If you belong to the gym for the purpose of using the step class, maybe a bit of swimming or racquetball to help your figure, you may have walked by the weight room from time to time. When you look in there, what’s the one thing you notice right away? For me it’s that it’s a room full of men. This is one room that women seem to have fled in favor of more “feminine” exercises. And the reasons that female weight training has not taken off is largely grounded in misunderstandings and fears that are simply not based in fact.

Female weight training can do a world of good for the female body as much as it does for men who give themselves to the discipline. When you looked in that weight room, the guys who have developed their muscles to the point that they are huge muscular “supermen” are the ones that get your attention first.

But if you look past those guys, you might not have noticed dozens of everyday guys that you might encounter anywhere in life using weight lifting to define tone and build muscle, not to lift a car with their teeth but to be fit for everyday life. And women have the same physical demands on their bodies during everyday life as men if not more.

So to, weight training can benefit everyday normal women just like you and I and it doesn’t have to transform our bodies into massively bulked out behemoths that would scare off husbands and boyfriends alike. The truth of the effect of female weight training on the female form is that the typical outcome of a well designed and faithfully followed weight lifting discipline is the opposite of that image of the superwomen we see in Olympic competition or on the covers of weight lifting magazines.

That image of the bulked out women is an aberration to how the female body works. To achieve that look, those women have to subject to themselves to a very carefully crafted lifestyle of weight lifting, diet control, chemical supplements (yes THOSE chemical supplements) and scientific and technically complicated programs to make their bodies look like that.

The truth is the female body is not designed to look like that. Instead, a program of weight lifting that a trainer can put together for you can give you new muscle tone and “core” muscle strength that will simply make the daily physical demands of life less difficult and less prone to give you aches and pain at night. And as you grow stronger, your shape will not become masculine and disfigured. Instead the new muscle tone will enhance your posture and put you at ease “in your own skin” in a way that will make you more shapely and feminine than ever.

So let’s stop running from the weight room and discover the good that the men have so carefully kept to themselves. It will benefit our daily lives, the way we react to change, aging and even pregnancy and it will even fight common feminine problems such as osteoporosis that can be so debilitating in older women. These benefits all dictate that we run TO the weight room and not away from it so we can learn the secrets of weight training for good help today and for all of our lives.