Women's Ab Exercise Videos and Home Workouts

Women's Home Workout Routines, Workouts for Weight Loss, and Exercise DVDs

Resistance essential to exercise videos for women.

The best exercise videos for women offer more than leg warmers and jazz steps; they include resistance training. The best home workouts, no matter your gender, rely heavily on strength training exercises because building muscle is the key to workouts for weight loss. Whether you're following an abs exercise video or doing toning exercises for women, working with weights is not just for men, nor is aerobic exercise alone the best way to get the fitness and weight loss results you want.

Modern exercise videos for women include strength training exercises for a variety of fitness and health reasons, but a major one is that adding muscle forces your body to burn more calories even while resting. (Mayo Clinic) Workouts for weight loss do more in less time with resistance training because not only do you burn calories during the intense exercises, but the muscles you build continue burning more calories. Advanced exercise DVDs, such as Chalene Johnson's TurboFire®, charge up this fat burning engine so you reach your goals sooner.

Following exercise videos for women that use resistance training doesn't mean you're going to bulk up and look like a man. For starters, even the best home workouts aren't going to make you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, because really large muscles are extremely hard to build. For women, strength training exercises are even less likely to create muscle mountains because of the presence of estrogen, which hinders muscle growth, and because women have significantly less of the hormones that promote outsized muscle growth, particularly testosterone. (Women's Heart Foundation) Toning exercises for women might strip away fat, revealing shapely muscles, but the exercises won't leave you looking like a cartoon Neanderthal. Check out fitness aces such as Johnson, who does lots of resistance training for her TurboFire series and yet retains a decidedly fit feminine physique.

Exercise videos for women don't have to show you how to sling around iron plates and dumbbells to get appropriate resistance training. Most of the core exercises done with free weights can be replicated with resistance bands, often in a safer and more controlled way. Home workout routines with resistance bands offer all the same benefits of dumbbells and iron bars without the clutter or expense, and resistance bands can easily be stored away or packed for a trip. It doesn't take hours of strength training exercises a day either, just 20 to 30 minutes, a few times a week. (Mayo Clinic) Exercise DVDs such as Tony Horton's 10-Minute Trainer® can easily get you there.