The 6 Must-Know Benefits of Weightlifting for Women

These are the 6 must-know benefits of weightlifting for women that are inspiring so many to start their weightlifting journey.

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I think weightlifting in the female community has been a taboo topic for a long time. Women have been hearing that if they lift weights, they will become bulky and masculine, which is completely not true!

Depending on your individual goals, weightlifting can be extremely beneficial for you, and trust me when I say it takes a whole lot of work to become extremely muscular like the female bodybuilders you see online.

Including some weight training in your exercise routine along with your cardiovascular training is super important for many reasons, I’ll be going over a few of them in this post.

I’ve put together a list of the benefits of weightlifting for women that will have you excited to start weight training today!

This post is about the 6 Must-Know Benefits of Weightlifting for Women.

Weight Training Decreases Pain & Risk of Injury

No one likes getting an injury, it can be frustrating and can take a long time to heal.

When you include weightlifting into your exercise routine you are putting good stress on your body’s ligaments and tendons which helps to make them stronger.

When weight training you are strengthening your body’s muscles and connective tissues. This then acts as a sort of reinforcement for your joints which can reduce future injuries.

It also helps to improve joint stability and increases the flexibility in your muscles and joints. This can help you maintain your range of motion, reducing the likelihood of joint pain during exercise and throughout your daily activities.

One study found that including strength training in your exercise routine can benefit people with osteoarthritis (OA) and help reduce the pain and stiffness associated with it.

Another study found that exercise programs that included exercises targeting the abdominal and hip area can help prevent and reduce back pain.

Improves Daily Movement Patterns

During weightlifting, a lot of the exercises you perform are similar to movement patterns you do throughout your everyday activities.

For example, squats are the same motion as getting in and out of a chair or bed, which as we age, we need to continue to be able to do.

The same goes for the deadlift exercise. This is an example of having to bend over towards the ground and pick an object up.

Now this can be an extremely difficult movement for a lot of people to do as they age. But if we are practicing it during our exercise sessions then it won’t be a big deal when we need to do it during our day.

Have you ever heard the saying before “If you don’t use it, you lose it”? That is true in this situation.

Continuously working on these movements with added weight means that when you do perform that same movement during your day with no weight you can perform them with ease.

Lifting Weights Increases Mood & Self-Confidence

A study found that people who strength train have a more positive overall body image.

Even if you don’t necessarily look the exact way think you should, you start to appreciate all your body can do for you.

You may feel proud and accomplished that you can lift that certain weight that maybe a few weeks ago seemed impossible to do.

Maybe now you can do 3 push-ups, when at the start you could barely get yourself up for one.

This can feel extremely empowering.

A lot of the time when you begin to strength train you start to focus less on the number on the scale dropping and more on the other goals you’ve set for yourself.

Then when you do reach that goal, you feel powerful and that feeling can set the tone for the rest of your day.

Weightlifting also increases the production of endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin which are those feel-good chemicals we love!

When these chemicals increase, they can play a role in the reduction of depression, helping increase your overall mood during your day.

Strength Training Lowers Risk of Disease

Heart disease is the 2^nd leading cause of death in Canada.

The leading causes of heart disease are high blood pressure, high low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and diabetes.

One of the biggest benefits of weightlifting is lowering the risk of these life-altering diseases.

Strength training has been studied to help reduce all these conditions in some form.

In one study it was found that weightlifting can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 40-70%.

Because strength training increases your body’s lean muscle mass, it provides places for your cardiovascular system to move the blood being pumped through your body. As a result, it lessens the blood pressure in your arteries, reducing cardiovascular disease risk.

It also reduces blood pressure at the same time.

When exercising the heart becomes stronger, which means it can pump more blood with less effort. This results in less force on our arteries, which reduces your blood pressure.

Our body uses stored carbohydrates and glucose as fuel for our muscles.

So, when you exercise or lift weights, you are using that glucose rather than it being stored in your blood and becoming too high, resulting in high blood glucose levels known as type 2 diabetes.

Weightlifting Builds Stronger Bones

As we age, we begin to lose more bone tissue than we build.

Our bones become less dense, and if this loss of bone density continues it can turn into osteoporosis. When bones are weakened by osteoporosis there is a higher risk of bone fractures.

To help counteract the loss of bone density and reduce the risk of fracture as we age, we need to grow new bone tissue.

For your body to create this new bone mass there needs to be an increase of good stress on your bones which will then increase the formation of strong bone tissue. The activity to which your body needs to build this new bone needs to be more strenuous than your regular daily activities.

That’s where weightlifting comes into play.

By adding weightlifting into your routine, you are adding that required strenuous activity that your body needs to form the new bone mass.

This way we can continue living our lives worrying less about the risk of fracture if we have a fall in our later years.

Promotes Weight Loss & Management

When you’re lifting weights, you are burning calories, along with stored energy also known as fat cells.

If your body has less muscle mass, it will have a slower metabolism.

Because as we age, we are continually losing more muscle, we need to actively work on building that muscle.

We can do this by weightlifting.

Once you have been weightlifting for a while you build up more muscle mass, and it automatically results in you having less fat tissue because it has been replaced with muscle tissue.

When your body has more lean muscle mass, your metabolism as a result will be higher.

Which we love!

When a person has a higher metabolism, their body burns more of the fuel they consume every day (food), rather than storing it as excess energy in the form of fat.

This also means that your body will be actively burning more calories when it is both at rest and during exercise.

Now you can start taking advantage of these benefits by adding weight training to your exercise routine!  

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