A common concern when weightlifting is whether or not you will grow bigger muscles. Some want this effect, and others do not. Does lifting weights definitely result in larger muscles?
Muscles Get Bigger In Different Ways
An important place to start is with the fact that we are not very certain on how muscle enlargement happens and the theories that we do have point to multiple potential avenues. One way they get larger may be through changes in the fibers themselves. They can thicken or they can add length. Another hypothesized avenue is an increase in the number of fibers, though this is uncertain. Another possible but unproven mechanism may be an increase in fluid volume around the muscles. When a muscle gets bigger, it could be by any of these mechanisms or any combination.1 Who knows if we will ever totally sort it out.
It is equally unclear what leads to these changes. We know weightlifting can do it, but not exactly why. It could be micro-damage to the fibers that trigger growth inducing repair. It could be changes in hormones like testosterone or growth hormone triggered by the stress. It could be the tension created in the fibers that trigger some sort of response. Or, again, it could be all of the above in various combinations.2 Or something else entirely.
This leaves us in a bit of a bind if we want to answer the all important question: will this make my muscles bigger?
Will This Make My Muscles Bigger?
Before we answer this, there are some observations we all can make with our own eyes that are very instructive. Head over to this article at bodybuilding.com. In it, the author makes the point that even though olympic weightlifters all participate in the same sport, which centers entirely around lifting heavy loads, they don’t all look the same, and you can check out the pictures to see for yourself. Why is this the case? It is because weightlifting has weight classes and weight classes allow for a variety of body types. People who are in the light weight classes tend to be small and have low body fat percentages. On the other end of the spectrum, in the heavy weight divisions, they tend to be tall and have a fair amount of body fat together with rather large muscles. In the middle weight classes we have a middle between the two. People who are of average height, relatively lean, and with more muscles showing.
What you can see here is a filtering affect. Although they all participate in the same sport, which involves lifting lots of weights and becoming very strong and powerful, they don’t all end up looking in a way that we would describe as muscle-bound. What really determines their shape is the weight class they are in. If you happen to be a small person you can get into weightlifting and, in spite of hours upon hours of weightlifting, still stay small. If you are a person who is very tall and large, you can train like the dickens and still stay that size.
So, Will This Make My Muscles Bigger?
It is of course possible to design different weightlifters’ training programs differently in order to elicit different responses. We could try to train the small people to stay as light as possible and the big people to be as heavy as possible, i.e. going for high muscle growth in large people and minimal in the smaller people. However, we have to bear in mind that there are limits to this. For one, in the example of olympic weightlifting, since everyone has to do the same thing, which is get heavy loads overhead, they’ve all got to do a pretty good amount of similar training. This is true in any sport. Further, as common sense lets us know, a five-foot-two person can no more become a six-and-a-half-foot giant than a six-and-a-half-foot giant can become five foot two, muscle size notwithstanding. Finally, and maybe most importantly, we have to remember what was mentioned above. We really don’t know for sure what mechanisms in what combinations are ultimately driving muscle growth. If we don’t know the mechanisms with certainty and with accuracy, then we’re really just guessing. We can experiment and see, not much more.
What this all means is that, in the end, how your muscles look comes down to experimenting with what your training does to your particular body. You probably can do certain things to steer the results a little, but we all have different body types that make up our starting point and that means we’ll all have a different experience.