LAdies...how do you build visible muscle?

To build muscle, it is really the same thing for men and women. You must eat slightly more than maintenance level calories, lift heavy weights, and I would suggest eating about 1 gram of protein per body weight daily.

Women do not build muscle as fast as men do on average, but if you keep working on it with heavy weights in the low rep range for hypertrophy as well as eating much more than you did when trying to lose weight, you'll get there.

And lay off the cardio if you do a lot of that. Body Pump is considered a cardio class, for example. Go pick up those free weights and kettlebells!

As far as the weight, it depends on how strong you personally are. I like to recommend that you pick up a weight that you can do between 8-12 reps of a certain exercise. If you can't get to 8 reps, then your weight is too heavy and you need something a little lighter. If you can do more than 12, then you didn't get something heavy enough and you need to lift more.

You will actually be surprised at how strong certain muscle groups really are. I would bet that 15-20 is great for upper body like biceps and triceps, but when you go to do some compound lower body exercises like squats or deadlifts you may need quite a bit more. I think that most women underestimate themselves when they first start out because most of us are so used to lifting those light weights in cardio set-ups like Body Pump. I am not knocking that workouts AT ALL cause I love it myself! But when you are lifting with more reps you simply must use lower weights to do it...and that's what most women have "always done."

When I started doing the ChaLEAN Extreme program at home, I at first picked up 15 pound weights for squats because I thought that was all I was going to be able to do. But, I knew right away that was not enough weight. For me to feel a decent burn, I had to pick up 30 pounds in each hand. I couldn't believe it, but yes, women frequently underestimate their strength.