How Much Weight Should You Gain Outside Of A Diet? (Maintenance, Reverse, & Building Phases)

Hey team, welcome back to the show. Today it is Andrea, Danny and myself talking about how much weight should you gain outside of a diet. So really setting realistic expectations for weight gain in a maintenance phase or reverse diet phase and building phases. I think this is a really important topic. I know we are chatting about this with clients every week, sometimes multiple times a week, because I think most everyone has a pretty clear idea of what to expect the scale to do during a fat loss phase. But when you're not dieting, like what should happen when you increase calories? If we're at maintenance calories, is it okay? We're still gaining weight. What if we're gaining muscle or where to building phase? Like is how much is too much? What's appropriate? Again, a lot of women just don't really understand what constitutes an appropriate amount of weight gain in these phases. And consequently, we can either panic over completely normal fluctuations or just kind of try to weight gain weight altogether. Now, if your goal is to build up as easily as it looks like you lift, you need to understand that the scale isn't always supposed to be moving down. Sometimes, moving up is exactly what we want. Sometimes, it should just be staying stable though. So I just want to get into some nuance of this episode. Now, Andrea, I know this is a topic you had brought up in terms of thinking it would be quite helpful to discuss. Was there anything specific that caused you to want to dig into this or why you think this is important to understand? Yeah, I have a lot, most of my clients win. They're not in a fat loss phase. Their goal is to be building muscle or just, you know, an overarching goal is to have more muscle than they do currently. And I, I'm right there with people with in this kind of fear of seeing the scale go up. So I understand it. But at the same time, if we do want to be building muscle, yet we're really nervous and sort of like white knuckleing, seeing the scale going up over time, it's just going to end up holding us back with long-term progress. And that doesn't mean that we can force feed the scale going up or we want to see like pounds of weight gain every week. That doesn't mean that we're just gaining muscle really quickly. But we do need to in a lot of a lot of situations sort of overcome that fear of seeing go up over time. And just having the understanding of why that's happening can really help with that fear. And I think really understanding how to interpret the objective data can help you start to detach from that because it is interesting. I will have some clients explain to me in their second why they shouldn't be worried that the scale is going up or because of the scale fluctuated. Even things as simple as like I woke up three hours earlier than I normally would. And thus like the scale was heavier. We had less time to digest in process of food, right? Like it makes sense. We miss all earlier. But still it really bothers me. This is heavier. Are you sure this is a fat gain? It's like I'm pretty sure. But it's over time if we can understand all these things, people can start to look at it more and more objectively. Rather than just being this gut reaction that we take so much stock in and like that number is up and that's bad no matter what. Because again, for a lot of people until we're willing to work through that, we're never going to get to the goal physique you want. Alright, so let's talk through. Why does weight increase with calories increase? So really before talking about how much weight someone should gain, distinguishing between weight gain and fat gain. And feel free to jump in if you think of any of the reasons that are worth mentioning here. But the scale can increase even when you're not gaining fat due to multiple factors. First, more muscle glycogen. So if you are eating more carbs anywhere previously, your body will typically store more of those carbs as muscle glycogen. Muscle glycogen, per gram of glycogen, we store we store about three grams of water so that glycogen soaks up some water as well. That will make us a considerable amount of heavier. So typically at like in their transition from diet to post diet phase, carbs go up. Some scale weight goes up suddenly because of this. Increases in food go volume. Similarly, for transitioning from diet to post diet phase, you will literally just have more food in your gut at any given time. The scale will be heavier again, not fat gain. We literally just have more food sitting in our belly. Sodium and fluid changes can make a big difference here as well. So we can see more sodium or I mean really any variables here like if you consume a lot less sodium, your body will retain more. It will prevent you from excreting as much. So to prevent you from getting drastically dehydrated, right? It's a feedback loop. So like changes, fluctuations in your sodium or water intake can cause you to retain more water, which will make us heavier. Training related inflammation, soreness from training, especially if we'd like started in training block or for a lot of clients and it's a lot more rare that I start someone out week one with the expectation of fat loss. But I almost always see like if I put someone on a calorie intake that I would expect to cause fat loss, I almost always see the first week if they're fairly detrained the first week they're typically going to be quite sore. We actually don't see weight move at all down that first week just due to the inflammation from the new training, novelty and training causes a lot of soreness which causes inflammation, which will again cause scale to be a little bit higher. Due to that, we typically won't see the weight move like at all the first week, you know, if someone is effectively losing body fat. Depending on where you're at in your menstrual cycle, changes in progesterone and estrogen specifically are going to impact water retention quite a bit. Progesterone has a bit of a diuretic effect, I believe. Is that right, Andrea? Yes. I think it's just how it relates to estrogen. So