Currently exercising more should I update my activity level?

The way MFP was designed is for your activity level to describe everyday, like what you do for work. If your exercise isn't that consistent, MFP intends for you to add it as exercise instead.

At the end of the day, what matters is you're exercising, sticking to your calorie goal, and adjusting that goal to account for your exercise. If one method of accounting works better for you for that than the others, use it. 🙂

sijomial wrote: »

If you want to gain muscle you have to stress / stretch your muscle's current capabilities.

"Light weight training" is a lot better than nothing but really you want heavy (heavy for you and your current capabilities) weight training. Yes muscle can be built with light weights and high reps but it's a very inefficient way to train if your main goal is adding muscle. You are doing plenty of other exercise for general fitness and don't need your lifting to be more of the same.

Think of it a bit like my main exercise of cycing.....
Sure I can build some muscle through cycling, especially if I take on extreme hills and sprints but I would be spending perhaps 10 hours a week to achieve much less than I could in a couple of hours in the gym and the upper limit of what's possible would be far, far lower.

Yes it takes time to build appreciable muscle but takes less time if your training is more appropriate for your goals and ambitions.

^^ This is really good advice, OP. This might not be true of you, @Angelbunny111, but as a fellow woman (unlike sijomial 😉), I've learned that some women do think that lifting light weights is how we get "toned", but lifting heavy weights will make us "bulky". That's not true at all.

It takes years of very intentional, well-planned hard work for a woman to get extremely muscular, like a bodybuilder. That can be a great thing, but it's not what every woman prefers.

Lifting heavy (for us) weights, heavy enough to be challenging while avoiding injury, is the fastest way (in calendar time) and most efficient way (least hours per week) to get to a nice "toned" appearance, or to points of muscularity beyond that if we want those. "Toned" is a combination of some healthy muscle, and being at a body fat level that allows it to show in a way we individually prefer.

The effective route is to lift challenging weights, then - if going for a certain appearance - to switch from a "gain muscle" training approach to a "keep the muscle I have" routine. (There'll be time enough along the way to learn the difference between those two things.) We don't suddenly wake up one morning and - poof! - all muscular, overnight. It's a slow-build thing, requiring patience, with plenty of time along the way to figure out how far we want to go, and what to do when we get there.

You've got great goals, now it's time to go out and pursue them. Go, you!

pridesabtch wrote: »

You are very small, your BF% may be off if you are just using a scale.

Also remember there are certain parts of the female anatomy, breast that are primarily fat. When I was at 105lbs and quite "tone" my scale still read 28% BF. I was mortified that I had worked so hard and still wasn't even close to my goal of <20% BF. It was suggested that I have my BF% measured by a professional with calipers. I did and was actually around 15%. I am large chested and that was enough to skew the scale. 10 pounds of boobs on a 105 pound person is almost 10% right off the top. Just saying the scales have limitations, at least that was my experience.

It's even simpler than that, I think:

As a generality, those scales aren't very accurate at measuring body fat. They don't "measure" it at all, in fact. They send a weak electrical current through your feet (and hands, for the 4-point ones with hand-holds), measure what comes through the circuit that includes your body, estimate body fat from that . . . not very well.

Breasts are just one case that confuses them.