Condition: How Far will it go?

Muscle size, proportion, balance, symmetry, definition, balance, structure, shape. These are the words that most bodybuilders would (in previous generations) use when explaining the qualities that make great champion in this very subjective sport of ours. Over the years we have seen certain judging criteria take a back seat and a greater emphasis be placed on other elements that make a bodybuilder stand out among his peers, but one aspect that has skyrocketed to become the utmost measuring stick for how someone will place in a contest (especially in the amateur ranks) is conditioning. While being “in condition” used to mean being ripped enough to show a high level of muscle definition, an absence of water under the skin and also a full and healthy look to the muscle, it has now pretty much come down to being devoid of anything resembling a morsel of adipose tissue or h2o at any cost.

There is no argument that reaching what is considered peak conditioning in today’s competitive bodybuilding world is a grueling process. The amount of suffering that goes along with running on fumes and torturing yourself with cardio and weight training while your body has zero energy stores left hanging on it’s body is a true test of the grit and determination of any human. While some people definitely achieve a lean physique with less effort than people who naturally reside on the husky side, no one feels good one week out from a competition; it’s common to hear that if you feel good in those final weeks, you are probably out of shape (or straight up fat, as us bodybuilders will refer to anyone who doesn’t look like a piece of beef jerky). This degree of difficulty has added the “blue collar” factor to go along with a truly ripped physique that is hard to not respect, as it can directly show a mans will power and perseverance (although sometimes NOT being in condition is due to a lack of knowledge as opposed to lack of effort). There are a few side effects of this shift towards the ultra ripped physique, and I don’t necessarily mean the physical ones.

Many times these days, we will see a competitor who has all the tools that make a physique impressive slip a few spots and be beaten out by genetically inferior talent who happens to be better conditioned. For me this is a grey area, and I can certainly see both sides of the coin. On one hand, it seems wrong to reward someone who clearly could have “suffered” a little harder to achieve the look that is now expected. This seems to be a mindset especially common with the average bodybuilder who feels he has little to relate to when it comes to the genetically elite athlete with perfect muscle bellies and structure. It’s natural for us humans to overstate the importance of things we are capable of achieving and downplay the important of areas we are simply not blessed. It’s our self defense mechanism for leveling the playing field. Why should someone place highly in competition just because they were born a certain way, when clearly there were others who outworked them?

One side effect of this is that we will sometimes see a bodybuilder push their bodies the extra mile to meet the insanely high judging standards and lose some of their gifts in the process. The fascination with “shredded glutes” is single highhandedly responsible for a lot of missed potential in my opinion. Every human being stores their fat in different patterns, making it possible for one bodybuilder to have a fat-less bottom end while still holding more total body fat than another competitor who might hoard all of their blubber in their butt even after it has been removed from the entire rest of their body. The glutes became the marker for flawless conditioning due to the fact the majority of people store fat there and it is the last place to go MOST of the time. What this means for the other guys is that they will have to push their bodies extremely hard to rid their butt of the fat and quite possibly deflate in the upper body or lose leg fullness from the extreme measures taken. Personally, I view bodybuilding as a total package, and if someone looks better in 95% of their body they should not be instantly demoted just because they do not have lines in their rear end. I feel stupid even writing that. If you look better with more fullness in your muscles and not killing yourself to achieve this ridiculously over-prioritized focus area, I think you should be judged on your entire package.

Do we want to reward the less genetically gifted athletes? What does this do for the gene pool in the long run when analyzing the forecast of talent? Although I would never make the connection that all bodybuilders who achieve elite conditioning are more often less gifted in other areas, I feel it is safe to say on the amateur circuits there could be some connections made. The “blue collar” mentality in turn promotes athletes who otherwise would have no shot at winning to utilize “hard work” to beat their opponents…and unfortunately, hard work in bodybuilding isn’t as positive as it sounds, as it can mean health problems and extreme drug use. This is not a direct link but I feel inadvertently there is a connection.

As much as we like to fantasize about bodybuilding being a sport, it simply is not. I feel what is happening to a degree is that people are trying to bridge some of the gap between bodybuilding and mainstream sports like football and baseball. While it still requires a trained eye to properly compare two levels of conditioning that both simply look “shredded” to the general public, it is much less esoteric than the concept of a shapely and aesthetic physique. So we have sports fans trying to add a concrete method of keeping score, while bodybuilding is much more of an art form than sport. Artists win prizes for sculptures and paintings, but it takes an artistic eye to recognize the different levels and compare them (and there is still a huge amount of personal taste involved)…and I would like to think bodybuilding is more of an art competition than sport. If we are attempting to make it more mainstream by adding some solid guidelines to help the public understand who should win or lose, is using a peeled ass the most marketable and socially acceptable measuring stick?

