It’s pretty common practice in the fitness industry to tell females to throw out the scale.
We say this because their goal is to lose fat and the scale doesn’t always accurately reflect what’s actually going on. More often than not it becomes a source of mental torture.
What I’ve come to also realize, is that guys trying to gain muscle should throw out the scale too.
I mean take that fuckin thing and heave it into the nearest dumpster immediately.
Why? Because guys trying to get jacked obsess over the scale the same way that girls trying to lose fat do.
And sure enough, it drives them insane, causes them to act irrationally and do things to screw up their results.
More often than not it becomes a source of depression and frustration. First you get depressed because you’re not gaining weight as fast as you think you should. Then you decide to keep cranking up your calories beyond a healthy or recommended level.
Next thing you know you’re fat. That means you’re now depressed as well. And so the cycle continues.
As a newbie muscle growth can take place pretty rapidly. And the reality is you really don’t even have to eat that much for it to happen. Sure, it helps, but the new stimulus itself is usually enough to stimulate some pretty impressive gains.
When those immediate newbie gains slow down, a young, ripped dude will have tremendous success by simply adding more food to the equation. The size gains will pick up again.
Now, the flip side of the coin is the dude who has just started training and is not so young and not so ripped. At that point he doesn’t have the luxury of just continually adding more calories because he’ll get fat.
You can only build muscle so fast no matter how much you eat.
And after the first year or so the young, ripped dude won’t be able to force gains as much anymore either.
The point of all this is that most of us (sans the young, ripped guys) don’t have to be and shouldn’t be force-feeding ourselves with an eye on the scale every five minutes. You will not see significant increases on the scale each week after your first couple years of training. You may not even see them monthly.
If you’ve been training for more than three years a gain of four pounds of muscle in six months would be incredible. I’ve used this example plenty of times but it bears repeating…
Look at eight of the leanest 8oz steaks you can find in the butchers window at your local market and imagine them evenly spread across your body as new muscle mass. You’d look dramatically different! If you stay very lean while gaining that much mass people will often think you gained twice as much.
The smartest nutrition plan is one that focuses on health and performance, first and foremost, that allows you to make lean gains and keep your body fat low in the process.
There’s never a need to wreck your digestive and immune system by force-feeding crap in an effort to make the scale move unless you just want to become offensive-lineman-big and don’t care about getting fat.
Otherwise it will just backfire in the end and you’ll be fatter than you wanted, depressed and back to square one again.
Judge your progress by your strength gains, your performance, your athleticism, how you look and feel more than what the scale says. The scale doesn’t tell the real story. It’s a lying seductress.
Jay Ferruggia
PS. Click HERE for the simple, healthy nutrition plan that builds muscle while keeping you lean.
