Strength training - bulky?

AnvilHead wrote: »

canadianlbs wrote: »

agree . . . you'll see it coming in time to stop it, if that's what you want to do.

Fatvaporizer wrote: »

Thank you for all the advice. I'm just afraid that I'll build all this muscle and turn my upper body into big and bulky, and won't be able to reverse it. I know I know sound a bit naive but it's just a concern and uncertainty as to whether I should do it or not.

don't take me as the only source . but everything i've read and been told is that 'hypertrophy' (i.e. your body adding new muscle mass) happens if you lift in the 8-12 rep range. in other words, if you do 8-12 repetitions of an exercise in every set, your body's muscle-creation will be more strongly triggered.

lifting in the 5-rep range, even with heavier weights, has a different effect. you get stronger without adding very much visible 'bulk'. i'm a little hesitant about stating this as solid fact since i'm a woman and not all that disposed to growing muscle in the first place. but for what it's worth, i can tell you that for more than a year i've been lifting with four to six men of varying ages/physical types and fitness levels. almsot all of us are doing 3x5 or similar programs, and i've seen them all get stronger over the time i've been there. some of them have gotten leaner. nobody's totally changed builds or body types though.

While 8-12 reps generally is regarded as the optimal hypertrophy range, that doesn't mean that lifting in that rep range will make one get big/bulky. Putting on muscle is an excruciatingly slow, gradual process - and putting on large amounts of muscle like the OP is thinking is nearly impossible for most people and certainly won't happen quickly or by accident. It takes incredible dedication and years of training to build "big, bulky" muscles - and in the case of many bodybuilders, it also involves taking anabolic steroids and doing many bulk/cut cycles to put that mass on.

OP is also trying to lose weight, which means he's eating in a caloric deficit, which makes building any significant amounts of muscle nearly impossible - and you're certainly not going to put on massive slabs of muscle and accidentally end up looking like a bodybuilder while weight training in a deficit. One is lucky if they preserve what muscle mass they have or perhaps put on a slight (very slight) amount of additional muscle when lifting in a caloric deficit.

If it was as easy as the OP thinks to get "huge", there would be a lot more "huge" guys walking around. Go into any gym anywhere and you'll see plenty of people lifting weights, gulping protein shakes and supplements, doing anything and everything they can in desperate efforts to put that muscle on. Every single one of them wishes it was as easy as some people think it is!