Gaining weight in weightlifting

A common question from new lifters is “Will I have to gain weight or get bigger to keep getting stronger?”

The answer in it’s simplest form is no. You don’t HAVE to do anything. You will be shocked how much stronger you can get whilst remaining the same weight on the scales.

Some of the answer comes down to how long you’ve been training, how lean you are, what weight category will actually suit your frame best and largely - HOW IMPORTANT ARE YOUR RESULTS?

I’m sure, in-part, all of us who participate in weightlifting believe that our progress and results are super important. After all why do it if you don’t care what you lift or about getting better? In reality however, most of us also know on some level that snatching another 3kg isn’t going to vastly advance our lives, careers and send us into the history books.

This is an important distinction as I’ve seen numerous people over-think weight gain and weight loss when the reality is that it had only a small influence in the short term. More significant is the change over long periods of time where a solid 1kg of useful muscle gained has real benefits. Equally, slow and sustained fat loss positively affects performance and also improves your Sinclair score / relative strength.

If you do enough training (volume of hard work) and eat enough calories (be in a positive energy balance) you will gain muscle. How excessive the calorie surplus is will determine the amount of fat gained alongside the muscle mass. That doesn’t mean that it’s strictly necessary, just that it is possible and can be a consequence if your calories go unchecked.

Strength gains happen for a few reasons and muscle size increase is only part of a wider array of changes.

Improved coordination - both in the muscles and in the moving body parts as a whole - will mean you can lift more.

Lifting fairly heavy weights regularly improves the ability of your central nervous system to stimulate our existing muscle mass meaning we can lift more load without gaining more.

At some point, we may exhaust the potential strength gains from improved skill and coordination and from enhanced CNS input and when this happens we may need to consider gaining more muscle mass to keep progressing. I think there is often a bit of misunderstanding about what that really means.

If you’re already pretty lean this can mean gaining weight on the scales, but often we can lose a similar amount of fat as we add in muscle, meaning our scale weight doesn’t change much if at all. You don’t suddenly need to weigh 5kg more to add 1kg to your total. I’m not sure there is much research into how much muscle increase does increase your total but if you take the numbers from the top 10 ranked British Mens 81kg category and the same in the Mens 89kg category you see an average difference in total of around 22kg. Clearly you’d have to do this calculation on every weight category for both male and female but it’s clear that YES, BEING HEAVIER (HAVING MORE MUSCLE MASS) DOES INDEED MEAN YOU WILL LIFT MORE.

Do you want to lift more? Cool. Me too. But I also don’t want to weigh 100kg just to have a bigger total. I’m far too short to pull that look off. My personal preference (as I’m not competitive at the numbers I lift) is to be at a reasonable weight I feel comfortable at and to stay here and make smaller gains that take a bit longer. You may choose differently but it comes down to personal choice ultimately, even for the guys and girls at the top of the sport. Will you be competitive at the new higher weight class?

If you compete and aim to do well I do recommend ‘filling out’ the weight class you are in, but letting that happen over a decent amount of time and training. Changes in body weight can effect how you move and feel so it makes sense to add a little, train there, add some more, train there and so on… Being at the top of the weight class for a good training block or two puts you in a much stronger position (see what I did there?).

YOU DON’T HAVE TO GAIN MUSCLE TO DO WEIGHTLIFTING. You may choose to gain muscle to get better at weightlifting…