Sign up FAST! Login

Female geek learns to lift weights


Stashed in: Women, #health, Fitspo

To save this post, select a stash from drop-down menu or type in a new one:

My friend talks about what she learned from lifting weights, which she has done through back pain, near carpal tunnel, and pregnancy. I must confess that heavy deadlifts had exactly the opposite effect on my grip and lower-arm ligaments... but YMMV and I've noticed it seems to vary more on the smaller muscles.

Oh man, these are great!

  • “Lift with your legs” basically means “lift by squeezing your glutes.” These are usually the largest muscles in your body, and basically they are your butt muscles. As my glutes have gotten stronger, my back pain has entirely gone away. In the last two years, I have had two incidents requiring more than a couple hours worth of recovery time. Previous to weight lifting, I’d needed sometimes 5 days to be able to stand up properly from a couch. While injured, I’d had to roll myself down to the floor and slowly push my entire body up, barely able to stand. Of course, this is specific to the injury I have. However, a lot of people sit in terrible chairs, hunched over computers all day and they could really benefit from learning how to strengthen their glutes.
  • Increasing glute strength through barbell lifting from a standing position (squats, deadlifts mostly) improved my posture dramatically. I now get people saying things in passing like “you have great posture”, something that I NEVER heard for the first 35 or so years of my life.
  • I need a lot of protein first thing in the morning to feel well through out the day. I eat two eggs every morning, usually also some yogurt and fruit. Cereal does not cut it. Oatmeal can sometimes be ok if combined with a bunch of other things.
  • Pain does not necessarily mean you are injured. You might just need to stretch something out.
  • Lifting weights when you feel like crap often will make you feel much much better.
  • It doesn’t take very long to get really strong. Within three months, I had dramatic improvements in basic stuff like being able to lift boxes of heavy stuff.
  • Grip strength improves amazingly as you increase the weight of barbell and dumbell lifts. I rarely feel pain in my hands and forearms anymore, and I have a pretty crushing grip.
  • Foam rollers are amazing. I foam roll a bunch of things before I work out and sometimes at home. Currently I’m focused on my t-bands and quads, and sometimes I roll out parts of my arms. My elbows started pinging when I started increasing the weights I used for curls. After I was able to do curls with something like a 55-lb barbell, the tightness and pain went away.

You May Also Like: