How Long Body Recomposition Takes If You're Skinny Fat | Ep 494
How long does body recomposition really take? Cutting calories to lose weight can make a skinny fat physique worse by stripping away the little muscle you have while giving you misleading “progress” signals.
Learn the realistic week-by-week timeline for noticeable changes, plus the simple tracking methods that prove your plan is working.
If the scale hasn't budged in 3 weeks and you're about to call it off, hit play. And shout out to listener Dhiren A. on Spotify for today's topic!
Get 20% off your first custom blend at True Nutrition with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. Build your own protein from 20+ bases and 28 flavors, third-party lab tested and first-party verified, now shipping to over 150 countries:
https://truenutrition.com/witsandweights
You'll learn:
Skinny fat explained as normal weight obesity and why BMI can miss the problem
Why the default advice to lose weight can backfire
The Forbes curve and how your starting leanness changes how much body fat you lose
Realistic muscle gain rates over 10 to 12 weeks
Why DEXA and scales struggle to detect small lean mass changes
4 priorities for body recomposition (including protein)
How to track progress instead of chasing day-to-day noise
A simple muscle-building signal hidden in your training log
Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.
Support the show by visiting today's sponsor:
Get 20% off your first custom blend at True Nutrition with code WITSANDWEIGHTS.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Why "just lose weight" backfires when you're skinny fat
6:43 - The Forbes curve (dieting, leanness, and body fat)
10:19 - How to build your own customized protein powder
13:03 - What happens in weeks 1 through 10
16:15 - What a good month of muscle gain looks like
17:35 - Does body fat measurement work?
19:57 - The problem that isn't your training
20:23 - 3 changes that make the timeline work
24:13 - How long until you see physical changes, and until others do
28:13 - The muscle-building evidence in your own training log
Episode Resources:
Free Body Fat Calculator - Navy formula estimate from a tape measure, plus a few other numbers: https://www.witsandweights.com/calculators
Q&A - How Fast Do You Really Lose Muscle? (Plus Bigger Glutes, Creatine, and More)
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Why "just lose weight" backfires when you're skinny fat
Philip Pape 0:00
No matter what your body looks or feels like, it seems like everybody keeps telling you the answer is to lose weight. But I want you to hear this before you start the next diet. Today I'm going to show you why cutting calories is often the thing that will make things worse that lead to skinny fat, looking soft, having worse body composition, less strength, and a body that you are less happy with, how long it actually takes to see the changes that you are really going for, and why the tools you're using to measure progress probably can't detect things like muscle growth. Today is all about the realistic timeline for body recomposition, especially if you're skinny fat, but even if you're not. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today's episode is straight from a listener. I love questions from listeners, and this is from Dearren A, who left a comment on Spotify in our episode about how fast you lose muscle. And they wrote, Great podcast as always. Please can you share a podcast on how long it takes to notice changes to your body and more into skinny fat to building muscle? So, Dearren, thank you. That's it's a great question because it's actually two different problems inside the question that we want to address today. One is about the timeline. How long does it take to notice changes in your body? The other is more of a measurement problem. How would you know if it were working, if going from skinny fat to building muscle? And honestly, this applies to everyone wherever you are on this journey because it all applies in kind of both directions. But a lot of people only ask about the timeline one because they're impatient. Let's be honest, we're impatient. We're always thinking lose weight. And today we're really going to talk about body recomposition, what skinny fat is. And it does have a real clinical name. I know some people are triggered by the term skinny fat for whatever reason, but it's not a bad term when you think about what it describes. It's, hey, you've lost weight and you're like thin in a shirt, but you have, you know, a muffin top or some extra belly fat or whatever. And whatever phrases trigger people, I don't know. I'm born in 1980. Forgive me. All right. Now we're also going to talk about the what the research says about how