Rosanna Harte female bodybuilder, fitness model

Megan Abshire female bodybuilder, fitness model

Marika Johansson female bodybuilder, fitness model, glamor model

Lora Barbazza female bodybuilder, fitness model, glamor model

By Karen Sessions

Many women struggle with flabby arms, commonly called batwings. This is simply an accumulation of body fat and lack of muscle development. You can have nice shapely arms by incorporating 3 essentials:

1. Quality Nutrition
2. Resistance Training
3. Cardiovascular Work

Quality Nutrition for Shaping Your Arms
In order to lose the excess body fat you have to eat right. This involves cutting out the obvious junk food and including more whole and natural foods. Eating a small balanced meal every three hours works well at stabilizing your blood sugar and curtailing cravings. I know the carb-craze is still in high gear, but there is a lack of quality carbohydrate information available. You can eat carbohydrates and lose weight. I have a ton of e-clients that are living proof. A balanced meal contains a protein, carbohydrate, and fat.
Resistance Training for Shaping Your Arms
Resistance training will build the muscles, giving curves and shape to the arms. It will not create huge bulky arms, which is commonly feared among women. The more muscle you add to your arms, the leaner they will appear, as muscle takes up less space than fat and it's denser

To work the back of your arms (triceps), try the following:

Overhead Extensions – Stand up or sit in a chair and hold a barbell or dumbbell over your head. In a slow and controlled manner, lower it behind your head, keeping your elbows close to your head. Once you have lowered the bar as far as you can, bring it back to the starting position, contract the triceps, and repeat the movement.

By Karen Sessions

Happy March! Hope you all are doing well. Seems that 2005 has quite a bit of challenges for me and I'm not up to them. I got hit with a bad sinus infection again that put me out of commission for several days. I still have this lingering cough, but I'll be back in the gym this week.
Feminine Iron
This month I'm going to trash some nagging myths. You may or may not have heard these, but if you have, I want to smash them again because if you hear wrong information too much, it can implant itself into your brain without consent.

Nagging Myth Number One:
Women who weight train will get bulky

This horrid rumor that women who lifts weights get bulky prevents a lot of women from even entering the weight room. To satisfy rumor starters, these ladies participate in aerobics classes and become cardio queens and don't even come close to their true athletic ability or desired body shape.

Those who dare to become bold and venture into the dungeon of iron find the lightest pair of dumbbells to work with and rely on cables and machines for the majority of their workout.

Sure, light dumbbells, cables, and machines can help in adding some lean muscle tissue and increase your metabolism, but why limit yourself? I don't care how much you can lift; you will never get huge and bulky by weight training as long as you produce more estrogen the testosterone. Those women you see who do sport the She-Ra-type body have specifically trained and eaten for it, and let me tell you, it's not easy.

As a female, you can only build so much muscle, and that's it. From there, you can increase muscle density, but you will never pack on the type of mass you see on true female bodybuilders.

By Karen Sessions

Spring is nearly upon us and we all know what that means everyone is now interested in whipping themselves into shape to look their very best this summer.

It may be for that special vacation to the beach you have planned, a reunion, or because you want this for yourself and now you're ready.

Whatever your reason might be just remember not to lose sight of your goal. Concrete your goals by putting them in writing and reading them every day.

This is a contract you have made with yourself. Honor it and I promise you will be so proud and thrilled about your achievements that there will be no turning back. There is nothing like the feeling of hard work and satisfaction and a job well done!
Rest for Muscle Growth
Many factors apply when it comes to bodybuilding, and the most overlooked aspect is rest. As simple as that may seem it is essential.

Rest will allow your muscles to recover. Without proper recovery, you will never grow. Thus, you will never achieve that award winning physique you worked so hard for unless you make sure to incorporate adequate rest.

In this article I will teach you how to properly tie-in rest into your workouts, making sure all of your hard efforts pay off 100%.
Rest Between Training Sessions for Muscle Growth
I have had people tell me they can actually feel their muscles gaining size during a workout. Although it might seem like it, that is false. This "feeling" you get is called a pump, and is not to be confused with muscle growth.

Muscle growth (hypertrophy) takes place during rest, not during a workout. You may get a pump during training, but it's merely blood being pumped into the heated muscle, making it harder and increased in size temporarily. When this happens, many get a mental pump and drag the training out, resulting in over training, which is something we don't want to do.

By Karen Sessions

I hope you all had a great holiday season. I want to wish you a Happy New year full of joy and success. December was very busy for me. I have a lot going on this year and I will be spreading myself thin, yet effective.

Daily Mass

This month I'm going to touch on how to effectively build mass and how to avoid the pitfalls. Building a solid foundation can be quite simple if you apply the proper techniques.

In order to build solid muscle, you have to incorporate a few necessary factors in your lifestyle.

Eat quality food - To build muscle mass and density, you need to eat whole food rather that processed junk, which just sits in your system and weighs you down. Whole food is actually used by the body to build muscle or act as fuel. In addition to eating quality food, you must eat enough to support muscle growth. This means eating several small meals throughout the day.

Eat to fuel your body - Eat enough food to fuel your body and your workouts. You must supply your body with sufficient calories and macro nutrients so it can perform in the gym and prompt muscle recovery. Lack of food equals lack of muscle.

Use free weights over machines - Free weights are more effective for building muscle, as they cause all the stabilizers to come into play, forcing you to use balance and form, and putting you in a natural position to execute the movement properly.

Build Beautiful Muscle in Minimal Time

Incorporate partials - Partials are a shoe-in in the mass building department. They allow you to focus on strength and power to build muscle and density because you can handle double the workload.

By: Bill Dobbins

The development of the hyper-muscular female body is chainging our culture's views of what is attractive, sexy and feminine about women's bodies.

There is a revolution in progress, but most people haven't noticed. This revolution is about the female body, and its most obvious manifestation is the elite, modern, female bodybuilder.

Our Culture

Our culture has celebrated the athletic male body for thousands of year. The sport of bodybuilding for men was officially created more than 60 years ago in 1940. But we have never in the past had comparable images or concepts of the strong, athletic female body. Of course, in real life, women themselves had to be strong. Most women - most people - throughout history have been farmers, and in families that worked the land women traditionally labored hard alongside their men. There was no place for a weak and pampered female when having to struggle against nature.

But while the aesthetic beauty of the male athletic body has always been a common subject of art, women have not received the same treatment. Woman was Eve, or the Virgin Mary or Venus - but the few so-called "amazons" we see in historic art tend to be what we would today describe as "beefy," and often depicted as mutilated and disfigured by the removal of a breast, supposedly to give them an advantage as archers.

What could be a better symbol of the judgment of society that women have to sacrifice their femininity if they chose to undertake activities commonly reserved to men?

However, throughout the 20th century the role of women in general began to be questioned and re-examined. Women gained the right to vote, to own property, to enter into politics, science, education and into professions long reserved for men. Toward the end of the century women began more and more to excel at sports, to the point where female Olympic athletes of today are breaking records set by men as late as the 1950s and 1960s.