Women are often scared that lifting weights will turn them into something akin to the Incredible Hulk.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth, as the thousands of incredible transformations we help women achieve at Ultimate Performance will tell you.
Long-time weight training devotee Gemma Atkinson addressed this myth head-on with U.P. personal trainer Elliott Upton.
Elliott explains how vastly different levels of hormones between men and women, mean that weights really won’t make you bulky.
GEMMA: I’ve been weight training for years and years. And I’m far from, I mean, if it was only easy for men to get that bulky from just natural weight training, you know what I mean?
You see pictures of women on stage, but they’re not just weightlifting, they’re doing a lot more.
ELLIOTT: In order to get bigger, to get muscular, to get thick or whatever it happens to be, even to the point where certain areas of your body that you want to grow like your bum, something like that, the effort you have to put in to make that happen and the sustained long-term effort is extraordinary.
So thinking that weight training alone is going to get you big, just not going to happen.
Second thing, one unique factor that men have over females within this kind of subject is we have things dangling between our legs that you don’t.
We produce testosterone that allows us to put on muscle much, much faster.
It allows us to grow quicker.
These are the things that make our hands bigger than yours, our general frames, our bone structures.
Everything is bigger because of our testosterone. You have, on average, about 5% of the total testosterone that a man has. It’s going to make it a lot more difficult for you, a lot more difficult.
Now yes, then you have what you see on social media, what you may see in certain magazines, the misinformation, preconceptions of females who get into particular shapes or put on a lot of muscle.
They are not just eating a certain way and training a certain way. There are things that they are doing that your average person is not prepared to do.
There are supplements they are taking, they have to take in order to be competitive in these types of industries.
Whether they admit it or not, this is what’s going on. So don’t believe everything you see.
