Inherited machine: how to progressive overload when ST with10kg levels

Very generally speaking, so-called coaches recommend high reps with low weight for women because of bizarre and inaccurate fears that women who lift heavy will get "bulky" overnight and "look like men". That's nonsense.

Any amount of muscle mass gain takes long, consistent effort, and happens slowly. Because women are on average smaller and have a different hormone profile, it's even slower for most women than for men.

I admit, I'm not a big lifter myself anymore at this point, but I'm associated with a large university's women's sports team that lifts regularly and heavy. (I've watched the varsity - the more advanced subset of them - lift. For legs, they bring out plates that look like freight train wheels to me, and use multiples.)

Right after a hard-fought competition, they look well-muscled, maybe more than some women would prefer, but they look great to me. Here's the thing, though: I've also seen them several hours post-competition at an evening banquet, all dressed up in pretty party dresses, short hems, spaghetti straps, all that kind of thing. Their physical appearance is IMO what almost every woman who wants to look "fit and toned" would hope for.

Ditto for female bodybuilders, who look much more muscle-forward at competitions mainly because of pump, fake tan, oil, and low body weight. At normal walking-around weight, with a thin layer of subcutaneous fat smoothing out appearance, they look enviable to most.

Maybe you already know this, but many don't: Don't be afraid of lifting heavy. Muscle is added slowly. If a woman reaches a look she likes, that will happen gradually, and she can switch to a maintenance routine when she thinks it's appropriate.

Here, this is a good thread:

Scroll through the thread to see more photos.

@NotForJustNowForever @Retroguy2000

. . . who replied upthread can give you better advice on frequency and rep ranges, etc., than I can. I hope he'll come back and do that.

While I've lifted regularly in the past, detailed expertise about that is not my forte. I'm fairly knowledgeable about training for my sport specifically (rowing, on-water in rowing shells, and on machine); somewhat knowledgeable about cardiovascular fitness development more generally; and really only informed about lifting to know what I personally want to do in a rather narrow case that includes some physical limitations.

Happy to help.

Right now I do legs & glutes on Tuesdays & Saturdays, and arms & core & back on Thursdays. I don't know if that makes me over-work the legs and glutes though.

That's perfect. You could actually do arms and core more frequently if you wanted, although you don't have to. In general, more working sets per week means more gain, but with diminishing return and the risk of building fatigue. Larger muscle groups like legs need more rest time though so twice per week is ideal. I'm just saying if core is a particular focus, you could do it more if you wanted. Don't neglect chest. As a new lifter, 10-15 working sets per week per muscle group should be your target. A working set should be challenging, about 2 reps from failure.

I'm 3 years away from 50 and a lot of what I'm doing now (my strength training is slightly vanity)

That's great that you're getting into it! Don't put yourself down calling it vanity though. It has many benefits including strength, bone density, posture, injury prevention (less likely to fall, and less likely to injure yourself if you do), blood markers, appetite, body comp, etc.

My zone 2 1 hour walk isn't ideal for cardiac optimization from what I understand, but it's been the one thing to stabilize my heart rate with no dips below 50 nor peaks above 100 unless highly stressed. It's also been a low intensity way to have stress relief (I listen to awesome music and time passes fast! LOL).

It's a fantastic way to burn fat without adding fatigue which impacts your main workouts.

Re the weights, Ann is correct earlier about the misconceptions. Most guys wish they could build muscle half as fast as most women fear they will, and guys especially younger guys have the benefit of youth and more testosterone than women too. "toned" doesn't really mean much. You can build muscle and lose muscle, and you can gain weight (in a calorie surplus) and lose weight (in a calorie deficit). That's it. If you want to build muscle and strength, it means lifting with intensity (close to failure) and progression (advancing in volume weekly). It also means good nutrition (close to 1g per pound bodyweight, at least 0.7g/lb, or use ideal weight if currently obese), good sleep, low stress, and if in a calorie deficit then not a large one. Even with all that, it takes time and consistency, especially if you're older, especially if you're female.

If you have more questions, feel free to ask.

Good catch! I missed that.

Maybe Retro wouldn't be too shy to say it, but as woman to woman I'm definitely not too shy:

Doing chest exercises isn't likely to make you "lose your assets". It can actually enhance what people sometimes call the perkiness. 😉

I think this may be another case where non-expert people misinterpret how female bodybuilders look at competition time: When a woman diets down to lower teens - sometimes lower - body fat percent for competition . . . well, yeah, assets may be lost. PEDs can worsen that effect. That's not going to happen for a normal woman doing normal strength training, at least not to a greater extent that might happen from losing body fat through weight loss even without strength training.