Bodybuilding and Appetite: Fast Metabolism, or Poor Appetite?

The list of misused or exaggerated terms in bodybuilding and fitness stretches far out of sight. Of the hundreds of misused terms in our industry, two interesting terms that are often incorrectly used, but seem to fly under the radar are “metabolism” and “appetite”. It seems that every athlete in our sport claims to have either a rapid fire metabolism, or the metabolic rate of a three toed sloth.

Why is it that athletes rarely if ever claim an “average” metabolism? This question is especially interesting when one considers that the word average implies to something that pertains to the majority. So what could conceivably explain this phenomenon?

The fast metabolism argument is generally accompanied by a hatred for eating. The slow metabolism argument is often times, though not always, accompanied by an enjoyment of eating large amounts of food, or at the very least the ability to do so. So the question must be asked, where are the bodybuilders who do not like to eat, but also have a “slow metabolism” so it all works out? One would be hard pressed to find an athlete claiming to meet this description. It simply does not make logical sense that these types of people do not exist in our community. When examined, it would stand to reason that this metabolism paradox is caused by the lack of recognition given to one’s appetite.

You will often hear a person claim that they know a competitor who “eats whatever they want” and still gets hard. What most individuals fail to grasp is that “whatever you want” varies vastly from person to person. Whatever competitor A wants could be a small bag of chips and a six inch sub, whereas whatever competitor B wants could be a whole pizza with ice cream for dessert! One must be leery when assuming a person has some sort of God-sent metabolism, just because they claim to eat whatever they want. You may actually be eating significantly more calories and carbs than that person while on your diet, due to their poor appetite.

Another delusion of metabolism can be caused by the consumption of “junk food”. For whatever reason it seems that many people mistake “junk” for “a lot”. Commonly, individuals will eat fast food or pizza every meal of the day and assume they are eating huge amounts of food, mainly because it is junk food. If a 200 lb. bodybuilder eats fast food and pizza three times a day, however, they only eat one burger and a medium fry or one slice of pizza per meal, of course they won’t gain weight! The same can be said for people who tend to eat all day long or “graze” but only consume a few bites each time. Through the eyes of onlookers, this individual may appear to be eating a lot of food (especially if it is “junk food”) whilst not gaining weight, when in reality this is not the case.

On the flip side, individuals also exist who claim a slow metabolism, who more than likely have a voracious appetite as opposed to an actual slow metabolism. It is not unlikely that there are bodybuilders under 200 lbs. who can eat 3500 calories a day and still go to bed hungry and wake up hungry. One can see how this situation would cause this particular athlete to claim a slow metabolism due to the fact that 3500 calories feels to them as if they are starving. When in reality, 3500 calories for a 190 pounder is at the very least, average.

It would stand to reason that bodybuilder’s appetites may actually play a much greater role in weight gain and/or loss than their individual “metabolisms”. Some prime examples of bodybuilders claiming a “fast metabolism” are Dexter Jackson, Jay Cutler, and Mike Liberatore, just to name a few. While all of these athletes often discuss their rapid-fire metabolisms, they are also very open about not liking to eat. Dexter in particular has said numerous times throughout his career that he prefers drinking shakes so that he does not have to eat at all! This begs the question, do they really have super fast metabolisms, or does it only seem that way to them due to having a lukewarm relationship with food?

Opposing examples include, Kai Greene and Ronnie Coleman. Nobody ever heard Ronnie complaining about his metabolism, however good money could be bet on him requiring three times as much food as Dexter or Mike. Due to his immense appetite and ability to consume huge quantities of food, metabolism was never an issue for Ronnie. Who had a faster metabolism than the Masterpiece BBQ disposal himself, at a shredded-to-the-bone 295 lbs.? Kai falls into a similar category, who’s eating prowess has become something resembling a mythical legend, inside these tight-knit walls of bodybuilding. If Mike were to eat bite for bite with Kai Greene in the off-season, it is fairly safe to say that Mike would quickly turn into a bloated whale of a man. In similar fashion to Ronnie, Kai has also never made mention of his metabolism. In fact, some experts in the industry have stated that Kai actually has a slow metabolism!

