Strength comes in so many forms, but generally speaking, it’s not encouraged in women as they grow up. Little girls are taught to be kind, gentle, and quiet, and while there’s nothing wrong with these characteristics, it’s time to find our FIERCE as well! So buckle up, girls, and lets learn how to become a strong woman in all it’s forms!
Get Strong With Weights
But not necessarily body building or body shaping. Weights are a sure fire way to build cardio (heart) strength, muscle strength, bone strength, and emotional resilience.
However, not all weights are created equally, and here’s a place to start:
- Sets of 15-20 reps are endurance/cardio. Start here if you’ve never done weights before, ORthe movements you’re choosing are taking weight away from the middle your body.
- Sets of 10 are great for building muscle density and tone – you will have to do an awful lotof sets of 10 daily, with several sessions a week and a very specific diet, to build muscle sizeas a woman.
- Sets of 6 ish are fabulous for hormonal health, bone health, and muscle health
- Make sure you train your body evenly – one back, one chest, one legs to begin and thenbuild from there.
Get Powerful with With POWER training
Power training is where you move loads with momentum – often meaning you can lift more than you can usually. Women are taught (generally) to be timid, gentle, soft. Power training teaches us to forceful, fierce, and ferocious – in a safe setting.Power training is explosive or absorptive:
- Explosive is where you throw the medicine ball, leap up on to the box, the accelerationphase of a sprint…
- Absorptive is where you catch the ball, or absorb the impact on landing, and deceleration ofthe movement.
Power training is a high(er) risk activity, so if this is your first foray in to it, seek professional advice. If you’ve been training weights or exercising for a long time, try incorporating power training in to your routine. Here are some ideas:
- If you’re a runner, incorporate stair, hill, flat line, or downhill sprints in to your routine.
- If you’re already lifting weights, go a little heavier and use your body to move the weight(eg. Shoulder press/squat)
- If you’ve never tried boxing before, start attending a class or hire a coach.
- If you’ve been doing gym classes forever, switch classes to one that has power exercise in itor try crossfit for the first time.
Watch: https://youtu.be/XF1NTafWlgY
Get Mentally Strong Through BRAIN Training!
Because strength is a mental state as much as it’s a physical one.
The more resilient you are, the stronger you are. Resilience is a form of emotional strength that allows you to recover quickly from stress or tough events. If you can recover quickly, you’re more able to use your logical parts of your brain; this is a protective factor for mental illnesses such as depression1.
Being resilient doesn’t mean being able to do it all, on your own, with an awesome attitude. Resilient people are actually MORE likely to ask for help, feel their feelings, express their emotions, and rearrange their work or plans to factor the stressful event. The key difference is that they do so feeling optimistic about their ability to work it out, they encourage themselves, and keep on trying.
So Brain Training is really important!
Positive Psychology has 17 excellent brain training tools for resilience which you can read here: https://positivepsychology.com/resilience-activities-exercises/
We have picked just 5 to share with you today:
- Identify your strengths: what are you good at? What do you like about yourself? Find waysto exploit these strengths daily!
- Perform acts of kindness, consider volunteering, or engage in random acts such as buyingcoffee for the person after you in line.
- Practise gratitude & positivity – it’s the practise, not the perfection, that matters to yourbrain. Use a calendar, diary, or scrap of paper to write down three good things about yourday, about the room your in, about your family, what you’re grateful for etc.
- Find your flow: what gets you really engaged? For some, it’s meditation, yoga, tai chi. Forothers its drawing, chess, or origami. The perfect flow exercise for you is a task that requires skill and concentration, is goal oriented, controlled by you, and where you lose track of time.
- Mindful breath activity: breath out through your mouth (making a whoosh sound) – breath in through your nose for 4
– hold your breath for 7
– exhale through your mouth, with whoosh sound for 8- repeat 4 times
Watch: https://youtu.be/VPgZbRe26Vo
Build Strength By Being Uncomfortable
Discomfort is essential for building strength, resilience, and confidence.
You’ll hear people in the fitness industry say all the time to “get out of your comfort zone”, because on both a physical and mental level, that place of discomfort is where you grow.
Here’s how it works:
- You plan something that makes you feel scared, nervous, or uncomfortable.
- You train for it – mentally or physically. If it’s abseiling you might visualise what it’s like. Ifit’s a marathon you might start running a bit further.
- You execute it – and succeed.
- You feel happiness, a sense of accomplishment, and pride.
- REPEAT
It doesn’t have to be extreme – you don’t have to bungee jump, do a silent retreat, or attempt to sleep standing up to be uncomfortable. It just has to be one step further than you are now.
Great ways to start getting uncomfortable include:
- Sign up for a fun run, obstacle racing event, or walk
- Commit to mixing up your daily walk: add a hill that intimidates you, try to walk 100mfurther in the same time, add something tricky like soft sand.
- Sign up for Adventure Saturdays, personal training, our a gym trip (and we’ll do the thinkingfor you!)
- Learn a new language, instrument, or game (like chess, sudoku, or the crossword)
Watch: https://youtu.be/MiWSpzKEufI
Make Being Stronger Easier, With Mobility Exercise
Mobility training will mean you resist your own movement less. To lift that heavy weight, or complete your power training you’ll have to overcome less of your own body’s resistance.The goal is to have fluid and full range movement, particularly in the:
- Shoulders
- Thoracic spine
- Pelvis
- Ankles and feet
A good way to start incorporating 3D movement in to your stretching: forward and back, left and right, and circles. Here is how I would do it with these common stretches:
- Chest against wall
- Lats off power plate
- Hip Flexor
- Adductors
- Glutes
- Toes
Watch: https://youtu.be/E3VsKSCGkx0
As you can see, strength training is about so much more than the act of lifting weights. It’s a state ofmind, it’s emotional resilience, it’s freedom of movement too!Send us a PM to get YOUR Women’s Health question answered!
You can look up your nearest women’s health physio here: http://whta.com.au/
Find an experienced personal trainer: https://burrelledaustralia.com/directory/
Clare Hozack is an ex-athlete and owner and founder of IntoYou. Clare is currently a strength and conditioning coach, using her skills to return women to functionality after having kids, and providing education for personal trainers in how to train women better.