Oprah's war on common sense continues, this time on the "women's fitness" front. (I got this off of T-Nation, so I didn't actually watch Oprah). She had on Gwyneth Paltrow's trainer, who gave a bunch of information on how women could get themselves looking like Gwyneth. First of all, what woman wants to look like her? She's emaciated. She is what we call "skinny-fat", which means she has he levels of body fat with little muscle, but she still looks relatively thin despite having almost no muscular weight. It looks pretty bad and sets you up very poorly for your later years.
Not skinny-fat. Looks much better, doesn't it?

Second of all, there's no mystery involved at all in getting the "Gwyneth look," - you just stop eating. Chief amongst Gwyneth's trainer's lies were that women shouldn't lift anything over 3 pounds. There are so many things wrong with this statement, that it's hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say, your body will only produce an adaptation if you force it to by progressively overloading it with heavier and heavier weights. If you don't add more reps or more weight to the barbell each time you go into the gym, you're not making any progress. Women have it in their heads that if they lift "like a man," they will turn into man-faced women bodybuilders. If this were true, you'd see plenty of men walking around with that level of musculature or much more, but that is not the case. Women bodybuilders develop that look because they consume large amounts of anabolic, androgen steroids. The side-effects of these on women are all permanent: deeper voice, enlarged clitorous, man-face, facial hair, chest hair, hair loss. If you're a woman reading this and don't want to look that way, then don't inject any male hormones. Otherwise, you're fine.

My wife "lifts like a man" (actually, that's not quite true, because she's stronger than most of the "men" that show up at the gym), and she's still only 134 lbs at 5'7". She has muscles, but nothing more than you'd see from a normal fitness model. What distinguishes her physique from that of her peers is more muscle, less bodyfat, and high bone density. In fact, her bone scan put her bone density at the top of the bell curve for her age group. Her friends ask her how she got the body she has, and she starts to describe squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, and pressing. That usually ends the conversation, as most men and women are afraid of these exercises and have no idea how to do them properly, but it's not very hard to learn. Buy this book, if you're a man or woman, and apply the knowledge therein for 3-9 months until you hit a plateau in strength gains. Here's the wiki page with helpful instructional videos from Mark Rippetoe himself. If you're a man and want to gain muscular weight, this is the way for a beginner to do it. If you're a woman and want to increase bone density, muscle and fat loss, this is the way to do it. You will look much better than Gwyneth and will have spent less than half the time in the gym to do so. No more pink dumbells, ladies.