yeah, it-- progesterone has kind of an anti-diuretic effect, correct? So if you're, yeah, usually if you increase progesterone in relation to estrogen, then you'll have a diuretic effect. So metedodiodial phase progesterone will be higher towards the endododiodial phase going to be much lower or like in your follicular phase, estrogen will be higher relative to progesterone. There's a lot of variables that are like cause your weight to fluctuate a lot even throughout your menstrual cycle. And simple one, but again, you ate later or weight in earlier than normal. And I find this is again for a lot of people who are really stressed about their way. It's just oftentimes like it fluctuates a lot. Dude, you mentioned you ate three hours later than you normally would. We just have less time for everybody to move all the food through our system. Oregon, you ate yourself earlier. Less time to digest all the food. You were going to be heavier. Anything else y'all can think of there? That's worth mentioning. Big swings in fiber will do it just because you're-- if you have a more rapid swing up, you're not going to-- your body's just not used to that. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing if it were steady, similar to sodium, but whenever there's a big deviation from the norm, then there will usually be more bloating or constipation. So you're going to have a heavier weight on the scale usually from that. And then another one with food is eating meals close together or having bites and taste of things because your body has a mechanism called the migrating motor complex that moves food through. And so if you have food closer together than three-ish hours or you're like munching on things through the day, even if calories were equated, but you organize your food that way, your digestion isn't going to move as normally. So then you're going to be thinking about it like a traffic jam in your GI. So you're going to end up more bloated and that scale will be heavier. That's one of the most common things I see with people with more digestive issues about this all really is getting them out of the habit of cramming like 75% of their daily calorie intake into the last five to six hours of the day. But that's an aside. So point of all this being, like you could finish a fat loss base at 135, get increased calories, increased carbs, and within a couple of weeks you could be 138. Did he gain three pounds of body fat? No, not necessarily. Potentially none of that. It's actually body fat. But you have to separate scale weight changes. Well, we can't just interpret scale weight changes without without also considering what's happening physiologically. All right. So let's talk about the post diet period. We're transitioning from deficit into maintenance or reverse diet phase. How much weight gain should you expect? First, I think it's important to put out there that your expectation shouldn't be to maintain your lowest weight or lowest weight in the diet. Not going to be realistic or even desirable. So again, even if we don't gain a single ounce of body fat, you should be heavier post diet because we can eat a lot more food. We need a lot more food to maintain than what it takes to build. Right. So if we were losing a pound a week, we're in roughly a 3,500 calorie per week or 500 calorie per day deficit. So we would to be at maintenance when I add in at least roughly 500 calories per day, just to maintain not gaining body fat. Then you will have again more muscle glycogen, which should lead to better fraying, better recovery. You will have more food in your gut. So there will be more body weight. Again, the goal shouldn't be to just maintain your lowest body weight. That's I think a very important expectation is understanding that side of things. But again, us increasing calories is automatically me. You're going to start getting body fat. Remember, maintenance by definition, we're not getting body fat at maintenance, right? You were in a deficit. We want to for health purposes, for maximizing your ability to build muscle. We want to bring you out of a deficit. But again, we can be at your maintenance calorie intake without us gaining body fat. So again, we don't need to eat our deficit calorie intake forever. We also shouldn't be super focused on just maintaining that lowest diet weight forever. Before we get into the questions to discuss here, anything to add for either from either of you there? I think that should the main thing, just realizing that your deficit calories, the calories that got you to that lowest weight are not your new maintenance. I think most of our type of clients know that and realize that, but I think that's an important thing to just hammer a home. That's not your new maintenance calories. Yeah. A lot of people do make the mistake. You can understand that, but so when they see the weight go up a little bit, it's like, "Oh, well, did I overshoot maintenance because I gained weight?" And again, in this instance, you have to look at what's happening physiologically, not just the scale. In this instance, no, right? More muscle glycogen, more gut content. So first question, should you expect your weight to increase immediately when you finish dieting? What would you all say? What do you typically expect with a client? Almost always, yes. I think it depends on the person, but almost always, yes, it's going to come back up. From all of those things that we mentioned with food volume coming back up, even if your body composition isn't so lean that we're not gaining fat, as we bring food up for all of those reasons that we listed, your weight will probably come back up as we add food back in, and that doesn't mean that you're gaining body fat back. But then also for some people, if the primary goal is to build muscle, sometimes there will be a little bit of fat gain associated with that, and that's also okay. In terms of initially increase, we want to see how much is readable. You touched on this, it is context dependent with how lean we got. When someone is at a sustainable body weight or body fat level, typically what I will say is about two to three percent of total body weight increase. Anywhere