This is still one of the most common misconceptions among female gym-goers, especially those new to weight training. They’ll often hold back from using a challenging weight on their gym exercises, or skip many upper body exercises altogether, due to a fear that it will make their appearance look overly muscular.  This couldn’t be further from the truth! Here are 3 main reasons why: Biology, Food, and Time.

• It is a biological fact that gaining muscle size is more difficult for women than for men. Due to the differences in hormone levels (higher testosterone in men = easier muscle gain, higher estrogen in women = harder to gain muscle), body mass size, bone structure and muscle fibres, men are genetically more predisposed to gaining larger muscles at a faster rate than women. This means that a woman could do the same weights exercises as a man for the same amount of reps and sets, but would not achieve the same amount of muscle gain from her workout as the man would.

• Believing that you will instantly ‘get bulky’ just from doing a heavy weights session is simply a misunderstanding of how muscle gain works. You don’t get bigger from doing the exercises alone; muscle size is highly dependent on how much food you eat to support your training. If your goal was to gain muscle mass and ‘bulk up’ you would need to eat in a constant state of calorie SURPLUS ie. regularly eat more than your body usually needs to maintain the same weight. If females were doing regular heavy weight training but ate at the same maintenance level (or less) than they normally do, not only would they not bulk up – they would probably look leaner and actually lose rather than gain weight. Getting larger and more muscular comes from training with heavy weights COMBINED with eating larger meals, not from heavy weights alone.

• Gaining significant muscle size takes longer than people think. Even elite athletes with the most advanced training protocols are lucky to gain 2kg of muscle per month, and the average gym trainee with a decent program can expect to gain just 1kg of muscle per month. That means if you gained more than 1kg of bodyweight in a month, bad news – it isn’t just muscle gain. You most likely gained bodyfat, and you can’t blame that on the weight training. Weights exercises by themselves don’t increase bodyfat and make you look bigger, consuming excess food does. If women trained with heavy weights and ate at the correct amount to support lean muscle gain, they would after a month be just 1kg heavier – probably even less than that due to reason #1 above. At this rate of muscle gain it would be impossible for women to ‘look bulky’ after just a few short weeks or months of training with heavy weights.