Jacked! Sydney! Sweeney!: a dreamer bulk breakdown

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Some may remember the jacked Sydney Sweeney photos from a few months ago. Turns out our girl gained 30 pounds for her role as a female boxer, including guns and a huge butt. Now that’s what I call a freaking bulk. Literally she ate; literally she left no crumbs. Quote:

“I came onboard to play Christy, and I had about three and a half months of training,” Sweeney told the publication. “I started eating. I weight-trained in the morning for an hour, kickboxed midday for about two hours, and then weight-trained again at night for an hour.”

“My body was completely different,” Sweeney said. “I didn’t fit in any of my clothes. I’m usually a size 23 in jeans, and I was wearing a size 27. My boobs got bigger. And my butt got huge. It was crazy! I was like, Oh my god… But it was amazing: I was so strong, like crazy strong.”

Longtime readers of both this newsletter/column and readers of A Physical Education may recall I have particular animosity toward the “X Celebrity Gained 25/30/40 Pounds of Muscle for Y Role” because no you didn’t; no one can gain dozens of pounds of muscle in a few months. But if someone does gain 30 pounds in three and a half months... what then?

I have no specific knowledge of Sydney Sweeney’s routine or diet, so this is all speculative ballpark stuff. We can start with the facts we know: On average, women can gain one pound per month of muscle, if they are relatively new to training. Let’s be generous and assume, without loss of generality, that Sydney Sweeney has gorilla genes and both her parents are brick shithouses, so she can gain two pounds per month. That would yield 7 pounds gained in lean muscle mass over three and a half months.

Then there is the contribution of what I think of as “fluid and energy restitution.” When we are properly fueled and hydrated and active, a lot of that fluid, and energy (in the form of glycogen) that helps hold that fluid, is stored in our muscles, ready to be called up and burned. But when a person is overdieted for a long time, as most celebrities likely are, their bodies are running on a low level of retained fluid and stored energy in their muscles. (If you recall those “lose 10 pounds in 10 days” crash diets of yore, the weight lost in an effort like that would mostly be fluids, and the energy/glycogen that helps hold those fluids. The people selling these diets might refer to this pejoratively as “water weight,” which is sort of true but misleading.)