I'll admit that my quick and dirty work out doesn't give me huge body builder style muscles. I am merely athletic, not huge. If I wanted to be huge, I guess I'd have to put in the work, lots of literature on the science of body building.
Lifting for strength and lifting for large muscles are actually quite different. It is likely a huge bodybuilder type will be strong relative to the average person, but that's not their primary goal, and correspondingly you can be strong without that look too.
The women you cite have a point though (while misusing the word "bulky" in front of a bodybuilder / fitness expert)
When I stopped ballroom dancing and started working out more, I did not get bulky in any way, however it surely felt that way!
Gone was my coordination, my elegance, my posture!
Isolated, limited movement with weight is the exact opposite of rhytmic dance movement with lots of body tension.
It annoyed me, but I can imagine that this matters a lot more to women. In dancing I've seen women who might have been a little overweight, moving around gracefully.
Just wanted to point that out, because I have noticed several comments like yours around the 'net recently - maybe people getting a little touchy that the work they put into their body is not appreciated sufficiently?
Are you using weight machines? Those are usually isolation exercises that neglect the stabilizer muscles. Most beginning lifting programs such as Starting Strength recommend the major, compound lifts.
There's something quite beautiful in watching a skilled lifter. Lifting a 200 pound bar without the slightest wobble takes no small amount of coordination, as does merely doing a powerclean at all.
After I started barbells, I noticed I got MUCH better at yoga and any activity that requires balance. You cannot lift 250 pounds safely without some measure of balance and grace.
When I look around the gym, I see a lot of people bouncing around when lifting lighter dumbbell weights or using weight machines. It's very possible to lift weights unbalanced, to a point.
However, the most efficient weight training will also train balance.
I'm guessing two things happened in your case:
1. Your form was off, and you unbalanced yourself
2. Your elegance stopped because you had stopped training elegance. It was lack of dance, rather than weight lifting.
Proper weight training does not destroy grace, it augments it.
Lifting requires form and balance and all that, and is beautiful in itself, and for elegance you gotta keep training elegance.
I do maintain that people look bulky and uncoordinated if they are only lift weights and doing nothing else (i.e. excluded people who do other sports, or women in the acrobatic bodybuilding categories etc.). This can be normal/cool for men, but is noticable in women in my opinion.
While we're in a general fitness/workout thread, I want to recommend activities that require coordination and skill.
If you are looking for an activity, see if you can find a broader challenge than just a weight - learning a skill in martial arts, experiencing progress more vividly in climbing, swimming and learning all 4 styles etc.
The attitude of articles like this (7 minutes) often feels like "how little do I have to do this dreaded activity for my health conscience". Meh.
"Isolated, limited movement" is a horrible way to exercise.
My flexibility, coordination and posture has all improved substantially through lifting - I needed a lot of work to get flexible enough to carry out e.g. deep squats and correct deadlifts without hurting myself.
Do primarily isolation exercises, and yes, you will not spend time maintaining and improving your flexibility and coordination. Do exercises with large range of motion and complex movements, like deep squats, clean and jerk or power clean (power cleans are "easy" compared to clean and jerk), or kettlebell exercises, and add in some dynamic stretches for mobility (separate by time from the lifting), and most people will get far more flexible and coordinated.
Personally I'm annoyed at people worrying about getting bulky for two reasons: Yes, it is annoying seeing beginners be all presumptuous about how easy it'll be, but I also find well trained but non-bulky women more attractive. And I happen to know that most of them will never, ever get into bulky territory without a combination of cutting their body fat to unhealthy levels and steroid use, so I would love more women to lift weights..
I think you're unfairly blaming weight training for the effect of cessation of skill training.
When, due to injury, I became unable last year to perform either the snatch or the clean and jerk, I was relegated to being able to do whatever it is I could. Lots of less complicated exercises that don't share any patterns in common with either of those two lifts.
At a recent experimental trial of my technique after 15 months away from the two lifts, it came as no surprise that I came kinda bad at them now.
