Fitness Rewired Capsule #8: The 3 Reasons You May Feel Bulky

Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I build Evo. Evo is science back strain training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evo now for two weeks free if you visit evlofitness.com. - Welcome to Fitness Rewired on the Dr. Shannon Show. A nine episode capsule designed to close the gap between fitness culture and exercise science so you can see higher return on your effort and finally feel like you're doing enough. Many fitness beliefs come from marketing and tradition and don't align with current evidence. When you learn the truth, you can rewire your thoughts around fitness. That shift leads to higher quality actions, better results, and health you can actually sustain. I'm your host, Shannon Richey. Welcome to the show. - Can women actually get bulky? In the first episode of this capsule, I talked about where the fear of getting bulky may have come from. And the truth is, it's probably a concern that's much older than we realize with women wanting to look feminine, not strong, but in the 80s, when female bodybuilding started to become popular, women who gained a lot of muscle were starting to get media attention. This scared away the average woman who had never lifted weights, thinking that she would look like that if she started lifting. So what happened is the pendulum swaying in the other direction. Jane Fonda workouts and the tone without the bulk messaging emerged using light weights, doing cardio only. But anytime I talk about how it's hard to get bulky as a woman, I get women in the comments who say, well, I got bulky from strength training and I look leaner doing lighter work. So, bulkiness is clearly subjective and it's important to define what you mean by bulky. And I think of three things. Number one is that bodybuilder physique from the 80s with lots of big defined muscles. Number two is maybe just feeling bigger overall but not necessarily defined muscles. Number three is puffy or inflamed or swollen looking. So all three of these are separate processes. So I wanna discuss how they happen and how to know which is which. So first is the bodybuilder physique. This comes from high training volume. So think hours in the gym every day. This is the type of training that not only takes hours of long workouts but it takes a long time like months and years. You may also feel really beat up from lots of high volume training. Many people don't have the time or desire to commit to this type of intense long training. And even if they had the time, many people struggle to recover from high volume training that builds lots of muscle quickly. This is why in the bodybuilding community, animal steroids are sometimes used so that someone can recover faster and continue to train more and train harder. So developing a large overly muscular physique does not happen by accident. It's not something you'll stumble into. Most women concerned about getting bulky don't have to worry about this category at all. The second type of bulkiness is one that is potentially more common, which is feeling bigger overall but not necessarily having defined muscles. This happens when you are gaining both fat and muscle. So a true quote unquote bulk. Bulking happens when you're combining strength training with a calorie surplus and is often a technique used intentionally to gain muscle really quickly. Many people unintentionally bulk by being in a calorie surplus while they're building muscle. And this is easily solved by just tracking your food and take to see where you're landing with your overall calories and moving into either calorie maintenance or a slight calorie deficit if your goal is to lose lean mass. I will say that it takes about three-ish months to build visible muscle definition. So if you haven't been training for three months, you're likely not experiencing significant muscle gain. You could be experiencing some swelling or fat gain. But if you've been training for over three months, it could be that you've built a substantial amount of muscle mass and either also gained fat mass or haven't lost fat mass so you've gained mass overall. If more of a quote unquote toned look is your goal that may come down to fine-tuning your diet a little bit more to lose more body fat. Strength training does not automatically make you leaner. If you want to body recomposition so build muscle while losing fat, you do have to be in a slight calorie deficit. But with this strategy, and I discussed all of this in detail in my last capsule about body recomposition, typically this solves the quote unquote bigger feeling that some people feel like they get to when they start showing training. So that's the second type of quote unquote bulkingness that some people experience. The third type is feeling puffy or swollen or inflamed. This happens when training volume is too high for you to recover from. Recovery capacity is individual and based on your life stage. If you manage stress well and good, good sleep, you'll likely be able to tolerate more exercise than if you don't. But if your training volume exceeds your current recovery capacity, your body may start to accumulate low levels of inflammation that sometimes makes you look puffy or inflamed. Swelling can happen when you first start a new routine, but