#111: 6 Strength Training Mistakes Midlife Women Make at the Gym (and how to fix them)

Are you unknowingly sabotaging your strength training progress?

If you’ve started lifting weights, this episode is a must-listen. 

Over the years, I’ve seen some common mistakes women make in the weight room - most of them with the best intentions. 

But the truth is, these well-meaning habits could be slowing you down or holding you back.

In this episode I’m sharing 6 mistakes I see women making in the gym—and what to do instead so you can get better results in less time.

You'll learn: 

• The biggest strength training mistakes I see women making 
• Why more sets and more exercises don’t always lead to more results
• How to get better results in less time by training smarter

Tune in to make sure you're not leaving results on the table! 

Resources mentioned in this episode: 

• Sign up for the next Midlife Fat Loss Blueprint Workshop >> 
• Learn more about my Lift with Lynn Membership >> 

Transcript

Welcome to 40+ fitness for women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women in midlife to get their bodies back to where they want them to be. So being strong, fit, firm, and lose fat. And I'm really excited actually today, it is Friday, the sun is shining, and this was one of the, let's say, most work filled two weeks of my business, because not only on Monday did I do a webinar on menopausal fitness, and I did it in Finnish, so I live in Finland.

And I am actually, I was born here, but raised in the U. S. So I did that webinar in Finnish. It's the first time I've presented this material in Finnish. So, oh my God, that was stepping slightly [00:01:00] outside my comfort zone, but that's over. And then after that on Thursday, so last night I gave my fat loss workshop, so my midlife fat loss blueprint workshop for the very first time.

So really the recipe, the blueprint, the instructions for losing fat in midlife. And I think it went really well. I had a lot of people sign up for that. And so now I'm feeling like. Whew. Maybe something a little calmer going forward. And by the way, if you missed the fat loss workshop and you are interested in losing some fat before summer, then get on the wait list for the next one because I will be doing another one soon.

I haven't decided on the date. I'll decide that next week. So get on the wait list. So you are sure to hear about it when it's available. 

[00:02:00] All right, so today's topic is actually about common mistakes that I see people making in the weight room, because I know a lot of you have taken the information that I've given you in this podcast and you're running with it.

And I think that is amazing that so many women have been inspired to get started with the weight training. So I wanted to go through the kinds of errors that I see so you can double check that you are not making these. And now I've made a list of six that came to mind like did them very quickly and let's go through those and remember that I'm always talking about these things from the point of view of being a as efficient as possible, getting as much bang for your minute that you're spending training, because if you're anything like me, you are busy and [00:03:00] you don't have time to just waste in the weight room.

Unlike my 17 year old son, who can hang out there with his friends for two hours a day and kind of do this, that, and the other. A lot of us, we just need to get in and out and we want the results. We want to know that what we're doing matters. And by the way, I will plug my membership program at this point, because if you are tired of trying to figure these things out for yourself, I have the membership where I do the programming for you so you can just focus on going, you know, showing up and doing your training and let me take care of all the hassle of thinking about what exercise should I do and how do I combine these exercises and, you know, am I hitting all my muscles? Am I being redundant? What am I doing? All right. 

So, but here we go with the mistakes that I'm seeing.

So the very first one actually has to do with [00:04:00] redundancy in exercises. So when you are training, you want to choose exercises that hit all the parts of your body that you are trying to hit in that training session. But it doesn't really help you much to do a bunch of different exercises that are all training the same thing, training the same movement pattern or training the same muscles.

So for example, you will see somebody who goes in and it's actually, this example comes very much from men. , and young boys, they go in and they're like, I'm training arms today. And they do four different variants of bicep curls and they do four sets of each and really, they could just choose one or max two different bicep curls and do two to four sets of each and they would be golden for that day for their bicep [00:05:00] curls. Because the thing is that each working set that you do is going to be less bang for your buck than the one before.

So the first working set that you do is going to be the most stimulating for your muscles. The next one's going to be a little bit less stimulating. The next one, a little bit less stimulating the next, a little bit less stimulating. 

And as you increase your volume, you also generally increase how much recovery you need before you can train that muscle again. So ideally, you're not doing a whole bunch of redundant sets. And one thing that I see for women in a lot of these free online Uh, training sessions that you see, and clients have shared them with me.

This is what I've been doing. I see that, okay, yeah, it's a bunch of different exercises, but they're basically doing the exact same thing. So rather do something that is training something [00:06:00] different rather than three or two exercises that are doing the exact same thing. So for example, different squat patterns, somebody may have, you know, two, three, or four different squat patterns in the same workout, and you don't need all that redundancy.

It's not going to speed up your results. All right, so redundancy was the first thing that I see, so it really comes down to good programming, somebody who understands biomechanics and how to assemble a good program for you.

The second thing is kind of related to this, which is the too many sets. So I see this, especially with the young women, but also with some older women that they're clearly trying to work on some specific body part and often it's glutes and they're doing like a million sets. I could go into the [00:07:00] gym. And they're there doing hip thrusts.