from one to three percent, really, is what I expect in the post diet, like the first four to six weeks post diet where we can typically see someone quite weight stable by the end of that. Again, due to it takes a couple weeks, oftentimes for us to find someone's maintenance, a lot of times we'll see. First week post diet, we didn't actually see like any weight gain. We actually, like, saw further drop. Sometimes we'll see, hey, we for sure needs some more food in this case, and it might take a couple weeks for us to get the weight stable. I typically expect somewhere between one to three percent up. If we end of the diet at what I would consider a sustainable body fat percentage, before we transition into, okay, the reverse diet phase is over and we're still weight stable here. Passed about that three percent mark, there's context here, but generally I'm a little bit more concerned if we're getting too far past that. Again, it's none of these are set in stone, but speaking in generalities here. Then the caveat to that would be if we were below a sustainable level of leanness, below that point, like let's say we got extremely lean for a photo shooter, like Danny, you're about, it could be Andrea, you competed a few months ago. Andrea, a post diet, you had to gain back some body fat, Danny, you're going to have to do the same to be in a healthy place where momentally physiologically prioritize building muscle again. So in that case, we might need to gain more. Any other nuance context you all want to add there? If a client doesn't gain weight, like let's say we bring their food up, they don't gain weight. Are you typically immediately going to be like, "Hey, we need to add more food here." Either you'll have a dick on that, or are we okay with that? I would, in my opinion, it mostly depends on, so if somebody is still pretty hungry and their weight stays the same or comes down, then that's a sign that we probably could, assuming food sources make sense, that's one thing I'll review first, but if their weight comes down, that tells me that they either are dropping some stress, and so water weight can come down associated with that, or we also just don't have their glycogen stores full yet, and all the way back up to maintenance, and we have some room to keep pushing food up. I would also be looking at the output, what does their training look like? What does their lifestyle look like? What are those demands around there? In addition to their recovery, just how is all that looking? Just as we've outlined, context matters? Yeah, so you're saying, "Hey, this person is way more active than they were before we'd increased food?" Yeah, potentially. Depending on the context, it's sometimes people, especially at the end of a prep or a photoshoot, it's like all of a sudden you have all this time on your hands, and you get the odd person that's like, "Oh, I want to try, I want to go hiking, I want to go cycling, I want to go yoga," because they have suddenly have all this time back, or they're meeting up with friends or whatever, but then you also want to be looking at nutrition and adherence. So are we fueling that output? Well, also, if there's a increase, got it. Okay, I'm going to put a sense of that. Yeah, I think also, I mean, quite similar what you said, Danny, basically looking at energy availability, is this person in the fairly low state where, hey, the calories coming in, the carbs coming in, relative to their activity levels, their body composition, their body size? Food pretty low. Before staying wasteable, I'm still probably a lot more likely to want to push that up. Again, I typically want to, by the end of this phase, see that one to three percent increase. Unless there is some contacts here. I have one client, a male client right now who's been a long-term client. He's the most ripped he's ever been. It's still less sustainable for him though. And I pushed him pretty hard this last diet phase, and he loves where he's at now. Initially, it was kind of resistant to him, but now he's still with where he's at. And we have been very, very conservative, because I'm excited for him, because it's like him to set higher goals for himself in his mind. And he wanted to be very conservative. I want to make sure I can maintain this. He's eating a decent amount of food. He feels good with where he's at. He loves how his physique looks. So I've been a lot less aggressive, like pushing him up. He's also someone who just, like, from past experience going through, again, we've been coaching together for so long. I've seen him more prone to weight gain in the past, fat gain in the past, a little bit more conservative with it. Anything else there before we continue? Sick. Let's talk about maintenance. So, does maintenance mean your weight never changes? No. Maintenance doesn't mean waking up at the exact same weight every morning. Even when your calorie intake is consistent, scale weight fluctuates. This is a huge thing we want to look at. Trends across weeks, not individual lands. I know that with my clients, I think you're all the same. Of course, our progress trackers show not just daily lands, but average weight across the week. Be it in a building phase or a fat loss phase or a maintenance phase. The biggest thing I'm looking at in terms of weight is how are those averages changing? Because a lot of times, like, how someone feels about, I mean, in a fat loss phase, a lot of times, it'll be like, we lost two pounds relative to where we ended last week. Let's say Monday, Tuesday, we dropped two pounds and then we just held there and people will be like, "Man, this week's sucked. I didn't lose any weight." It's like, "Wait, we lost two pounds relative to the last week. It just didn't feel like it because hasn't belonged the last three or four days." Or vice versa, we had a highway in. But if we look at the weekly average, hey, this is quite normal. So, I'm much more focused on that. I think we all are. Let's see. Outside of that, I think one of the most important things is really again, kind of, for most people will be able to establish a weight range. I find for most people, this is something like plus