Building Muscle for Women: the Bulky Myth

Building muscle is one of the top things you can do for your health - yet you might worry about becoming too bulky.  Learn how you can approach building muscle without this worry. 

Transcript

For questions please email jolie@thejolielife.com

If you are interested in the Strong & Lean Program, find more details here :https://www.thejolielife.com/store/p459/Strong_%26_Lean_%3A_September_Body_Recomposition_Program.html

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Jolie Life Podcast. Today starts a series in this podcast that I am so excited about and I know is going to be incredibly helpful to you. So many women and men, but mainly women in their forties, fifties, sixties, are looking to build muscle. We hear all over the place, social media, magazines, news, headlines, how important it is to build muscle. Our muscle is what helps us not to age. Our muscle solves so many of the problems of aging, and it makes our life easeful. Having more muscle protects your bones, having more muscle protects you from falls from getting injured, having more muscle amplifies your immunity and your disease resistance. Having more muscle balances, your sugar levels in your blood, it balances your blood lipid profile. Having more muscle improves testosterone and gives men more vigor. It also helps women to balance their hormones.
(01:27)
Therefore, raising our libido, having more muscle prevents the waistline from getting thicker and thicker, and it also makes you look younger and it makes you feel more confident. And honestly, it just makes the day easier. So carrying in your groceries, carrying anything suddenly is not as hard because you are stronger. The way you fit in your clothes changes because your body changes shape in the most positive way when you begin to build muscle. However, the thing that I hear most frequently is besides, how do I do this is, but I don't want to get bulky, and that was one of my concerns when I started building muscle. I don't want to get bulky. I'm going to tell you right now, you're not going to get bulky and I'm going to back up and tell you why. But first lemme tell you a little story. So when I started getting really into building muscle, part of it was I needed a new challenge for myself and I love working out.
(02:43)
I'm like, okay, I have this new machine and embody that measures how much fat I have in my body, how much lean muscle mass, how much water and how much visceral fat. The visceral fat is the fat in my organs. So I get to see an inside view of my body, which I love. Having this machine really excited me as I saw my workouts beginning to yield results. And as I dove into, okay, what do I need to build more muscle because I'm a goal girl and I have to have a goal that I want to achieve. And I quickly discovered it wasn't just working out and it wasn't just any workout. I quickly discovered that I needed the fuel to actually make the muscles and we all hear, oh, eat more protein, eat more protein. It is more nuanced than that in that two vital factors.
(03:53)
A, you need way more protein than you think, and B, you need way more recovery foods in your diet than you think. In addition to that, your exercise has to be very specific, which I will get to later, not in this podcast, but in a different one. Today we're talking about why you're not going to get bulky. So me being competitive, once I saw my muscle mass hit certain levels, I began to look into bodybuilding. Competitions not like strength building, but now bodybuilding is more diverse so they have more lifestyle competitions where a woman still looks very feminine, but she is very, very defined. And as I dove into that and dove into the information and the science and the how to and all this kind of stuff, it became abundantly clear that to look like these women, look, it takes a lot, it takes a lot of intention, it takes a lot of hard work, it takes a lot of purposeful action to get to that point.
(05:07)
And this was me looking at it at 84 pounds of muscle, 16% body fat. So I had a lot of work to do in order to get that level of bulk that I needed. The intentionality and how specific you have to be made it really, really clear that to get bulky, a woman has to circumvent her natural programming. And this leads to why we are not going to get bulky when we decide to build muscle. We are not going to get bulky because our hormones are different than men's. We have testosterone. Men have testosterone. Men generally have much higher levels of testosterone than we do. That's what makes them a man. Testosterone is the muscle building hormone. It is one of them, but it is a very, very important one. So when women, we have naturally lower levels of testosterone, which means that our muscles are not driven to grow bulky.
(06:29)
