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"  If you told women that in order to succeed and thrive in their dream careers they&amp;#039;d have to put on 30 pounds, I have a feeling many of them would lean out. Not women Olympic athletes, though. I&amp;#039;ve been closely following the reinvented careers of track-and-field stars Lolo Jones and Lauryn Williams, who make their Winter Olympics debut this week as members of the Team U.S.A. women&amp;#039;s bobsled team. To be successful in their new sport, bulking up is required. Lolo Jones went from 130 pounds to 159 pounds. Jones told USA Today back in September of her track diet, &amp;quot;You eat an M&amp;amp;amp;M and you think your career is over.&amp;quot; On a bobsled diet, McDonald&amp;#039;s double cheeseburgers aren&amp;#039;t out of the question.  There are a few strategic reasons why adding on muscle mass is important for women bobsledders. Jason Hartman, a trainer who works with Olympic bobsledder Jamie Greubel, as well as several luge and skeleton athletes, explained the physics: In bobsledding, the maximum combined weight for a two-woman bobsled team (including the weight of the sled) is 340kg, or 748 pounds. The heavier the bobsled, the faster it will ultimately go. However, you ideally want the actual bobsled itself to be lighter, because that makes it easier to push. The way you make up the weight? With the athletes themselves. &amp;quot;Muscle mass is important to the bobsled athlete for the ability to assist with pushing the very heavy sled. Increase in muscle mass has a positive correlation with increases in muscular strength,&amp;quot; Hartman said. &amp;quot;In addition, the heavier the athletes become, the lighter they can make their sleds.&amp;quot;  Related: The Most Winning Olympic Beauty Looks I often hear women say they don&amp;#039;t want to use heavier weights in the gym because they&amp;#039;re afraid of getting bulky, but it is actually really difficult to get big. &amp;quot;Female athletes lack the levels of circulating anabolic hormones, namely testosterone, that makes the process of muscle gain much easier for their male counterparts,&amp;quot; Hartman said. &amp;quot;Because of this hormonal limitation, the process of gaining lean muscle mass can often take much longer for a female.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s also a pretty big mental hurdle to overcome.  &amp;quot;Many female athletes are afraid of bulking up for social and psychological reasons. The first step a female athlete needs to take is to make the mental commitment to carry the extra body weight,&amp;quot; Hartman said. &amp;quot;Once the mental commitment is in place, they then must begin a long, arduous journey of physical training and increased food consumption.&amp;quot; Jones didn&amp;#039;t seem to balk at this, though. As a matter of fact, she was hoping to get up to 170 pounds, but her track coach warned her that it could affect her track career.   Bulking up is a finely tuned process of diet and exercise over the course of many months. Just using eight-pound weights instead of your usual five is not enough to do it. What you put in your mouth also matters. &amp;quot;Muscle gain is 80% nutrition and 20% physical training,&amp;quot; Hartman said. &amp;quot;The take-home point is that everyone can always weight train. If muscular growth is an undesired outcome, then make sure your diet does not include an excess of calories.&amp;quot; And if you eat one too many macaroons once in a while, don&amp;#039;t worry. Athletes add on 500 to 1,000 calories per day, which equals a one to two-pound weight gain per week. Jones was reportedly eating 9,000 calories per day at one point.  Related: How Gwyneth Paltrow&amp;#039;s Trainer Fine-Tunes Real Women To see if I could tolerate an Olympic style get-super-ripped workout, I turned to Meka Gibson, a personal training manager at David Barton Gym in NYC and a former competitive weight lifter. According to Hartman, to gain muscle weight you have to do &amp;quot;many exercises performed for many sets with a high number of repetitions and short rest periods in between.&amp;quot; Gibson certainly gave me that.  There was nothing remotely feminine or graceful about the workout. Gibson had me do set after set of Olympic weight training exercises like back squats (squatting with a barbell resting on your shoulders), bench pressing, standing rows, and push presses (holding a barbell at chest level, then explosively pushing it over your head). I am no stranger to slinging iron, but I never go as heavy as what Gibson was loading on for me, and I certainly am not used to working out in such close proximity to the type of ripped male specimens who make up a big chunk of the clientele at David Barton Gym.  Gibson slowly worked me up from squatting with a 45-pound bar, to a personal best of 105 pounds. I was feeling fairly badass about this until Gibson told me that at her best she could squat 245 pounds. Oh. Upper body exercises like bench pressing and pull-ups\u2014heavily assisted\u2014were much more humbling. I guess those two pound weights I&amp;#039;m lifting for a zillion reps in my SoulCycle class aren&amp;#039;t doing much for my strength.  Related: How SJP&amp;#039;s Workout Turned Me Into a Wannabe Dancer When I walked out of there, or rather, when I attempted to walk out of there, because my legs were already shaky, I felt tighter and taller somehow. While lifting weights can be a bit dull, repetitive, and lack that endorphin rush that comes from a good cardio workout, there&amp;#039;s an undeniable sense of power you feel right afterwards. For the next two days I was stiff and sore but I swear to god my ass was tighter and I felt more confident. Seriously.  One thing I didn&amp;#039;t do in this little experiment was increase my caloric intake. I already am carrying a few too many pounds on my frame for my liking, and I don&amp;#039;t really have the bobsledding excuse. I did go sledding this winter, though. I bet I had the fastest time of any woman in the park.  Photo: Getty Images  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/news/a18958/olympic-bobsledder-workout/>