Believe it or not, you can gain strength without gaining weight in the gym. This is great news, because so many people avoid strength training for fear of becoming “bulky.”
Luckily, the gym has evolved so far past the point of being a bodybuilder’s playground, and we understand so much more about getting stronger, healthier, and better at physical activity without gaining lots of muscle.
For more information on the difference between strength and muscle gains, read this post.
Are You Actually Gaining Muscle When You Train?
Before we get to my tips on avoiding gaining muscle during weight lifting, there’s one thing I’d like to add. You’ve probably heard it before, but it’s actually very hard to to build muscle – it rarely happens by accident. It requires:
- A consistent calorie surplus;
- Plenty of protein in your diet;
- Regularly training each muscle group.
Often, what people mistake for “getting bulky” is actually:
- Increased muscle definition caused by getting a little leaner. The shape of muscle becomes more visible, but it hasn’t actually gotten much bigger.
- Weight gain caused by eating more. The gym is stimulating your appetite and you’re eating to refuel. Whether this is intentional or not, it’s has very little to do with your lifting weights.
This begs the question…
Why Are You Afraid of Getting Bulky When You Lift Weights?
There are plenty of valid reasons to avoid gaining muscle when lifting weights. You may just like the way your body looks right now, or you may need to maintain a specific weight for your sport. If this is you, you’ll find the information here useful.
However, if your fear of getting bulky in the gym is driven by a belief that you should always be getting smaller and thinner, then this post may not help. This desire is often very deeply routed in your values alongside societal expectations of what you should look like. Until you unpack and challenge these beliefs about your body image, you may be conflicted by weight training.
With all that said, let’s get to my tips for avoiding muscle gain during strength training.
Tip 1: Avoid Fatigue when Weight Training
If it’s your desire to build strength without gaining weight and muscle, it’s useful to understand what exactly you’re trying to avoid. Aside from the factors I’ve already mentioned, muscle growth is also influenced by muscular fatigue. There are two main ways we manage fatigue in a workout:
- How close we get to muscular failure;
- How much rest we have.
Muscular failure is a “point of no return” that significantly reduces our ability to perform more reps of an exercise. Taking a muscle to its limit is this way can stimulate new adaptations as a compensation for those limits. In weight training, we often describe our proximity to failure (and thus our exercise intensity) by estimating how many reps in reserve (RIR) were left at the end of a set.
Our rest period allows us to rebuild the buffer zone that protects us from muscular failure. This includes replenishing muscle energy and clearing waste products. The less we rest, typically the closer we get to failure, because we’re less able to build that buffer zone. Think of it like your savings – the smaller the gap between shopping sprees, the closer you’ll get to your overdraft.
You can still build strength without gaining weight as long as you manipulate these two variables to avoid excessive fatigue. If you finish sets with around 3-4 reps in reserve, you’re less likely to trigger some of those muscle-building processes. Pair this with a good amount of rest (at least 2 minutes) and you’re even more likely to avoid failure. Luckily, these types of sessions tend to be effective for building strength and power, and are probably still fine for other weightlifting benefits such as bone density preservation.
Tip 2: Focus on Compound Lifts to Avoid Building Muscle
Compound lifts are exercises that require multiple joints and muscle groups to perform. These are exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench press, and pullups.
Compound exercises don’t always provide the best platform for building muscle. It’s hard to truly isolate any single muscle group, and the nervous system has a lot of “multi-tasking” to do, which means individual muscles probably aren’t contracting as well as they are in isolation exercises.
While you technically can build muscle from compound exercises, it will certainly be harder to target all muscle fibres this way. If you combine this with Tip 1, you should be on pretty safe ground.
Tip 3: Maintain a Calorie Deficit
If you can get away with training in a calorie deficit of around 500 calories a day, this will probably allow you to perform strength training without gaining muscle. What’s more, the meta-analysis that collected these findings did NOT find statistically significant reductions in strength training progress at the same time.
If you’re training to get stronger and improve your sport performance, it may not be suitable to maintain this calorie deficit long-term as you’ll need energy to recover and maintain performance. I would recommend starting with a smaller calorie deficit, alongside the other tips here, and see how you get on.
Summary
Whenever issues of body image and weight gain intersect with training for strength, quality of life, and health, it’s important that you first explore your feelings. This will help you understand why you’re afraid of gaining muscle in the gym, and also whether the muscle growth you’re perceiving is actually true.
This may sound patronising, but you’d be surprised how many people I’ve met who think they are an outlier when it comes to gaining muscle. If I had a pound for every time someone told me they gain muscle really easily, and their arms blow up as soon as they look at a weight, I’d be rich. With this many people believing they are the exception to the rule that gaining muscle is slow and difficult, there must be another explanation.
Once you’ve made peace with your motivations and concerns, you can employ the tips I’ve listed here to improve your strength without gaining weight. These are changes you can clearly measure in the gym, so avoiding a major muscle-growth stimulus in training should be relatively straightforward.
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