhances and accelerates them.

Thus, as if it needed confirmation, we see now that Dara Torres knew what she was talking about when she unveiled her first Milk Mustache ad:

But this good news comes with a caveat, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Girls are hitting the weight room more than ever before, and not surprisingly that has come with a price—more injuries occurring in the weight room.

The price, however, is a small one compared to the injuries to be prevented by girls' building stronger, more durable bodies. Not only that, it is one that can be avoided without too much difficulty.

Despite the hyperbole ("alarming rate") fated to any topic that finds its way into mainstream media, the news here is straightforward and mostly propitious; but it does require some attention:

The problem:

"Using data from 100 emergency rooms, researchers found that although men and boys still make up the majority of gym injuries, the increase was the largest among teen girls, indicating that more girls are lifting weights than ever before."

The cause:

"From that [data collected from hospitals], researchers were able to surmise that lack of supervision was the main reason girls were hurting themselves, not because they were lifting too much."

The solution:

"Getting proper instruction on how to use the machines and lift safely is essential, and always use a spotter with free weights."

See, not so hard, was it?

Aneta Florczyk owns the official title but one could make the case that Becca Swanson is the strongest woman in the world. Swanson holds every noteworthy world powerlifting record, including a 600-lb bench press that is daunting even to contemplate.

Not long ago, Swanson visited Jakked Hardcore Gym to lift with some of the strongest men in the Chicago area. The T-shirt says it all:

Somewhere there is a little girl warming up with your max

Thanks to stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, personal trainer Tracy Anderson has become a minor celebrity herself. Anderson caters to a Hollywood aesthetic that prizes slimness above all else (that is, for women anyway; men, not so much). Unfortunately, her work perpetuates a foolish ideal, not just in Hollywood but in the general culture; for better or worse, celebrities hold sway over how people think and act.

But it is particularly inimical when female athletes, their parents, or their coaches take such nonsense to heart:

Beware of the gym: the weights are too heavy. "After over-exercising in gyms in my late teens my muscles got very bulky and I was more like a gymnast than a ballet dancer. It looked like somebody threw me in the trash compactor: my neck got really short."

To point out just one relevant danger, female athletes would in fact do well to train their neck and trapezius muscles, and yes, with heavy weights.

One last observation. Not to take too much away from Anderson, but I suspect that more than anything else Madonna owes her fantastic body to an admirable work ethic and good genetics—I don't remember her ever not having a nice body, always rather athletic—and she would probably look and feel even better with some heavy weights thrown into her workout mix.

Just in time for peak wedding season (imagine that!) FitnessMagazine.com has launched a "bridal boot camp" that includes workout videos, targeted workouts, and a 20-minute circuit workout for buff brides.

Brides want to look great on their wedding day, a worthy and understandable goal. But muscling up before the wedding also has a utilitarian purpose—the buff bride is prepared to take charge when it obliges her fancy:

Lenda Murray, eight-time Ms. Olympia, the greatest female bodybuilder ever, seems to have a talent for dance too, as seen here in video taken at the 2009 Lenda Murray Bodybuilding Championships. Perhaps a stint on DWTS (which, boo! doesn't have a female athlete this season) is next?

If you watched women's Olympic downhill skiing yesterday, you understand why Emily Brydon and her fellow competitors might think such a thing. We saw again the awesome difference strength can make in sports, seemingly almost any sport. The Vancouver Sun makes clear what sets Lindsey Vonn apart:

The fact is, Vonn, an analytical perfectionist whose size and strength — she’s [5-10 and 165 pounds] — allows her to race on more forgiving men’s skis, is just too powerful, too innately talented to be caught when she’s on her game, shin bruise or not.

Congratulations to Lindsey Vonn and to Julia Mancuso!

