In reading Rachel Cosgrove’s blog today, I saw a link to a great article in Women’s Health magazine.  Those of us who weight train regularly, either with free weights, kettlebells, sandbags or other equipment know that the benefits of doing so are numerous.  We don’t need to be sold.  However, it’s sometimes fun to relook those benefits to keep our own motivation high.  Plus we stay ready to freely spout these facts to unsuspecting listeners wherever we go!  Here is an excerpt from the article from Women’s Health, April 2009 (Italics added by me):

Pump Up, Slim Down

If you’ve blown off weight training for fear of bulking up, you’re missing out on the fastest fat-burning method known to woman

Lauren Aaronson

Tired of sweating all over every piece of cardio equipment at the gym and still getting zero love from the scale? You need more iron. Not in your diet—in your hands. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a mere 21 percent of women strength train two or more times a week. What you don’t know: When you skip the weight room, you lose out on the ultimate flab melter. Those two sessions a week can reduce overall body fat by about 3 percentage points in just 10 weeks, even if you don’t cut a single calorie. That translates to as much as three inches total off your waist and hips. Even better, all that new muscle pays off in a long-term boost to your metabolism, which helps keep your body lean and sculpted. Suddenly, dumbbells sound like a smart idea. Need more convincing? Read on for more solid reasons why you should build flex time into your day.

Torch Calories 24/7
Though cardio burns more calories than strength training during those 30 sweaty minutes, pumping iron slashes more overall. A study in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that women who completed an hour-long strength-training workout burned an average of 100 more calories in the 24 hours afterward than they did when they hadn’t lifted weights. At three sessions a week, that’s 15,600 calories a year, or about four and a half pounds of fat—without having to move a muscle.

What’s more, increasing that afterburn is as easy as upping the weight on your bar. In a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, women burned nearly twice as many calories in the two hours after their workout when they lifted 85 percent of their max load for eight reps than when they did more reps (15) at a lower weight (45 percent of their max).

There’s a longer-term benefit to all that lifting, too: Muscle accounts for about a third of the average woman’s weight, so it has a profound effect on her metabolism, says Kenneth Walsh, director of Boston University School of Medicine’s Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute. Specifically, that effect is to burn extra calories, because muscle, unlike fat, is metabolically active. In English: Muscle chews up calories even when you’re not in the gym. Replace 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of lean muscle and you’ll burn an additional 25 to 50 calories a day without even trying.

Target Your Trouble Spots
If you’ve ever tried to ditch the saddlebags and ended up a bra size smaller instead, you know that where you lose is as important as how much. As great as it might be to see the numbers on the scale go down, when you’re on a strict cardio-only program your victory is likely to be empty. A recent study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham compared dieters who lifted three times a week with those who did aerobic exercise for the same amount of time. Both groups ate the same number of calories, and both lost the same amount—26 pounds—but the lifters lost pure chub, while about 8 percent of the aerobicizers’ drop came from valuable muscle. Researchers have also found that lifting weights is better than cardio at whittling intra-abdominal fat—the Buddha-belly kind that’s associated with diseases from diabetes to cancer.

Just don’t rely exclusively on the scale to track your progress in the battle of the bulge. Because muscle is denser than fat, it squeezes the same amount of weight into less space. “Often, our clients’ scales won’t drop as fast, but they’ll fit into smaller jeans,” says Rachel Cosgrove, owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California. And it’s the number on the tag inside your bootcuts you want to get lower, right?

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Weight training women are in the minority.  Let’s change that!

Full article here:   http://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/weight-training-tips

The flow of this session is awesome.  I think it would be a great one to fall back on, when you don’t feel like coming up with a new program for the day.  This is strength and cardio in one – beautiful.

Right hand:  single hand swing, single hand clean, front squat, military press.  Do this up to five times and then do the same with the left hand.  Rest and repeat.

I had been doing this with the 10kg kettlebell and had planned to do the same today.  After the first round, I decided to try it with the 12kg bell, knowing I might have to reduce the reps or number of rounds. (My shoulders are (one of) my weak spot(s) and presses with the 12kg have been a struggle.)  To my surprise, I was able to complete the session with the 12 with no modification at all. 

 YES!!! 

I think I’m seeing the benefit of the Turkish Get Ups.  I know that the press was easier because the preceding movement was a squat, and that my legs helped power the bell up.  However, it was a huge step forward and I am psyched!

That’s what I love about strength training -seeing rewards for your hard work. 

Wise words bring many benefits, and hard work brings rewards. Proverbs 12:14