or minus two to three pounds that we will fluctuate within. The more dialed then you are with your lifestyle, your food timing, your sleep and awake times. The smaller the degree that will be, I would say for most people like plus or minus. Realistically, if we're eating the same foods, our schedule is pretty consistent, which is true for most of our clients, we're pretty dialed in. It's more like plus or minus a pound. I don't know if we're having more meals out, more variability, more like plus or minus two pounds for most people. Would you all agree with, like, it's a pretty typical weight range? Yeah, for sure. If you take that to the extreme with the people who I've had recently do photo shoot or Andy who's in peak week right now, I can pretty much predict what her weight is going to be in her morning weigh-ins and then her evening weigh-ins because she's sending me morning pictures after two meals pictures and then evening pictures. I just pretty much know what they're going to be. Then if she comes in under it, for example, then I'll add a little bit more food to make sure that we're filling out her glycogen stores. The more dialed, like you said, the more dialed that somebody is, it's just very, very predictable because there's not those fluctuations in water and sodium and fiber like they're normally would be. Yeah, okay, okay. So when we're looking at establishing maintenance, how long do you all typically like to observe someone's weight before we decide, okay, this is a maintenance and take for you? To me, it's more, it's like the combination of weight waste measurements and hunger. I want to re-look at those altogether. Once we've gotten to a point where waste isn't trending up and their hunger is like they probably have a little bit of hunger, but it's not extreme hunger. Then if the scale, even if the scale slowly trends over time upward, but the waste measurement stays the same, I'm generally okay with that. Even if the goal is maintenance, like that tells me, okay, we're getting a lot stronger in the gym. The scale weight isn't trending up quickly, but also where our hunger is in a good place. It's not over. full or hungry and the waste isn't trending up. Maybe even coming down over time like that's that's generally what I'm looking for. Yeah, Mary will put. Yeah, if we're and if we're at a sustainable body fat biofeedback should be good. Another important consideration. I would agree, though, I think looking at mid range of maintenance for most people. There is typically a little bit of hunger. It's not like you're starving, but like, hey, there might be some hunger for your next meal. I wouldn't expect to be like, I'm full all the time if we are at maintenance. The interesting thing here as well is that I think oftentimes it's understood is that maintenance is very much a range. And even if someone is that like, hey, weight is stable, I would say for most people like three to four weeks of us staying weight was stable in terms of similar to you. I'm looking at weight measurements, civilly-enabled measurement, progress pictures. Even then, we can sometimes push out food up higher and still we'll see you maintain, right? If people are adaptive where when we eat more, we do more pacing, fidgeting, blinking. So even there, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the top end of our maintenance. But that's a good again, like three to four weeks, maintaining those metrics is a good sign we're at maintenance. Anything else? I guess another important consideration here. What if we're building most of that maintenance? Then how does this impact our expectations in terms of weight gain? That would be that scenario that I mentioned where the weight is just kind of slowly trending up, but the weight is staying the same. And we're getting stronger in the gym. Yeah, that's where I'd be primarily just looking at the logbook just because there's so much more involved in building, like building muscle and getting stronger. There's, you know, how modern year-on recruitment, skill, improvement, like we're not building muscle from day one. There's still a lot of things that have to be ticked off before we can say, yeah, we're building lean tissue. So I wouldn't necessarily just be like, oh, yeah, we're gaining weight. Okay, we're building muscle like that's great. Okay. Anything else on maintenance phases before we talk about building phases? Cool. All right. Let's talk building. Now, a lot of women believe that if they're trying to build muscle, they should either gain absolutely no weight, which again, is going to be a mistake if we're kind of like somehow recomb our way to like we have weight on muscle, but our weight is stayed the same or intentionally eat a large surplus because they've heard that they need to bulk and just gain a lot of body fat. And the other goal is necessarily appropriate here. If the goal is building muscle, I think this is the most important they understand. If your goal is to build muscle, which almost every client who comes to us, even those who say their goal isn't to build muscle when we see like what the goal is equal, looks like it's almost always, hey, this person has at least five more pounds of muscle in their frame than you do. If your goal is to build muscle, your goal is to get heavier over time because more muscle in your frame means we have more weight on our frame, the muscle mass. So like your lean is physique at the end of your first diet versus your lean is physique, given we got quite lean, the lean is physique at the end of your second diet. If we go muscle in between, we'll probably be heavier. That's why we post a lot of these, hey, this person is the same weight between these two pictures, but their physique looks drastically leaner and more jacked in the after because they add a weight to their frame via muscle mass, they have less weight via fat, but they have more of your muscle mass. So the point of all those being like the goal is to add weight to your frame via muscle mass. Fighting this is counterproductive to the goal. In the context of building phases, especially here, if we are productively building, the goal is to maximize