8 Week Beginner Workout for Women

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For the longest time, the fitness industry has catered its workout templates and training programs towards optimizing workouts for men.

But, that leaves women having to adopt training principles that might not be productive for their own goals or their own natural differences in sex-specific body types.

At Muscle & Strength, we’re trying our best to change that. Perhaps you’ve noticed the growth of our women’s workout routines database.

Still, looking at it, it appears we’re missing a pretty significant routine.

A workout for women who are just getting started in the gym.

You may need to tinker with this one to optimize it for your own goals, but I think you’ll find it perfect if you’re a beginner.

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8 Week Beginner Workout for Women

Beginners, both men and women, typically respond well to full body training. As a beginner, the weight used for each exercise doesn’t create as much stress as it would when using heavier weights at a more advanced level.

This allows you to recover faster and train each body part more frequently. To compliment this, women also naturally have a quicker recovery rate than men. So, full body workouts will allow you to workout at a training frequency for each muscle group that will help optimize your results.

Since we are working out just 3 days a week to start off with, we will focus our workouts around compound movements. These exercise will require more muscles to be involved in the movement which will not only build those muscle, but also provide a higher calorie burn than working each muscle in isolation.

For the workout, you’ll want to have at least 1 day of rest after each training bout. You can set up your weekly workouts on fixed days, or utilize an every other day training structure. This will be based on your individual time restraints outside of working out.

Rest for 2-3 minutes in between sets. This will allow you to recover and maximize the amount of weight you are able to use for each exercise on every set.

Choose a weight that is challenging. Since these exercises are predominately compound, you don’t want to take them to complete failure. Try to keep 1-2 reps in reserve (feeling as though if truly pushed you could get 1-2 more reps) for each set.

Added to the end of each workout are some isolation exercises for the glutes. Glute development is a common goal a lot of lifters. Strong glutes have a positive carry over in a lot of strength aspects both inside and outside of the gym.

However, the program is simply a template. If there is another area you’d like to focus your isolation lifts on, feel free to alter the template in whatever way you see fit.

Keep your rest periods shorter on your isolation exercises. 60-90 seconds should do the trick depending on the amount of weight used.

Day 1: Full Body Beginner Women’s Workout

*If you can perform without assistance do so and progress by adding weight.

Day 2: Full Body Beginner Women’s Workout

*If you can perform without assistance do so and progress by adding weight.

Day 3: Full Body Beginner Women’s Workout

*If you can perform without assistance do so and progress by adding reps.

Conclusion

The program listed above is suitable for most healthy women looking to get started in the gym. It involves a lot of foundational movements that are important to learn how to do and progress with through your fitness journey.

That being said, it is a template and some movements may need to be substituted for other variations depending on your own ability to perform them.

This program can be used for however long you wish to use it so long as you are enjoying it and still making progress. Focus on progressing with the weight you are using whenever possible (week to week or biweekly depending on your abilities) as the primary form of progression.

If you have any questions about the workout routine, please feel free to leave us a comment in the comments section below. We’re always more than happy to help.