fast you can add muscle if you are, especially if you're starting from that place of skinny fat. Why I'll say the advice you hear from most podcasters or coaches often makes it worse. We're going to clarify the different pieces of advice and which one might make sense for you. And then how we measure muscle growth because things like DEXA and your bathroom scale, whatever, may not be able to do that in the way you want. And there's simple things you can do to address that and have more confidence of what you're doing is working. Because one of the most common questions we get in our program is definitely, how do I know I'm building enough muscle? Am I going to the right rate of gain? Et cetera. It's not just about the fat, it's also about the muscle. If you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you a number that you can take from your training log that tells you whether you're building muscle as well. Okay. So I love process-oriented metrics that are leading metrics as well as those lagging metrics that help us measure things after the fact because I'm an engineer. Okay. So let's define the thing first. We love definitions and skinny fat is like a bro term, a gym term, whatever. There is a clinical version called normal weight obesity. So if you don't like the term skinny fat, you could call it normal weight obesity. And that means that your BMI is in the quote unquote normal range. So that's 18.5 to 24.9, but your body fat percentage is high and your lean mass is low. Now, a lot of my buddies and friends and the ladies out there listening to the show have the opposite problem because you've been lifting weights and building muscle. Your opposite problem is your BMA, your BMI is high, but you actually have a lower body fat percentage and higher lean mass. That's a different issue, and that's not a bad problem to have. That's just doctors and the medical system needing to catch up with the importance of body comp versus BMI. But for those of you who do have a low BMI, but really have more body fat than you'd like, and you know you're probably not happy how you look and your physique and you don't have much muscle mass and all that, this is a very common, you know, place to be for the vast majority of people. There is data that shows if we take the cutoff for men at about 33% body fat, or women, sorry, women for 33% body fat, roughly one in three American women with a normal BMI qualified as skinny fat. In other words, they had above 33% body fat, which for men would be like 25% body fat. So if you have above that percentage body fat, but your BMI is still normal, then you could say maybe you're skinny fat, right? And it's not a cosmetic thing. It's not a cosmetic thing. It is really a health thing. Metabolic syndrome shows up in about 17% of the normal weight obesity group compared to less than 5% in folks who have a normal BMI but also low body fat. So that's four times the metabolic risk from having that extra body fat, even though your scale weight is normal. Now, that is a huge wake-up call for you guys. Please take this is like the essence of what the show is about, is that it's not about your weight, it's about your body composition. So if you've been walking around feeling, you know, something's off, even though the doctor says I'm fine because my BMI is good, you're not imagining it. You're probably understanding that there are other things going on with your body and your health that you want to address. And that's totally cool. We want to be healthier. Now, when we look at the research, a lot of this was built by epidemiologists. And it's designed to identify, for example, who's going to get diabetes. They almost never get into strength training programs or even changing your diet. Like it's very rare, especially for a skinny fat person. A lot of these studies that look at people that are normal weight obesity are looking at prediabetes instead. So it's interesting because the fitness industry loves to throw around skinny fat like it's this unique condition and it has a unique solution and a method, and we're gonna cure your skinny fat. Whereas it's just like the vast majority of people are skinny fat. Okay. And when you go to a doctor, or even if you go to a personal trainer, you go to a friend, and you say, look, I don't like how I look. Like, let's say you confide in them, I'm not happy with how I look. What do they say? Lose weight, cut the calories, move more, watch the scale, eat better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The universal stuff that just is worthless, useless. For the person who is skinny fat, which again is the fast majority of us, then the advice is often gonna make it worse. So there's something called the Forbes curve. Curve.