They are driven to grow, but not in a bulky way. In order to get more testosterone or to push our bodies to become bulky, we would have to use performance enhancing drugs, which is not what we're about at the Jo life. So our muscle growth is relatively slow and it's relatively moderate. If you want to look, if you want to get an assessment of, okay, how am I going to look when I add a lot more muscle to my body? Go work out, do some sort of strength class, do bar, do a power yoga class, do a strength training class and look at your muscles there. Your muscles have, they call it hyper atory. Oh, I always have a hard problem with pronouncing that it is the muscles getting bigger. You're going to look at your arm and you're going to see what does that look like. If you like what that looks like, you're golden because when you add more muscle, that's what you're going to look like. If you do your workout and you're like, I still can't see my muscle, you're golden there too because it means you have a long way to go for muscle hypertrophy. There we got it.
(07:52)
So you have a lee way in looking and working for gaining your muscles. I have yet to get to a point where after workout, I look at my muscles and I say, that's too much. It's going to take a really long time for me to get there. So you have a little warning sign. So next time you work out, which hopefully later today, tomorrow morning, look at your muscles and say to yourself, can I go a bit more? And then you'll have your answer. So what they look like after your workout is what they would look like on a normal day if you gained muscle mass. The other thing is you can put the brakes on muscle growth at any point because your muscle growth is gradual. For me, I like to do things intensely. So I've been putting on a lot of muscle very fast, which is what we're going to do in our September program, but even fast is gradual when you think about it.
(08:55)
So as we're putting on muscle, when I say fast, we want to see a change in our bodies in four to six weeks. And slow is like, okay, I'm going to work out for a year and see where I get. I'm not that type of person. I like to get results pretty darn quickly. But that being said, four to six weeks, if you overshoot your muscle gain goal, then you pull back and you shift into muscle maintenance, which that is important too. We need to learn how to build muscle and we need to learn how to maintain it. I think we all know how to lose it, and that's literally having a bad diet or a diet that's not pro muscle. I won't even say a bad diet because many of us have very healthy diets, but they're not muscle and not working out in the proper way.
(09:48)
So we have two things that protect us from getting bulky. One, we have to be really intentional about it because hormones make it hard. And two, our muscle growth is gradual. The third is your diet. Your diet controls your outcome. And here I'll give you another story. So I did this week by week comparison where I did the same exercise routine week A in the same exercise week B. And since I have the lovely embody machine, I get the inside view of what my body looks like in terms of muscle fat and water at the beginning, middle, and end of each week. So with week A where I ate a relatively normal-ish protein diet, and when I say normal, I say that for me is about 20 to 30 grams per meal for normal protein intake. I use the metric of 0.6 to one gram of protein for every pound of body weight.
(11:00)
And I did all my exercise and I maintained my muscle mass. I did not grow muscle, I did not lose muscle, I did not grow fat, I did not lose fat. I maintained my muscle mass. And then the second week I basically doubled my protein. So every meal I was getting about 40 to 50 grams of protein, so a big doubling. I did the same exercise routine and guess what? More muscle your diet very much controls your outcome. If your calorie intake matches or is slightly below what you're burning and you're having a lot of protein, you will increase your muscle density while losing, and that will make you look slimmer. It won't make you look larger When you have a diet where you've amped up the protein but you've kept the calories minimal or with a slight deficit and you're working out that those factors are all important, your body is going to preferentially build muscle and convert fat to energy, which you end up stronger and leaner, which is where we most of us want to end up stronger and leaner.
(12:29)
You might say to yourself, well, I'm very thin. I don't need to lose any weight. When we talk about building muscle, sometimes there is an exchange, but the cool thing about muscle building is the hormone balance that comes with it prevents you from burning too much of your body fat and my dive into female bodybuilding competitions in order to get to those super low numbers of body fat while having super high numbers of a high amount of muscle, again, we go back to our first point. You have to be incredibly intentional and very, very specific on your diet so you don't have to worry about that. And the bulky look that you will sometimes see on people, and I sometimes see that on people is the combination of fat plus muscle. And that tends to happen when we are working out and we're like, oh my gosh, I worked out so much.
(13:42)
