Weight lifting for women - Part 2

Tips on building your program

• It is recommended to start with a two or a three day program. You could break the days according to muscle groups targeted, i.e. upper body, lower body, or types of exercises you are doing, i.e. push or pull. You could also do full body exercises each time you are in the gym. This type of workout is often recommended for beginners. Currently, I have a three day break - upper, lower and back (I pay special attention to my back due to posture problems).
• Your program should not take you more than an hour to complete. At the beginning it is recommended to do one exercise per muscle group, i.e. one exercise for biceps, one for pecs (chest), etc. I work out for about 45 minutes.
• To develop your muscles you need to make the workout a little harder each time. It does not need to be a big increase. You can add just one repetition in one set or increase the weight slightly. The strategy I use is to start with a certain weight and 8 reps x 3 sets.  Each workout I increase the reps (sometimes by one, sometimes by more) until I reach 11 reps x 3 sets. Then I increase the weight and go back to 8 reps per set. This is just one strategy, there are millions of others. Importantly, ALWAYS maintain good form.
• Before you start lifting weights, you need to warm up for about 5-10 minutes. Any cardio exercise will do it. You can stretch after the warm up or in between sets. You could also do a warm up set of each exercise with light weight before you go to the heavier weights.  Your session could look something like this: cardio - stretching - exercices with weights - longer stretching. 

Other tips

• Keep an exercise log. It will help you remember what you did on the previous exercise day and will also allow you to monitor your progress. I use an Excel spreadsheet and an iPhone application called iFitness.
• If you don't have access to a gym for some reason, you could train at home. Get a decent set of dumbbells in a garage sale or at a sports store, and build your program using exercises based on dumbbells or body weight. I trained this way for about four months and it worked just fine.
• I recommend spending 20 bucks on a pair of gym gloves. They will spare you some painful moments and give you a better grip on the weights.

If you have questions and I can answer them, I will gladly do so.