The Most Effective Weight Lifting Exercises For Women

Let this be your reference guide to the best and most effective weight lifting exercises I use in my workouts so you will never be caught stranded during a workout or left clueless in the gym.

This guide is a straight forward, easy to understand introduction to the most popular and very basic weight lifting exercises, categorized in an easy to read format with the targeted muscles or muscle groups and a few common terms used in fitness that I will explain at the end. Scroll down to see these awesome exercises right away or read on to learn more.

Let’s get started!

Muscle groups defined:

We have three body sections, upper, middle, and lower. Upper is comprised of the neck, traps, chest, upper back and arms - shoulders, biceps, triceps, and forearms. Middle is our abdominals and lower back. The lower body is quads (top leg front), glutes (top rear), hamstrings (back of the leg), and calves. Please see the diagram below for identification and latin names.

For a more in-depth look at the muscles please see this article from elevatenutriotion.com.

Before we dive too deep I want to make clear that I do not focus on neck, traps, or calves in my workouts. It is my honest belief for woman that these particular muscles are well enough targeted during normal exercise that they need no more special attention. However, if you feel they need attention by all means work them, there’s no harm. That said, you will not see exercises related to these parts in the below lists of exercises.

I like to use basic and long-time used weight lifting exercises that require mostly free weights, these are dumbbells, barbell, and EZ bars. I also really like the smith machine which is a barbell secured to verticle tracks. I will list some machines as I do like them for isolating the muscles and they’re best used at the end of a routine to finish off and really burn up the muscle they target.

Weight lifting has been around for a very long time so certain exercises, restassured have been tested to the max, performed through and through and are proven to give the results that the best of the best expect.

The following are all of my favorite exercises categorized with the targeted muscle groups. You will find them used in my workout plans, from one day full-body workouts, plans for muscle definition and growth, and simple at home dumbbell workouts.

There are certain terms I use and you’ll see in my workouts that you should be familiar with. They are also great to know when exploring the world of fitness on your own.

Exercise/workout terms and their definitions:

SET
A set is a collection of repetitions performed consecutively without rest.

REPETITION
A representation of the single, full motion for any one specific exercise, repeated.

CIRCUIT
A group of different exercises performed one after the other with no rest, completing a full “set” for each exercise.

COMPOUND/SUPER SET
Performing one set of a specific exercise then immediately performing a second exercise immediately after with little to no rest. Often targets opposing muscles or muscle groups.

DROP SET
Performing a set of repetitions for a specific exercise to failure then immediately lowing the weight, perform the exercise repeat til failure, lower the weight again, repeat til failure. Typically 5-10 pounds is taken off each time for a given exercise.

COMPOUND EXERCISE
An single exercise that targets more then one muscle group at a time.