My doc said easy with weights.....which is fine because I don't think girls look good with big muscle anyway.......not even an option to go there. I am just wanting to be toned.
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Rani, lifting weights is not bad if you know how to do it.
If you want to tone, you do more repetitions (10-12)with less weight (about 55-60% of your max)..
If you want to build bulk, you do less repetitions (5-8) with heavier weight (about 70% of your max).
I grew up on the swim team. We lifted weights for strength and didn't want bulk, as the bulk slows you down (aerodynamics in water LOL!). So we used less weight with more repetitions. (Yes, we even had girls lifting with us - gigity, gigity).
One day when I was a freshman in high school, I decided to see how much I could lift (Max out). I was lifting regularly back then. So I went off on my own and had 210 lb on the stack for the bench machine, and a football player came by with his buddy and said, "you can't do that much."
It made me want to lift it even more. I did get it up with a little struggle, but Sean couldn't believe it. He turned to his buddy and said, "We're not leaving here today until we can lift 200 lbs) - he had no clue how lifting weights works....
When you lift weights, you "tear down" the muscle. Then it takes a day for it to "rebuild" itself back, a little stronger. Then you lift again, and rest that muscle another day while it rebuilds. You don't want to work the same muscle two days in a row. Always give it a day to rebuild itself back. Each time it rebuilds itself, it gets stronger.
Another swimmer out squatted him a few days later. He came up to me in the locker room all upset asking, "why do you swimmers look so whimpy, but lift more weights than us football players?"
I had to knock his ego down a notch and replied, "You're not the big **** that you think that you are..."
Then a few weeks later, we were doing our physical fitness testing and the coach gave a little talk about "I don't care how much you can lift, it's the guys that can do the most pull ups that are strong..."
I was one of only 3 guys in the class to do over 20 pull ups. Our gym coach (who was also the wrestling coach) approached me and asked me to try out for the wrestling team. I had to decline because swimming was the same season as wrestling, and I was a swimmer (had been since I was 4 years old).
There was also a girl on the swim team that I started on when I was younger that was also a "lifer" swimmer. She had two older brothers that were also on our team. She bench pressed 150 lbs as a freshman in high school - embarrassing a bunch of guys in her class. She was gorgeous also and didn't have "man arms" like the woman body builders. She was just very strong from swimming all of those years. If she didn't look to "manly", I don't think that you will have anything to worry about.
