By Katy Loren
Women should prioritize upper-body strength training, and it goes far beyond how you look in a tank top. Strong shoulders, arms, and back muscles improve your posture, which can reduce everyday aches and pains.
Upper-body training also builds the functional strength you need to lift groceries, carry luggage, or even play with your kids or grandkids. Plus, building muscle in your upper body helps boost bone density, essential for women in preventing issues like osteoporosis as we age. And let’s not forget that feeling of power and capability – training your upper body makes you stronger for sports, hobbies, and all the challenges life throws your way.
Here are five upper-body-boosting tips for women. (By the way, men can certainly benefit from all five of these tips too . . . that is, if you boys can keep up.)
1. Train for strength.
Isn’t “training for strength” the point of this whole post? Yes, but a common reason people stop getting stronger is because their workouts are geared toward different goals, whether it’s muscle building (typically employing moderate weights and rep ranges of 8-12), muscular endurance (with lighter weights and longer sets of 15 reps or more), or some other hybrid.
To gain strength, you may just want to rip a page from the training journal of a powerlifter or Olympic lifting athlete and dedicate a few workouts (or a few weeks or months’ worth of workouts) to pure strength gains.
That means heavier weights with which you can only eke out a handful of reps and compound, multijoint exercises—that is, moves that call on a number of muscle groups to perform. This includes bench presses, seated overhead presses, bent-over rows, deadlifts, squats, and power cleans, to name a few of the best strength builders.
Of course, going heavier isn’t something you should take lightly (pun intended). You’ll want an experienced spotter on hand for presses and squats. You’ll also want to do a thorough warm-up before lifting weights at 85% of your one-rep max or above. In addition, keep a record of your exercises, sets, reps, and weights used so that you can ensure you’re making some incremental progress week to week.
2. Get more explosive.
Finding ourselves in a typical, results-sapping training rut isn’t just about relying on the same exercises for the same number of sets and reps over and over (and over) again. Think about this: Do you always perform your reps at the same speed?
You may be in the habit of doing all your sets under control, say, taking about two seconds to lift the weight through what’s called the “positive” portion of a repetition, pausing at the top of a rep for a second, then lowering the weight back to the start in two counts (i.e., the “negative” or “eccentric” contraction). That’s a solid approach for the most part: You’re controlling the resistance and making your muscle work, keeping momentum out of the equation. Great!
Well, it’s usually great, but it’s not the only way to build muscular strength. Not by accident, the lifters who move the most prodigious amounts of weight in the gym are the aforementioned powerlifters and Olympic lifters. A key part of their approach is the use of explosive reps, which engage the body’s fast-twitch muscle fibers.
We suggest identifying the exercises in your current workout where your strength has plateaued and introducing a few sets focusing on explosive reps.
For example, let’s say you regularly do a bench press, and you’ve been stuck at 100 on the weight stack for a few months. In your next workout, attack it this way: Pyramid up from a warm-up resistance — and then, for your working sets, perform the positive portion of the rep fast and forcefully. Thinking about it in seconds, you’d perform the press as fast as you can, a second or less, followed by the one-second pause at the top and then a controlled, 2-to-3-second descent. Here’s a set and rep breakdown:
For the explosive approach, you can tackle one or two exercises every workout or try it more sporadically. Either way, it should help shake you out of a rut and prompt new strength gains over time.
Tip: Like the idea of adding some explosive-style training but don’t want to overhaul your current workouts? Sprinkle in a few classic plyometric moves—some particularly effective options are standing long jumps, bench jumps, clap push-ups, burpees, tuck jumps, and medicine-ball slams, to name a few. Plyos not only improve your body’s ability to generate force, but they also help enhance agility and endurance. Plus, they can be a great finisher to any training session.
3. Be negative (sometimes).
We just talked about speeding up and doing some “explosive” style training. Now, let’s discuss slowing things down a bit because science has revealed an interesting tidbit about the typical repetition.