our ability to productively build. We don't want you in a deficit. Thus, we shouldn't be losing body fat. Thus, there's no means by which we should be losing weight or getting leaner. So if we're not slowly seeing weight turned out over time, we're probably not building muscle. So again, counterproductive to the goal for us to try to avoid weight gain. We also though don't want you to get fat and we're on the same page here. This is again, like a big concern in building phases or seeing scale fluctuate. Again, I always encourage people to remember that like this is how we feed our family, this coaching. We are, if we're not stressed about your weight gain, this is like our livelihood. If we're not stressed about it, you don't need to be stressed about it either. We want you to do great results just as much as you do, but it doesn't serve any purpose for you to get gain like excess body fat in a building phase. Sometimes a little bit will happen, but let's talk about how to determine a proper rate of gain. In general, what are the biggest things y'all are looking at to determine if a building phase is going well and someone is gaining at the appropriate rate? Did any of you have a call for an attacker? Yeah, I typically am primarily looking at their training quality and their strength going up gradually over time. Usually if they're in a true build phase and they're not, we're not just doing like a body recon phase, they're probably a little bit more advanced. And so by this point, they're probably not like getting stronger by leaps and bounds every week. And that's not a problem. Like once you get to the point where you're having to grind for an extra, you know, few percent on a movement that's normal. But I would like to see that a lot of things are trending up slowly over time with their strength. And then I also, I mean, usually looking at least initially to see about a percent rate of gain per month on the scale. And then after a little while, that might be that expectation might be adjusted, like somebody might be someone that gains a little bit more slowly or a little bit more quickly. But that's usually kind of like the jumping off point, because that's kind of like where the research shows that you can be certain that you're not dipping in and out of a deficit, which is what we want from establishing a target with calories. But it's it's so it's quick enough that we know that we're not doing that, but it's also slow enough that we're not gaining unnecessary amounts of body fat. Absolutely. Okay. Dan was going. Yeah, I was just going to say it's always beneficial looking at the person's training age, you know, just how, how new they are. Like, you know, there's new beings are a thing like it's a lot easier for a beginner, a beginner to gain more muscles, especially in those early phases. They're learning how to move, learning how to train they're using muscles that they've never used before or haven't used in a long time versus a more advanced lifter. And so that rate of muscle growth is going to be is going to be different. But yeah, faster, just, you know, faster weight gain doesn't automatically mean muscle, muscle gain. And I think it's just important to remember that, you know, you don't get jacked overnight, right? This is this is a long game that we all play. Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great point. That's when I was going to bring up as well. The amount of muscle you've already built plus your current current training quality in terms of how good are you at executing the movements well and intensely getting close to failure? Like a combination of those is really going to be what's going to determine how quickly we are or aren't okay with you gaining, right? Someone who's, hey, you haven't built a lot of muscle. But for some reason, you just pick up the execution cues we're giving you so well and you're really good at training hard. Man, I would be okay with that person gaining towards the higher end of that one percent or one percent or potentially even a little bit more per month because they should be able to gain quite quickly. Whereas if you're like, like Danny, your years into this, you have a lot of muscle already. Like, do we expect you to gain two pounds a muscle a month? No. You don't weigh 200 pounds either. So, yes, I'm my bad, my bad. One point that would be sick, honestly. One point what? One point three pounds per month. Like, do we expect to gain that quickly? No, probably not. So again, that's temporary our expectations. But also looking at what we're seeing in progress pictures. And as you said, Andrea training, I've said this so many times lately, but I can almost always tell how the building phase is going simply by what I'm seeing in somebody's training videos throughout the week, right? Man, this person is training so well. They're training so hard. I know we're hitting PRs and we're hitting new numbers here. Building phase is going pretty well. Almost like just by that, I can determine how well it's going. I lost my train of thought there. I had something insightful to say and I completely forgot what it was. Anyways, that's going to be one of my biggest variables. Oh, and then progress pictures are another one in terms of sometimes we might see a think of my client Aaron. She's wearing a little mini cut phase now, but has had a very productive building phase. And there was a stretch of time where she was gaining pretty quickly, but it was like our training numbers are just going crazy, right? Training is really clicking. She picked it up very well. And it was a big change from what she was doing previously. And I'm looking at body composition week to week. And man, it's not. It doesn't look like we're getting fatter here, right? Like, okay, I'm good with us increasing a little bit quicker. That's another big thing that was I like to look at. Not just week to week, but like progress pictures now versus like three to four weeks ago. Do I see us really within the last three weeks. I think it's a good real thumb to have we visually gained body fat. Okay, then if so, we might want to slow it down. Again, there's a point where we can be too