The simple fact of the matter is, if you’re going to carry around 250 lbs. or more of active body tissue all day long, train intensely with weights six days a week and do some sort of cardio, you’re going to have a fast metabolism! However, it is difficult to buy the story that some vast underlying difference in base metabolic rate is causing each competitor to require exceedingly different amounts of food. Of course, this discussion is referring strictly to the majority. There are certainly exceptions, they just seem to be far more rare than many people think. A prime example of one of these exceptions would be Juan Morel. Juan has been blessed with the Mako shark of metabolisms. Some may call this quality a curse, however, that statement will more than likely never be heard coming from an individual with a “slow metabolism” or more importantly, a preparing-for-hibernation-grizzly bear sized appetite.

How Steroids Work?

Here is a basic rundown of how testosterone works in the body. Its a very brief description of a complex and not perfectly understood process.

• Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone
• Testosterone is androgenic and is responsible for secondary male characteristics such as body hair, beard growth, deep voice, increased production of sebaceous glands, development of the penis, aggressiveness, sexual behavior, libido, and the maturation of sperm
• Testosterone is anabolic (promotes muscle growth)
• Testosterone is made in the Leydig Cells in the testes
• Men produce approx 5-10mg of Testosterone per day
• Normal testosterone concentration in men is between 300-100 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl)
• Typical prescription testosterone therapy will consist of only 25-75mg of testosterone administered per week
• Testosterone strengthens bones

For testosterone to actually work in your body you have to get it in you first. There are other new developments in the ways of sublingual lozenges, patches, and transdermal creams, but typically it is done in one of two ways. It is either taken orally (pill) or injected directly into the muscle (using a needle).

Oral anabolic steroids

Like all drugs (taken orally), testosterone will have to go through the digestion process to get absorbed into your blood stream. This means that the drug must go through your stomach. Then from your stomach, the drug goes into the small intestine where it is absorbed and transported to the liver. Among its many important jobs, the liver is responsible for processing nutrients and vitamins from food, storage of nutrients for later use by the body, cleaning dead cells out of the blood, getting rid of toxic substances (like alcohol), producing bile (to help digest fat), and you guessed it, metabolism of drugs!

Almost all prescription drugs, including steroids, are absorbed in the small intestine and have to go through the liver. In the process, most are almost completely destroyed after the first time through. This is called first-pass metabolism. Some steroids are 17-alkylated, which is a chemical alteration specifically designed to protect the drug against first pass metabolism. The ones that are 1 7-alkylated are much more effective as oral steroids, however they can damage the liver very quickly.

Injectable anabolic steroids

When injected, steroids are much more effective milligram for milligram since they are not subjected to the digestion process and the first pass of the liver. Believe it or not, but digestion can render up to 95% of the steroid totally useless! Not that injecting doesn’t come with its own set of disadvantages, but you will read about that later.

Now that you have the testosterone in your system it needs to be activated through the androgen receptor. Think of the androgen receptor as a lock and testosterone is the key. When testosterone isn’t bound to a receptor (key in the lock) it is called “Free Testosterone’. Only about 2% of all the testosterone in your system is actually ‘Free” at any given time. The remaining is bound to proteins and albumin, rendering it temporarily useless.

Once the free testosterone (the key) binds to the androgen receptor (the lock) in skeletal muscle, BAM! Major muscle growth is activated! Then, when the testosterone is done interacting with the receptor, it releases and gets sent back into circulation; is the key step that triggers hypertrophy within the muscle cells. Contrary to popular belief, anabolic steroids do not cause more muscle cells to be created. They only have a limited ability to cause them to create more connective material around them and get larger. However, steroids only cause limited hypertrophy (muscle growth) on their own. For dramatic improvements in muscle growth, steroids need to be combined with proper diet and resistance exercise.

But you have to keep one thing in mind. Androgen receptors are found in many areas of the body! This is one reason why side effects occur. You see, when testosterone binds with the androgen receptor in skeletal muscle, it promotes muscle growth, but when it binds with the androgen receptor within the central nervous system, for example, it promotes aggressiveness.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to pick and chose which cells will be activated by the testosterone. A lot of side effects are really pre-determined by genetics. If you Just happen to naturally have a high concentration of androgen receptors in your hair follicles, for instance, you are much more apt to hair loss as a side effect of taking steroids.

This is really just a brief explanation of a super involved, complicated process, but I think you get this gets the point across. Check out the chart if you are more of a visual learner

The basic of training for size or strenght

When you first walked into the gym, your goal was most likely to get big and strong, as if the two objectives were interchangeable. You read about how weight training builds size and strength, so naturally you followed a program that delivered both. Well, at least it did in the beginning.