that typically goes away after about a month or so. But that swelling may linger if you aren't recovering between sessions because your body is struggling to clear inflammation. This isn't always the direct fault of your workout program. It could be an accumulation of stress over all that's inhibiting recovery and causing that swelling or inflammation or quote unquote puffyness. If you aren't sleeping, if you're drinking a lot of alcohol, if you're not fueling properly, and you have a routine that's stressing your body, even if it's the perfect routine, that may be too much for your system to handle. So the hard truth is if you want physical results, both health and aesthetic results, you do have to take a hard look at your life stress in general and make sure that your workouts are in balance with your overall recovery capacity. I do have to say that when I started drinking less and eating better and sleeping more, my workout seemed a lot more effective. I could lift heavier, I could recover better, and I could see more progress. But sometimes it's that your workout is just simply too much. Many people report going from hit and hypertrophy work to Pilates and walking and they all send feel tighter and more toned. And that isn't because their workout toned them. It's likely because their body wasn't fighting so hard to recover and swelling reduced so they could see the existing muscle that they had built in their prior workout. I discussed in detail why this may happen in episode number four if you want to know more about that when I talked about the burn and toning. But this doesn't mean that Pilates and walking is the answer. It also doesn't mean that high volume hit and high volume lifting is the answer. It's likely a middle ground for the majority of people that are busy and have a good amount of life stress like we all do. Small doses of hit so maybe once per week and moderate volume strength training like EVLO is much less likely to be overwhelming on your body but still drives adaptation and change. However, if you have high life stress, even that routine might feel like too much. The first thing to go should be your hit. And then second is maybe you back off your resistance training volume a little bit. If you're an EVLO member and you're doing, let's say the five time per week track, you could switch to start doing Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday classes only. And that will be less volume overall but the irony is it might be more effective because you might feel like you can show up with more intensity to each of those workouts. Once your body is feeling better and better adapted then maybe you can go back to the five time per week track in the regular programming but sometimes doing less is actually the answer to saying better results. So those are the three reasons why I think some people may feel bulky. How do you know which is the one that you are experiencing? First, let's rule out the bodybuilder physique because no one is getting into that by accident and it's also pretty clear. You don't just stumble into getting bulky, huge muscles like that but it may be harder to determine if you are someone that has gained fat or if it's inflammation from overtraining. I'm gonna give you a really easy test to determine is it because I have some fat to lose or is it because of inflammation? So take a week off lifting or intense exercise. If you notice the swelling and puffiness goes down over that week, it was likely your workout volume not actual lean mass that you've built. That just means adjust your volume slightly. If you didn't see much of a change it could mean that you have some fat mass to lose and so adjust your nutrition slightly. I think this is a really important conversation because women are getting brushed aside for experiencing these things and instead of feeling like they have a place lifting weights they decide it's not for them and they need to go do this lightweight high rep training which likely isn't building the type two muscle fibers that we're losing as we age. So I wanna tell you, don't give up if you notice these things just tweak. Keep showing up with adjustments and treat your body like a science experiment because no one's going to do it for you. You have to do the work of finding what volume clicks in your current life stage that you're in. So if we wanna get really scientific about what quote unquote tone without the bulk really looks like it's not lightweight workouts where you're doing ankle weights for 300 reps. It's diet for fat loss plus moderate volume strength training to at least maintain muscle if not build it slowly. My goal of this episode is not that we hyper obsess about how our body looks. It's just a game. give you the tools to stay consistent because I think a lot of people find that they feel bigger overall and they stop training altogether and that's the last thing I want us to do for our health. So my hope is that this helps lift the fear and helps you stay consistent with straight training. So, to this point in this capsule, we've talked about calories, we've talked about working out hard, we've talked about toning, sculpting, sweating, soreness and now bulkiness. By now you may be wondering what actually works. That's what we'll discuss tomorrow. See you then. [BLANK_AUDIO]