Many people get thrown off the idea of strength training because they don’t really desire huge muscles. (This is common among girls especially, but plenty of guys for the same reason.) Most people don’t want to look grotesque and muscular, like a pumped up bodybuilder. They just want to be lean, have good muscle definition, some visible abs, and be strong and physically capable.
It’s an admirable goal. One that I think EVERYONE should put at least some degree of effort into achieving. Who doesn’t want to look like that? It’s hot, it’s healthy, it’s not extreme, you don’t look gross at all. And because of that you’d probably think it doesn’t take that much to pull off.
But how many people do you see walking around looking like that?
I can tell you that the route to getting there is so f***ing simple, but people have this narrative in their head that cuts their efforts short before they even begin.
I can tell you now, high reps is not the answer. Cardio? Not the answer. Sit-ups? Also not the answer. What about some intense metabolic conditioning, maybe Crossfit or some other “functional” training? No, stop it now.
The answer, whether you want to look like a cut Brad Pitt in fight club or a magazine cover bikini girl, is to drop all that stuff and focus on simply getting as strong as humanly possible.
Lift as heavy as you can, infrequently, and let your body build as much muscle as you can allow it.
Sounds ridiculous, right?
Again, let me ask you how many people do you see on the street who look how you want to look. Compare that to the number of people you see trying to look like that, through fitness classes, treadmill sessions and other ineffective solutions trying to indirectly sell you your dream body one way or another.
Maybe common sense isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So bear with me.
People tend to think that heavy strength training = big muscles = bodybuilder-looking hulk beast before you know it. But this is just so far from reality it’s criminal.
Proper strength training does allow you to build muscles. But even if we want super slim model-looking bodies, this is EXACTLY what we need to achieve!
Why? Well, the other part of the physique equation we haven’t yet addressed is body fat. This part is more obvious to people: lower body fat generally looks better.
Body fat is simple to lose. You sit in a calorie deficit of an appropriate size (e.g. consuming 20% less calories than you need to maintain your weight over the week), your body burns fat (mostly) for fuel, you do this for enough weeks to lose the desired amount of fat, and then you stop.
Done. Simple equation.
What people don’t intuitively realise is that in order to have one (low body fat), you need the other (high muscle mass). That is, in order to carry decently low body fat and not look skinny and feel like trash, you need to fill out your frame with muscle. In other words, for the ideal physique you want to sit at a “normal” weight, but with as much of that weight as possible coming from muscle (rather than fat). This is what’s called good ‘body composition’.
And THAT is what makes a physique look great. You might be a 6-foot tall guy weighing only 75kg, but if you’ve spent enough time getting as strong as possible and stacking on muscle, you might sit at that weight under 10% body fat. That is, you’d have clear six-pack and visible muscle definition across your body. Nothing extreme in clothes, but ripped when naked. The dream.
Bear in mind, achieving those stats (that was me at the time of writing this article) took 4 years of dedicated work gaining as much muscle as I possibly could, with intermittent bursts (less than 3 months a year) of calorie deficits to periodically cut body fat down and stay lean. And I knew what I was doing—I’d already spent the previous three years figuring this stuff out through trial and error, so at this point I was going gangbusters to get as swol as possible. Yet you can see that the results are far from gorilla-mode bodybuilder.
The key point is this:
Muscle is hard to gain. Even more slow and difficult if you’re female.
But it’s essential if you want a really attractive looking body.
So the rule of thumb is that you want to build as much of it as possible, so you can cut your body fat down and look awesome as soon as possible.
If I had have realised the importance of this sooner, I may have focused in on this one goal and been another two or three years ahead in the process by now. But we learn.
Realise now that your capacity to have an awesome looking rig comes down to how much muscle you can stack on it. As soon as you’re worried that you’re looking “bulky”, you can cut body fat down in a matter of weeks and I can guarantee that it will cease to be an issue. (“Bulky” just means high body fat. Unless you’re on steroids, it will NEVER be an issue of too much muscle mass. Ever.)
If you ever get to 10% body fat as a guy / 20% as a girl and feel “too big”, then you have a problem that no one I have ever heard of in the entirety of the universe has ever had, and the solution will be literally be sitting on your ass for a bit. You have conquered fitness.
More than likely, the issue will actually be that your body fat is still higher than those levels, and you need to use a calorie deficit to cut down further. Once you’re lean, you can properly see your body in all its glory. And you’ll likely want more muscle.
So let’s bring it back to the start—if you don’t want to be huge but just want to be lean, have good muscle definition, have some visible abs, and be strong and physically capable, there is one surefire route to getting there: get as strong as you can and let your body build as much muscle as possible. Then (at some point, or in stages) cut down to somewhere around 10%/20% body fat (men/women), and you’ll be at your dream physique. The difference between someone who’s 10% body fat and big vs 10% body fat and slim is simply the amount of time and effort put into this muscle gaining pursuit.
So if you just want to be lean and ripped, but not too big, the good news is…
…it’s not that hard!
You can be there sooner than you realise.
Just start getting stronger.