How to Get Defined Arms With Simple Weight Lifting

So how does strength training help improve arm definition? Here's the reality. When you are lifting weights, something really interesting happens. Lifting weights can help you burn fat even when you're not working out. In fact, even more so than when you're working out. When I'm working out, I'm going hard. I'm doing intensity and I'm actually going to use more of the carbohydrates stored in my muscles as glycogen than I am fat. Fat's something, you know, we're actually very rarely are we ever just burning fat or just burning carbs. We're generally a hybrid Hybrid doing both. But if you are doing more intense exercise, you'll be using more carbs. If you're doing more low-level stuff, you'll be burning more fat. So when you're sitting around the house, you're doing a lot of fat burning, but you're not burning a lot of calories. When you're doing intense exercise, you're burning more carbs, but you're also burning a lot of calories. End of the day, calorie deficit's going to determine if you have to dig into those fat stores and use fat for fuel. Lifting weights can help you burn fat, even when you're not working out in a couple different ways. Number one, when you have more muscle in your body, you have a better resting energy expenditure. You use more calories. So that's super cool. And muscle protein turnover is a costly thing. Also, when you have more muscle and your body's used to working out, it's more metabolically flexible. It's able to be a better hybrid. Sometimes if you become more insulin resistant, it is hard for your body to use stored fat for fuel, and that will make you hungrier, and that will make your blood sugar more unstable. That's problematic. We want to be able to shift between burning fat and burning carbs. Also, when you are contracting your muscles, you are releasing a bunch of different messages, things that say build muscle, lower inflammation, improve my immune system, build new mitochondria. But one of the messengers that's released is something called erisin, and erisin helps you take white fat and beige it, which makes it have more mitochondria and be easier to burn off, which is super cool. Now, can women get bulky arms from strength training, or is that a myth? Because I hear it all the time. Here's what I hear. I want to have your arms like yours. I don't want to get big. I'm like, well, I do really big stuff to get arms like this. So that's the reality of it. In 40 years of doing this, like, I just haven't had someone get bigger lifting weights. Their muscles get bigger and then they get smaller because their muscles hold everything in tighter and their muscles help them have a better resting energy expenditure. So now they're burning more calories. So I I just haven't seen it happen. If while you're lifting weights, all of a sudden one day you go, you know, I think I'm getting a little too big, stop. But you won't have drive-by muscle mass gain. Like, muscle takes a while to build. You'd be lucky to put on a pound of muscle in a month. So you're not gonna wake up one morning with like Popeye biceps. This happens over time. You can always back off. But in 40 years of doing this, I've never had someone wanna do that. So, not going to get bulky. It's going to hold everything in tighter. But you do want to make sure that you're losing body fat. You're going to lose body fat faster than you're going to build muscle. So I like to say lose 0.5 to 1% of your total body weight each week. Ideally, you're losing fat and build about a pound of muscle a month. Now, if you really just want to focus on building muscle and getting strong, you would not do caloric restriction. You'd actually increase your calories a little bit by maybe 200 to 300 calories a day because it would help you build muscle. You'd put on a little fat too, and then at some point you'd want to take, you know, lose the fat. So if you really just were like, "I want to build muscle," well, that's how you would focus on it.