Weight Training Won’t Bulk You Up – Unless You Want It To

Photo Credit: roonb

Stop running from the weight bench and put down those girly pink dumbbells! Weight exercises are good for you and won’t turn you into the Hulk. Weight exercises won’t make your muscles bulky unless your goal is to bulk up and build bulging biceps. Weight exercises will help tone and firm your muscles, increase your ability to burn fat and improve your bone health. So, grab some weights and get strong. There is a difference between weight training to get stronger and weight training to build bulky muscles. To get stronger without building big muscles, lift light weights for many repetitions, roughly 12 to 15 repetitions. Build bulky muscles by lifting heavier weights for fewer repetitions. By changing the way you work out when doing weight exercises, you can target different types of muscle fibers. Heavy weight with few repetitions targets your type II muscle fibers for bulk, while lighter weights with more repetitions targets your type I muscles fibers for muscular endurance.

Weight exercises benefit your body, even if you aren’t trying to build muscle. Lifting weights, doing bodyweight exercises, such as push-ups, and resistance exercises help reduce the risk and symptoms of chronic illness and disease, including osteoporosis, arthritis and diabetes. Strong muscles, especially in your back and core, help improve your balance to prevent falls. Post-menopausal women are at risk for weakened bones due to loss of bone mass. Weight training can help reduce bone loss and can even improve bone mass. Muscle tissue is very efficient at using glucose for fuel to help keep your blood sugar levels under control and reduce your risk of diabetes.

You will have to spend hours in the gym, take supplements and eat high protein diet if you want to build bulky muscles. It’s difficult for women to build huge muscles like men because women lack sufficient testosterone to build muscle mass. Your lack of testosterone along with your DNA determine how you build muscles. Mesomorphs, or muscular body types, are more likely to build bulky muscles than endomorphs, or those with rounder, curvy bodies. Ectomorph body types are slimmer and leaner than either mesomorphs or endomorphs. No matter what your body type, you will benefit from weight training by becoming stronger.

In addition to exercise, your nutrition and body type will help determine whether you build muscle and how big your muscles will grow. According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (eatright.org), you should eat 1.4 to 1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day when lifting weights if you want to build muscle. This amounts to up to 20 percent of your daily caloric intake. Eating more protein won’t build bigger muscles. Even if you don’t want bulky muscles, your body still needs protein to repair and build new muscle after a workout.