Q: I enjoy weight training to gain muscle but I do not want to become big and bulky. Is there a way to limit how much weight I gain?
The biggest myth in the gym is that lifting weights makes you big and bulky. I blame Hulk Hogan and Arnie.
“Never forget to train, eat your vitamins and say your prayers,” Hulk Hogan told a generation of wide-eyed boys and girls. That’s all it took for America’s hero to survive the Iron Sheikh’s Camel Clutch, a bizarre allegory — if you were American — for the Iranian hostage crisis. Hulk Hogan made America great and his advice taught children how to become big and strong.
Except that his fan base in the early 1980s didn’t realise that “vitamins” actually meant anabolic steroids and that his praying was most likely directed at not being outed publicly. Which he was, of course.
Unfortunately there’s still a perception that oversized and cartoonesque bulk is the result of lifting weights, taking your vitamins and saying your prayers.
On the other side of the coin is a bizarre “natty or not” social media subculture that exists to expose lying public figures, fitness personalities and social media stars. It’s so extreme that anyone with any muscle runs the risk of being “outed”. The retort — which is probably fair — is: “Stop being a keyboard warrior, get into the gym, and you’ll likely also gain some muscle.”
Back to your question. Unless you plan to take a cocktail of drugs over a sustained period of time — accompanied by extraordinary training and diet dedication — or overeat and become fat, then becoming too bulky shouldn’t be too much of a concern.
Let’s look at the factors that determine muscle growth: intense resistance training, diet, sleep, age, gender, hormone profile, your frame, your starting point, genetics and a long-term commitment.
Any one of those factors could effectively increase or decrease your muscle-growth potential and performance. How are you eating? Do you eat too much or too little? Do you eat enough protein? Do you sleep enough? Have you been training for years or have you just started?
Are you male or female? That is not a right-wing question, it refers to frame, body size and testosterone averages. How old are you? Do you have little wrists or ankles? Every one of these factors matter.
Many men worry that once they pass 40, they’ll lose their ability to build muscle. About five years ago, Menshealth.com referenced a University of Oklahoma study that put young men and middle-aged men (35-50) through an identical programme. Measured with DEXA scans, the middle-aged men gained slightly more muscle than the 18-22 year olds.
Knowledge like that is a bit like the four-minute mile. It breaks perceptions of what is and isn’t possible. You can scour the internet yourself, but you will find that the “average” man can gain up to 900g of muscle a month and the “average” woman can gain up to 450g in a month if all variables are perfect, and that these gains persist for up to a year, and then rapidly decrease until about four years where gains become negligible and hardly noticeable.
Estimates are that a man’s upper limit is 15-20kg of extra muscle over his lifetime and a woman can expect an upper limit of 9-11kg. Most people won’t get anywhere near this.
However, people gain far more weight. Gains of 10 or even 20kg in a few months — which make people bulky — are not muscle. Big weight swings are caused by water retention, glycogen and fat gain. If, on the other hand, it really is muscle, rest assured it is pharmaceutically assisted and will melt off as fast as it went on when the chemistry class comes to an end.
If you do not want to become big and bulky then watch what you eat. It’s that simple. The small amounts of muscle you gain naturally will increase your metabolism and shape your physique if your body fat is low enough, over and above the other well-documented benefit: life becomes easier.
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