Am I building strength/muscle ?

What do you mean “What is going on?”You’re strength training and lifting more weight. Isn’t that what you expected to happen?

fitnessdiva_ wrote: »

I eat about 1500 Cals a day and I consume about 100g of protein. My aim is fat loss but I want to build muscle when I get to my gw. Lately I’ve been raising my weights a lot, everything feels so light. I leg pressed 170 today easily, I can squat 100 now. I’ve also been doing a lot of arm work, and I feel like my arms feel harder/look my defined in certain angles or when I flex. My calves and legs feel harder too. What is going on ? I try to push myself/achieve hypertropy.

Good job starting now, not waiting until GW.

When people do that they invariably seem to lose a little of what muscle they do have, and end up skinny fat at healthy weight - fat loss shows nothing off but more fat.

You make many form improvements when you start that should cause increases on the weight lifted.
Get through that period of time fast while still losing - and if still enough fat you could have those newbie gains mentioned - though you'd be hard pressed to determine if it happened.

Better just to know you'll keep getting stronger until the muscle is tapped out, and eventually body will require more to keep progressing.
That may occur if remaining weight loss is very reasonable with minor deficit and enough protein, or may take eating at maintenance.

Either way - you got something to show as fat is dropped.

fitnessdiva_ wrote: »

lorrpb wrote: »

What do you mean “What is going on?”You’re strength training and lifting more weight. Isn’t that what you expected to happen?

Yes but I wasn’t expecting gains on such a big deficit

For relative beginners at strength training, strength improvements don't require creating new muscle fibers. First, we start recruiting and using the existing muscle fibers more effectively ("neuromuscular adaptation", or NMA, as previously mentioned). That can happen pretty fast, and as long as deficit doesn't wipe out energy level, it can happen in a decent-sized deficit.

And relative beginners can gain a little muscle mass ("hypertrophy") even in a deficit, especially if young, with positive genetics for it, substantially overweight to start, with a small calorie deficit, getting enough protein, doing a well-designed progressive program consistently, or some combination of those and luck. It's not guaranteed, and you see it debunked here a lot when people are thinking the reason the scale isn't dropping is because they're building muscle (any realistic rate of muscle tissue gain is way slower than any reasonably sensible but observable rate of fat loss). Mass gain is not something to expect in a deficit, but can happen.

Appearance and feel of the muscles is influenced by those, but also by the water retained for muscle repair, among other things.