conservative, but like over the last like two to three weeks, if we're like, wow, we definitely have a good amount of body fat that we did that like three weeks ago. We might be gaining a little bit too quickly, whereas if we're to look like six, eight weeks ago, if we're in a slight sort of plus I would expect like, hey, we might look a little bit softer. What about like someone's sex hormone status? Hey, we're in a healthy place there versus like your metaposal and you, we know your sex hormones around the tank. With that impact, what y'all expecter? Going to be more conservative with pushing food up, if somebody has pretty low testosterone or is it menopause, just because they're not going to be able to take that food and utilize that for building muscle as efficiently as someone who does have higher sex hormones. It plays into nitrogen retention, right? If you have higher testosterone levels, you're literally able to use the protein that you're taking in and build muscle with it better versus someone who doesn't. So it doesn't make sense to push food harder when we're not able to utilize that like we want to. Absolutely, yeah. I would have also considered looking at recovery considerations as well. It's like, yes, okay, it's about the training quality and yes, it's about nutrition and that being a supportive environment for it, for that, but can we recover from all the work that we're doing? And if our hormones are in the tank, then that's not an ideal environment for us to build muscle. Yeah, absolutely. That's a very good point. Food is a part of recovery capacity, but it's not the only part of recovery capacity. And the recovery capacity really dictates how much work it's productive versus counterproductive. Cool. So how do you know if you're gaining the right amount? Again, we need to talk about these different variables. We wanted our first bodyweight changes being good or bad must be looked at through the scope of first training performance. Are we seeing improvements in low reps or execution progress pictures? Again, are we seeing quick changes of body fat a week to week? We see you gaining body fat probably too fast. No changes a week to week in body fat or even in the context of the last couple of weeks. Probably okay. And there's a lot of nuance here like depending on the quality of the progress pictures, you have variability in posing, etc. Again, I wouldn't use for most people unless you're like a professional, you're really good at taking quality progress pictures, same lighting. I wouldn't base it all on this progress pictures as an aside, but also look at measurements training quality and rate again, but it is a big piece of the pie measurements. Again, our changes here are consistent with our goals, right? So we're seeing hey, way moving up at a good clip, but waste measurements are staying the same strength is going way up. Maybe we're seeing all measurements say the same as strength going way up. We might even see like hey, in the airs, we're really prioritizing like your quads. We see thigh measurement up. Okay, cool. Yes, some of that could be body fat or it could be muscle, but when we look at what we see visually, it doesn't look like we have a whole lot more body fat here or any more body fat here, what we see them in the logbook. Okay, we can be pretty confident. This is muscle, biofeedback, your energy recovery, digestion, hunger, all quite important. Obviously adherence, if the scale isn't doing what you want to is moving up too quickly, we're just like having a lot of bites like taste. This is where it's like sometimes we're looking for a reason for it to like why it isn't fat gain where it's like a lot of times in that reason, this is in that case, this is actually just fat gain. But those are important variables to consider here when we're looking at whether body weight change is good, bad, neutral. So let's talk through a couple scenarios here, scenario A. Someone is weight-estable, but their training performance is improving in a building phase. In this case, you'll go with this. Do we need to add more food? Like, is this a problem? We've stayed stable as long as trains improving. What's your take? If someone's primary goal is to build muscle and they have like healthy sex hormone status, all of those sort of things are in our our buttoned up, I would want to see some and they're not brand new. I would want to see someone's weight trending up because there are neurological adaptations. You can just get better at movements and get stronger or if there could be little like microchanges in form that are causing you to to get stronger on paper. But if you're if you're not a newbie and your primary goal is to build muscle and we're not visually seeing changes in your pictures that prove that muscle building is happening without the scale going up, then I would want to see the scale going up because it's going to ensure that you have the again like you're not dipping in and out of a deficit and it's very easy to spin your wheels for a long time and then and try and play it so conservatively that you majorly shortchange the amount of muscle that you're building where if you do push it and you end up gaining two pounds of body fat, that's like two weeks of dieting to get that back off. And so if you're so scared of gaining body fat because of of that fat gain or so scared of gaining body fat that you're shortchanging the amount of muscle that you're able to build and you're spending months like that to trade off that two weeks it just doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's a good way to get nowhere. I also assume that they're the kind of person that if they're if training if training performance is going up then they'll be quite happy to get more food as well just to just to fuel that and just continue fueling that performance. Again, like everything that you everything that you put into the engine is going to improve outputs. If we can give we can put more more in then let's do that. It is really cool to take clients through the building process and see people who initially were like so scared of having more food and so scared of like gaining weight