10 Top Tips To Get Women Started In Lifting

Lift, lift, lift. That’s all we keep telling you…

Sign up for our free plans, and get started today…

We’ve got all the workout categories to support your goals…

We’ve got an entire website exceeding 1000 pages of workouts, information and all the fun lifting stuff.

But I get it, piecing it all together can feel like a minefield. Especially if you haven’t even started lifting yet.

Where Do You Start?

What should you be looking for?

What to do?

When to do it?

How often?

With what intensity?

And how will you know how to perform each exercise?

What weight to use?

How heavy is “heavy”?

And that’s not even half the questions that I am sure go on in the minds of aspiring female lifters.

So if you’re interested in lifting and you want support getting started, let me help you. Please. The pleasure is all mine.

Lifting Weights Is Empowering

I harp on about this A LOT on this website and in my emails to those on our mailing list (which you can join free on the top bar if you like lifting stuff to land in your inbox). So I will keep this section here very short.

Lifting is an incredibly empowering sport for a woman, and it is this feeling of empowerment that came over me in my powerlifting days that encouraged me to start Lipstick Lifters.

Honestly, you have to feel it to believe it.

That’s why I want to encourage and support you in getting started.

If you start lifting, and keep lifting, because it empowers you and you feel great. My job is done.

10 Tips To Get Women Started In Lifting

Do some research:

Explore the internet and socials for inspiring women who lift.

While I don’t recommend that you blindly follow another woman's plan (because you are not her, you should find the thing that works for you, more on that later). I do 100% recommend using other women's experience with lifting to empower you to start.

Learn about the different types of lifting, we tend to use “weightlifting” as a generic term, but there is weight lifting in general, and also powerlifting, bodybuilding, strength training, Olympic lifting, strongwoman training and calisthenics.

You might even find your passion in boxing, martial arts or CrossFit. How will you know if you don’t explore your options?

Decide which lifting style you’d like to explore:

As I mentioned above, there are various different lifting styles, and while you don’t have to commit your life to one, you should choose a method and stick with it long enough to reap the long term benefits. If after some months, or even years, you decide you want to switch, that’s fine, many lifters do.

Get in a gym:

Join a gym with a good selection of free weights and machines.

There is a lot to be said for home gyms and workaround exercises, but the best advice I can give to an absolute beginner is to get into a well equipped gym to learn.

The reason for this is because it exposes you to the best equipment, and you get to casually observe other lifters using the equipment. This will help with your learning and progression.

If you’re brave enough, ask for help. Most seasoned lifters are more than happy to support you. Just don’t interrupt mid-set, wait for an appropriate time to approach.

Think about your body parts:

This is essential for long term success in lifting.

You’ll struggle to get the best results if you just aimlessly do exercises you like.

Think about which parts of your body you want to focus on and build your plan around that.

Start with a simple upper/lower split:

Even with your target body parts in mind, you shouldn’t neglect any muscle groups. So start with a simple upper/lower body split.

That means you train your upper body in one workout and your lower body in the next, followed by a rest or light cardio day.

The way to work your target muscles in is to add key exercises into the respective plan.

For example; if you’re keen to grow your glutes, you make sure you have a compound glute exercise in your lower body plan and an isolation glute exercise.

Add weight slowly:

When you start working with weights, start light.

Your priority to begin with should be to master the movement with a full range of motion and good form.

Don’t add weight to sloppy sets.

With experience, (a lot of experience), you can get away with this, because you’ll know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

But in the beginning, don’t take part in that game. Just get really good at performing the movement in its entirety and then gradually add weight to it.

Don’t get bogged down into “what works”:

I’m going to tell you a secret that most people working in this industry won’t tell you…

It all works.

Yep, that’s right, I said it.

It doesn’t actually matter what you do strength wise in the gym, as long as you show up to do it.

What you should be worried about is; what are you going to stick to? What do you think you can show up a few times a week, at least, consistently, to do, over and over again?

Everything else you need to get results will come to you in the process, with experience.

Go outside:

Besides lifting, hiking is my second passion. Getting out in nature and climbing a mountain is as liberating as it is an excellent workout.

A mountain climb will humble the strongest of lifters, because it’s a completely different workout that still relies on you to be physically strong, especially if you get a trail where you have to do some scrambling.

The movements that you are forced to do when working with nature are very different to the movements we do in our everyday lives and in the gym.

So now you are building strength from a different perspective.

Would you climb the side of a mountain for a moment of peace with this view? I literally took this photo yesterday.

Force yourself to show up:

Getting started is often the hardest hurdle for many women to pass. How do you show up to do the workout time after time?

You just show up. There is no magic trick here, it’s on you to show up for the workout, same way it’s on you to show up to work every day, or show up to prepare a meal for your kids.

Cut yourself some slack and don’t be so hard on yourself. The “go hard or go home” mantra is toxic and not what you want to benchmark yourself against.

Instead, focus on showing up as often as you can for as much as you can, and congratulate yourself for doing it, even if it was just 10 minutes of working on your squat or deadlift form.

Give the big exercises the time and respect they deserve:

There’s a reason we base most of our workout plans and our beginner packs around key exercises like the squat, deadlift, bench press and overhead press.

These are the most powerful lifting exercises that exist, they are the exercises that will allow you to move maximum weight, targeting multiple muscle groups, through one single fluid movement.

They’re your fast track gainers, your foundation. Everything else is built in around that.

So if you’re just getting started, give these exercises your utmost attention until you are confident that you have them mastered.

Even if that means dedicating your entire workout to the one move. In time, and with experience, everything else will follow and start to take shape around it.

Learn As You Lift

The reason we have built our entire brand around our learn as you lift mantra is because experience in lifting is everything.

Think of it like going for a walk around your local area, first you just go around the block, then you start weaving in and out of some other roads, you become more familiar, and those roads you never considered at the start are now part of your regular walking route.

Lifting is the same, except rather than side roads, you’re working with different exercises, different muscle groups, different rep/set ranges, different weights and different levels of intensity.

But you’re never going to get to any of that if you don’t start at the beginning with the above tips.

You can start for absolutely nothing with our free exercise database.

If you need more than that, we have a 4 day workout split that you can use 100% free, forever, inside our Members Zone portal.

And if you feel like you need a little more support than that, you can subscribe for full access and dedicated online support. That means you can join the Lipstick Lifters team and reach out to us for direct support to help you work through this and achieve your personal goals, as often as you need.