The possibility of gaining muscle mass shouldn’t deter you from lifting heavy.
Appearance has never been a big driver of my fitness. Instead of worrying about what I look like, I focus on how my workouts make me feel. I train for energy. To move with ease. To feel like I can accomplish difficult things. To injury-proof my future.
Still, as an Equinox Coach, I know that aesthetics are often a concern — especially when it comes to weight lifting. Women frequently report concerns that they will “bulk up” if they perform ongoing resistance training, and this fear is one of the biggest barriers to participation. So it’s no surprise that, in 2020, just 27 percent of adult women met the federal guidelines for muscle-strengthening physical activity.
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But “bulking” — or simply gaining visible mass, which is what most people mean when they use the term — doesn’t happen like a flip of a switch. You don’t start lifting weights, then, bam, you’re suddenly as jacked as a competitive powerlifter, particularly for women.
Part of it comes down to hormones. Compared to cisgender women, cisgender men have 15 to 20 times more circulating testosterone, a hormone that stimulates skeletal muscle growth. This discrepancy plays into differences in body composition and athletic performance; men tend to have more skeletal muscle mass (particularly fast, type II muscle fibers) and a lower percentage of body fat, as well as greater strength and power. (It’s important to note that less is known about female athlete physiology and athletic performance due to a lack of studies focused on women or research that distinguishes between the sexes.)
How you train also matters. To stimulate hypertrophy, you need to train close to failure, new research suggests. According to the findings, the closer you are to failure when you end your sets (read: you don’t have another rep left in the tank), the more muscle growth you generally experience. To maximize muscle growth, a good rule of thumb is performing eight to 12 reps using a load that’s 60 to 80 percent of your one-rep max. Generally, you’ll need to lift heavy — heavier than the items around your house that you hold or carry on a daily basis — at least four to six days a week. (You’ll need to eat more and tweak your fueling strategy, too; you can’t build muscle if you’re not feeding it.)
That’s not to say you won’t gain muscle following a different protocol, but you may not see as great of growth. Muscle mass is earned — it doesn’t just appear out of thin air.
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All that said, the possibility of “bulking” shouldn’t influence you one way or another. Resistance training is always worth incorporating into your exercise programming. It enhances bone health, is linked with a reduced risk of all-cause, cardiovascular disease, and cancer-specific mortality, and may even support brain health, research suggests. Considering you naturally begin to lose three to five percent of your body’s muscle mass per decade starting at age 30, lifting weights is essential to, at the very least, offsetting those declines.
It’s not just about your fitness. It’s about your life. I want you to be able to bend down and pick up a heavy box without pain or discomfort, to toss your luggage in the plane’s overhead compartment. I want you to build strong bones, tendons, and ligaments that resist injury. I want you to build the trust and confidence to count on yourself at a moment’s notice — and lifting will help you get there.
Looking your best is great and all, but what’s most important is creating a body that you can rely on 24/7. My advice? Begin with fundamental exercises and practice solid, functional movement patterns to build a strong foundation, then add load and progressions. Work with a Coach for fine-tuning that enables you to move more efficiently.
Stop overthinking your looks. Start moving.
Soi Kumpant is a COACH+ at Equinox Studio City in Los Angeles, California, and has been with Equinox since 2015. Soi holds certifications from StrongFirst and USA Weightlifting and in functional range conditioning, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, and functional movement screening.