Does Lifting Heavy Weights Make You Bulky? The Truth
Without question the most common phrase I hear from women during consultations and sessions is “I don’t want to get bulky”.
Typically the average trainer will tell you “You won’t get bulky, you don’t have the hormones to grow big muscles”.
Strictly speaking this is true for most women, but it’s also true that the personal trainer hasn’t listened to the clients genuine concern about getting too bulky from lightning weights.
Personally I know women who train with heavy weights consistently and they look great but are not bulky, I also know women who train with heavy weights and are so naturally muscular they make me look like I’ve never set foot in the gym.
Bulky is a spectrum and the definition of bulky is unique to the individual. When it comes to our bodies, it’s up to us to decide what level of muscularity we want for ourselves. What one woman finds bulky, another might find still too slim, or just right, or perhaps even beautiful.
So Does Lifting Heavy Weights Make You Bulky?
Well yes…. and also no.
Lifting weights combined with the right diet will over time add muscle to your frame, some may consider this “bulk”. I personally as a coach will always endorse strength, muscle and an athletic physique over being skinny.
But coaches are not wrong. For women it is impossible to get large muscles without hormone levels beyond what most women naturally have. Also we must consider that there are women out there that you see on social media and in magazines that have used steroids which can distort your view of what weight training can do to a woman’s body.
The other main consideration is that building muscle takes a long time, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work, big effort, big eating and a strong desire to actually build muscle.
Muscular growth depends on the woman, her individual biochemistry, body type, previous training history, what type of strength training she is doing, how often she is training, how much she is eating, etc.
Without all these elements it’s actually quite difficult to build and maintain muscle. Trust me, I’ve been trying to get bulky for 20 years and I’m still not a big guy! 😂
Let’s look at my client Kelli as an example.
This is Kelli, she’s the best! Kelli trains heavy, she is probably my strongest female client and loves to get weight on the bar. But she’s not bulky, in fact weight training has helped her to loose fat, get leaner, but her bum has noticeable grown and improved.
Bigger, leaner, stronger, and technically bulkier.
So in a manner of speaking, lifting weights will make you “bulky”, but let’s look a little deeper as it’s not that simple.
How to get “bulky”
As I’ve just mentioned, lifting heavy can build “bulk” in the form of muscle. But conditions need to be just right.
But how do you actually build muscle? What do you need to be doing consistently to build muscle?
The How is all down to the mechanisms of muscular growth.
There are three mechanisms thought to cause muscle growth: mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and muscle damage.
Mechanical Tension
Mechanical tension is created by using a heavy weight and performing exercises through a full range of motion for a period of time.
The time the muscle spends under tension provided by the weight (barbell, dumbbell etc) creates Mechanical Tension in the muscle.
The more time spent under load, the more mechanical tension provided.
However, tension alone won’t cause maximal muscle growth.
In order to cause further growth, the muscle has to also go through a full range of motion.
Muscle Damage
Muscle damage is an essential component of the muscle-building process.
Muscle damage is sustained during resistance training, largely coming from eccentric (lowering the weight) and concentric contractions (lifting the weight). Both types of contractions cause muscle damage, but eccentric contractions cause more damage to the muscle than concentric contractions.
Metabolic Stress
If you’ve done any sort of resistance training you will have more than likely experienced, ‘the burn’ or ‘the pump’ as you perform higher reps followed by short rest periods.
With the muscles continually contracting and relaxing blood pools within the muscle. The cells swell and we get the pump, and we love the pump.
This, in turn, results in restricted blood flow to the muscle know as occlusion.
Now with the lack of oxygenated blood being able to fuel the muscle we cause hypoxia.
This leads to a large build-up of metabolites like lactate, hydrogen ions etc.
The resulting metabolic stress placed on the muscles has a growth (anabolic) effect on the muscle fibres and helps in the muscle building process.
You Need a Caloric Surplus
A calorie surplus is simple, you consuming more calories than you burn, so you eat more food that your body needs to function day to day.
It’s these extra calories that will cause you to get “bulky” and gain weight.
However, how you train and what you eat will largely dictate how you look in the end.
We want to add weight from muscle, not weight from fat. If you’re training uses the strategies I mentioned above, then you’ll build muscle and develop a leaner, healthier and curvier physique.
