As a personal trainer, I hear lots of excuses from clients why the scale hasn’t budged. Some are legitimate (in which case we call them reasons) like they didn’t have time to work out, ate too much (ie. didn’t do what they were supposed to do). These reasons, of course, don’t make me happy, but I can’t fight with them because they are the truth.
Then I have clients that give excuses. They tell me they have done everything they are supposed to do so it couldn’t be their fault – it must be “that time of the month”, or they had too much sodium and are retaining water or, my personal favorite, they have gained muscle. I love it – blame it on the actual exercise itself.
Yes, it is true that muscle weighs more than fat. One cubic inch of muscle is going to weight more than a cubic inch of fat. (But please don’t be one of those people that says a pound of muscle weighs more than a pound of fat, because obviously, they both weight a pound.) Under this logic, one could theoretically drop body fat, gain muscle, and weigh the same. But, I challenge you to find one person that can actually pull that off.
Here’s why:
It’s safe to assume someone trying to lose weight, has weight to lose, right? Let’s say our subject is 50 pounds overweight. This puts them in the overweight/obese classification depending on their body type.
I hate to tell you, but at this stage, you shouldn’t even be thinking of muscle gain. It doesn’t matter what kind of exercise you do – you just need to do something. It doesn’t matter how you split up your meals, whether you are in the fat burning or cardio mode, how you space your meals, how many exact grams of every nutrient you need to eat – you just need to cut out the crap and move a little more. At this stage, its all about getting the fat off. Every day it sits on your body and is ensnared between your vital organs, you are shortening your life.
Not all fitness information floating around out there is for everyone. When people hear “muscle weighs more than fat” they think, Bingo! That must be why my scale isn’t moving!
Once you reach a healthy weight, then you can worry about protein, heart rate, muscle, blah, blah, blah. Being at a point where you are gaining weight (or not losing any) because you are gaining muscle is reserved for the fantastically fit, or those with little spare weight to lose.
So yes, you can gain weight with muscle. In order to do this, you have to be putting in a whole hell of a lot of hours in the gym, and have relatively no fat to lose. Trust me, there are women out their busting their butts trying to put on muscle – and it’s not easy. It takes a lot of time, a lot of working out and a lot of perfectly portioned and planned meals. People who are overweight/obese cannot use this excuse, even if they are gaining muscle, because in order to work out hard enough to gain muscle – you’ll also be burning a hell of a lot of calories at the same time – which would result in, you guessed it, weight loss.
Its the most frustrating thing in the world, as a trainer, when people try and spin what they hear about fitness and exercise as an excuse for why they aren’t progressing. People have to learn to be accountable and to be honest with themselves. It’s not magic – it’s calories in and calories out. It’s not easy either, but making excuses, and using exercise itself as a scapegoat, isn’t going to help.
(Photo By: Helgasms
When we stop giving excuses and admit that we haven’t been pushing ourselves as much as we could have, or that we haven’t been following the program 100%, we’ll be much more capable of getting back on track, too!