Total Body Composition

liftingbro

I often see people here saying , "i'm losing inches bu not weight". And people claim muscle gain.

The thing is that a male with normal testerone levels that has good nutrition, lifts heavy is only probably going to put on 1.5 pounds of muscle in a month, MAX if you are conditioned to lifting. If you are a newbie, you could gain as much as 5 pounds of muscle per month. This assumes you are not eating in a deficit. If you are eating in a deficit you will still get newbie gains but probably half the results and it wil only last for 2-3 months. If you are female, you can cut all of these numbers in half.

So, if you're not losing weight, it's not likely due to gaining muscle.

Source info: http://www.thefactsaboutfitness.com/research/fail.htm

However, it is kinda of cool to track your gains. Most of us don't have a dexa scanner in our basement and can't afford to have it done. Most of us have a scale or handheld device to measure BF%. Yes, I understand these are not the most accurate in general but that's not the point. The point is to find a baseline and track how it moves. Most of these devices are not likely to give you nearly as accurate of a BF% as a podpod or Dexa but they generally are consistent which is the important part.

So, lets say your scale says 30% bf one week and a few weeks later it says 28%. You weighed 200 pounds the first time (200x x .30=140 lbs of LM), 198 the second one (143lbs of LM), that means you gained three pounds of LM). Would it matter if it was of by 5%? 35% would be 130 and 133 for 28% would be the same 3 lb gain in lean mass.

As long as you keep in mind that the LM and BF% could be off but it's the change that matters these devices can be handy tools for tracking progress.

Now, if you take your total lean mass gain or loss and add it to the total number of pounds you've lost you'd have your total composition change stat.

So, in the above example, he lost 2 pounds but added 3 pounds of LM, so total composition change is 5 pounds.

OTOH, if you lost 10 pounds but lost 3 pounds of lean mass, your total composition change is only 7 pounds, not 10.

I have been usig this for a while to track my progress and I know it isn't perfect and is flawed in some ways but I thought people might find it useful.