The Forbes curve (dieting, leanness, and body fat)
Philip Pape 6:43
Forbes curve. The Forbes curve, it comes from research that Gilbert Forbes did several decades ago, and it's been refined over the time, over that time. And what it describes is the relationship between how much fat you're carrying on your body when you start losing weight and what fraction of that weight comes off as fat versus lean tissue. And so the rule of thumb you hear oftentimes is like 75%, 25% lean tissue. But it's not linear, it's like a sliding scale. Somebody who has a lot of fat can lose weight and have almost all of it come off as fat. In fact, they might lose a little muscle, but it's just the extra muscle they gained because they gained a lot of weight, if you know what I mean, not necessarily just muscle from strength training. So they can they can lose like 90% of their tissue as fat, but as you get leaner, the fraction tends to shift, where a relatively lean person losing weight might give up even more of their weight as lean tissue. Now, this is if you're not lifting weights. So this could be people on GLP1s, for example, who are not lifting weights. Again, not calling you out if you take GLP1s and you do lift weights, different category. So, what this means for the skinny fat person is okay, you have a normal BMI. So you don't really have that much fat to give up in absolute terms. Your percentage body fat is higher than you want it to be, but in absolute terms of pounds, it's not very high. It's because you also have very, very low muscle. You're just small all over the place. And so when you go into a calorie deficit and you don't have that much fat on you at this level, your body might actually burn more muscle. I hate to say burn, but you might lose more muscle mass than you even might think. Because your body's gonna preferentially go to the tissue that you are already short on because muscle tissue is more expensive, but you don't have much of it. And now you're gonna be even lighter and smaller, but even worse body fat percentage. So the skinny fat problem gets even worse. You get even softer and weaker and smaller and worse looking. Okay. And let's I'm just calling it out. I'm stating it like it is. And I see this constantly. This is maybe the single most common person who reaches out because it's the majority of us. That's exactly who I was for all those years until I started lifting weights and eating more in the right way and having more protein, all the things that I'm trying to share with you and ask you to do along with me. So if you've been dieting many times, which is likely the case, and if you're not carrying the extra, so some of you listening are just overweight. I get it. Okay. But you've probably been in situations where you did lose a bunch of weight, or heck, maybe you took a GLP one now and you've lost a bunch of weight really fast. But then you look worse than you did. And I don't even want to go into like Ozempic face and all that stuff, but I imagine that some of that is related to the fact that people are losing a bunch of muscle mass as well, right? Which we're not gonna hammer home that point. We're just talking about why cutting calories over and over again is setting you back further and making things harder, making the underlying problem worse, even though the scale looks like a success. And that's why the scale is worthless in so many of these scenarios. So you're not missing weight loss. You probably know how to lose weight. You've probably done it many times. What you're missing is muscle. And we know that lifting in protein supports muscle. So it's always great to come back to that, isn't it? Like just to reinforce it. Even if you listen to the show to be like, all right, Phillips reminding me yet again, got to get in the gym, have that routine, gotta eat well, track my food, eat my protein, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And I mean, eating protein right alone is gonna be a huge game changer, as we've talked about many times. And that's a very smooth segue into today's
How to build your own customized protein powder
Philip Pape 10:19
sponsor, True Nutrition. Because if protein is such a big lever, then you wanna be able to have protein from sources that you'll actually consume to get enough of it. True Nutrition, I love these guys. I've been using them for years for other products, like their highly branched cyclic dextrin for carbs. True Nutrition makes protein powder that you can customize. So cool. I've got bags of this stuff now because I love it. I love how it tastes. It's the exact ingredients you want, the flavor you want, the sweetener or no sweetener, because the protein you buy on Amazon or somewhere else, it's this one size fits all. It usually doesn't taste the best and it doesn't have exactly what you want. True Nutrition lets you customize it all the way in just four steps. Just takes a couple minutes. It's a lot of fun. You pick your base of protein, they have like 20 plus options: whey, plant, dairy-free. All third-party lab tested, first party verified at their own facility. You pick your flavor out of 28 flavors. You can sweeten it with stevia or monk fruit. It's not sugar, it's not artificial sweeteners. It's stevia or monk fruit. You choose the intensity of the sweetener, light, regular, heavy, and then you add what they call boosts. So things like fiber and probiotics and even colostrum. And you know, I can't say I would choose all of these, but you might choose them, and that's the whole point. Let you customize it the way you want. Also, how often you want it shipped, and you can save the mix and you can refill the same mix or you can have multiple custom proteins. So, my mix is a whey, egg, and casein blend. I like cookies and cream, sweetened vestivia. I add a little bit of psyllium husk for fiber and a little multivitamin, mainly for the B vitamins, built in. So that's three different protein sources with some extra