Now that I'm at a regular keyboard, I also want to comment on something in your PP, and probably yammer on at ridiculous length about it 😬:

My zone 2 1 hour walk isn't ideal for cardiac optimization from what I understand, but it's been the one thing to stabilize my heart rate with no dips below 50 nor peaks above 100 unless highly stressed. 

I wouldn't go as far as saying your walk isn't ideal for cardiac optimization. The fact that you're stabilizing normal HR is a positive sign. I'd also expect you to be seeing resting heart rate gradually become lower, and your post-exercise heart rate return to non-exercise levels more quickly than previously. Super bonus that you're enjoying those walks!

Beyond that, it matters what your goals and current status are. For sure, if someone doesn't yet have a solid cardiovascular base - something that's best achieved from the kind of moderate work you're doing, and sticking with that for quite a while - adding intensity probably isn't a great idea.

There are some additional benefits at some point from relatively small doses of higher-intensity work, but higher intensity cardio is substantially more fatiguing minute for minute than moderate intensity cardiovascular work. It can be easy to overdo high intensity - so many people these days are going for the "daily HIIT workout" kind of thing, and for most of them that's seriously overdoing.

The cost of overdoing when a person has weight-management goals is that fatigue can bleed calorie burn out of the rest of our day(s), because we rest more or move less, possibly in subtle ways. It's sometimes called "energy compensation" or "calorie compensation".

Overdoing isn't necessarily any particular zone or intensity, IMO, in the cardio realm. It's a mismatch between current fitness level and total exercise load. Total load encompasses intensity, duration, frequency, and type of exercise. When a person can mix in some shorter but high intensity cardiovascular work - when they have sufficient fitness base - that's useful for developing well-rounded cardiovascular fitness, including potentially some benefits to general health. However, in a weight management context, the person would need to accept that a shorter intense session may burn fewer calories because of the shorter time, even though it burns more calories per minute.

Sometimes people here - often strength-centric folks - will say that one should never go over zone 2 heart rate because it will cause calorie compensation. I don't agree. I've been quite active in my cardiovascularly-intense sport for over 20 years, and routinely do quite a lot of zone 3 workouts, and often some zone 4 in the mix. (5 zone scheme.) I'm conditioned to it; it's not a big deal, and I don't believe there's a substantial calorie compensation as a result. If I go long on zone 4 workouts, yeah, there can be . . . but in the case of my specific goals, I need some of that in the mix.

FWIW, lifting close to failure is also more fatiguing than stopping lots shorter of failure, but I wouldn't suggest people who are pursuing weight loss stop way short of failure when lifting because of calorie compensation. There are strength and body composition benefits from taking it close; those make it worth doing. I'd also point out that some strength-centric folks tout the high EPOC - excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, a.k.a. "afterburn" of calories - from strength training. Higher intensity cardiovascular exercise also has higher EPOC. There are tradeoffs on both sides.

It's about balance: Finding the right total overall exercise mix for current capabilities, manageably challenging but not over-fatiguing, sensibly progressive on both the strength and cardiovascular fronts, with enough recovery in the schedule (since recovery is where the magic - rebuilding the body better - happens).

Of course, there's also a need to stay with a time budget that allows good overall life balance: Enough time and energy for family, job, home chores, and anything else important to a person. The individual's specific fitness goals also matter in the mix. I'd be torpedoing my own fitness goals if I stuck entirely to zone 2 cardio, for example, even though weight management is also important to me.

For right now, I think what you're doing sounds pretty perfect, presuming you keep going with tuning up your strength training tactics as you learn more, including learning from smart people like Retro.

On the cardiovascular side, the one thing I'd say is that at some point you might want to take a look at an RPE (rate of perceived exertion) scale that correlates perceived exertion with approximate heart rate zones, just as a reality check.

You mention stabilizing routine heart rate in the 50-100 range. That's fine. The issue with heart rate during workouts for cardiovascular fitness progress is that most HRM assume our HRmax is 220 minus age. For a substantial minority of people, that's not true. If I trained with the assumption that 220 minus age was true for me, I'd think HRmax was 151bpm, since I'm 69 (yep, one of those "women in their 50s, 60s, and more" 😉). Since in reality (from testing) it's more like 180, I'd seriously undertrain if I assumed 151. Short of testing, using RPE as a reality check can help. In my case, at 151 bpm, I'm maybe around 85% HRmax, zone 4 in my 5-zone scheme, and it feels the way an RPE scale suggests it would.

