Why strength is the best metric for determining progress

This is your sign to throw away your scale... You seriously could and it would probably make your fitness journey easier. Not because scales are inherently bad, but because they often portray the wrong message. The scale goes up or down with no explanation sometimes. So you can be doing everything right and still see an increase on the scale, which can be super unmotivating. But fortunately for us, we now know that just losing weight isn’t what we should be aiming to do, instead we should be aiming to build muscle and lose fat. By building muscle and losing fat, we are lowering our bodyfat percentage and improving our strength - this is where real, lasting progress is made.

Weight on the scale doesn’t tell the whole story

You weighed yourself yesterday and noticed you were down one whole pound! Woohoo! But you weighed yourself today and you’re up three… What the f@#$! I’m sure we have all been there: sad and confused. How could my weight fluctuate so much in one day? I didn’t even eat any cake at the party, I just smelled it! It’s very unmotivating.

The good news is that the scale is very misleading. Water weight is what often fluctuates most day to day. And water weight can fluctuate based on how many carbs you ate that day, how much salt you consumed, if you’ve sweat or not recently - and sometimes you can just have a big ol’ poop that needs to come out. Even if you do everything right, the weight can sometimes just go up, it’s not necessarily anything you did wrong! And you will never gain three pounds of fat in one day, it’s almost humanely impossible (I can’t guarantee it isn’t possible but it would be very hard to do!)

So stop relying on the scale to determine your progress, it’s a losing battle. A better approach is to track your strength progression at various strength training exercises. Accessing your strength as well as how you overall feel are the two best ways to track your fitness progression.

Strength gains mean muscle gains

Strength is essentially how much force your muscles can resist. Let’s take a squat for example, if you did a 135 pound barbell squat, your leg muscles in unison can produce enough force to resist that 135 pounds on your back. As you get stronger, you’ll be able to produce more and more force which allows you to resist more and more weight (to a point, you can’t necessarily get stronger forever).

Your strength can only improve if you are building muscle. Without building muscle, you CANNOT get stronger. Technically, practice can help you improve your technique and teach your body how to leverage weight more effectively, but that is an advanced approach that Olympic lifters have mastered. For our sake, strength gains mean muscle gains.

So if you’ve been lifting weights in the gym for two months and your squat went up from 75 pounds to 150 pounds, your strength in that exercise doubled. In that same period, if your weight stayed at 150 pounds from start to finish, you would probably feel discouraged, but you shouldn’t be. What happened is you lost fat and gained muscle. You did a one-for-one swap. You effectively lowered your bodyfat percentage by increasing your muscle mass and decreasing your fat mass.

Not only did you get stronger, built muscle, and lost fat, you also improved your metabolism which will make weight loss way easier down the road. Realistically, anyone with a weight loss goal should focus on first building muscle and improving their metabolism before they start cutting calories. This is called reverse dieting. Instead of cutting calories and moving more, you ADD calories and focus on getting stronger which builds more muscle, thus improving your metabolism.

After reverse dieting and increasing your metabolism by 500-1,000 calories, you can then drop calories from your new, higher amount by 250-500 and should see the weight start falling off with way less calorie restriction. This is the long term strategy for lifelong weight loss.

How to measure strength gains

The best way to measure strength gains is by tracking your strength progression in certain compound lifts. For example, the deadlift and overhead press are two great compound lifts that you can track to see if you are making progress.

The easiest way to do this is to test your personal records when you first start lifting, then again a month or so later. To test your personal record in a lift, you want to properly warm up, then test your one rep maximum weight (how much you can lift for one repetition) by slowly adding weight to the bar until you can no longer lift the weight with good form.

Let’s say when I first started I could overhead press 75 pounds, but after 4-6 weeks when I retested, I could now lift 100 pounds, my one rep maximum went up by 33%. That’s a huge improvement and tells me that I have clearly built muscle and gotten stronger, thus improving my metabolism.

If testing your one rep maximum sounds a bit daunting, you can also track your strengths gains by keeping track of the weights you are lifting in each workout and see if you are able to increase those weights overtime.

For example, let’s say when I first start doing the overhead press for 3 sets of 5 repetitions in a workout, I use just the 45 pound barbell. 4-6 weeks later when I do that same 3 sets of 5 repetitions, I can now do 55 pounds, that’s over a 20% increase. This is a similar approach to testing one rep maximums, but can be a little more challenging to notice big gains just because the extend of increase may be less, but nonetheless, it’s still a great option for tracking strength gains.

In conclusion: stop weighing yourself everyday! Weight on the scale doesn’t tell you what’s actually happening. Body composition and strength gains are better metrics. For most people, I recommend tracking strength gains for the first 3-6 months, then tracking body composition a bit more closely. Body composition is just how your body feels, not how much it weighs. You could be the same weight, but have a smaller waist, this is because your body composition changed - you built muscle and lost fat.

If you liked this post, consider sharing it with friends and reading some of my other posts! If you are interested in personal training, in-person at my gym in central Maine, or virtually with me via zoom, reach out to schedule a free consultation meeting! Thank you!