Women's Weightlifting Finally Taking Centre Stage

Women's weightlifting has been somewhat of a slow burner. But this once male dominated sport is slowly being overrun with a feminine touch.

If you’ve been in this space for a while, you might remember the days when there were only 1-2 women in the lifting room, if that. All others occupied the cardio equipment or filled up the spaces in group classes. But not anymore, now we see that more and more women are choosing weightlifting as their sport of choice.

Women's weightlifting for all women

Literally any woman can weight lift, results may vary depending on a number of factors, but the wonderful thing about this sport is that all you need is repetition and resistance to build muscle.

It’s really not that complicated, it just might seem so from an outsider's perspective. But once you feel your way around and get comfortable, picking up the heavy stuff will literally be your favourite thing to do.

If you haven’t started yet, take inspiration from all the women weightlifting around you. They will be there, both in the gym and online.

The rise of women weightlifting - breaking the stereotype

I still remember writing this brief blog post in 2018 about bitchy insults that women in weightlifting actually considered compliments. We sure have come a long way since then, perhaps the 2018 article is soon to become redundant, if truth be told, I haven’t heard any of those in the last few years. Maybe I’ll leave it there for nostalgia.

But here we are, 2024 and almost everyone and her mum is interested in hitting the non conventional iron. What a wonderful thing to experience for us all.

Women are starting to understand that weightlifting is an excellent form of physical exercise. There is only so much cardio you can do, only so many hours in a day that you can walk and run to burn calories. Weightlifting, on the other hand, burns fat by way of speeding up your metabolism. So now the cardio bunny stereotype that women once aspired to be has a strong competitor, and that competitor is the barbell.

What changed? Why are more women weightlifting now?

Personally I think we have social media to thank, it has exposed more women to the fact that they can get into weightlifting without hulking out.

The truth is, women's weightlifting is nothing new, it is not something that just became a thing in the past 5-6 years. These vintage female weightlifters date back to the 16th century. But they didn’t have a tripod and their smartphone in the gym plus a social media platform to post it on.

Now we are inundated with weightlifting women showing us their workouts and/or results through our socials. More power to them. I just have one gripe - be honest.

Camera angles and filters are skewing reality. Yes you can build any muscle group with weightlifting, and yes, weightlifting is an excellent fat burner - better than cardio. With weightlifting you will burn fat even in your sleep, because the more lean muscle you have, the faster your metabolism.

So as a woman, you can do wonderful things with weightlifting, you can literally change your physique. But it’s not easy, it doesn’t happen quickly and you need to move a considerable amount of weight. It won’t be all smiles and pretty faces.

Types of women's weightlifting

Many women are unaware that there are actually a few different weightlifting sports. I won’t go into too much detail here, because there is a lot of detail on our main workout plans page. But the short version is that there are 3 main weightlifting sports:

Bodybuilding

Powerlifting

Olympic lifting

There is also, just weightlifting in the general sense, in which lifters tend to use a combination of the 3 sports for funzies, meaning they don’t lift competitively and just do what they enjoy.

All women's weightlifting sports have a competitive arena, you can check out this article about competitive female bodybuilding and this one about female powerlifting.

We have yet to produce an article about women's Olympic weightlifting, but we do have a beginners Olympic lifting plan if you’re interested in understanding that in more detail. If you plan on going all the way to the Olympics, you need to work with a coach. Olympic lifts are by far the most technical.

It is possible to compete in bodybuilding and powerlifting competitions without a coach, women do it, but it takes a lot of self learning over a long period of time, and self discipline, we do strongly recommend you get a local coach nonetheless.

As a side note, there is also callisthenics, which isn't technically weightlifting, but it’s still strength training so worth a mention.

Essential tips for Women's weightlifting

Lipstick Lifters has been active since 2015, so we have covered a lot on our website. It would be impossible to summarise everything into one article, so let’s consider the basics and then for anything else, just use the search bar on our website for anything you’re interested in. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to reach out and let us know.

Absolute beginners should start here.

Just familiarise yourself with the weights and the sport in general. The best tip we can give you is; show up and do the workout. Everything else comes with experience.

Key exercises

When getting into weightlifting, women should consider that there are 3 key exercises that form the basis of any good weightlifting workout plan. Those are the squat, deadlift and bench press. 99% of weightlifting workouts will be centred around some variation of one of those exercises. More advanced upper body workouts may be built around the overhead press.

Workouts should be a combination of both compound and isolation exercises. Again, we cover this in great detail on our main workout plans page so do take the time to check it out if you want to learn more.

Switching between weightlifting sports

It’s not uncommon for women weightlifting to switch mostly between bodybuilding and powerlifting, sometimes even combine the two. But the training methods are different. A quick and easy way to explain this is to say that powerlifting is about strength and power, bodybuilding is about hypertrophy (building muscle), for aesthetic purposes.

Bodybuilding, if you’re going all in, is also heavily diet dependent. It’s about building the muscle and burning the fat to reveal that muscle. See; bulking and cutting for women.

Powerlifting, on the other hand, is about lifting as much weight as possible, without so much emphasis on aesthetics. That’s not to say that powerlifters aren’t concerned about diet, or physique, it’s just not the direct nature of the sport.

Women's weightlifting workout plans

If you’re looking for a weightlifting workout plan, you’re in the right place.

Lipstick Lifters has helped over 5000 women worldwide with their weightlifting workouts, we have a broad range of plans to suit all levels and goals.

Our priority is not just to provide women with weightlifting workouts, but it is to teach women gym independence. Our goal is to help you get to the point that you can build your own weightlifting workouts as and when you need them. To help, we also provide 10 bonus guides and dedicated online support, all of which contributes to you becoming fully gym independent. You can learn more about that here.

You can even sample our plans for free. There is a 4 day split waiting for you when you create your free Members Zone account. Also, when you sign up you get our free Gym Independence guide, this will help you see how you can become gym independent in as little as 6 months.