01/11/2020
The Truth About Weight Training — What The Scale Might Say….
Whenever I put scale weight on people will always reply, but it will be muscle weight won’t it..?
Its makes me laugh that people think I don’t have the ability to gain body fat.
Yes I’m a trainer.
Yes I rarely miss a week of training.
Yes I lift heavy weights.
But also…
Yes, I over eat my calories.
Yes I put on body fat and no I’m not a muscle building machine.
Scale weight is ONE of the many resources we have to track our body if we want, and if you have a good relationship with the scales, and it doesn't dictate your mood for the day then I have no problem with people using it as a tracker on their fat loss journey.
However we do need to understand scale weight a little more and treat it as the resource it is, not the demon or shame standard many currently see it as.
Scale weight is just DATA; a marker to help see if what you are currently doing is helping you towards your goal, and if the results aren’t what you want, we can tweak and change things and reevaluate for the next week, while also using other resources.
So what happens to scale weight when we lift weights?
Myth — The scale will go up, because muscle weighs more than fat.
The only time the scale will increase is when reducing body fat is NOT a goal and we want to add muscle mass; meaning we are in a calorie surplus where we eat more than we burn off.
If you do have a goal of fat loss, scale weight can still go down, even when weight training .
If the scale weight is going up, it’s very unlikely you’ve built purely muscle, especially if its over only a few weeks/months. It’s more likely that you are actually in a calorie surplus and gaining some body fat.
For example, a 60kg female fairly new to lifting weights (under 2 years training) could expect a maximum of 1–1.5% of their body weight in muscle gain each month (and usually towards the lower end of that scale due to lower testosterone levels compared with men).
That would mean that if you trained hard with heavy loads 3–5 times per week, followed a strict training program, and ate to support this, you could expect a 60kg beginner to gain at MOST, 0.6–0.9kg of pure muscle per month.
Expected rates of muscle gain depending on training statues.
Any more than that? It’s likely to be fat gain.
So, if you have a goal to lose 10kg, even if you are lifting weights as part of the your training, the scale should still be going down.
Remember to lose body fat we need to be in a calorie deficit, where we burn more than we consume. And it is VERY difficult to build muscle if we truly are in a deficit.
Fat loss is also a MUCH quicker process than building muscle.
If you were to cut 7000kcals out of your diet per week, you could lose almost 1kg of bodyfat in a week.
However if you ADDED 7000kcals a week to your diet, you would still only be able to build around 0.1 to 0.2kg of muscle in that same week; a number that’s barely even noticeable on the scales.
Once the maximum amount of muscle you can build is reached, any extra weight you add will be a combination of fat and some water weight too.
So if someone gained 2–3+kg in a month, less than 1kg of that would be muscle (and remember, this requires a lot of heavy lifting, great recovery and consistently good nutrition)— meaning that they are probably still overeating in quite a big calorie surplus so the extra 1–2kg gained would be fat/water and not muscle.
If you are using scale weight as one of your resources and are adding any more kg per month than what the table above shows, we need to reassess the calorie intake, instead of blaming the weights.
It can be easy to blame the thing that is new or different as the obvious cause. But science shows us that building 3kg of muscle in a month simply isn’t physiologically possible.
Dammit science!
Besides, adding body fat isn’t a big deal; and its OK if we do! Feeling stronger, more energised, fitter and healthier are far more important.
But if the goal is fat loss (along with the other factors) and the scale is going up, we need to be honest with ourselves and understand that over the month a calorie deficit wasn't achieved.
You can’t build a few kg of muscle in a month, but you can gain that in fat.
And if it fat loss is still the goal we can use that data to refocus and move forward, while still lifting those weights!
That might have been a lot to take in! So grab a brew, re-read and get that barbell out!!