You can calculate your own calorie needs here with my calculator
You Need Patience
Patience is hugely important. Building muscle takes a long time, every gram is hard earned battle, you have to fight for it. For most people muscle doesn’t just grow on it’s own. You have to look at muscle growth in periods of months and more realistically years not weeks.
If you follow al these principles then you will absolutely build muscle and add “bulk”, which SHOULD NOT be viewed as a bad thing. How much you add or want is up to you, but I guarantee you will look and feel better with more muscle on your frame.
I’ve NEVER worked with a single female client who didn’t end up loving weight training and love having more muscle.
Will lifting weights make you gain weight?
Fat can also be considered bulk.
Bulk is purely being bigger in some form.
An occasional complaint when women begin to weight train is that the scale has gone up and their clothes feel tighter and they are feeling bulky. Often they put this down to the weights and adding muscle.
The truth is more often than not that they’ve gained weight i.e added body fat.
Why? because they’ve started eating more food because the training had increased their appetite. Often they increase in calories is from poor food choices like snack foods.
In this instance, of course they were going to gain size. They were eating more calories, and gaining something without losing anything else.
What’s happening is that they are likely building some new muscle, along with muscle comes increase glycogen storage (muscle fuel), glycogen also stores 4x its weight in water, so you add water weight too and yes they’ve likely added some body fat. That’s what happens when you are in a calorie surplus, but in my experience it' doesn’t have to be this way.
Let’s look at another example, let’s look at me!
This is the very definition of bulk! A few years back, I wanted to add some muscle to compete in a bodybuilding show. I made sure I hit all the requirements, I trained hard and I ate big and I got bulky. The bad bulky, basically I got fat! I topped the scale at a whopping 95kg (left) and hit the stage at a tiny 74kg (this is also a lesson on hiring a poor coach).
In an entire year of bulking and training I build an estimated 1kg of new muscle. That’s it…..1 measly kilogram.
But I also added 15kg of fat.
So even as a guy, with all the elements in my favour, my “bulk” came from fat, an over consumption of calories and not purely from weight training.
What you see in the right hand picture is me at an unsustainably lean body fat but also it shows the sum total of (at that point) 17 years of weight training, and let’s face it, I’m not a big guy, despite me efforts.
So be wary that bulk can often be fat and not muscle.
But to lose all that fat, I still trained weights.
Wait! You mean lifting heavy will make me lean?
More often than not, when my clients start strength training they actually loose body fat due to the increased physical activity and increased muscle mass.
So even though the client is gaining muscle, she is also losing body fat (not simultaneously, but within the same time period).
She ends up leaner, firmer, and smaller, even if she hasn’t altered her diet much.
100% of my clients train with weights and very little cardio. Everyone has lost weight, build strength and confidence in the gym and not a single one of them looks like a man…..except the men.
Check out this post on why All women should life weights.
Muscle and Fat are NOT the same
An important consideration is that fat and muscle have different densities and volumes.
Muscle takes up around 20% less volume than fat.
If you lost 5 pounds of fat and added 5 pounds of muscle the scale would not change but you would be physically smaller.
So you see, you can add muscular “bulk” but if you loose your fat “bulk” along with it you will actually end up looking smaller even if you weight exactly the same. This is what we call recomposition. Awesome right! It shows what a bitch the scale can be as a measurement of progress.
So Again, Does Lifting Heavy Weights Make You Bulky?
Yes, but only if:
You really want it too.
You have insane genetics.
You are over eating and gaining fat instead of building muscle.
You are already “bulky” from carrying excess body fat.
In reality No, because;
Muscle takes up less space than fat.
You’ll lose fat when strength training.
You only have to get as muscular as you want, your body, your choice.
Lifting heavy doesn’t give you one particular body type, it will give you a strong, fit, bad-ass version of the body you were given.
You can still train with weights and not gain muscle, you can maintain and just focus on strength, fitness and mobility, but more than likely you’ll still end up looking better than before.
All these women lift weights, All these women switch cardio for resistance training and changed up their diets.
None of them are bulky or manly. Many of them were bulky from excess body fat, not muscle.
P.s. None of them are my clients, so I’m making no claims or responsibility. They are purely for example.
Get Your Own Personal Plan
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Hi, I’m Aaron Schiavone, owner of Mind Muscle Personal Training. Over the past 5+ years I have helped women increase their self confidence, improve their relationship with food, improve their health, become stronger, fitter and happier.