I couldn't find a 5-zone chart with both HR and RPE plus good subjective descriptions, but here's one for a 6-zone scheme.

That's from this site: https://chilitri.com/blog/karenparnell01%40hotmail.com/run-training-heart-rate-maf-power-and-pace

I'm not endorsing that site: It may be great, it may be poor . . . but it had a reasonable chart. 😆

I think that when people here tell you here to stick with zone 2, they'd be talking about zone 2 and maybe lower zone 3 in this kind of 6-zone scheme. That does tend to be the sweet spot for many people for adding exercise calories without incurring energy compensation, especially for folks relatively new to training.

FWIW, I'm age 47 (same age as OP), prefer lifting over any other type of exercise, and trying for that slow shedding of fat which is hiding the muscles gained over my lifting "career." To that end, my weekly workout routine is 3-4 days lifting per week, and my cardio is 2-3 walks on a treadmill per week, about an hour each, at a steady pace but with an incline thrown in. When I'm trying to lose fat (like now) I do 3 lifts, 3 walks per week; when trying to build muscle, it's 4 lifts, 2 walks per week. Per the chart Ann threw in, I'd rate my walks as Zone 3 on that scale.

Chalk me up also on the idea that the OP needs to add some pectoral exercises also (word choice intentional to separate the muscular/strength improvement from any cosmetic effect). While it's probably true that many women will not have occasion to push something away ala with the pectoral muscles, there's a synergy effect across the entire muscular system. What I mean is an improvement in one area can improve another, often in non-obvious ways. For example, when I focused upon improving my squat to increase leg strength, I discovered my bench press (pectoral strength) also increased. I firmly believe the reverse can also occur (legs can become stronger due to other muscles growing stronger).

From seeing your posts on another thread, I'd point out that IMO a smart thing you've done on the cardiovascular side is to push the objective intensity of those walks as they became subjectively easier at a given pace and treadmill incline. That's a really good example of what I meant in my previous post about "pay attention to how (you) feel and increase any of the factors in exercise load gradually". That way, you do "more", but don't significantly increase fatigue penalty.

As with strength training at constant weight/reps/sets and the same schedule, doing the same cardiovascular exercise for the same duration, at the same intensity and frequency long term is a fitness-maintenance activity. Maintenance is a legit goal, but if a person wants continuing fitness improvement, they're going to need to increase the challenge in objective terms to keep a manageable challenge in the picture.

OP, your weight loss and diligence with this is commendable.

I'm always second guessing my workout calorie estimations

That's smart. It's best to be conservative with those estimates if your goal is to maintain or lose weight. IMO, if you've been doing this for a while like you have, it's best to track your calories in and track your weight change. That informs you what your TDEE actually is. So e.g. if you're losing one pound per week while on a CI of 2,000 say, then it implies your TDEE is actually 2,500. That is more accurate than estimating activity levels and workout calories. To reduce spikes in the weight tracking data from water retention, sodium levels etc., you can do daily weight checks if needed and make a rolling average.

I've been tracking my weekly weight for a long time, and I correlate that with my weight change to estimate my TDEE based on recent data.

Also I took note of your other recommendations and added the standing calf raise, the Romanian deadlift and added back the chest flyes.

Huzzah! Hopefully that's a chest fly with weights or cables? Ideally you want the pecs to be feeling stretch under load, such that it's hardest in the stretched arms apart position.

I did my weekly RDL yesterday, increased volume to a new high, and my glutes are giving DOMS this morning lol.

[leg raise] I'm still struggling a lot with that one. If I just focus on holding the legs mid air but not touching the ground I feel it in my abdominals (core?). But raising my hips is still heavy so I don't manage to do as many when I do. But it's the goal.

That's a hip flexor exercise as you describe it. Yeah you'll feel a bit in your abs, but your body is hinging at the hip there. Imagine the same body position if standing. It would be like you bending at the waist. Abs do nothing. What you could try instead is bending your knees towards your chest and then raising your hips. That will produce ab flexion. Or another simple option is banded crunch. Anchor the band to the top of a door, kneel facing away, hold the band at the back of your head, and flex your abs to crunch your upper body forward. You can progressive overload this with additional bands or a heavier band.

You're welcome!