You must be Growing Muscule: FYI
Folks, I don’t want to sound like a know it all, but just want to share some interesting info.
People often gain a bit of weight when they start a new excersise regimen. Quite often I hear the ‘you must be gaining muscle!’ responce to it. But it’s actually a bit of a misconception that seems to be as common as the good old ‘muscule weight more than fat’ (they do not, they are denser). Recently I’ve read that a human female takes ~ 6 months to put on 2 pounds of muscle. It’s more likely that the physocal activity stimulates appetite in the short term and more calories are consummed unconsiously or the water weight play tricks with your system. Or there are not enough calories consummed and the body tries to hold on to the weight. It’s nothing to worry about though, as it takes only a few weeks to find a proper balance of nutrition and activity, and excersise will start driving the weight down, instead of that seeming temp. increase. Do check though how many calories you are burning - excersise often doesn’t burn as much as one thinks it would.
And, of course, arm yourself with a measuring tape! Inches going away will tell you all about your fat-muscule ratio and effectiveness of your excersise program!
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I can’t stand when people say “You must have gained muscle!” when it’s only been, say, a week of working out. If it was so easy to pack on muscle, we’d all look like bodybuilders
I think its just one of those metabolic mysteries as to why you gain weight all of a sudden (or lose it all of a sudden) I don’t think our bodies are as easy to figure out as we think. It’s not just a ‘calories in - calories out = weight lost.
At the beginning of this week I all of a sudden gained 3lbs without eating more and when I snuck a peek on the scale yesterday the 3lbs are gone again. I would like to be able to explain it but I can’t so I just chalk it down to ‘one of those things’. (Although it is pretty damn frustrating at times!)
I’ve visited on bodybuilding.com (may have mentioned that before… lol) and I saw the profile of this one girl who, during the “off season” of the figure competitions, MOSTLY does a LOT of weight training, not much cardio. She starts looking quite a bit bigger, maybe even a bit chunky, then when it’s time to get ready for the competitions, she adds an hour or two of cardio daily in ADDITION to her weight routines, and like freaking magic, a few (4-6) weeks later, she looks like a body builder. Amazing. No… that’s what happens when you really DO have a lot of muscle beneath the surface. When it’s just fat beneath the surface, you lose weight and look like a skinny person who used to be fat, NOT like a body builder. lol Seeing her pics really drive the difference home.
It definitely is HARD for women to pack on pounds of muscle though. We just don’t have the testosterone for it.