As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of ways to track your progress, but when it comes to losing fat and building muscle specifically, there are three main areas to track: body weight, body measurements, & progress pictures.
We have a precise process for how we’re going to track body weight. You might already have a scale, either way, you’ll need a solid quality digital scale that ideally tells you your body fat percentage.
You can purchase one from Amazon, I’ve already pulled up a list of high-quality digital scales to choose from.
Click here to browse them. Grab a nice one that won’t hurt ya pockets.
Most people look at their weight once per day or week and use that single number to assess their overall progress.
This is a huge mistake.
We’ll be weighing in every morning.
- Same time
- no clothes on (if you can’t, underwear is fine)
- After using the bathroom (if possible, if not, no biggie)
- Before eating anything
If you can’t weigh yourself at the same time every morning, no don’t stress. But ideally, that’s most optimal for consistency in determining results. Caution: I’ll let you know right now that your weight will shift, differ, vary from day to day and this is typical. DO NOT fall in love with the scale. It can be deceiving.
Various factors will cause this swing, including:
- Rather or not you’ve used the bathroom.
- Exactly what you ate the day before (ex: high sodium foods like soup or pizza, Or carb-heavy
meal like potatoes) - The time of your last meal the night before (because food itself has weight)
- menstrual cycle and more
So due to the daily shifts in weight at any moment in time, we’re not going to focus on your daily weight. Instead, we’re going to place our energy and attention on your average weekly weight. This will even out the daily shifts in your weight and use that as a measure of progress.
Again, you weight WILL fluctuate daily and weekly, which is why it’s important to look at long-term trends in weight change.
At the end of each week, you’re going to take your weight for each day, add them all up, then simply divide them by 7 ( as in 7 Days).
So we’ll do an example below Let’s say these are your weigh-ins for Week 1:
Sunday: 202LBS (Starting weight)
Monday: 201LBS
Tuesday: 198LBS
Wednesday: 203LBS
Thursday: 200LBS
Friday: 199LBS
Saturday: 201LBS
202 + 201 + 198 + 203+ 200 + 199 + 201 = 1404
1404 divided by 7 Days = 200.5LBS | The average weight for Week 1 is: 200.5 LBS
We’re going to do this every week. We’ll then compare your average weight from Week 1 to your average weight from Week 2 to week 3, etc.
So although I weighed the same on Sunday and Saturday, I was able to drop roughly 1.5 lbs from my starting weight over the course of the week.
This will give you clear indications of your true progress because your daily weight shifts, but the weekly weight will tend to smoothen out the daily fluctuations. That’s why this is the most effective method for tracking your body weight.
If they only weighed once per week, they wouldn’t know how much progress they’ve actually made by looking at bodyweight.
Now let’s learn how to measure our body composition progress.