Workout program for women to gain muscle

This is a mistake. Instead, choose a weight that can be lifted 10 times, with the last two reps posing a significant challenge. It is important to maintain good form when performing your exercises. As soon as you notice your form starting to fail, drop the amount of weight being lifted or take a rest. The goal here is to lift heavy and well, not lift heavy and get hurt. Be sure to have a spotter when performing exercises such as a back squat, bench presses and overhead presses, especially when going up in weight.

The typical recommendation for building muscle is to complete three to four sets of eight to 12 reps of an exercise. If you choose a heavier weight and do fewer repetitions e. If you want to increase muscles size, reduce the amount of rest you take between sets.

One of the most important elements to achieving muscle gains is consistency, so aim to weight train four to five days a week, if possible. Recording your exercises and weights in a journal is a great way to track gains. You can have good intentions to lift heavy, but the only way you will know if you are getting stronger is by writing down the sets, reps and weights used during each workout.

Another thing to consider is the breakdown of your weight-training sessions. Will you perform total-body workouts or focus exclusively on upper- or lower-body exercises?

Or maybe two body parts per workout? Whatever you end up deciding, the key is consistency and overload. There are countless ways to create a workout to gain muscle mass. Doing so enables you to expend greater energy on these movements, while still being able to perform well on smaller movements toward the end of your workout.

Choose six to eight exercises to perform on any given day. These are the best leg exercises for women, arranged perfectly to achieve every physique goal! The four muscles that make up the front of the thigh, affectionately known as "the quads," are currently having a moment.

Not coincidentally, it matches up with more women lifting weights—and squatting in particular. But having muscular or strong thighs, something that was once a point of shame for many, has rightfully become a point of pride. Forget leg " toning " workouts— quadzillas unite!

Ready to fearlessly build your quads? These nine lower-body workouts for women from my little black book are just what you need. Although their function is the same for all of us, how our thighs appear is as random as the female shape itself. They can be long and lovely with a gap at the top, or short and strong with a sweep that makes skinny jeans hide in fear. Neither is better than the other, of course. Our thighs are certainly the result of our genetics, but also of our hours in the gym performing the best leg exercises for our goals.

Do you want to build mass? Then squats and leg presses with heavy weight will be in your future. Do you want to build strong thighs, but with less outward flare and more detail? Then single-leg squats and lunges are a great foundation for your lower-body training. Or maybe you're a circuit gal, wanting to exhaust your legs top to bottom with a fast-paced workout using a variety of exercises. And maybe you read that list and you want to do it all!

Well, you can follow one of these workouts consistently for weeks to chase a specific goal, or you can rotate between them. That's up to you! But no matter what you do, make sure you warm up thoroughly and correctly first.

Love squatting but your knees don't? Protect your knees while you strengthen your legs! Maybe you've been sitting down all day , or you just got out of bed, or you've been driving around before you get to the gym. In any of these cases, your body is not ideally primed to hit it hard on a major quad movement. Your warm-up doesn't have to be complicated, though. However, adding extra work will make your workouts last longer.

If you can't spare the extra time, it'll be difficult to add more of anything to your workout. When you set up your training plan, there are a few variables you can play with. You can increase sets, reps, weight or the number of workouts you do per week. To build muscle , your priority should be something specific: increasing volume. Training volume is a number you get by multiplying the number of sets and reps you do, and the weight you use, in a given exercise.

For example, if you do three sets of 10 reps, with 10 pounds for a dumbbell bicep curl, your volume is You can calculate your training volume for almost any exercise. Bodyweight exercises will be difficult to calculate, because you can't figure out exactly how much weight you're lifting. Keep track of your volume for each exercise, because it should increase over time. A February study published in Sports Medicine looked at volume, frequency and muscle growth.

The researchers wanted to see if training frequency, which is the number of times you workout per week, was a factor in muscle growth. They found that people who trained more frequently built more muscle, but that wasn't necessarily because of the increased workout frequency. It all comes back to volume, as the researchers found. As long as volume was equal, training frequency didn't make a difference.

This is important to know, because in order to increase your training volume and gain more muscle you need to increase either reps, sets, weight or a combination of all three of these factors.

The easiest way to do this is by increasing the number of times you workout per week. Going back to the example of the bicep curls, if you do that exercise twice in a week, your volume doubles, from to An October study published in Sports Medicine confirmed that training more frequently helped build more muscle. In the study, researchers allowed at least 48 hours of rest between training sessions for each muscle group.

Training the muscles more often led to increased protein synthesis, which is a sign that the muscles are building up mass. This style of training is sometimes referred to as split training. Instead of doing full-body workouts, you do a few muscle groups per workout, and repeat muscle groups every few days. This gives the muscles at least 48 hours to recover between workouts. For example, you can work your legs on Monday, upper body on Tuesday, core on Wednesday, take a day off, and then repeat.

That gives you six days of workouts with one day of rest per week. Once you figure out a routine that works for you, stick to it. Consistency is important, and you should do everything you can to stay in a groove.

Make sure to bring some extra towels so you can reserve all the machines and benches you need for the movements. This workout will improve your endurance as well as your strength since you will be working both types of muscle fibers. Always start with 2 warm-up sets for the first exercise per body part to warm up the joints and muscles. Try to hit failure at around 10 reps on the first weight, 8 on the second and then 4 more reps on the lightest weight.

This is a perfect workout in case you are lacking a training partner or a spotter and still want to work with heavy weights. Since you are adding more reps to your set there is no need to do more than 2 drop sets of each exercise with 45 second rest in between. Remember, women don't want to overtrain any muscle group as we have a harder time to recover which will lead a catabolic state and no muscle growth. This is a workout that demands its performer—Beware all weak minds! This will show you that only the strong survive and will become a true Valkyria in Valhalla.

Well, back to reality, this workout will fatigue your muscles like nothing else and will make you pass limits of endurance and lactic acid. Here we try to use only one exercise to maximize the reps and to shock your muscle by doing five sets going from high to low reps, and then back up from low to high reps which will total at 10 sets.

It might sound complicated but it is as simple as can be. You simply use 5 different weights going from super light for your 40 reps to the heavy weight for your 5 reps with no rest in between. I can assure you that when you go back down on the weights from high reps it will feel much heavier than you began with. This method stimulates both of our muscle fibers, the slow acting and the fast acting, since you train both with high reps as with low reps in same set.

This will give us a complete breakdown of the muscles we train. It will be a fast and intense workout leaving only the energy to make a quick exit. Another way to increase growth is by increasing your strength too. To do this, we need to work our fast twitch fibers and do heavier weights for fewer repetitions. Our goal is now to get stronger for every workout we do which means breaking weight records in every workout. This can be challenging but also inspiring especially those needing a lot of hard work.

But as they say, "No pain, no gain! What we implement here is pyramid training which means increasing the weights to lower the reps for every set we do. The last set should be only up to 4 reps. Every exercise consists of 4 sets with a 45 seconds rest in between each of them.