Many women are told not to workout with weights. This is absolutely false. One of the biggest misconceptions is that women who lift weights will develop bulky, ugly muscle mass.

Trust me, it’s very tough to build lean muscle mass. It takes a combination of proper exercise, diet, and hormonal processes. The fact is that women just do not have the same amount of testosterone that men do to build the kind of bulky muscles that men have.

On top of that, women also have high levels of the hormone estrogen. Estrogen is a fat-storing hormone, which is why women often find it more difficult to lose weight then men.

However, weight training, done properly, can help women lose weight, and maintain it in the long term. Women will build lean muscle mass, however the muscle mass will help them increase their metabolic rate and shape their physique.

Your metabolic rate is the rate at which your body burns calories. Hence, the higher your metabolic rate, the more calories you will burn at rest. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, which means it requires more calories to maintain a pound of muscle than a pound of fat.

Weight training can also help shape your physique. Bodybuilders do this all the time. But women can learn some things from bodybuilders without having to worry about building huge muscles, as I mentioned earlier.

When bodybuilders want to bring up a particular body part, they engage in a specific program to target that muscle group and to improve it. This is why they perform split training routines.

Now, I’m actually an advocate of full body workouts. However, once you have developed a good base of fitness, it’s a good idea to spend some time training a particular muscle group just to improve upon it.

Developing a basic dumbbell workout is quite easy. What you want to do is choose 3-10 exercises that train your entire body and organize them into a routine using a variety of training methods.

For beginners, a simple straight set method is sufficient. A straight set refers to the act of simply performing an a set of an exercise, resting, then performing another set for the desired number of total sets.

More information on how to develop your own dumbbell workout can be found in Coach Lomax’s Gladiator Body Workout program. Click here to learn more about this program.