And when I leave the gym 45 minutes or an hour later, they're still doing hip thrusts. And of course, you know, they're taking the three to five minute breaks because they're lifting heavy and all that. But honestly, same thing as I mentioned earlier, that each set that you do of that same exercise working that same muscle group is going to be less stimulatory than the one before. So Honestly, two to four sets if you're doing good working sets is plenty. And then go train something else. Okay. 

Then number three and number four are kind of two sides of the same coin. The first one, number three is women who are not challenging themselves enough. Now, if you can be chatting with your friend or talking on the phone or, you know, [00:08:00] your first rep is as fast as your last rep, you are not challenging yourself enough.

Okay. In the very beginning, when you're first starting out weight training, it can be lighter because you're getting your body used to the motions and doing the various movement patterns. But pretty soon, you should get to the point where you're challenging yourself and those last reps are experiencing an involuntary slowdown because you are really pushing your muscles.

So make sure you're challenging yourself enough. Otherwise you're not going to have the progress, right? I've talked about this before, that if you are jogging and you always took off and you ran around the same circuit, maybe once around your block and you kept the same pace each time you went out running, you are not going to develop.

And it's the same thing with the weight training. If you're always doing the same thing and not challenging yourself, [00:09:00] you are not going to develop.. 

And then on the other hand, I see the ego lifting. So this is number four. And what ego lifting means is that people get a little bit too focused on, Oh, I want to lift a lot of weight, 

they know I should be lifting heavy. I should be progressing. I should be increasing my weights over time. But what happens is they're increasing their weights when their bodies are not actually lifting. strong enough to increase their weights. And so what happens is they decrease their range of motion.

And this I see a lot in things like squats, where they become these teeny tiny little squats, you've got an impressive amount of weight on your back, but it's like this teeny tiny little squat. And Uh, Bulgarian split squats is another one where I see this, where they're like these little curtsies, you've got massive weights, but then you do this teeny tiny curtsy, and then you're back up [00:10:00] instead of a deep knee bend to work the full range of motion.

Because remember, what we want to do is we want to be strong. And when you're thinking about things like squats or split squats or reverse lunges, all these kinds of motions, What you're training really is your ability to get up off the floor or the ground when you're older. And when you're on the ground, if you think about when you're getting up off the ground or the floor, you're usually on one knee and then you put the other foot on the floor and then you hoist yourself up.

That is a very deep knee bend, so we want to be Stimulating that as much as possible in our training. So make sure you're doing the full range of motion in your training and not ego lifting. Your muscles don't care what the number on the dumbbell is they care about what is [00:11:00] the level of challenge you're providing them.

And the level of challenge is going to be greater with the bigger range of motion. Now I will say that obviously some of us, including me, have wear and tear on our bodies. I have an arthritic knee. I cannot do full full depth on let's say a leg press machine because my knee just won't tolerate it, so you do need to take those kinds of things into account, but if you can, go as low as you can go, go do the full range of motion as much as your body will allow. All right, so that was number four.  

Number five is, and this surprises me always, these women who come in and they don't take advantage of all the amazing equipment that you have in a weight room. And instead they grab a rubber band or they [00:12:00] grab a dumbbell and they go do like a little session in the corner over there. 

And I'm thinking to myself, Oh, wow there are the weight stacks over there. There's a machine over there, which would allow you to challenge your muscles even better than that rubber band or that dumbbell, but they're just not making use of the equipment. And this is another place where. You really could chat with a personal trainer or get one of my programs that will really get you using the equipment in the weight room to challenge your muscles a bit better okay.

And then number six is about doing cardio with weights rather than weight training. So this, usually I see it as a group of women who come in and they're like, we're going to get fit. And they grab some dumbbells [00:13:00] and there'll be three or four of them. And they'll set up a little circuit that they work on.

And they are Doing maybe they would do some exercises that could be considered weight training like that you would have in a weight training program, but instead of taking a break between sets, they start like jumping onto a step board or doing some burpees or something like that, which is not allowing their body to recover between sets and then, you know, do the next set with full intensity.

, They're bringing their cardio with weights. In other words, they're kind of doing, uh, a group fitness class, but just the three or four of them and. Well, and I'll say as somebody who lifts weights, it's a little bit annoying because they end up taking a lot of space around there as they set up their little cardio station and their weight training station.

And it's like, okay guys, go to the class if you [00:14:00] want to do the classes. And if you want to weight train, then this, this is the place to do that. And they would really get so much better results if they would just do the quote unquote boring strength training. It may seem boring. It may not be.

You may feel like you're doing less. I mean, they're probably feeling more. kind of winded and their calorie meters are telling them, on their watches that they've burned more calories during their session than I have in mine as I do my one minute set and then stand there for three minutes, 

but which one of us is putting on more muscle? For sure me. . So those were probably the biggest ones that I've noticed. 

All right, and with that, I hope that you will improve upon your strength training practices based on these mistakes that I'm seeing. And if you want help with your programming, then by [00:15:00] all means, Join my membership. I am always happy to have more women in there and more information on the membership can be found on my website, www. befitafter40. com/membership. So it's that simple. And the link is in the show notes. And with that, I wish you a wonderful week ahead and happy training.