A female fitness model's perspective!
Foreword: Mengting is a good friend of mine, whom I met in my 1 year in Pioneer Junior College. She recently took part in a fitness-pagaent contest held by Nutrifirst, singapore's largest online supplement store -- http://www.nutrifirst.net/ .Below are a few words by her about her training, diet directed for girls looking to start training and weightlifting for beginners! Who said weightlifting is just for guys and it makes big muscular blobs out of women?
P.S. All credits go to Nutrifirst and Mengting.
Background: I'm Mengting, a first year student pursuing a degree in Environmental Science and Engineering in the National University of Singapore. I have always been interested in playing sports ever since secondary school days but have only gotten serious with fitness for about a year. I have never competed in any professional field but am currently a participant of the Nutrigirl 2014, a fitness-pageant-like event organised by the largest online supplement store in Singapore, Nutrifirst. I obtain most of my knowledge in this field from experimenting the effects of different types of trainings and diets have on my physique, knowledge shared by my friends on social media sites such as Instagram, as well as forums such as bodybuilding.com.
Training: Many have asked me about ways or tips and tricks to 'tone up' their body, to rid the 'flabs' on common problem areas such as arms, waist, back, glutes, and thighs. When confronted with such questions, I generally do not have the kind of answers that most people would expect. Personally, I do not believe in excessive steady cardiovascular exercises (such as long runs on the treadmills) because I have read from various sources that the fat burning effect of this exercise pales greatly in comparison to High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT is a type of exercise where the user reaches and maintains 80-90% of his/her maximum heart rate for any duration between 30 seconds to 2 minutes, rest for a similar amount of time, and repeats the cycle. However, the bulk of my usual training regime consists of heavy weight lifting. For compound exercises such as squats and deadlifts, I adopt the pyramid training style, where I slowly work my way up with ample rest time to the maximum weight for 1 full range of motion (i.e. 1 repetition), reduce the weight by about 2.5/5kg and complete the maximum number of repetitions for that weight, reduce the weight again and go again until the weight is lowered to the value that I warmed up with. This is the style of training which I respond the best to. However, one can never out-train bad diet. If one desires to achieve their ideal physique, proper nutrition is extremely crucial. After all, everyone can work out for 1hour but not everyone has the discipline to control what goes into their digestive system for the next 23hours. This brings me to my next point.
Nutrition: To begin with, I try my best to keep my diet as clean as possible. This means no process food such as fishballs, sausages, meatballs, hashbrowns etc. Also, I watched my sodium and fats intake carefully. There are various different kinds of eating lifestyles that fitness enthusiast adopt, some are more general/lenient (as some may perceive) such as 'eating clean', If It Fits Your Macros, Intermittent Fasting, etc whereas others might be more extreme (again, it's subjective), such as Ketosis, Paleo diet, vegan, etc. Many females tend to fall into cycles of fad diets such as 'juice diet' or 'cabbage soup diet' or whatever other crash diets that deplete their bodies of proper nutrition in a hopeless pursuit to lose 'weight'. When these females talk to me about losing 'weight' the first thing I ask them is "what kind of weight do you want to lose?" Weight is mere number of the scale. One can lose weight by dehydrating themselves in the sauna, losing water weight; she can also go on a 800kcal crash diet for a week and lose 3kg in a week and gain 6kg the following week where she eats normally at about 2000kcal again. Therefore, nutrition is key when we want to burn fats and retain muscle mass for good.
Advice: In general, I would advice females against fad diets and falling into the trap thinking that lifting weights will make them bulky. This is because females do not have as much testerones as men so it would be much more different to build enough muscles to appear 'buff'. Also, lifting weights are generally more effective at burning fat so that a more lean and 'toned' physique beneath can be exposed.
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