When last we saw bodybuilder Kathy Bertram she was snapping a baseball bat. In today's bit of fun we find her doing dishes, that is, in her own eccentric strongwoman way:

Thanks to Under Armour, we get to see just how hard ski racer Lindsey Vonn is working to prepare herself for the 2010 Olympics. Here she is a role model for not only her hard work but her insight. Vonn gets it—she understands that you must build your body for your sport, and that starts in the gym, most often with strength training:

My little contribution to a "Best of '09" series by Women Talk Sports bloggers is a selection of favorites from this blog. I don't expect you'll find a particular mood or theme, less so a standard of quality, but rather, I hope, a few morsels that provoke reflection or simply entertain:

The story of Tina Lockwood

A Kind of Grace

Super shenanigans

Esther Williams

A lesson from the past

Athlete or sex symbol? A false dichotomy

A Wonder Woman of color?

Aneta Florczyk: setting records, inspiring women

Female Muscle: a little schooling for its detractors

Ruminating on the big fight

DC shakeup. The ugly paradox

The Body Issue

Advancing women's sports: largely a bootstrap process

Bridgett "Baby Doll" Riley and her art of violence


Happy New Year!


More "Best of '09" from other WTS bloggers:

Best of '09: Forming a community, WomenTalkSports.com

The "Best" of 2009 and the State of Girls & Women in Sports

Best of '09: A Fresh Meat’s Perspective

Best of '09 – A Year for Women in Wake

2009 Salute to Women in Sports

Victories and Failures in Women's Sports in 2009, or #FTW and #FAIL (Hot or Not for us old-timers)

Best of 2009: The Humble Emergence of Tanisha Wright

Best of the Best of 2009

Editor's note: We know that upper-body strength affords tangible athletic advantage in many, perhaps most, sports—even auto racing, strangely enough. This is of special importance to female athletes, who too often haven't been sufficiently encouraged and instructed in this mode of conditioning. Today's guest post by experienced bodybuilder and weightlifter Elle Nash aims to change that. I hope you find it useful.—Rob

Upper-body strength, an overview

Upper-body strength comes from mainly three areas: chest, back and core. There are other secondary muscles like the triceps, biceps and shoulders, but they really don’t provide the power that comes along with strength. The core is really the power spot because it will balance out your upper body and allow your other muscles to fully exert their strength. The core makes up your abdominal muscles, as well as the muscles in your lower back.

Exercises for upper-body strength

There are many different exercises that achieve this. There are things that you can do around the home, but the long term results are very limited. Pushups and pull ups work great, but there is a point where you’ll plateau. If you’re serious about getting more strength than you should be looking toward a gym membership or gym equipment.

Bench Press: You can do both barbell and dumbbell exercises of this. I like to mix it up week to week when I do this particular exercise. I find that the barbell bench press provides the most strength for the chest area. The dumbbells help work your stabilizer muscles and eventually help you get over plateaus.

Deadlifts: This is by far the best core exercise that you can do. I don’t even do sit ups or crunches anymore because they’re useless in my opinion. Lifting a barbell of weight off the floor requires an enormous amount of strength and really develops the core muscles, especially the lower back.

Bent Over Rows: You will also have the choice of using barbells and dumbbells for this one. I find value in both of them, so I switch it up week to week. This is going to develop strength in your upper back.

The exercises above are the main focus of your training for upper-body strength. They hit the biggest muscles in the upper body and they also work the secondary muscles in an indirect way. If you ever feel that your strength training is hitting a plateau than you should work your secondary muscles. This would include exercises like military press, triceps curls, biceps curls, seated rows, etc.

Diet for upper-body strength

As important as weight lifting is to developing strength, you also need to eat properly for the development of your muscles. The proper diet isn’t as complicated as most people assume. The hard part is just following it.

Since muscle tissue doesn’t build instantly, you have to constantly feed your system with protein. This is so your muscles always have nutrients available to them throughout the day. That doesn’t mean you have to eat all the time. The magic number is 4 hours. You should be getting a meal into you every 4 hours that contains protein. You’re not going to have big meals though. The idea here is to eat about 5-6 times a day instead of the usual 3.

