It will however, make you strong, fast, explosive, confident, and durable.
“Not only does strength training not make you slow and stiff, it doesn’t make you ‘bulky’ either.
Think about it.
Every gym bro at the globo gym, wearing clothes 2 sizes too small is TRYING to get bulky with all his might..
And he still can’t even come within a country mile of it.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
“We don’t want him to get too bulky, as we’d hate for the weights to make him slow and stiff.”
I would understand this comment coming from somebody in the mid 90’s when we had less research on sports performance and everybody associated “weight lifting” with 300+ pound powerlifters and juiced to get gills bodybuilders, but in 2023, I don’t know how the wives tail still has legs, but it does.
However, instead of just bashing one’s silly thinking or pointing them to research articles (wives tails believers don’t typically subject themselves to peer reviewed research journals), I wanted to come from a more digestible angle.
Getting bulky is extremely difficult.
Not only is the amount of hours training and isolating specific body parts for breakdown and regrowth time consuming, but that is EASY part.
10 hours a week, hell 12 hours a week in the gym isn’t going to make you bulky.
The “bulk” comes from the real hard part, ingesting thousands of calories/hundreds of grams of protein (daily), every day for a really long time.
So now let’s reverse the scenario.
A teenage youth sport athlete who is devoting the majority of his or her time to their sports, who uses the weight room 2-3 hours a week, to develop stronger, more explosive muscles, eating moderate amounts of calories and protein isn’t going to get bulky. It’s physiologically impossible.
There isn’t enough muscle damage taking place in the gym, nor are their enough calories being ingested, as with even a ‘higher than moderate’ caloric intake, most youth athletes are still in a caloric deficit (burning off more calories than they are eating).
This is exactly why every run of the mill kid, and even most grown adults you see at the globo gym in MuscleShark tanks that are too small, always look the same, despite TRYING to get bulky.
They do the latest beast mode work out, but still eat like small children and their physique is a representation, of not how they workout, but how they eat.
It’s hard to get to bulky, slow, and stiff from the weight room.
It takes YEARS of calculated effort to do it.
Don’t fear wives tails.
The weight room is where youth speed, power, and performance happens.
