Hard work includes lifting heavier weights

It's not enough to progress from lifting the Barbie 'bells fifteen times to lifting them twenty times. It may be an accomplishment -that is, the result of purposeful and exhausting work-but it's not going to make muscles bigger. Muscles grow for a variety of reasons, but the main one is strength. If you force them to get stronger, they will get bigger. If you start lifting 100 pounds five times , but train your body to lift 1 50 pounds five times, you're going to end up with bigger muscles. But if you start off lifting 50 pounds ten times, and progress to lifting the same 50 pounds fifteen times, all you've done is increase the endurance of the muscles, which by itself will not make them bigger.You'll rarely see a woman lifting weights with bad form in a gym. And you'll almost always see at least one man slinging iron around with technique so miserably wrong you want to dial 9 and 1 on your cell phone just to save time when the inevitable spinebuckling accident occurs. In between the extremes, you'll see lots of guys pushing themselves out to the edge of acceptable form to get an extra repetition in their final set of an exercise, or to hit a new personal record on a lift. If nothing else, you'll probably see guys lift at a variety of speeds, perhaps shifting into a faster gear near the end of a set to help them complete more repetitions. The more experienced a male lifter is, the more he learns to trust his own body and his own instincts. (Alas, inexperienced lifters often feel the same way, even if their instincts haven't yet earned that trust.) But you'll rarely see a woman deviate from the textbook description of the exercise. And when it comes to the tempo of her lifts, she performs them like clockwork, even if it means she has to use un challenging weights to make such precision possible. I'd never advocate lifting with bad form. But there 's more to strength training than coloring inside the lines. Part of the problem is fear. When women are introduced to the weight room, they're taught that there's only one way to perform each exercise, and that small adjustments to accommodate individual biomechanics will put her in the ER. If anybody tries to instill such fear in a man, the sound magically stops before it reaches his eardrums. To make things worse, women are sometimes presented with cautions that have little basis in the real world, creating fear of injury when the actual risk is non-existent. For example, in the book Body for Life for Women, the author offers this instruction for a simple shoulder press: "Press the weights up until your arms are almost straight (with your elbows just short of locked) ." Since the author is Pamela Peeke, M.D., and not some garden-variety personal trainer or celebrity who decided to expand her investment portfolio by writing a workout book, you'd assume the anti-elbow-straightening precaution has a basis in science. That is, straightening your arms at the elbow joints must be bad for you. It's not. In all my years of writing about strength training, and in all my months of studying for my credentials as a trainer, I've never come across any suggestion of injury risk from this simple movement. More to the point, elbows are supposed to lock. It's called "straightening your arms. " The triceps muscles are designed to straighten your elbows until they reach that locked position. If you don't lock, you don't work your triceps through their full range of motion, which means you don't get the full benefits of the elbow-straightening exercise you' re performing. My issue here isn't with the idea that people should exercise with caution, and I'm not arguing for more reckless abandon in the weight room. What I am saying is that your body has natural movement patterns, which support a range of variations. Maybe all strength-training precautions can be reduced to these two sentences: If it's what your body was designed to do, it's probably not bad form. And if the exercise requires you to do something unnatural, you should think twice before doing it. I realize that the word "natural" isn't always helpful in early twenty-first-century America, where humans spend much of the day sitting at desks or driving cars, two actions that no one would argue our bodies evolved to perform. To me, a "natural" position or movement is one you would assume or perform in an athletic activity. Picture yourself playing volleyball, getting ready to return the other team's serve. Your feet are parallel to each other, perhaps shoulder-width apart, with toes pointed forward. Your knees are bent slightly. (You'd never play any sport with stiff knees; you'd be virtually immobile.) Your lower back is arched slightly. Your shoulders are square, and your midsection's tight. That's what a human body looks like when it's ready for physical action, whether that action is a game, a hunt, or a wrestling match. Now picture a typical woman standing at the cable station in a