Do I blame the other weight training? No: I realise that these two lifts require constant practice to remain smooth, precise and efficient. It's the same for other inter-muscular coordination tasks. If you stop doing them, you get worse at them.
You don't "double your volume" in 3 months unless your starting point is ridiculously small and/or you're counting added fat. Contrary to what fitness magazines and supplement manufacturers like to pretend, the body's ability to synthesise protein to build muscle is fairly limited.
"Double" your strength, sure, in the sense that beginner gains due to improved coordination and better understanding of your actual limits means it's not uncommon to double or triple the weight you can lift in the first few months (I tripled most of mine in the first month I exercised - these days I'm lucky if I can increase my max by 2.5kg per month from starting points ranging from 90kg to ca. 200kg depending on lift; often the increase takes longer than a month by now).
And it's worth pointing out a couple of other things most people don't realize:
Almost all of the people you see pictures off with really huge muscles today are/were heavy steroid users. Arnie looks "normal" compared to modern bodybuilders, and he used lots of steroids and put in massive amount of effort (another thing a lot of non-lifters don't understand is that steroid users don't get it easy, what they get is much faster and better recovery, letting them work harder and keep improving beyond a point where non-steroid users plateau) year after year after year. He first won a competition in 1965 after many years of exercise, and got his last Mr Olympia's in 1975 and 1980. The entire competitive field moved massively in that period with
Even more so, you usually see pictures of them that are nothing at all like what they normally look like. When training for Conan, Arnold decided to take one last shot at Mr. Olympia, and went on to win the 1980. Here's what he looked like:
http://www.ironmanmagazine.com/blog/johnhansen/2011/12/27/th...
But he looked like this, minutes to hours at a time at most, while covered in oil and dark colouring to bring out his definition. This is Arnold near or at his peak, after months of gruelling competition preparation, followed by making sure he is hydrated just right and his muscles are pumped for competition.
Outside of competition or exercise situations most lifters will be much less lean (especially power lifters) and will ironically often look smaller as a result of less definition and for many a less V-shaped torso that masks some of the development. I even find myself impressed by guys at the gym that I know for a fact are less muscular than me when they happen to be leaner so their build is more noticeable.
I just did heavy (for me) bench sets this morning. When I do, my chest and arms swell enough that my normally well fitting t-shifts stretch noticeably. I have to keep adjusting my polo shirts. This lasts for a couple of hours, and the swelling wears off.
I'm roughly Arnie's height, and weigh as much as he did at his peak. My body volume is bigger than he was at his peak, but I look much smaller because I have about 15kg more fat than him and 15kg or so less muscle... (I can claim my volume is bigger because muscle is more dense than fat - his overall volume would have been smaller, but concentrated in more muscle on his arms, chest and legs rather than as more evenly spread fat; I believe his waist was 34" when he was competing; I'm 36" to 38").
This is after 8 years of "recreational" lifting, starting at 30. I'm consistently in the gym 3-5 times every week outside of perhaps 2-3 weeks a year. If I started younger, and lifted more seriously, I might have gotten closer in size, but without steroids and far more work I'd have no chance of getting close to that kind of muscle volume and development. I'm not even at competitive levels for regional competitions in either power lifting or body building.
Yet I look more muscular than most guys who worry about getting bulky ever will, but I look tiny compared to well developed body builders much smaller than Arnold, despite a similar body volume.
Another thing most people that worry about this don't realize is that they eat way too little to ever get to even my size no matter how much they exercise. Currently I'm gaining strength at a good rate without increasing my weight thanks to mostly following intermittent fasting with a very high protein diet. Most days I eat 180g-230g of protein... Most people will find they'll be so stuffed they can hardly push more food down if they try that, pretty much irrespective of total calorie intake - getting most of it via lean chicken to give me some flexibility for other meals, still means I have nearly a kilo of chicken for lunch... I'm sick of chicken...
And I am not eating enough to get steroid-eating body-builder big, by far - I currently eat at roughly maintenance levels but varying up and down to get me in a slight deficit on non-exercise days and slightly above on exercise days.