With your body getting the necessary nutrition all the time, you’ll have the potential to repair muscle tissue properly and gain the upper-body strength you desire.

Resting

Most of the repairs done to your body will occur while you’re asleep, and if you’re not getting enough sleep they just won’t happen. This is why it is extremely important to get a full night of sleep, every night. If you’re someone that normally gets 5-6 hours a night than you’re going to have to bump it up to 8-9 hours a night.

I wish that strength training was all done in the gym, but you have to get the rest you need for your body to repair itself. After you start lifting heavy weights you’ll want to sleep more at a night.

This is everything you need to know on how to build upper-body strength as a female. Remember that results aren’t instant or fast. It takes time, so be patient and just keep working at it.

About the author: Elle Nash has been an amateur female bodybuilder for nearly 10 years. She has participated in many bodybuilding competitions around Canada. You can visit her website and blog on women's bodybuilding.

Reebok has a new line of shoes, and of course new commercials to promote them. Called Easytone, the shoes condition a woman's butt and legs, so we are told anyway. No gym. No workouts. Just wear shoes. Snake oil? Perhaps. But that's not what I'm concerned with today.

What bothers me is the image peddled to women as the ideal. A "toned" look suggests, to me and many others, I'm sure, an athletic physique. Maybe not a bodybuilder's, but manifestly athletic. What is presented instead, though, is the same soft, smooth, size 2 look we are informed constantly is the feminine ideal. Is this model's physique really much different from that seen in a thousand other advertisements?—



Contrasted with that of fitness athlete Jelena Abbou seen in this Fahrenheit commercial, it becomes obvious how paltry Easytone's "toned" look is:



In the Fahrenheit commercial we see a woman lucidly strong and athletic, yet strikingly attractive by any reasonable standard. Why can't there be more like this?

You have to admire 21-year-old bodybuilder Hayley McNeff (Facebook, MySpace). Her work ethic, her determination, her brazenness—model qualities for female athletes who truly want to excel:

Iris Kyle won her fifth Ms. Olympia last weekend. One doesn't risk much saying that she is this decade's dominant female bodybuilder. But has she been rewarded enough for her talent and hard work? Apparently not. Kyle was paid a meager $28,000 this year while the winner on the men's side got $200,000—a shocking discrepancy that leaves little doubt about how far we need to go before female athletes are justly compensated.

DC shakeup. No, not that DC. I refer here to DC Comics, which now has a new name—DC Entertainment—and a new president. This overhaul by parent company Warner Bros. bodes well for a forthcoming Wonder Woman film. Another sign that things are looking up for the Amazon: she now has her own forum at Comic Book Resources.

The ugly paradox. Caster Semenya's story, though regrettable, has at least given rise to worthwhile, occasionally enlightened, media commentary. Among the best I've seen is "Women in sports: The ugly paradox," a piece that throws into relief what is the nub of the story, and the bane of all female athletes: "They say the Semenya case shows that an old, ugly paradox is alive and well in women's sport: The same giant quadriceps and bulky shoulders that can clinch championships make athletes look 'unfeminine' in the eyes of the world. And that can be a difficult reality for many women."

Nasty as it was, Serena's tantrum at the US Open isn't as troubling as what she says about her arms in an interview for People: "I think they're too muscular. They're too thick," tennis champion Serena Williams said of her ripped arms in an Aug. 27 interview with People Magazine. "I know that toned arms are in now. Look at Michelle Obama. ... I'm like, 'keep wearing strapless dresses!' But I don't like mine."

Serena's is merely a representative case. The problem is in fact societal. That Serena sees her muscular physique as something better shunned isn't unusual. But when one of the world's most accomplished female athletes, ever, says as much in public, the fallacy is perpetuated—given life anew to burden the next generation of female athletes.

Sad it is to think that Serena apparently cannot reconcile her muscles with the women's fineries she sells on HSN; the same muscles, to continue the paradox theme, that helped make her a famous athlete, famous enough to have her own line of merchandise to peddle on a shopping network.