typical gym, getting ready to perform triceps extensions. (In case you're new to lifting, the extension is an elbow-straightening exercise, usually done with a straight bar attached to the cable.) Her feet are together, her knees are locked, her lower back is flat, and her shoulders are hunched up toward her ears. In other words, she's in the opposite of an athletic position, despite the fact she's about to do an exercise that, in theory, will make her body more athletic. Workout advice for women is riddled with allusions to making muscles "longer. " I started noticing it a few years ago at the front end of the Pilates craze. In fact, I was on a panel at a conference with an editor from a women's magazine who, in discussing fitness trends, said that women didn't want to build "bulky" muscles; instead, they wanted "long, lean muscles, like a dancer's," and they could get these muscles from Pilates. I started laughing (not my most gracious moment, I admit) , and wondered if I should start telling my readers at Men 's Health that our workouts could make them taller. The poor woman looked stunned; I don't think it had occurred to her that her pro-Pilates sentiments were nothing more than propaganda. The reality is this: muscles, as aforementioned, have a genetically predetermined shape. If you train and feed a muscle so that it grows, you can't choose whether the muscle becomes "bulky" or "long and lean, like a dancer's," any more than you can choose your own height. I won't claim men are inherently reality-based-I've gotten e-mails from more than one guy asking how he can get "ripped abs, like Brad Pitt" (my answer: "For starters, you'll need his parents ")-but I 've never had anyone ask me how he can make his muscles "longer. " It just doesn't occur to guys to think of their bodies as being that malleable. That said, I think both genders fall for the entirely fallacious notion that by doing a particular person's workout, they can have a physique like that person. Anyone in the business of publishing bodybuilding magazines will tell you that the surest way to sell more copies than usual is to slap a black-and-white picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover, and promise Schwarzeneggerian results with the workout routine inside. For some reason, it never occurs to anyone that Arnold was the only guy in the history of bodybuilding who ever looked like Arnold. Logically, that suggests a one-of-a-kind quirk in Schwarzenegger 's genetic code, something that allowed him to achieve unique physical proportions that were simply unattainable by anyone else. Same goes for whichever model or actress is on the cover of Shape or Fitness or Self this month. You can use their "Exclusive Stay-Slim Workout Secrets !" from now till doomsday, but there 's not a chance in a million you'll emerge with a belly, shank, or rump like that celebrity unless your genetics allow it. Another idea I'd like to dispel, while I'm at it: Let's say you accept the impossibility of developing a celebrity's proportions without being a clone of that celebrity. Chances are, you still believe that you can achieve a "type" of physique if you train like people who have that type. Magazines feed this notion, rarely stated in so many words, by showing tall, lean models doing workouts that promise readers a long, lean physique. Of course, this makes perfect sense from the magazines ' point of view. They aren't going to sell many copies if they show short, chunky women in their workout features. But you have to understand that the models doing the workouts are just that. They were cast by the photo editors specifically because they already have what the feature promises. If the exercises in the feature are unique, you can bet the model is doing them for the first time. She had that body when she walked in the door of the photo studio, and she'll still have it when she walks out. That's why she's a model. An obvious point? Okay. But raise your hand if you believe that running will make you look like a runner. If your hand isn't in the air, you're probably not being honest with yourself. Don't you believe that running makes you lose weight, and that successful runners are skinny because they run? Isn't that why you, or people you know, turn to endurance exercise as the first step in a weight-loss program? I'm not going to tackle the myths and realities of long-distance locomotion until Chapter 3, and I won't for a second argue that women are more susceptible to the seductive strains of "Build a Dancer's Body! " than men are to the testosterone-soaked dream of "Build Arms Like Arnold's! " But if we don't start this relationship with a firm grasp of the reality of our undertaking, it's just not going to work. And if it doesn't work, you'll go right back to toning, shaping, and sculpting, not to mention living in fear of being bulky. Even worse, if things really go bad, I may have to go back to writing articles about Brad Pitt's abs. Nobody wants that.