boosts, really cool, and it has a great taste. It is not chalky, it's actually really smooth. I was commenting to my wife the other day how it's more like a milk product. It's so smooth. There's not this thick, clumpy chalkiness. It's delicious. Doesn't have GMOs, doesn't have fillers, doesn't have additives, doesn't have gluten. If those are important to you, even a better reason to try to true nutrition. And then now they ship worldwide to over 150 countries. And I know a lot of my listeners, you guys are from all over the world. Thank you. Check out True Nutrition, go to true nutrition.com slash wits and weights to support the show. Use code wits and weights for 20% off your first custom protein blend. That's true nutrition.com slash wits and weights. You spell it out. Use code wits and weights, 20% off your first custom blend. You can build your own mix, get 20% off. Link is also in the show notes. All right, let's get back to it because now we are going to dive into the specifics to Dieran's question. Let's say you
What happens in weeks 1 through 10
Philip Pape 13:03
do everything right starting Monday. You live three days a week, you eat enough protein, you stop dieting and eat more to fuel your body right, do this the right way. Well, what happens over the next 12 weeks, week by week, in your actual body? This is the timeline. And what happens? Okay, weeks one through six. Your strength is going to climb and it's going to climb very quickly, especially if you're new to this. You might add 20, 30 pounds to a lift, and that's going to feel amazing. That's a real thing. That's strength. It's not necessarily muscle. That's your nervous system getting trained. That's motor unit recruitment going up from your muscle fibers. That's firing rates of your muscles going up. That's your antagonist muscles learning to stop fighting the movements. You become efficient. Your brain gets better at using the muscle you already have. So you had all this sleeping muscle that is now woken up and reactivated like a big monster that's benefiting you and making you super strong. It is real strength. It is real strength, but it's not necessarily size yet. So now the size question. When we say size, by the way, men and women, interpret that how you will. For men, they're going to want to think of size as getting big and bulky. For women, they want to think of it as tone and lean. Guess what? The answer is yes. It does that to both. And it's actually a gender-specific thing when you look at the results. So there's no risk of getting bulky for women. There's only a risk of looking better and feeling better and getting stronger. So there's a study from Damas and colleagues. I'm probably butchering the name, 2016. It's one of the few studies that looked in the early weeks of a strength training program, right? And in just instead of just measuring start and after. So they took untrained people and then they trained them and they measured thigh muscle cross-sectional area at weeks three and weeks, week three and 10. At week three, the muscle was up 2.7%. And then at week 10, it was up 10.4%. Now it sounds like it sounds kind of like a ramp up, like you almost might imagine a line, right? But they also took biopsies and when they looked at the muscle fibers, the fiber cross-sectional area had only increased at week 10. So at week three, there was no fiber growth. Instead, what the scan, the body scan, was picking up, was swelling, edema from the muscle damage of being new to training. So what's interesting is the first three weeks, the gain in strength is real, but you're probably not gaining muscle. But the size gain looks real, but it's mostly water. So everything you perceive, let's say in the wind, in the in the wind window, I keep saying window, mirror in that window of time is not really representative of what's happening yet. Like you shouldn't just trust, trust it based on how you look. That's pretty wild. That's pretty wild because people are so in a hurry and so anxious for feedback on like, is this working? But in those first three or four weeks is exactly the point where you can't trust it at all. You can't trust it at all. You can trust that your strength is going up because your numbers on the bar are going up, which is the thing it wants you to lean into here. So then real muscle starts to accumulate from about week three or four onward. And the question is, okay, how fast does muscle accumulate? So I
What a good month of muscle gain looks like
Philip Pape 16:15
want to give you actual numbers. We do have resistance training trials in post-menopausal women, which is actually a lot very relevant to a lot of you who listen to this show when there's almost no other research on this group. And it was 10 to 12 weeks of lifting. Lean mass went up about 1.2 to 1.4 kilograms. So in pounds, that's like two and a half to three pounds of muscle over three months. So it's a little bit under a pound of muscle per month. So that's what a good month of strength training and muscle growth looks like. And you don't gain five pounds of muscle, it's just under a pound of muscle. And this is what I often tell clients, you know, in our program who are worried that they're not gaining muscle fast enough. You can only gain muscle so quickly, even if you totally optimize and eat all your food and train as hard as possible. You know, especially if you're a woman of certain size, you're only going to gain like maybe a pound a month. Not only. I mean, that's incredible compared to the alternative, which is not gaining muscle and in fact losing muscle for the rest of your life. So it's it's really flipping that around. I wish we could take credit for the muscle mass you are not losing. Because let's say you were going to lose a half pound of muscle otherwise. Well, technically the the flip, the switch is one and a half pounds of gain, not one. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. So if
Does body fat measurement work?
