9 Reasons Women Shouldn't Be Afraid Of Lifting Weights
Feel like boss and look muscular only if you want to.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
First things first: Muscles are badass and beautiful and there is no reason anyone should be ashamed of them.
Everyone is allowed to have muscles, and literally no one should tell you differently. That said, we know that everyone has different body composition goals, so if yours don't include bigger muscles — but you still want to lift weights and get stronger — read on!
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The thing about lifting weights as a woman is that you probably won't get big, bulging muscles (unless you work really hard to do so).
As BuzzFeed Health has has previously reported, putting on serious size and bulk really requires a training and nutrition plan geared towards those specific goals, along with a hormonal response that makes it happen relatively easily (more on all that in a sec).
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Generally speaking, the average woman's hormone levels don't enable muscle growth the way men's do.
Hypertrophy — an increase in muscle size — occurs when, among other things, strength training creates a hormonal response that promotes muscle growth. The hormones in question here are testosterone and growth hormone, says Heather Milton, exercise physiologist at NYU Langone's Sports Performance Center.
So even if you're lifting weights like crazy, you need to actually have enough of those hormones available to cause your muscles to get bigger. It's not that your muscles won't grow at all though. It's that on average, cisgender women have a fraction (around a tenth) of the circulating testosterone that men do, says exercise scientist Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D. And having less testosterone makes it harder and makes it take longer to gain as much muscle mass, says Milton.
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