Quote:
Originally Posted by hhm6
Quick question-(this might be a stupid question) but when you weight train do you notice your legs getting bigger than arms or vice versa? I know people say you can't spot reduce, but then I always say people saying 'leg day" aren't they focusing on legs then?? and Do you stay proportional? (Assuming you're proportional to start with?) I feel like as I gained weight, I got top heavy and weight training might accentuate? Does that make any sense at all?
Never a stupid question!! I hope you don't mind if I give an answer here. No, you cannot spot reduce. Example: overweight people doing 100 situps a day thinking they'll have a 6-pack in a month. They will never see their ab muscles if they still remain overweight. The 100 situps will burn calories and you'll lose fat, but not necessarily around your abs, i.e. spot-reducing.
You CAN spot TRAIN your muscles though, if you work hard on your abs, and once you have lost overall body fat to be at a healthy weight, you will be able to see a difference. Think of bodybuilders, they spot train (excessively), and you see them huge and ripped because they have such little fat on their bodies as a whole and they purposely choose which muscles to work on.
If you notice your legs (for example) seemingly bigger, it's likely because the muscles are shaping and growing, yet you haven't lost enough fat around the muscles to make them look lean, though I haven't really seen this in my own body, I can't deny it could happen to others.
If people say they have a "leg day", it likely means that for that specific day, they are focusing their weight training on their lower body, then the next day on their upper body...usually this is either to break up the length of the workout (say 1 hour each day as opposed to 2 hours 3x a week)...another benefit of this is that, if you're committed, you're usually doing weight training 6x a week (M-W-F lower body; T-TH-SA upper body), which means you're keeping your metabolism going more steadily, because working your muscles through weight training heightens the metabolism more than a cardio workout alone.
As for proportional, that would depend on where you store fat I suppose. Mine is stored in my chest and abs so even though my legs look great now, I still have flab on my abs and a big bustline.
I don't think any woman should be leery of weight training, the only way you will look bulky is if you eat too many calories and keep a layer of fat on your
body while actually lifting weights for the purpose of body building.
All of my information comes from over a decade of reading books written by various bodybuilders, fitness gurus and health experts. Also, from talking to wrestlers and martial artists (I was lucky through my job to have met a lot of them one year), also through personal experience.