versus like I can think of a couple of my clients where it's like we're seven eight months deep in that. And now when I bump food is like oh thank goodness like that seemed very needed right it's just funny and cool how much mindset around that can change. But I would agree Andrea like the context is important here. This is different like a lot of newer clients we might have you in more of like a recon phase where hey we're not gaining weight we're seeing measurements drop you're actually losing some body fat and building muscle the same time sick we're okay with that but in the context of a true building phase yeah I'm okay with like two three weeks of things saying stable but if we're getting to like man it's been about a month and things aren't moving along I probably would bump food as well now typically what I see in a building phase I think people often want weight gain to be quite linear here I generally see it seems like most of the time most of that we look in the context for a month most of the actual increase comes in the matter of one to two weeks and then we see things say more stagnant and then there's a bit of a jump up so also don't let that freak you out I just in anecdote that's almost always the pattern I see where a lot of hums is like I can't matter it seems like 10 days where we saw most of the jump up and wait then we hold for the better part of two two and a half weeks I see that too and so because I know that I'm usually slower to add food whenever there is a slower week to gain so like if somebody needs to be gaining on paper like you know a pound and a half per month let's say and they spend two weeks not gaining but they're also feeling really good and strong in the gym I'm not gonna immediately add more food but if that stretches on for three or four weeks and we don't see that increase then that's when I'm probably gonna add a bit more food in agreed it is a really interesting thing too because like we could relate it to we could chalk it out to like cycle related changes and wait but I mean that's how like male clients that's how my building phase is always seem to be as well it's really interesting next scenario weight is increasing slowly and training is improving I think this is basically exactly what we're looking for in a building phase so again unless we're seeing someone gain your body fat too quickly probably wouldn't change anything agreed cool yep next weight increasing fairly quickly but quickly what training is stagnant so training isn't progressing in this instance I think we probably need to look at are we creating unnecessary fat gain can remember that training is a stimulus for building muscle now sometimes like we need to look at like how we manage fatigue well how we do loaded when we need to is it like training related fatigue we need to pull back temporarily to be in a place where we can actually express the adaptations we made and show that okay basically we're stronger we can move heavier loads if that's not given that's not the case hey we're probably just gaining body fat and increasing food further isn't going to accomplish anything the amount of food we have right now again is probably describing excess body fat this is where like we talk a lot about building phases and just kind of like this idea of having some urgency in your building phase where a lot of people get quite lax in missing training sessions or not setting this up to be able to train well in terms of how they're fueling around their sessions where dude that stimulus is the thing that builds muscle we need to prioritize really quality training and consistent training we don't have that like more food doesn't cause more muscle gain it just causes more fat gain but key takeaway here don't evaluate this success of a building phase based exclusively on whether you are gaining weight or not anything else on building phases before we talk a bit about the psychological side and then wrap things up cool so fundamental problem here on the psychological side fundamental problem here we've discussed quite a bit through this this episode many people say they went to build muscle but the moment the body weight that body weight increases more than a couple pounds they started to get uncomfortable and went to diet again so the thing to understand here is if we have a different goal set that goal set being building muscle you can't judge the success of a building phase using the same criteria used during a fat loss phase and I think there's a big difference in being okay with building muscle and theory versus being okay with everything the process of building entails right understanding the cave we're in a building face. I thought grow up in my class with this all like how you're close fit a lot because a lot of times I will get like, man, my pants just fit me differently and I think it's back gain. And I love to like, okay, pull up the goal for Zeke. Okay, look at this person's legs. If this girl were to like jump in your pants, do you think that sounded weird? No, what I meant. She would have tried your pants on. Do you think she would fit in the same as you do? Right? They'd probably be tighter, right? She has like huge quads or whatever. Maybe they would feel different. Same thing here, we're literally changing your shape. Thus we're going to change the way your shape fits into your clothes. And it doesn't necessarily have to meet back gain. A lot of times here as well, we can pull up like your waist measurements are the same or like last time you were this weight when we started, your waist measurements are like two or three inches leaner, like we're leaner. It's again muscle that we're gaining here. But also some degree of additional body fat. And are you touched on this well? Like, let's see, you gain two pounds of body fat. That's like two weeks worth of dieting. Us making sure your well fuel consistently and a surplus optimizing for muscle growth. Versus trying to whole weight is so stable and fighting body fat or by fighting any weight gain to the nail and just absolutely killing your ability to actually progress. Like, little bit of body fat gain. Is it pretty acceptable for it off