Either way, I ended up at work the next week with pain that made it difficult to sit for any length of time. The pain made my Pilates and yoga classes even more difficult. After some rest and stretching I’ve gotten back to my usual routine, but it got me thinking. I consider myself to have a pretty strong core. I do Pilates several times a week and never neglect the less popular core muscles (transverse abdominis, erector spinae) in favor of working my six pack muscles. I make sure my movements are slow and controlled, with deep breathing and a focus on quality over quantity.

You may take this to mean that it doesn’t matter what you do or how good of shape you are in, you can still get injured. I guess that’s true, but I look at it as a sign that what I’ve been doing has paid off. It took a lot of abuse before my back let me know it wasn’t happy. Imagine I’d strained it lifting a heavy box or that it simply hurt due to lack of muscle strength. After the strain I got back on my feet pretty quickly. Because of my experience with strength and flexibility training I knew what I could and could not do and worked my way up to being pain-free. I feel sorry for people who haven’t experienced how healing strength training and can be.

Also most people are trying to get through their workouts as quickly as possible so long-lasting reps aren’t really a priority. I know this because I occasionally have to fight my own urges to throw form out the window and allow momentum to power me through a hard set.

But I know deep down that if I’m not doing my reps right I might as well not be doing them at all. I want my body to be strong, but I also want to work the right muscles and maintain good posture. And I don’t want to risk an injury by swinging weights around instead of controlling them.

Take your time to lower the weight.

So here’s the deal. Most of the time you should be lifting and lowering weights slowly, especially if you are relatively new to resistance training. About two seconds for the beginning part of the movement (the concentric contraction)  and four seconds to bring the weight back to the starting position (the eccentric contraction). That means two seconds to curl a dumbbell up with your bicep and four seconds to lower it back down.

If you really want to speed your workout up, try cutting down on the amount of time you rest between exercises instead.

A word of warning – the slower you go the less weight you’ll be able to lift. But that’s a good thing because you’ll know your muscles are actually strong enough to handle it. So start slowing down for faster results.

Most experts say it is safe to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week, although we’ve all seen contestants on The Biggest Loser drop twice that amount in a day (that’s another issue for another time). So if someone has become overweight by eating 3,000 calories a day, wouldn’t it be safe to assume they’d still lose a healthy amount of weight by cutting that down to 2,000?

It  takes many years for people to become overweight, why make them feel like a failure by expecting them to take it all back off in a matter of months through something so torturous as starvation? Seriously…if the average moderately active woman requires about 2100 calories a day, why change that formula if you don’t have to (I understand that there are other factors for certain people to consider and they should follow the advice of healthcare professionals). It is just reinforcing the idea that weight maintenance is about sporadic dieting and not an overall healthy lifestyle.

In one very basic way a human body is like a car. It requires fuel to run. But it is obviously much more complicated. Without fuel a car simply won’t run, whereas the human body will continue to run using stored energy. It sounds good for people wanting to get rid of excess fat. Quit giving your body food and it will start to use stored fat for energy.

But using stored energy comes at a big cost. The body reacts to a limited supply of fuel by conserving it and burning fewer calories. And when the body doesn’t get the right amount of calories for maintenance it uses muscle as well as fat for fuel, which can decrease metabolism further. So when the day comes that you discontinue your diet, and it will, you’ll be eating the same as before but with a body that can no longer burn calories as efficiently as it once could. I hope that analogy makes sense and has you questioning the value of restrictive diets. If you’re exercising while dieting, there’s even more you should consider.

So that must mean a routine consisting of Pilates and light weights is the answer? Not even close.

There is one main reason certain women appear to have long, lean muscles – they have less body fat than the rest of us. Take the same body and add or subtract 50 pounds. I guarantee you the lighter version will appear a lot longer and leaner. It’s more about what is overlying the muscle than the muscle itself. Any exercises that causes your body to shed fat will help you achieve the long, lean look.

Of course this is not always true you’re probably thinking. Just look at female bodybuilders. Well if you haven’t read our page on female muscle myths I won’t fault you for that belief. The truth is women need a lot of help to gain a significant amount of muscle. This can come in the form of a diet high in protein and muscle building supplements, coupled with frequent high volume strength training involving plenty of isolation exercises. Sometimes it also involves steroids. Without all that there’s no way the rest of us will ever come close.

The way your muscle will look has a lot more to do with genetics. Muscles can only be as long as the distance between their attachments. Your biceps femoris isn’t going to grow any longer than your upper arm, no matter how many reps you complete with a three pound dumbbell. Even worse, if you’re strictly using light weights the muscle not only won’t lengthen, it won’t grow in size or strength either.

A better plan of attack would be to fix your posture. If your shoulders are rounded forward and your back is hunched of course you’re going to look shorter. Work on strengthening the muscles that pull your shoulders back and improve posture (such as the rhomboids) and stretching the muscles that are tight and pulling you into that forward position (pectorals). And put down the baby weights. You should be pumping enough iron to hit momentary muscle fatigue after 8 – 15 repetitions (that means you’d have to cheat on your form to complete another one).

Why you should want muscle– Aside from the fact that a tight, toned body looks great? How about that it feels great to be strong and capable of taking on anything life throws at you. It’s an unbeatable feeling when you can finally lift that weight you never thought you could or when you finally spot the first signs of definition in your shoulders. Then there’s the fact that having more muscle means having a higher metabolism.

How to keep the muscle you’ve got – Here’s the bad news, if you haven’t so much as lifted a 2 lb dumbbell in the past few years your body’s percentage of muscle is already decreasing. And the older you get the quicker muscle makes its retreat. But just one day a week of resistance training can stop the decline. Bump that up to two or three days a week and you’ll start gaining back muscle that’s been lost and then some. Just ask yourself, do you have 30 minutes to spare?

The best way to get more muscle – This one’s easy, lift weights. The more often you lift a certain weight, the better your body becomes at doing it. Your muscles grow and adapt to become more efficient. The weight you once struggled to finish 12 repetitions with will feel like a breeze in a few weeks or months time. At that point simply increase the weight or up the repetitions for more challenge. If you don’t have access to weights, no problem. Resistance bands are a cheap alternative and work just as well. You can also get an awesome total body workout using no equipment whatsoever. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, just a few sessions with an understanding personal trainer can give you the confidence you need to continue muscle building and toning on your own.