Philip Pape 17:35
you took a DEXA scan, this is like the gold standard, you know, you pay, I don't know, 100 bucks, 200 bucks nowadays, and you scan your body for body fat and bone density and all of that. It is the most often one used in research. And even despite that, DEXA has what's called a measurement error. So for lean mass on a DEXA, it's about a kilogram of error, even if you scan on the same exact day. So if you're scanning on different days, which is what you actually do, it's as high as two kilograms. That's four and a half pounds of error. So the error bar on what we would consider the gold standard best body composition tool we have is somewhere between two and a half, or I'll say two and four and a half pounds. And if a month of genuine everything is going right, muscle growth is under a pound, what does that tell you? That tells you that scanning on a DEXA is not going to see it. It's not that it might not see it, you just cannot. The signal is multiple times smaller than the noise. It's kind of like trying to weigh an envelope on your bathroom scale, because you know, I'm not talking about a food scale that can weigh in grams, but a bathroom scale where it reads in like at the smallest half pound increments, well, maybe tenths in some cases, but look, an envelope weighs an ounce. That's one sixteenth of a pound. So you wouldn't see your conclusion is the envelope weighs zero based on the bathroom scale, right? Raw, right tool, wrong job, the tool doesn't tell you that that's the wrong job. It just says, here's your report out, like the DEXA, here's the report out. And it might be beneficial for things like bone density. It's definitely beneficial over a longer period, potentially. Depends on what you're trying to measure. If you're just trying to measure a couple pounds of lean mass change, it really isn't going to help you much. It can change by water, glycogen, sodium, where you are in your cycle, all the same things that affect body weight, even if you go in with the same conditions. So I guess what I'm trying to get at here for Dearan and for you, dear listener, is when you diet for three or four weeks and you do everything right and you step on the scale and nothing has moved, you haven't learned anything. You have not learned anything because you cannot measure what has changed at that point. But if you do assume that you've learned something, in other words, if the weight is higher or lower and you make a conclusion based on that, now you're going to make a decision based on that that could be wrong. So it's not that you're failing to do the thing that gets you muscle or fat loss or whatever. It's
The problem that isn't your training
Philip Pape 19:57
you're failing to detect the result of doing the thing. And these are two different problems. Which is the one that's in your control? Which is the one that's in your control? Okay. The thing that's in your control is the process, the leading indicators, not the detection of the outcome, at least to a certain extent. So what do you do? So I'm gonna give you four things. These aren't exotic. As always on the show, these are actually pretty simple. The
3 changes that make the timeline work
Philip Pape 20:23
question is, are you gonna do them? Number one is to stop dieting. Eat at maintenance. Or if you know you're trying to go for body recomp, maybe a tiny deficit, maybe a tiny surplus, depending on which side you're biasing. Are you biasing the fat loss side or the muscle gaining side? I like to bias the muscle gaining side and eat in a tiny, tiny surplus and then still lose body fat because you're really, really close to maintenance. But your call. The point is to stay relatively close to maintenance. There's good evidence for this because we we've seen studies where they compared slow to fast weight loss in groups that lift weights. And those that go slower, even if they are in a slight deficit, sometimes increase their lean body mass, or at the very least, they lose less body mass. So that's kind of what we're aiming for here is not just to not lose it, but to potentially gain it, which is why I sometimes bias toward a little bit of a surplus, especially for a skinny, fat person whose whole issue is a lack of muscle. So even if you are dead set on a deficit, keep it extremely, extremely tiny, close to maintenance, if just not staying at maintenance, and really just focus on the building part of it to add what you can't, what you're here to add, which is muscle. Okay, number two is of course protein. We had that huge meta-analysis from Morton and colleagues, 49 studies that found that the benefit of protein for gaining lean mass with resistance training plateaus around 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. That's 0.7 grams per pound. So a 160 pound person, call it 110 to 120 grams of protein a day minimum, that's the number. Now, going way above it isn't gonna do much for you unless it helps more with such. Or your lifestyle preferences. If you're in a bigger deficit, it could help, but protein's important. Number three, progressive overload, lifting weights. Now, this is an important one because the primary metric is not the scale or the mirror, it's your training log. Weight on the bar, reps