Does lifting weights make you bulky?

Jan 25

Short answer. It depends.

I hear the concern when talking about weight training “But I don’t want to get bulky” - like people think by picking up a weight they will instantly turn into the Michelin man!

I’m going to tell you a little story about my experience with “bulking up”, aka, putting on a bit of muscle mass.

Up until last year my training has always seemed to be about losing weight in some way (for aesthetics, thinking it would make me more confident or to help with my running).

Yeeeee... i’m kind of over that now!

Look… I’m never going to be skinny… and I’m ok with that (and I’m actually saying that honestly for the first time in my life!).

Do you know what… I’m going to go one step further and say I don’t want to be “skinny” anymore… I want to be strong, awesome, a machine and I love to see what my body is actually capable of… because it’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it!

Last August, after falling out of love with running a bit for various reasons, (which is what I had been training for at that time… I won’t go into it right now but I’m sure you’ll hear about it at some point), my purpose for training dwindled a bit and I started to get frustrated with myself and persistent niggling injuries, so I decided it was time for a new challenge to get me excited about training again…

So, I decided to try something completely the opposite of anything I had ever done before…

BULKING UP

I did this for several reasons…

I was really interested in seeing how my body could change through by building some mass.
I was interested to see what I could learn from this experience to develop as a PT and so I can feel confident that I could help any clients may want to do the same (I dont like to give my clients things I haven’t tried myself before!).
I was stuck on 1800 calories and quite frankly wanted to see how much food I could eat without putting on any body fat!! (Because I like to eat… well I did!).

I gave myself 6 months to see where I could get to.

Wow… this was a real eye opener.. anyone that says dieting is hard… try to bulk!

Now bearing in mind I started this challenge off as someone who loves to eat! I thought I could eat a lot of food and was always hungry, being nicknamed “Hattie fatty bum bum” by my friends because of how much I could eat…

I quickly realised, I actually couldn't eat enough food… well the higher quality foods anyway…! Within the first few weeks I was feeling fed up of food and barely feeling hungry… something I never thought I’d be saying! Ask my friend Emma (who was helping me with my nutrition through all of this) the amount of times I messaged her saying “HELP - I DONT WANT TO EAT ANYMORE!!!!”

Basically, if you want to “get bulky” you have to eat A LOT of food to the point you have to force it down in any way you can!

So, to elaborate on my short answer earlier…

Lifting weights ALONE does not make you bulky…. you need ALLLLLL THE FOOOOOOD to go along with it too!

Staying on the food side for a minute... the idea was to try and increase my calories up as high as I could in order to put on weight but not increase my body fat (too much). We took body fat measurements every 2 weeks to check things were going in the right direction and adjusted calories and macros according to this. If the weight was going up and the body fat was staying the same or decreasing, then I was putting on muscle. Simples.

I managed to increase my calories up to 3300… this was a daily struggle!! (we tried 3600 at one point but that was a touch too far and I started getting a bit too fluffy!)

Think…. 1000 calories on your morning bowl of porridge and the day often ended the same way too just to top up those calories!

WENT ALL BRO ON CHICKEN & RICE FOR A WHILE

Ok food rant over.

What about the training?

OH MY. I was feeling AMAZING!!!

So much more energy, felt happier (when I wasn’t complaining about how much I had to eat!), slept better, got stronger… I was basically superwoman, right?

Don’t get me wrong... I had to train harder, push myself more, reps went up (mentally anything above 6 gets me!), and that burn was real but I felt I could because my body was fed for it and I felt awesome!!

So, to go even further on my elaborated answer earlier… Lifting weights ALONE and with all the food, does not make you “Bulky” - you also need to train hard & consistently, otherwise, let’s be honest, you’re just going to end up as a ball of fluff!

(In case you haven’t figured out by now…. what others may refer to as fat I call “fluff” - makes it cuter somehow?! 🤷🏽‍♀️).

So how did I look through all this?

I’ll let the progress photos show you this.

START - August 2020