5 Signs You’re Gaining Muscle and Losing Fat

Ever wonder if your hard work in the gym is actually paying off?

Tracking your progress toward fitness can be challenging, whether you aim to build muscle, shred fat, or both.

Regardless of your goals, sometimes the scale doesn’t tell the full story, and you need other ways to know if you’re building muscle and losing fat.

Why is this important?

For starters, seeing progress from week to week is a powerful source of motivation to continue showing up and training hard.

But knowing if you are progressing towards your aesthetic goals also helps ensure that you are on the right program.

I assume you want to reach your goals as fast as possible.

Knowing whether you are progressing will determine whether you need to stay the course or pivot into a new strategy.

This article will explore various ways to tell if you are building muscle or losing fat, allowing you to monitor your progress and know that you are making gains in the gym.

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When your goals include building muscle and losing fat, it’s common that the scale doesn't tell the full story.

You may think you are making progress in shredding fat, but the scale number goes up.

This can leave many fitness enthusiasts feeling frustrated and like they are going in the wrong direction, no matter what they do.

But why does this happen?

With quality training and nutrition, your body will build muscle and mobilize fat for energy.

Muscle mass weighs more than body fat; thus, as you gain muscle mass, you may gain weight even though your body fat is decreasing.

This is why you may find yourself fitting into your jeans better even though the scale isn’t budging.

Shifting your focus away from the number on the scale and more on your body composition is the better choice.

The number on the scale can be affected by hydration, hormones, the time of day, and digestion of previous meals.

Tracking muscle mass and body fat percentage can give you a more clear picture of your progress.

There are several ways to do this. The most accurate way is to use the DEXA Scan, which uses X-ray technology to scan your body and assess the different tissues in it. (1)

However, more affordable options include skin calipers, bioelectrical impedance devices, and bodpods.

Each has its own methods for discerning the amount of lean mass and fat mass in your body, ranging from calculations to air displacement. 

Also Read: Beginners Guide to Bodybuilding

Measuring various body parts might be the most straightforward way to determine whether you are building muscle mass.

Although there might be more accurate ways, you only need a tape measure.

Simply mark a starting point on your arms, legs, abdomen, or legs, wrap a tape measure around the thickest part of the muscle belly, and note the distance.

After several weeks of training, you can repeat this process and determine if the distance around the measurement site changed.

If you have been training with heavy weights and the measurement distance has increased, then there is a good chance your muscles have grown.

If you have been cutting calories and increasing your cardio and the measurement distance has decreased, you have probably shredded some fat tissue.

The key to making this kind of measurement as accurate as possible is to keep the measurement spots the same.

This increases the reliability of the measurement.

You’ll also want to measure the right spots. For muscle mass gains, measure the thickest part of the muscle bellies, and for fat loss, measure sites like your abdomen and waist. 

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Another indirect way to tell if you are building muscle and losing fat is increased muscle definition.

Muscle tissues comprise individual muscle fibers that appear as striations in the muscle belly.

Similarly, each muscle has a unique shape. For instance, the deltoid has a circular teardrop shape, while the triceps have a more triangular shape.

As you train and build muscle mass, your muscles will begin to grow, but if you have a high body fat percentage, you may only see an increase in bulk.

If you are losing body fat, the shapes of your muscles and the separations between them will become increasingly evident.

You will begin to see muscle striations at extremely low body fat percentages.

This is common in the shoulder and chest muscles since most people store their body fat around the abdomen and hips.

Assessing an increase in muscle definition can be a good way to judge improvements in body composition because it shifts the focus away from the scale and toward how you look. 

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After several weeks of a challenging training program, one of the best feelings is putting on an old pair of jeans or t-shirt and noticing that it fits a little differently.

You might notice that the material around your thighs is slightly more snug as you pull your jeans up due to increased quadriceps size.

Or maybe the sleeves on your T-shirt went from loose and saggy to squeezing around your biceps and triceps.

For those searching for weight loss, you may need a new belt because you blow past the holes in your old one.

Taking note of how your clothes fit can be a great sign that you are progressing in your appearance.

In addition to simply being a metric for progress, when your clothes fit better it can be an excellent motivator for consistency in the gym.

When you have evidence of increased muscle mass and fat loss plus you start to look better in your clothes you cant help but want to keep the progress going. 

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Though a change in body weight is not the best sign of increased muscle or decreased fat mass, it may have some merit.

If you are searching for explosive muscle gains, you will usually be adding pounds to the scale.

This is a good thing because an increase in caloric intake is required to build muscle, leading to weight gain.

With appropriate calorie and macronutrient prescriptions, you can try to limit the amount of excess fat mass you gain, but on a pure weight-gaining protocol, it can be challenging only to accrue muscle mass.

Conversely, in most cases, a reduction in fat mass will also reduce total body weight.

Just like you need to add calories to build muscle mass to shed body fat, you’ll need to reduce your calories to create a caloric deficit.

Depending on how aggressive this caloric deficit is, it will dictate how much bodyweight you lose week to week.

Ideally, a 15% reduction in calorie intake can kickstart fat and weight loss, but anything more, you may start to dip into muscle mass.

Muscle wasting can happen, especially if you are not weight training and consuming adequate amounts of protein while restricting calories.

The scale can give you insight into potential changes in muscle mass and body fat, but it can be misleading since 100% of the changes are usually not all muscle or all body fat.

Plus, much of the weight fluctuations on the scale can be related to other factors like hydration status. 

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Now that you know the signs of increased muscle mass and decreased fat, it’s time to review how to troubleshoot when progress stalls or goes in the opposite direction.

Below, we’ll outline the common roadblocks you might face in your fitness journey and ways to overcome them so you can continue to build muscle or shed body fat. 

The first and most obvious question to ask yourself when you aren't progressing is to evaluate our training program.

Consider these factors regarding your workouts. 

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Consistency is one of the most important components of your training program, regardless of your goals.

The most perfectly designed training and nutrition program is useless if you only perform it 25% of the time.

A person with the perfect program will see better results than a person with a subpar program who is religious in their consistency.

The body simply needs consistent input and frequency to adapt and grow stronger. Without it, you’ll be spinning your wheels. (2)

If you lack consistency, ask yourself why. Is five days of training too much to schedule in? Are the workouts too challenging? Are they too long? Do you find them boring? Etc.

Once you know why, you can make changes, such as opting for a three-day workout routine, dialing back intensity, or using techniques like supersets to decrease the total session time. 

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Another reason you may not see the progress you want is because you aren’t training with enough intensity.

Only some people, such as high-level athletes, need to train at maximum intensity every day to see progress.

You may not ever need to go to a maximal intensity at all.

However, a threshold of effort is required to create a stimulus for the body to grow and make changes. (3)

For example, if you routinely finish your working sets and feel that you have several repetitions left in the tank, it's likely that you did not create enough mechanical tension or muscle damage to drive growth.

Conversely, suppose your metabolic workouts are not done at a high enough intensity or for a long enough duration.

In that case, it's possible that there is not enough stimulus to increase metabolic rate and caloric expenditure beyond sedentary levels.

Ask yourself if you are truly challenging yourself in the gym. If you have more to give in your workouts, it might be time to dial up the intensity. 

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For both muscle mass and fat loss goals, the importance of nutrition cannot be understated.

A great way to think about making gains from your workouts is that the training is the stimulus to change, while your nutrition is the building block to making the changes.

If you aren’t seeing the changes you’d like to see in the gym, consider your nutrition.

Assesses things like your total calorie intake, your macronutrient profile, your hydration levels, and your supplement stack.

Supplements such as a high-quality protein supplement like Nitro Tech 100% Whey Protein or BurniQ from MuscleTech can help accelerate your progress. 

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If you underfeed yourself calories, you will create a catabolic environment in your body, which is a breakdown that leads to fat loss. (4)

If you overfeed yourself and create a caloric surplus, you will create an anabolic environment or one of growth, increasing muscle mass and weight.

A good general rule of thumb is to increase or decrease your calories by 15%, depending on your goal. 

Also Read: Weight Gain Meal Plan

Each macronutrient will be essential for gaining muscle mass or losing fat.

Protein, arguably the most important, will help support muscle growth and exercise recovery.

It will also increase your total daily energy expenditure because it has the highest thermic effect or the caloric cost to break down. (4)

Carbohydrates will help fuel your training, whether you need energy to perform heavy strength training or to keep you going at high intensity during cardio workouts that burn fat.

Lastly, fat is critical to optimal hormone function and nutrient absorption. It can also be an energy source during long, steady-state cardio training and suppress fat mass creation, such as testosterone. (4) 

Also Read: How Can You Workout Everyday?

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References:

1. Ackland, T. R., Lohman, T. G., Sundgot-Borgen, J., Maughan, R. J., Meyer, N. L., Stewart, A. D., & Müller, W. (2012). Current status of body composition assessment in sport: review and position statement on behalf of the ad hoc research working group on body composition health and performance, under the auspices of the I.O.C. Medical Commission. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 42(3), 227–249. https://doi.org/10.2165/11597140-000000000-00000

2. Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 46(11), 1689–1697. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0543-8

3. Androulakis-Korakakis, P., Fisher, J. P., & Steele, J. (2020). The Minimum Effective Training Dose Required to Increase 1RM Strength in Resistance-Trained Men: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 50(4), 751–765. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-019-01236-0

4. Trexler, E. T., Smith-Ryan, A. E., & Norton, L. E. (2014). Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 11(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.1186/1550-2783-11-7