But to keep making significant progress - especially as you become more advanced - you may need to specialize your training to the point where you either train for size like a bodybuilder or strength like a powerlifter. While some programs can have elements of both, there are important distinctions in how each kind of athlete trains.

Even an onlooker with an untrained eye can notice the difference in the training methods of powerlifters and bodybuilders. While they share the common ground of barbells and dumbbells, the utilization of these implements is often drastically different.

What are those differences, why do they exist, and how do you optimize your training to gain either size or strength? There's been plenty of research on just those topics, so let's take a closer look.

THE ADAPTATION PROCESS

Your body has a single, uniform purpose: to survive. To do that, it communicates with your environment via adaptation. The environment starts the conversation by imposing stress on your body, and your body responds by selectively adapting in a way that best suits its survival chances.

Training, then, is a conscious communication with your body - imposing self-selected stress to mold your frame into a desired shape, or increasing your capabilities beyond their current state. It's a powerful farce. You convince your body that, if it doesn't meet your demands, it will perish. This, of course, isn't true, but it's the true power of training.

Let these ideas frame your thought process as you examine the rest of this article. Growing or getting stronger is the outcome of effective physical communication. Be sure you're telling your body exactly the things you want it to hear!

SIZE AND STRENGTH THE DIFFERENCE

Let's start by stripping the difference between size and strength training down to the barest essential.

The simplest difference between building size and boosting strength is training volume. Hypertrophy requires more total training volume than strength-building does.

Training volume is the number of sets and reps you do in a given workout. The more exercises you do for a body part, and the more sets you do of a given exercise, the greater your training volume.

Of course, there are other variables that impact how your body will adapt to the training stress you impose on it.

GOAL 1 BUILDING MUSCLE SIZE (HYPERTROPHY)

So, what makes muscles bigger? Stress - another way to refer to the amount of weight you lift - is the primary answer. But you want the degree of stress that tells your body, "Get bigger or you're kaput, my friend."

You already know that hypertrophy requires more total training volume than building absolute strength, but that doesn't mean you get to eliminate load (weight) from the discussion. You're still going to use the heaviest weight possible, but the need for more training volume - your body needs reps, too - dictates that the weights are lighter than those used for building absolute strength. Blending the right amount of volume with the right amount of load creates stress that translates into growth.

When performing your main lifts - full range-of-motion barbell bench presses, squats, deadlifts, and rowing variations - do 20-36 total reps (all reps of all working sets of that move) with a load around 70-85 percent of your one-rep max (1RM). For example, if your max bench press is 255 pounds, use a weight that's about 180-215 pounds.

There are a variety of volume breakdowns - 4 sets of 5, 4 sets of 6, 5 sets of 5, and 6 sets of 6 - commonly prescribed. Progressing from 4 sets of 5 with heavier loads to 6 sets of 6 with slightly lighter loads is a simple and effective strategy.

Rest between sets is also an important consideration. With hypertrophy training, there's an accumulation of stress that coerces muscle cell growth. There's a rest-time sweet spot that accumulates stress while allowing enough recovery to keep loads in your desired percentage range (70-85). That sweet spot hovers around the two-minute mark, depending on the lifter's condition and experience.

Assistance exercises, or the exercises that follow your heavy barbell lifts, should be done with more volume and shorter rest periods. Here, the total number of reps per exercise should fall between 30 and 50. Rest periods range from nonexistent to 90 seconds, depending on the load and set-and-rep scheme.

Doing 3-5 sets of 10 with 60-90 seconds rest is common in first-level assistance exercises in hypertrophy programs. Nothing fancy here, but it gets the job done.

On assistance exercises, choose exercises that improve upon your weaknesses—aesthetic or otherwise. For example, if the flat bench press was your main lift, the incline or decline bench press is a solid choice for your first assistance exercise. Dumbbell variations also work as assistance exercises, but it's best to use them after completing a few barbell lifts. You want to accumulate a lot of barbell stress before employing less stressful dumbbell work.

Program structure usually depends on the individual, but typically it's 3-5 multijoint assistance lifts following the main heavier barbell exercise.

