The Most Effective Weightlifting Exercises For Women

Let this be your reference guide to the best and most effective weight lifting exercises that are time tested and proven to get results! 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 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.

Within each of these muscle groups are smaller muscles, to keep things simple that’s as far as I will go there but you can find more about specifics in this article from britannica.com. Please see the diagram below for identification and latin names of the muscle groups.

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, as I have NEVER focused on them, that these particular muscles are well enough targeted during normal exercise, they need no additional or 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.

A little bit of weight-lift history…

I like to use, simple, long-time used, weight lifting exercises that require mostly free weights - dumbbells, barbells, and EZ bars. An advancement I appreciate is the smith machine which is a barbell secured to verticle tracks on a square frame. Most machines offered in popular gyms are not necessary and very few are super effective or get results. Machines are best used at the end of any lifting/strength routine as they isolate the muscle and work best to use up the glycogen stores in the targeted muscle to really burn them up.

Weight lifting has been around for a long time, since the early 1800s and certain exercises, like those here, have been tested to the max, performed through and through, and are proven to give the results that the best of the best expect.

Here I’ve listed the most effective weightlifting exercises categorized with the muscles groups they target. They are popularly seen in most workouts, from one day full-body plans for muscle definition and growth and simple, at home, dumbbell routines.

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 exercise that is a multi-joint movement and targets and requires use of more then one muscle group.

ISOLATION EXERCISE
An exercise that is a single joint movment and targets or focuses on a specific muscle.

FAILURE
The point at which an exercise repetition can no longer be properly performed and the muscle is completely depleted/exhausted of energy.