completed. Right? There's really just a few ways to progress. There's the load and there's the reps. Now, you could progress on things like rep quality, I suppose, but that's like a secondary factor. What we just covered earlier today in this episode is that your strength is going to move first, and it moves a month or two before your size, your muscle size moves or increases. So your earliest reliable signal is is my strength going up? So when the log for your load or weight on the bar, weight on the dumbbells or machines or whatever and/or reps is going up, then you must be getting stronger, which is eventually going to translate to more muscle mass. Now you might be saying, okay, I want to look better. I don't care about my squat. Fair. I hear you. But guess what? The squat is a major movement pattern involving so many muscle groups that you want to look better. And looking better is a result of getting stronger. You don't get one without the other. Number four, and this is the timing piece of it, is I want you to be patient and set your window of assessment at about 12 weeks, which is three months. Not three weeks for sure, not four, not five, not six, twelve weeks. And I want you to use three ways to measure this, none of which is the body scale. So the first measurement is your log, your training log. The second measurement is your waist. Now you could also measure somewhere else that matters to you, like your biceps, but you could do it once every week, once every two weeks, same time of day, same conditions. And then photos. Same lighting, same clothes, all that jazz. And I know nobody wants to take photos. Take them anyway. Take them for yourself. In our program, we ask you to take photos, but we don't ask you to share them unless you're comfortable. Because at the end of the day, we just want you to have the data. But then if you have it and we're working through some challenges or some questions you have about muscle definition, we can take a look and say, okay, here's what's happening. Just from an objective standpoint. Not trying to judge anybody. We're just trying to look at the objective result. And you could just take them and put them away and just keep them on your phone, put them in the hidden folder, whatever. Okay.
How long until you see physical changes, and until others do
Philip Pape 24:13
But then in three months, you'll be glad you have them because you can compare. Now, our Spotify listener, Darren, their actual question was how long until you notice the changes? So my honest answer is the subtle changes that you'll actually see yourself if you're looking at month-to-month photos as opposed to the mirror, because the mirror screws up with your head big time, it's probably eight to 12 weeks. So two to three months out. Now, change that other people notice might even be longer, like four to six months. And it depends, men, women, how you dress, what time of year, like if you're going to the beach and taking your clothes off, most of your clothes off, let's say maybe it's a nude beach, I don't know. Or if you're a man and you know, men tend to have more prominent like traps and delts and back where you might see that in a shirt, for example. But a genuinely different looking body. If especially if you're starting from skinny fat, like a genuinely transformed body is probably a one to two year project, if you're honest with yourself. If you're starting this from square one at skinny fat, which is really not that time that long in the scheme of things. I mean, scheme of your life, you've probably been dieting for years. What's one to two years? I mean, I started lifting weights properly back in 2020. It is 2026. I feel like I still have a long way to go, but I'm happy about that because I enjoy the process and I've seen massive improvement. And I saw massive improvement in that first year, too. And yeah, it took about a year or two to be like, wow, okay, something is really different now, right? And and I think that's fine. That that's being a human being, that's our body. We're trying to shift things. Let's be patient about it. That's not a discouraging answer. That that's you know what you're signing up for, and you don't quit early. You got to do the hard thing and get the result. So I'm not saying skinny fat requires a special method or program. I said that earlier, I kind of made fun of it even. Of course, it doesn't. It's the same lifting, same protein, same eating enough food, falling the thing. What's different, I think, is your expectation and how you measure it, right? But if if someone's selling you a skinny fat protocol, that just doesn't exist. Just stay away from those guys. I'm also not saying don't lose fat. Like if you're carrying enough fat that it makes sense to go into a deficit, then go into a deficit. But if you're skinny fat, you probably need to build muscle. I'm also not saying the scale's useless. It's it's probably a very helpful tool, especially when we're looking at staying at maintenance and eating the right amount of food for our body. And look, if you start building muscle, you're gonna have to eat more. I actually would rather you be logging and understanding your metabolism based on the scale and based on your food with a tool like macrofactor, so