As explained earlier, a rep includes a movement through the “positive” (up) portion, a static hold at the transition point, and then a “negative” (down) portion. Most people focus on the positive, assuming that’s where the real benefits derive — and not so much on the negative.
That’s a mistake, though, according to research. One review from 2018, published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, noted that “muscles that are elongated while activated (i.e., eccentric muscle action) are stronger and require less energy (per unit of force) than muscles that are shortening (i.e., concentric contraction).”
A study published in 2022 in the European Journal of Applied Physiology put that idea to the test, dividing 53 college-age students into four groups to find the effect of preacher curls using concentric and eccentric reps, concentric-only moves, or eccentric-only actions over five weeks and 10 sessions. The result: Eccentric training increased muscle strength and thickness similar to doing the concentric and eccentric action, despite the fact the negative-only subjects essentially did half of the overall training volume.
What’s the takeaway? You should focus fully on all phases of a rep. In addition, there are two techniques you can sprinkle into your usual workouts:
• Enhanced Negatives: Choose an exercise and do longer four-count negatives on each rep. For instance, if doing the aforementioned preacher curl, take two seconds to lift the weight up, pause for a one-count at the top, and then do a controlled four-count on the way down. Breathe in on the concentric motion, and breathe out slowly as you lower the weight.
• Negative-Only Burnouts: For this one, you’ll need a spotter to assist at the end of your set. Start with traditional reps, performing the “up” and the “down” on your own. Once you reach a point of momentary muscular failure — you can’t lift the weight by yourself through the positive part of the rep — your spotter will jump in and assist you in lifting the weight. Then, he or she will stay with you as you lower the weight through the eccentric part as slowly as possible. One or two negative-only reps is likely plenty . . . as you’ll realize once you’ll feel the burn.
Related: The Science-Backed Benefits of Exercise
4. Don’t forget your forearms.
“Wait, aren’t forearms technically one of the smallest muscle groups of the upper body? Why would you need to worry about them to get stronger?” That’s a great question.
Sure, the forearms may be small, but their contribution to upper-body strength is outsized. They’re the key to holding and controlling more weight during all sorts of major exercises, everything from rows to presses to curls. If they’re not up to the task, they’ll give out too soon during your most challenging sets, leaving the main muscle group you’re working with under-stimulated.
The muscles of the forearms have more slow-twitch fibers in their makeup, which are smaller than fast-twitch fibers and pack a lot of power and endurance in a relatively small package. In other words, you don’t need to build a set of thick, gnarly, Popeye-esque forearms to get a strength and performance boost out of them.
Instead, all that’s needed for better results on upper-body days is a smidge of attention, say, by tacking on a forearm move to the end of one or two of your training sessions per week — 3 sets or so of at least 15 reps to momentary muscular failure should do it. You can try reverse EZ-bar curls, barbell wrist curls, dumbbell wrist curls, or even simple dead hangs from a pull-up bar. A few weeks in, you should start noticing a powerful difference in the weight you can handle throughout your workouts.
5. Aim for one small victory at a time.
I’ll admit it — I was a skinny teenager growing up. So, when I first discovered the joys of the gym, my goal was to get stronger and add some muscle tone to my beanpole frame. I tackled all the major barbell exercises as part of my regimen, and I took meticulous notes of my workouts in a notebook to ensure I was progressing from week to week.
The problem was that once I reached a certain fitness level, I began to plateau on more and more exercises. My secret weapon? I bought a set of 2 1/2-pound plates and brought them with me—the club where I trained didn’t have any—which helped me nudge up the weight I was lifting on my heaviest sets, helping me set new personal bests.
You could argue it wasn’t those little plates that did the trick but my dedication to setting new goals to lift just a little more from week to week and month to month. The takeaway remains the same: Striving for incremental improvements and tracking those results is paramount to success.
Related: Capacity: Upper Body