I get to eat this sandwich for lunch. Oh my gosh, I worked out so much. I get to eat ice cream on the weekend. Oh my gosh, I worked out so much. I get to have an extra helping. This is one of the biggest pitfalls I will say of exercise is sometimes we get in this mode, oh, I worked out really hard so I can have this, but unless we're working out for multiple hours, we are not building a bank of calories that we can then dip into to eat. When we do do that where we think in our mind, okay, we built in this big surplus of calories so we can eat more, then we become bulky. But it's not the muscle that's making us bulky, it's the additional body fat that's making us bulky. And so I want to just underline that the ideal is body recomposition where you're fat for muscle, not where you're gaining both or where yes, you're gaining muscle, but you're not losing the body fat that could be lost in the process and that doing that is going to make your clothes not fit.
(15:10)
It's going to make you feel bigger, it's going to make you feel puffy, it's going to make you feel bulky. So when we perceive that, oh my gosh, I've gotten bulky, it's most often because you've gained both muscle and body fat. The key here is your nutrition. It is keeping the nutrition in check. The sort of secret sauce or the magic is increasing protein while holding calories the same or slightly below. Oftentimes when we look to increase protein, we increase our overall calorie consumption, which puts us in that gaining fat and muscle stage, which we're not going to like how we look after that. So to dispel the myth, you can build muscle with the right nutrition and the right workout without looking bulky, and you have to be really, really intentional if you want to get bulky or your nutrition isn't matching. And so hopefully from this podcast, you are inspired to go and build muscle and you no longer are operating from the fear of, oh my gosh, if I do this, I'm going to get too bulky.
(16:34)
No, go build your muscle. You are going to feel fabulous. Just be mindful that because you are exercising more, because you are eating more protein, that you are not increasing your overall calorie consumption. This September we have a program at Jolie that is called Strong and Lean, and that program is going to be all about creating a diet, eating foods, eating a diet that helps your body to build lean and strong. And we are going to use the embodying machine and other factors to track our results, but we are basically going to swap fat for muscle. So we're going to build nice lean physiques and we are going to lose any excess body fat that we have. And what is going to end up happening is that at the end of four weeks, or you can do the six week program at the end of six weeks, your body is going to look phenomenal. It is going to be, it is to be strong, your clothes are going to fit beautifully, and your body's going to literally function better because of the impact that muscle has on your metabolism, on your sleep, on your cognition, on your memory, on your heart, help.
(18:12)
You are going to feel fabulous. And because this is so much, so important to me and so much my passion, particularly for the menopausal and postmenopausal group, recovery is going to be built into this. Recovery is our key to forever mobility. And when we look to build muscle, we're a protecting ourselves and we're helping ourselves to age well. And then when we layer onto that, the Jolie Life Diet, which is super anti-inflammatory, and then we layer onto that improved recovery practices, everyone is going to be golden at the end of four to six weeks. So if you are interested in that program, please head over to our website and sign up. The first 50 clients that sign up for the program will receive a complimentary recovery kit, which will be super, super juicy. And if you are not in the New Jersey, New York area, just email us because we have A-D-I-Y-A do it yourself program that you can implement at home, a nutrition program and a movement program that will allow you to become lean and strong, strong and lean in four to six weeks.
(19:37)
And when I say in four to six weeks, I want you to see a noticeable difference in your body, a noticeable difference in how you feel every day, how you move, how you look, and for you to be able, if you're here, you're going to get the Embody machine. It's part of the program, you're going to get access to it for you to see, oh my gosh, I build this much muscle. And to really revel in the improvements that you've made on all levels of your health. So that is it. Next podcast, we are going to talk about out recovery because recovery is so important and the strong and lean diet is one that builds in recovery, and it's actually the thing that allows you to keep going, to keep improving, to keep getting better. And that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jo Life Podcast.
(20:45)
And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped by this podcast, I would love to hear your comments. And you can contact me at julia@thejulielife.com and please follow us on Instagram, the Jolie Life. Our website is the jolie life.com, and it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone. Let the ripple effect happen. Let the Jo life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving.