5 Signs You're Building Muscle (Even When the Mirror Says Otherwise) | Ep 435
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You're training consistently, eating enough protein, doing everything you're supposed to, but when you look in the mirror or step on the scale, nothing seems to be changing.
Or worse, you look softer than last week. What's going on?
The mirror and scale are terrible short-term indicators of muscle growth.
They're influenced by glycogen levels, water retention, inflammation, and your nervous system, none of which reflect actual changes in muscle or fat tissue. If you're judging progress by how you looked this morning vs. last week, you're setting yourself up for frustration and bad decisions.
Learn the 5 reliable signs that you're actually building muscle. You'll also hear the common scenarios where feedback gets confusing (deloads, building phases, body recomp, and post-diet maintenance) and exactly what to expect during each one.
Plus, we answer a listener question about what to track during a deload week.
Whether you're focused on strength training over 40, working on body recomp, or just trying to build muscle without the mental games, you'll get a framework to trust your process.
Timestamps:
0:00 – Why the mirror and scale are misleading when building muscle
3:28 – How glycogen and water create short-term visual fluctuations
5:32 – 5 reliable signs you're building muscle
10:48 – Strength progression and recovery as leading indicators
14:32 – Changes in your clothes and performance
18:10 – Biofeedback markers (sleep, energy, hunger)
20:29 – Sleep and recovery tools for better adaptation
23:07 – What to expect during a deload week
28:20 – Reading your data correctly early in a building phase
31:23 – Body recomp and post-diet maintenance pitfalls
Many lifters grind for weeks, step on the scale, and feel deflated by numbers that swing like a weather report. The truth is that visual changes and daily body weight are lagging, noisy signals. Glycogen shifts, water retention, inflammation from training, and even your nervous system state can make you look fuller one day and “flat” the next with no real change in fat or muscle. That’s why progress often hides in plain sight. Instead of chasing the mirror, you need reliable leading indicators that coaches use to guide programming and reassure athletes they’re on track even when short-term feedback is confusing.
The first leading indicator is strength. If you’re adding weight to the bar, getting more reps at the same load, or performing better within your core lifts over training cycles, your muscles are adapting. Strength and hypertrophy are not identical twins, but they’re close companions; sustained strength gains demand tissue growth. Track a handful of key lifts consistently and evaluate progress over four to twelve weeks, not days. Advanced trainees will see slower trends, but trends nonetheless. Think of this as your financial ledger: a steady rise confirms your deposits of effort are compounding, even if the mirror statement hasn’t arrived yet.
Recovery quality is the second signal, and it flips a common myth. Less soreness does not mean less progress; it usually means your body has adapted to the stress and is repairing more efficiently. When you notice fewer nagging aches, faster bounce-back between sessions, and more stable joints after similar or slightly increased training, growth is underway. During a deload, you may even feel “softer” as inflammation drops and glycogen shifts, but improved sleep, calmer nerves, and renewed motivation to train mark a successful reset. Resist the urge to cut calories during this week; fueling recovery accelerates the return to productive training.
Third, examine performance beyond raw strength. Can you handle more total work in a session without feeling wrecked? Are you hitting the top of your rep ranges more often, keeping rest tight without losing quality, and maintaining bar speed deeper into sets? Those are hallmarks of improving work capacity and neural efficiency supported by more contractile tissue and better energy system function. These changes often appear sooner than dramatic physique shifts and set the stage for future hypertrophy by allowing you to tolerate greater training volumes safely.
Fourth, consider how your clothes fit, not just whether your waist shrinks. Body recomposition often shows up as shirts getting snug in the shoulders and sleeves while pants loosen at the waist yet tighten through the thighs. Early in a building phase, the waist may tick up slightly from glycogen and a small surplus, which is normal and productive. Interpreting these signals requires context: phase, nutrition, and training volume. A tighter chest and sleeves paired with stable or modest waist change is classic recomposition—even when the mirror looks unconvincing on any single day.
Finally, watch biofeedback: sleep depth, energy, mood, libido, digestion, and hunger signals. When these stabilize or improve, your system is handling stress and adapting. Poor sleep, brain fog, erratic appetite, and constant fatigue point to recovery or nutrition gaps. Biofeedback is the dashboard for your physiology; if the lights are green, push. If they’re flashing red, adjust volume, calories, or protein and carb timing. This matters during transitions like deloads, early surpluses, refeed weekends, body recomp, and post-diet maintenance when visual cues get especially messy.
Misreading short-term feedback leads to three costly mistakes: slashing calories because you “look soft,” adding reactive cardio to chase water weight spikes, and program hopping before a plan has time to work. All three undermine adaptation and stall gains. Instead, commit to cycles of six to twelve weeks, fuel recovery, and let strength, recovery, performance, clothing fit, and biofeedback guide you. The mirror will catch up. Treat these leading indicators as your compass, and your physique will become the inevitable byproduct of consistent, focused work.
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Philip Pape: 0:01
You might be training hard and eating right, but when you look in the mirror or step on the scale, it feels like nothing's happening, or worse, like you're going backward. If you've ever thought, I'm doing everything right, so why don't I look like it? This episode is for you. Today I'm breaking down five signs that you're actually building muscle that have nothing to do with how you look. These are the markers that experienced coaches track, that research supports, and that most people are ignoring while they obsess over the scale or over the mirror. By the end, you'll know exactly what to pay attention to and what to stop letting mess with your head. She is in a coaching program, she's doing all the right things, and her coach had her take a deload week, which is a planned reduction in training volume, which is which is to let your body recover. And she wrote me this quote, I'm used to being rewarded for consistency and effort and pressure, so my nervous system is like scanning for threats because I'm not getting immediate feedback. I look softer, my veins are almost gone, and I feel like something's wrong, even though I know intellectually that this is supposed to happen, end quote. And actually, she sent me a lot more details behind that. And the message really stuck with me because this is a microcosm of a bigger challenge that I hear from a lot of people, right? She isn't alone. I hear versions of this all the time, whether you're in a building phase or a fat loss phase, but oftentimes it's you're trying to build muscle and you're watching the scale climb up, you might be panicking, people doing body recomp, wondering if anything's happening, people in maintenance after a diet who feel like they're losing their progress. And I think the common thread here is that you're relying on feedback that's either delayed, it's like lagging indicators, or it's misleading, or it's the wrong feedback for the phase that you're in. So today I'm gonna give you five reliable signs that you are building muscle and making progress that do not depend on the mirror or the scale doing what you want. And I'm gonna answer Aaron's specific question a little bit later as well about what to actually expect during a D-load, because I don't think many people talk about that either. Then stick around to the end because I'm gonna share three of the most common ways that people blow up their own progress by misreading short-term feedback. And you've probably done at least one of them for, so stick around for that. Now, before we get into the five signs, I want to explain why the two metrics that everyone is obsessing over, the mirror and the scale, are rather terrible indicators, especially of short-term progress. How you look on any given day depends on a bunch of factors that have nothing to do with actual muscle or fat changes. We've got to think short-term versus long term. So, short-term, what is happening way overrides the long term, and this is where it throws us off mentally. So you've got your glycogen levels. This is the carbs stored in your muscles. Those are gonna fluctuate a lot based on your training, your carb intake, your hydration status. When glycogen is high, you're gonna look fuller and tighter. And when it's low, you tend to look flatter and softer. And this is one of the reasons why if I take someone through a fat loss phase for a specific event, I actually want them to refill with their glycogen a few weeks before so they look fuller and tighter. And neither of these reflects actual change in fat loss or fat gain either way. So that's glycogen. Then we have our hydration and water. Water distribution shifts all the time. After you train hard, like a heavy leg day, you're gonna hold water from the inflammation. If you're in a D-load or you're in a rest period or vacation, sometimes that inflammation drops away, and now you look less, look less lean, even though you might be recovering and growing. So it really messes with your mind, and the body can change how hydrated or dehydrated it is as like an adaptive response to a lot of things like alcohol and fluid intake and stuff like that. Then there's your nervous system, which affects how you look as well, believe it or not, right? When you're in a stressed, ramped up state from even if it's from a good thing, like a heavy training session, you carry yourself differently physically in response to that. Your blood flow is a little different, your muscle tone might look a little different. And then when you recover, that changes, you might look softer. So all of that affects how you look on a short-term basis. And then the scale is even worse for short-term tracking, guys. It measures the gravity pulling you down to earth. That's it. How much mass you have, that's your muscle, your fat, your water, your glycogen, organs and skeleton, food in your gut, everything in your body. And so day-to-day swings of between, say, two to four or even five pounds are extremely normal and also meaningless. Even though I encourage people to weigh every day, actually using that daily point is meaningless. So if you're judging your progress by how you look this morning versus last week, you're just trying to read the tea leaves. It's it's it's meaningless, guys. These metrics matter only over at least weeks, but more likely months when we're talking about building muscle and body recomposition, not days or just a few weeks. So, what should you track instead? That is what the rest of this episode is about. Let's go over the five signs that you're building muscle. So if you know these signs, then you know what to track. So, sign number one is that your strength is going up. It's as simple as that. This is the most reliable indicator that muscle growth is happening. Muscle is strength, strength is muscle. If you're getting stronger over time, adding weight to the bar, getting more reps at the same weight, progressing on your lifts overall, your muscles are adapting to give you that extra strength, and therefore your muscles are getting bigger. Strength and muscle size, they're not perfectly correlated. It's not a one-to-one, but they're closely linked. You can't keep getting stronger forever without building muscle tissue. And then, and the muscle has to grow to support the increased force production. So tracking your key lifts, and these could be as simple as the big three or big four, like the powerlifting moves, deadlift, squat, press, overhead, or and or it could be a whole bunch of other lifts that are part of your programming. And you want to track them over your cycle, or not, you know, over your uh training cycle. Maybe that's four weeks, maybe that's six, eight, twelve, whatever. Are you progressing, even if it's slow, right? The more advanced you are, the more slowly it might progress, but that is the signal in the noise, not what you see or the weight on the scale. So sign number one is that if you're not doing that, that's a big game changer. Sign number two is that your recovery is getting better. And it kind of trips people up because it feels counterintuitive. As your body adapts to training, you often recover faster being between sessions. This is where when I start working with people and they express that they don't have much soreness and they're surprised about that, I have to have that conversation that, you know, because we're progressing using the same lifts, your body adapts, you're not gonna have soreness. It's not like those YouTube workouts or the F-45 or the Pilates, whatever, where you're just doing random stuff and a lot of eccentric work, and it's really not producing any gain in muscle and you feel beat up. But if you are actually adapting to your training, you're gonna feel more recovered in some ways and less beat up day to day and bounce back quicker, which is incredible, which is an incredible extra side benefit. A lot of you start to realize. Now, a lot of people think this means their training isn't working because they're not as sore. And that's backward. It means your body's getting better at handling the stress and repairing the tissue, which is which is literally what adaptation is. All right. Pay attention to how you feel about 24 to 48 hours after you train. If you're recovering better than you were two months ago, that's a really good sign that you are adapting and getting stronger. Interesting, right? And you're getting more athletic, you're getting, you're just getting better and stronger. Sign number three is that your performance is improving. So this is beyond just strength, just those numbers. I want you to look at your overall training quality. Can you do more total work in a session? That's your work capacity. Is your endurance within the sets getting better? And mind you, this could occur without having extra cardio. This is why I love lifting weights. It checks so many boxes. Are you hitting the higher end of your rep ranges more consistently? Are you more efficient, which means now you can express even more strength and grow even more? These performance markers reflect your body's increased capacity overall, not just muscle, but your energy system, your neural efficiency, and of course, more muscle tissue supporting the work. So if your training's getting better, your body's adapting. Sign number four is that your clothes fit differently. Now that's the key word, differently, not just that your pants are looser, because again, it depends on what phase you're in. You might be gaining weight and your waist might be going up on purpose because you're gaining some fat with the muscle. We're not talking about this. This is about where body recomp kind of shows up before the mirror tells you that it's there. And you might notice that like your shirt's a little bit tighter in the shoulders or chest and your arms in a good way. Your pants fit a little looser in the waist, but maybe tighter in the thighs. And maybe they're not looser in the waist, maybe they're the same, but it you've got to understand how to put all the data together. And this happens because you're gaining muscle and you're either losing fat at the same time if your waist is going down, or you're not really gaining that much fat, but the muscular areas of your body are outpacing the fat gain areas of your body, if that makes sense. And again, this can be very difficult psychologically because if your waist is going up, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. It definitely can happen. But if you're doing like a lean gain or aggressive maintenance or body recomp, generally you wouldn't expect much change on your waist, but you would expect bigger circumference in other areas, maybe your neck, your biceps, your chest, your, what am I trying to say, your thigh, your hip thighs, not necessarily your hips, but your thighs. So if your clothes are fitting in this slightly different way, again, trust those before you would necessarily look at the scale or even the mirror, because the mirror could be a very cruel mistress because of the subjective interpretation. Sign number five is that your biofeedback is solid. All right. And this is another one people, a lot of people I meet who haven't listened to this podcast or are very much into you know evidence-based fitness, aren't aware that, hey, all these physiological expressions of your body give you really good information. How's your sleep? How's your energy level? How's your mood, your libido, your digestion, your hunger? Right. There's like a good list of between six and eight measures that are helpful for most people. For some of you, you may have other things that that are helpful as well, but but that's those are the big ones. When your body's adapting well to training and nutrition, these also tend to be stable or improving, right? You tend to sleep a little better, a little more energy for your workouts. You're not constantly starving or battling cravings either, because you're managing your hunger sick hunger signals better, probably because you're also fueling better. And conversely, if you have poor biofeedback, right? Your energy is constantly low, your sleep is inconsistent or bad or just disruptive, you're always hungry or you have just erratic hunger, brain fog, all of this kind of stuff, then there's something off with your recovery, maybe your nutrition, your calories, protein, carbs, maybe your training load, your volume, your approach, how much cardio you're doing, et cetera. So good biofeedback means your system is handling the stress and adapting. And notice not all of these are direct measures of hypertrophy, but they're corollary measures of a body that is thriving, growing, building, getting more functional, and performing better. All right, so quick reminder at the end of this episode, I'm gonna share the three most common mistakes people make when they misread their short-term feedback. And these tend to stop people from making progress. And we're gonna help you not do that. Now, we've been talking about biofeedback. All right, these are the markers that tell your you your body is adapting well. And I would put sleep by far at the top of that list. And what helps recovery happen even faster is if you can have a really cozy, indulgent, helpful, calm environment for sleep. Not just more hours, but better quality sleep, deeper REM sleep, deeper deep sleep. And I want to talk about today's sponsor because this is super aligned. Cozy Earth came to me a while back. I wanted to sponsor the show. I said, I need to start using your products for a while, and I did, and I love these guys. The quality is extremely high. You get what you pay for, but you also get the recovery. I have talked before about their bamboo derived sheet set, but now I want to tell you about their pajamas that I've been wearing for a while. I'm not a pajama person, and usually because they're too hot and they're they're not comfortable. These, like their sheets, are extremely lightweight. 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Even when we have the fire going or the heat on, it keeps you warm. So those are the kind of things I really like. I love Cozy Earth. They have a ton of products, they're all super high quality. If you like to support the podcast, this is a great way to do it, right? We don't bring in much income from the podcast itself. So it really helps us make more of these episodes. Go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth and you'll get 20% off. Now, if you don't see the 20% off, use our code Wits and Weights, but it should auto-apply. Go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth because it's it's just another tool in the toolbox and they back up their products. They have a hundred night sleep trial. And I've talked to people who have gotten nicks and scratches on their own fault, and they'll still return and give you a replacement. Uh, they have a 10-year warranty. So if you don't love it, you can send it back and I think you will. I love it. I I need to get more sheets and I need to get more pajamas so I have enough to rotate through. Go to witzawaits.com slash cozy earth, support the podcast, check out Cozy Earth's amazing products to help with your sleep and comfort. Witzawaits.com slash cozy earth. All right, let me walk you through some specific situations where the mirror and the scale can be misleading. And then they you can recognize when they happen to you. All right, scenario number one is during a deload or rest week. Now, this is what listener Erin H, who wrote the original question that spurred this episode, this is what she was experiencing that during a deload, you're reducing your training volume. You're doing this on purpose to try to recover and get rid of some of the fatigue. And so a lot of things will happen. This is like a transitionary period, just like when you start on a diet or get out of a diet, or you start a new training program, you're effectively turning a big switch down on your training. And so the turnover, turnover in your like glycogen will slow down, inflammation should go down. Your nervous system, nervous system, your CNS, should be far less stimulated. In fact, I I spoke to all-time world record holder in the 181 women's raw squat, Steph Mager, here on the podcast. And she said for her D-Load, she doesn't even use a barbell that week in to deliberately force her from being able to stimulate your nervous system too much. She switches to dumbbells, it's still pretty heavy, but she reduces the overall volume. So during a D-load, you might look a little flatter, softer, less pumped because you don't have that constant stimulus coming in, especially if you've got a hypertrophy program going on. And this doesn't mean you're regressing. It's just you're recovering, you know, your muscles aren't shrinking away. You're not gonna lose your gains. We want this, we want to do this. You're still gonna train that week, right? You're not just taking it off altogether. And even if you were, that's not gonna set you back. You're getting a better chance to repair and grow and reduce some of that fatigue, that nervous system stress. And so there could be visual changes that you don't like during a delo. And guess what? They're gonna reverse within a session or two once you resume normal training. So, since Aaron asked a very specific question that nobody ever talks about on these podcasts, I want to address it today. And that is what should you expect during a deload week? What metrics matter? What feedback's normal? How do you know it's working? Just gonna take like a couple minutes to answer this real quick and then we get back to the main topic. But here's your answer, Aaron. Okay. What you'll probably see is that the scale weight might go up a little bit because of water distribution, or it might go down from reduced inflammation, could go either way, right? Because you've disrupted your training patterns. I'm not gonna read into that because I never read into a few days or a week or even two weeks anyway. I always say think about a three-week average when you think of scale weight. Visually, you might look a little softer, flatter, less pumped. Your veins might not be there if you normally look vascular, right? Some people don't have that, you know, that look anyway, but depends. And this is all the glycogen and water shifts we talked about. And then probably some reduced muscles tone, you don't have the same pump, your nervous system's calmed down. And this is temporary, it's gonna reverse within one or two sessions. So I would forget the mirror. I would pay attention to your recovery markers during that week as the most important thing that you care about. That's all that matters. Is your sleep getting better? Are those nagging aches in your joints, like your low back or shoulders or knees or wherever that is, starting to go away? Are they fading away? That to me is really important, especially for those of us over 40, achy joints. You want to listen to that. Is your digestion a little better? Do you feel less mentally fried? Because that's also very important. And then I guess here's the big one because by the end of the deload, you should start feeling a genuine desire, like psyched up to train hard again. Like, okay, I missed training, I gotta get back to it next week, right? Real eagerness to do it, that pull toward the gym. And that tells you that's a really good message to tell you you're recovered. And don't forget the food side of this. During a deload is not the time to go into a deficit if you weren't to begin with. I mean, if you're already dieting and you just want to continue diet, great. But I would say a delo, if anything, you want to increase calories. And even if you're dieting, this might be a great week to take a maintenance break because you're trying to help the recovery, and that's only going to accelerate it. So a successful deload, I would say doesn't always feel productive in the moment. It kind of feels lazy to some of us, right? Like so, like you and me, Aaron, who wire to think that like our effort means we're making progress and you don't want to rest on your laurels. So you're not going to get the same feedback. You know, the pump isn't there, the mirror may not look like you want. But if you feel better by the end of the week than you did at the start, you're sleeping well, aches are gone, you're looking forward to training more than you were before, those are good signs. And then when you come back to normal training, you'll know the D load work. That's the other thing. You have to have that feedback of okay, the weights might feel a little lighter, uh, you're Pumps are going to come back immediately if you care about that. Your motivation should be a little higher. So there's all of these aspects that we get from a D-Lo, whether they're programmed in or done a little bit more auto-regulated fashion. That's a whole other episode. Like, how do we do Doads? All right. So sometimes, Aaron and everyone listening, you do have to change what you measure based on the phase, even if it's a week-long special phase like this. Same thing goes for when you travel, same thing goes for if you take a diet break or a refeed or anything else, just has to change. I'm on my refeed weekend in the middle of a fat loss phase. So during the weekend, I'm tracking things a little different than I do during the week. I know my weight is gonna pop a little bit and then it's gonna drop back down, but I kind of ignore it for a few days, knowing that happens. I take it, I measure it, but I ignore I ignore it mentally more than I would otherwise. So that's that's the first scenario is the is a D load of rest week. The second scenario for when feedback gets a little bit confusing is early in a building phase. So when you go into a building phase, you're gonna eat more than you were before, probably in a small surplus. And I know there's more info now about how big of a surplus do you have to be. Maybe you don't have to be in that much of a surplus. Doesn't matter. You're eating more, you're eating enough to build muscle. The scale is probably gonna go up a little bit. And you might look a little softer in the midsection, and then you might panic. Okay. And you might stop. And this is this is a lot of my clients and those of you in physique university or using my app. It's like you have to commit to it and understand what's happening. What is actually happening is you're holding on to more glycogen and water from the increased food and training. That's it. You're gonna gain some weight just from that. You might even gain a little bloating initially because your body's not used to the extra fluid, has to adapt before it releases some of it. And there might be a tiny bit of fat gain as you go along during the building phase because most of what you're trying to gain is muscle. But to gain that muscle, you're in a little bit of a surplus, and therefore you might gain a little bit of fat. Now we do it in a very efficient way these days. I often don't push people too hard on the amount of a surplus. More with men than women tends to be the case. And if you're open to adding gaining a little more fat, but you might gain even more muscle, you've got to see what works for you in that regard. I've been through very, very aggressive phases and very, very lean phases. And now I know what works well for me. For me, it is somewhere in the middle. For some people, it might be on either end. All right. So early on, your muscles are gonna fill out with fuel. It's kind of like when you start taking creatine, people are like, oh my God, I gain weight on creatine and I feel bloated and this and that. Well, it's usually a good sign your muscles are filling up with more fuel. That's what allows you to perform better. And then your body adapts to the fluid change and will look better once it adapts. And so I would I say, I say wait eight to 12 weeks, like like two to three months into a building phase before you really judge anything. Because the building side is slower than the fat loss side. So everything's just kind of stretched out. It's a process, guys, but it's a process that's so worth it. So that's scenario two is the early building phase. Scenario three, where the feedback gets a little weird, is body recomp. In fact, all of it. Now, I recently had a whole episode devoted to body recomp. I've had several of those. And a lot of people want to do it, but a lot of people don't want to accept how the measurement gets a little wonky and precise and difficult. Okay, you're eating around maintenance, maybe a little higher, maybe lower. You're still training, you're doing all the things, but a lot thing a lot is not going to change. The scale is probably not going to change that much. Even what you see in the mirror, it's going to take time to change. And that's the hard part about body recomp. As much as everyone thinks it's a holy grail, it's slow and it's hard to see week to week. And yeah, you might be losing fat, gaining muscle at the same rate, and your weight stays sable. So that kind of throws you off. So the signs show up, and guess what? The five signs we talked about earlier: strength progression, how your clothes fit, those kinds of things. Now you can take things like photos and compare them. You don't want to look at your mirror every day or any day, really, and try to compare that because you just, it's not possible for our human brain to comprehend from you know three weeks ago in the mirror to today in the mirror. Our brains just don't work well with that kind of memory. Photos, though, are a more objective way to do that, especially if you're if you get to share that with a coach or even in our community, if you were to share the photos in appropriate clothing, and we can help you identify before and after. And then scenario four where it gets confusing is post-diet maintenance. So after a fat loss phase and you bump your calories back up to maintenance, a lot of things can like look worse, quote unquote, qualitatively in the short term because you're going to gain several pounds of fluid, glycogen, water. You're losing the inflammation-driven hardness that dieting creates. Dieting creates this kind of hardness, if you will, that some people like, I have to, I have to say, but it also is counter to performance and building muscle and everything. So all these changes are transitionary. A lot of them stabilize or the body adapts and return to a normal state instead of a depleted one. And then we'll start, you know, kind of looking quote unquote normal again. So these are the things you have to deal with. In all these scenarios, the five signs I gave you earlier, five signs you're actually building muscle, still apply. And so I want you to check those as you go. So I want to leave you with something that I think matters here about visible progress and transformation, because we think that if we're working hard, we should see it, that the mirror and the scale should tell it. And the whole fitness, wellness, dieting, weight loss industry is built on quote unquote transformations that are visual, before and after photos, right? Before and after photos. And even I have to use that sometimes in my marketing materials because it's the only thing people see to kind of get them in the door before you're like, no, it's not really about that. But those of us who are experienced doing this, or those of you listening who are experienced, coaches, things like that, visible progress is at best a lagging indicator. It shows up after the real work has been done. And even then, it may not be what you expect because we all have different body types, different goals, different genetics, et cetera. The gain in strength, recovery, performance markers, these are the leading indicators, right? Leading versus lagging. They tell you progress is happening before you can see it. It's like tracking your bank account as you go is your financial leading indicator versus the bank statement at the end of the month is the lagging indicator, right? The person who can trust the leading indicator without needing constant validation of the visual progress is the person who stays consistent long enough to get the visual progress and results they want. Ah, that's that's the gold right there. So when you're a little bit frustrated with what you see in the mirror, ask yourself Am I getting stronger? Am I recovering better? Is my performance improving? Do my clothes fit better differently? Is my biofeedback solid? If the answer to most of them is yes, you're probably building muscle, the mirror is gonna catch up with you. All right. Remember, I promise you those three common mistakes people make when they misread short-term feedback that's coming up in a second. Quick message though, if you want help tracking these metrics and knowing what to actually pay attention to, check out my Fitness Lab app. It tracks your biofeedback and your training data and your recovery markers. If you have iPhone, it now connects to Apple Health. And then it gives you a simple set of daily tasks, including an educational briefing based on what is happening. So the briefing you get is based on you. If you had trouble sleep, it'll say, Hey, I just saw from your sleep data you only got five and a half hours of sleep. Let's talk about it. I'm gonna help you out in a very low stress way. All right, so whether you use the data integration or not, it works that way. It adapts to you. You can chat with it. It's like having a coach in your pocket. And as always, podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off using the link in my show notes. You've got to go to that link. You'll take a free quiz, learn what it's all about, get a custom plan before you even buy the app to see if it's right for you. Again, that's Fitness Lab. Go to the link in the show notes. All right, here are the three mistakes I promised. These are the things people do when they misread short-term feedback, and then it holds you back even more. Mistake number one is cutting calories because you look soft. If you're in a building phase or you're in a delo, which is usually like a week, you look, you know, you might look less lean than last week. And so you drop your food, you drop your calories. And this could be a gut reaction because you feel like you're getting fat in a building phase, or it could be because what you talked about about a deload. Oh, I'm deloading and I'm not working out, so I'm not burning as many calories, so I need to drop my food. Well, you're just killed, you killed your recovery right there, and you killed your muscle building potential for no reason, just because water flu is fluctuating in your body. That's it. Don't do it. Don't just cut calories reactively, ever, ever, ever, ever. Mistake number two is adding cardio to try to fix whatever issue you think is there. Okay. And I say it that way because if you've listened to this whole episode, you know there may not be an issue. If the scale went up three pounds and then you throw in extra cardio to burn off that, then you're in a very dysfunctional, unhealthy mental state of mind. I am telling you that right now. Because that weight of three pounds is absolutely 100% glycogen and water, not fat, because the only way to gain three pounds of fat is to overconsume by well over 10,000 calories in one day. And I know you're not doing that. So you just added more stress and fatigue to your body by adding cardio just for that purpose. And if you're doing it just like as a one-time thing, it's it's just gonna be kind of useless unless you're doing it because you like it and it's part of your training and you're doing it in a non-stressful way, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about the reactive, I need to do cardio to burn off calories. Mistake number three is program hopping. Okay, program hopping is one of the most common things I see. And people will do a program for two weeks, they don't see the changes they want, they think it doesn't work, and they change, right? For whatever reason, they make an excuse. I'm bored, I wanted to do something different, whatever. But you never gave it enough time to produce results. All right, building muscle takes months, not weeks. I usually recommend people follow a program for at least six weeks minimum, but ideally eight, 10, 12, and you can have deloads in there, or you can just run the same program several times, or you can run the same program and swap out some of the exercises. So, all three of these mistakes cutting calories, adding cardio, program hopping, really they come from the same place. And that is that you're giving too much trust to the short-term visual feedback as if it means anything, and that could be the scale as well, instead of the leading indicators that matter that we already talked about. All right, that's it for today. The core message is very simple. The mirror, the scale are generally terrible short-term progress indicators, and they lag as well. They lag behind what you're really working on and focused on. So if you want to know whether you're building muscle, look at strength, recovery, performance, close, and biofeedback, and those will help you a lot more than the mirror or the scale. Thanks to Aaron H for the message. Shout out to Aaron for your message on Instagram. You guys can reach me on Instagram at Wits and Weights if you have a question, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash question. Easy way to do that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember progress is happening even when you can't see it. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