that you can actually increase the food over time and stay in the range that you need to be, which is a great problem to have. Now, one final, I guess, positive thought is if you truly are skinny fat and you're untrained and you're listening to this episode, maybe you just found the show, you're probably in the single best position right now from which to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. The only other, I guess, envious position I'll say is someone who has a lot of weight to lose. And they probably wouldn't argue if you if you're carrying a lot of extra body fat, you're probably not gonna argue that that's an envious position because you have certain health risks, right? But it also means you can, if you're at that demographic, you can, like overweight, obese, can go into a deficit and your body won't feel like it's in a deficit. So that's also not a bad place to be. So I like to reframe things positively where I can, and those are a couple of places where we can do that. So before we wrap up, I mentioned earlier that there is something you can get from your training log that's gonna help you understand whether you're building muscle. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if you're sitting there, you're like, okay, I get it. I need a way to see this happening over the next 12 weeks. We do have a free body fat calculator. So I almost never mention these, but if you go to wits and weights.com slash calculators, we have a few free calculators on there. One of them it is body fat. And you just take a tape measurement, it takes like a minute and uses the Navy formula, but it gives you some other cool numbers. I'm not gonna reveal what those are, just go check it out. We're always updating these tools, but it's gonna be a helpful number to say, okay, this is roughly where I might be starting from, and then go use the trend over time to see how your body is changing. Witsandweights.com slash calculators. I'll include a link directly to that specific calculator in the show notes. All right, so here is that number from your training log that I mentioned earlier.
The muscle-building evidence in your own training log
Philip Pape 28:13
It's called tonnage. Some people call it volume load, but I like tonnage. It takes about a minute to calculate. Many apps do this for you. So check if they're sometimes they just call it volume as well, but pick a lift. It doesn't matter which one, just pick something that you do every single week in your current program. And then for each set, you're gonna multiply the weight by the reps and then add up your sets. So that's our tonnage. That's all it is. That's why some people call it volume, but to me, volume is the number of sets where obviously your load might be different. So I know some people don't like that lack of precision if you have an engineering brain like me. But tonnage is sets times reps times weight. So you're kind of multiplying all that. So if you had, let's say, three sets of eight of a hundred pounds, then that's a hundred times eight, that's 800 pounds per set times three sets. So that's 2400 pounds, right? So 800 pounds a set times three, 2400 pounds. That's your tonnage on the lift. And what's cool about it is if your weight goes up, it goes up. If you add a rep, it goes up. Even if you add sets, it goes up. Now, if you're adding sets, if you're on a set-based progression, it's gonna go way up. And in fact, that's the premise behind a wave-based program. Um, like we have one called Ironclad. If you tracked your tonnage, you would actually see this massive ramp up over three weeks and then it drops way back down because that's the point. But let's say you're doing a normal single or double progression, you're going up in weight, and or you're going up in reps. Tonnage will basically combine the two because you're multiplying it all together. And so some people get confused because they they increase weight one week, but then the next three weeks they increase reps, and they're just not quite sure if it's all working out. Because then what you might do is you might reset the weight. Once you hit the top of the rep range, you might let's say reset the weight, but then go higher reps, it gets confusing. You know what I'm saying? Like if things aren't just going up in a line, it gets confusing to do the math. So the tonnage can kind of take that confusion out of it, assuming the sets are the same. Assuming the sets are the same. So if you're a math nerd like me, if you're an engineer, if you like numbers, if you like to take some of the confusion out of progression, it's just an extra way to track that. And again, a lot of apps do that for you. So if anything, just go in your current app that you use, whether it's Boost Camp or Macrofactor workouts or something else. And they may have something like that. They also have other tools in these apps that look at actual volume per muscle group. But again, that's just sets. This is tonnage. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, when you are starting from skinny fat, you don't have a weight problem, you have a muscle problem. And muscle takes a bit longer to build. So you gotta be patient and put in the work. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
