I Don’t Want Big Muscles!!!

When i recommend a resistance workout to women the first thing that they always say is ‘I don’t want to get big muscles! i just want to be lean…’

Now if you had ever been to the gym and seen how hard the guys have to work to get big muscles, you would know that this is not going to happen.

Nevertheless, the resistance training for fat loss is very different to resistance training for gaining big muscles. In order to demonstrate this i am going to go through each of them and show you what i would be thinking if i were designing a program for each.

Lets start with getting big muscles. The process for this when i go to gym is that i want to split my muscle fibres under duress so they will grow back bigger and stronger. The only way i can do this is to load huge amounts of weight onto all my exercises and do very low repetitions on all my sets, so i have the energy to push as hard as i can. In fact this damage to my muscle fibers happens right at the end of the set, where i can’t go on and i essentially ‘fail’ to lift another rep. After this damage has occurred to my muscles i need to repair them. So i turn to my food, and as you can imagine i would need a load of energy for my body to repair these muscles properly so i eat a lot, many more calories than my body needs to run. Most of this goes into growing my body bigger, some of it goes into my fat stores.

Now lets compare that with resistance training for weight loss. The concept behind interval training is exhausting your muscle energy stores, this follows exactly the same route.

* Instead of doing one exercise with low reps, you will be doing two, three or even four exercises in a row without a rest.
* Your reps will be higher than a muscle gain type of workout and your rest periods a lot shorter.
* Instead of working out to failure, you will finish all your sets….with difficulty, but you will finish.
* And lastly your diet will not provide enough energy to grow massive muscles, if that energy was to come from anywhere it would be your fat stores and they are too busy refilling your muscle energy stores. In any case your muscles aren’t ‘damaged’ from pushing extreme weights. There adaptation will be to use energy more efficiently and to give you that great lean look.

Now if you are a guy and you really want to get massive, this probably isn’t the workout for you. You are going to get stronger on this workout and you certainly will not be losing any muscle. And this is a key difference to a lot of fat loss plans. You need these muscles to turn your body into a fat burning machine.