"I don't want to get buff from weights"

You won’t. Many women have fears of getting “buff and gross”, as one patient put it.

If you are female, you should lift weights and the weights should become progressively heavier.

Regardless, here are the reasons lifting won’t cause you to get buff:

1. Genetics. People that get big have the genetics to get big. There are ectomorphs, mesomorphs and endomorphs. Google them and you’ll soon learn that you can’t make an ectomorph into a mesomorph. Trust me, I’ve tried for years.

2. You must lift weights for many years, even decades, and lift more than twice your body weight in the three big lifts: bench press, squat and deadlift, and do NO CARDIO. If you’re lifting dumbbells or pulling cables, you are most certainly not going to get large.

3. You must eat 2 grams of protein for each pound of body weight per day. To get huge, if you are a scrawny 140 pounds, you must eat 280 grams of protein per day. If you are not doing that then you will simply not grow large bulging muscles.

4. Those people that achieve the really “gross” appearance have taken steroids. Since you are not going to do that, you will not achieve that grotesque look.

5. You must use spray tanning techniques to highlight all the little lines that define muscle.

6. Those “gross” people in magazines are in their contest shape. They aren’t like that all the time. Those pictures show them just 30 minutes away from passing out due to dehydration (dehydrated muscles look better on a stage). They’ve dieted down to the leanest that they can become.

7. Photoshop. All those good looking models in the magazines were half created by a computer technician that can narrow the hips, make lips fuller, etc. What you see in a magazine is a half-truth.

So you can see that lifting weights will not cause you to get big. It takes a lot of work both in and out of a gym to achieve that, as well as good genetics and other techniques.

You need to be strong enough to carry your child, lift a bag of dog food, work in the back yard, walk up the flight of stairs to my office, etc. If you can’t, you need to lift weights to build up to at least that. You will want to lift progressively heavier weights and you should have no fear of getting too buff.