in a building phase? Again, we can diet it off quickly. And if you gain, let's see, you gain five pounds of muscle and five pounds of body fat at the end of eight months. Man, the five weeks of dieting, that body fat is off. You have five more pounds. I'm also your physique will it's way different? Or again, you can spin your wheels just trying to recon for life. Anyways, when it comes to helping clients who struggle emotionally with gaining weight, any specific ways y'all like to approach this? I like through a lot of sorry, Danny. I talked through a lot of this stuff that we have talked through today and explain it. I always first usually will talk through it logically because sometimes just knowing the facts can help people. But then I also, I'll explain what we just talked about with like if we gain two pounds of body fat throughout this and that takes a couple weeks of diet that's like you've already proven to yourself usually because of your after fat loss phase, you've already proven to yourself that you can do that. And then I will also, there's a I'll also usually pull up pictures of either usually like one of our clients or Natalie shared a good one lately of the same weight comparisons and like explain the in between that she did gain weight in between. And if she hadn't, then this wouldn't be possible. This change coming back down to the same weight wouldn't be possible. And then there's also something that Natalie said one time that like if you can reframe it to think about your training, being the thing that you're driving the scale up, that helps me too. Like I like that one. If you can reframe like seeing the scale trending up as like a result of all of the hard work that you're putting in in the gym, that can be really helpful. I really like that. Go ahead, Danny. Yeah, I was going to say just focusing more on performance metrics in the gym is super, super helpful. And you know, something that I've I've encouraged my clients to do, it's you know, have have a goal with you know, PR PR is in the gym on a specific lift. And we are focusing all of our training around that. Like yes, we're going to go hard on hamstrings, but that's going to help with our with our deadlift over time, you know, and that that's what we're going to focus on. But also with a lot of clients that we take through a building phase, you know, kind of like what Andrew was saying, they've they've earned they've earned the right to go into a building phase, right? We don't really start clients off that way. They've had to earn that by going through some sort of cut to some degree or primer phase or some sort of adherence that they've proven themselves. And so going into you know, a building phase with the knowledge of we know exactly what we need to do to cut to cut back down and get all that body fat off. Like you know that you can do that. We're just not doing that right now because we have we have this ultimate goal, this ultimate physique that we are trying to achieve. So all in due time. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a normal struggle to have. I always like to make sure that's clear as well as normal for everyone. I like this because it's such like an it's almost like an exaggerated example. Like all sometimes Joe clients pictures of me from like like a side by side of me from like three years ago versus me recently. And it's like, hey, I'm the look at these pictures on the after I'm 30 pounds heavier. But I look a lot leaner, right? Because I built a lot more muscle in the time between which again, I was for a class going to be 30 pounds heavier. No, that's but again, it like really kind of over exaggerates that like and I think it makes the point well. I also think it's so easy to for people to just get so fixated on it. And this is a conversation that has sometimes as well as like, man, just the amount of time we're spending focusing on this. Like I know this is scary, but you want to defer result you've gotten in the past. I need you to let go of this and just trust that I can coach you through this process better than you may be able to coach yourself through it. And again, I'm happy to talk through these things. I know it's a scary thing, but I'm sorry. And he goes having such a bad dog nightmare in the background. Can you guys hear that? Hey, but like that, sometimes it does just need to be like, hey, it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable. You don't have to love gaining weight, but we need to understand why we're doing it. And again, being willing to trade, accept the trade offs involved in pursuing your goals. You can remember that like we as coaches, we won the best possible results for you as well, but also, man, we've taken hundreds of people through this exact same process. You're a one to be guided through. We can take you through this so well. Sometimes it just have to let us take the wheel and not worry. There is going to be, it's okay if it's uncomfortable. There will be a degree of discomfort in all good coaching experiences. Yeah. Anything else to add there on the psychological side of things before we wrap it up? What's that saying in order to you got to do something you've never done in order to get somewhere? Something you've never got. Yeah, something like that. Fully agreed. Cool. Anything else on weight gain, weight fluctuations, etc. But we wrap this one up from y'all. Cool. All right. Well, hopefully this was valuable. We appreciate y'all listening. If you enjoyed the show, do us a huge favor, leave us a five star rating interview. If you would like to be guided through your own building phase, again, we've taken so many people through this. Something we're very good at. Truthfully, I don't really get something that a lot of coaches know how to do well. There's a lot of fat loss coaching out there. I don't think there's a lot in terms of how do we actually strategically add muscle to your frame and really change the shape of your physique. I would say I think that's one of the things we do that really does as a part. So if you want guidance through that, the link for coaching with us is in the show notes and we will catch you guys next time.