JJ Virgin explains why women don't get bulky from lifting: realistic muscle growth is only 1-2 pounds per month. She calls muscle a "metabolic Spanx" that tightens your body and raises your metabolism. Train with 8-15 reps per set, increase weight when it gets easy, and keep your form tight.
Here's what we have to blow up. This idea that if you're lifting heavy weights, you're gonna get bulky. Do you know how much you have to lift and how long and how hard you have to lift to really put on muscle? You're lucky if you can put on 1 to 2 pounds of muscle a month. The other thing that's important about muscle is think of muscle like your metabolic Spanx. Muscle holds everything in tighter and it boosts your metabolic rate while doing that. So muscle really is the key here, and you wanna make sure that you're doing enough stimulus as you do it. So if you can keep going, doing 20 reps, 30 reps, 40 reps of something, pump the weight up. Ideally work between say 8 and 15 reps, and if you can keep going, get the weight up heavier. If you can't quite get to 5, then let's lighten the load, but let's really start to push the heaviest weight you can handle. And again, the caveat is in good form.