Sample Lower-Body Hypertrophy Routine

Barbell Squat
5 sets of 5 reps, 8RM, 120-sec. rest

SUPERSET
Front Barbell Squat
4 sets of 10 reps, 10RM, 90-sec. rest

Hanging Leg Raise
3 sets of 10 reps, to failure, 90-sec. rest

SUPERSET
Goblet Squat
3 sets of 10 reps, 10RM, 60-sec. rest

Floor Glute-Ham Raise
3 sets of 10 reps, 10RM, 60-sec. rest

Bodyweight Walking Lunge
3 sets of 8 reps per side, 8-10RM, 60-sec. rest

GOAL 2 BUILDING STRENGTH

To build absolute strength, the stress communication changes in a few ways. For one, as stated earlier, you'll use less training volume. You'll also include heavier weight and fewer reps per set.

Strength programs are structured similarly to hypertrophy programs - a main lift followed by assistance lifts, but here you're drastically cutting the number of reps per set because you're significantly increasing the weight.

Main lifts fall in a percentage range of between 80-90 percent of your 1RM. The total number of reps for main lifts also drops to 10-20 total. At certain times, however, strength programs increase load above 90 percent of your 1RM; at those times, the total reps are significantly cut further. Here, no more than 10 are completed during a training session.

To accumulate the total volume, you'll use sets of 2-4 reps in the range of 80-90 percent of 1RM. If you climb above 90 percent, cut the reps per set to 1-2.

Rest periods between sets are an eternity compared to those of a hypertrophy program, but they're necessary since heavier loads are more neurologically demanding than lighter ones. The nervous system requires considerably more rest than does muscle tissue. Rest 3-5 minutes between sets of the day's main lift.

Assistance training for absolute strength is much different than what's programmed for hypertrophy. Most new lifters botch this process and overload their nervous system. Commonly, beginners treat absolute strength assistance as if it were hypertrophy assistance—lots of sets, lots of volume. That dog just won't hunt. Attempting to maintain the same volume while increasing intensity is a plan destined to fail.

Absolute strength assistance training exists in the 15-25 total rep range, with loads between 70-80 percent of your 1RM. You'll also use fewer total assistance exercises, roughly 2-4 instead of 3-5. Without this reduction, it's difficult to recover, and overtraining eventually becomes reality because you've giving your body more stress than it can accommodate.

In this assistance-training realm, exercises are chosen specifically to abolish weak points in your main lifts. Let's demonstrate with the deadlift. Say you have a hard time breaking the plates from the floor, but once you get the bar moving, you finish the lift without difficulty. After your main deadlifting sets, your first assistance exercise should be one that attacks your weak point. Snatch-grip deadlifts and deficit deadlifts are two great options.

Choose the rest of your assistance exercises in much the same way, ensuring that you build a complete, strong main lift. Check out this example strength routine.

Sample Upper-Body Strength Routine

SUPERSET
Barbell Bench Press - Medium Grip
6 sets of 3 reps, 5RM, 180-sec. rest

Face Pull
3 sets of 12 reps, 5RM, during bench press rest

SUPERSET
Barbell Incline Bench Press - Medium Grip
3 sets of 5 reps, 8RM, 120-sec. rest

Dumbbell Incline Row
3 sets of 6 reps, 8RM, 120-sec. rest

Dumbbell Bench Press
3 sets of 5 reps, 8RM, 120-sec. rest

START WITH STRENGTH

These points are meant as general guidelines to get you started. Reality, of course, is situational—it all depends on your starting point.

If you're a newbie, any program is a strength and size program. Simply stressing your frame via any load and volume combination is enough to build muscle and develop force. The same is often true for those who have been on gym hiatus.

Hypertrophy and strength training begin to dovetail only when a trainee has accomplished a reputable degree of strength. It's at this point that your stress communication must specifically dictate the desired adaptation.

Hypertrophy now requires different stress and more volume than it did as you trained yourself from beginner to intermediate. For best results, follow the principles discussed earlier in this article.

Body Composition

At long last, more and more people are finally becoming aware of the concept of body composition and that it somehow differs from simply focusing on changes in body weight.

However, this is all too commonly leading to confusion as people ask “What does body composition mean?“. They know that it’s important but aren’t quite sure why it’s important or what the concept is about. I want to help take some of the confusion out of the topic here.

What Are You Made Of?

I’m not talking here about the scientifically proven fact that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice while boys are made of slugs, and snails and puppy dog tails; rather, I want to talk about what the human body is composed of in biological terms.

Let’s imagine that I could magically (and hopefully painlessly) separate your body into all of its different components and put them on a slab somewhere (putting you back together might be a problem). What would we find? Well, there’d be some skeletal muscle, some fat cells (possibly too many fat cells), your bones, your organs, your brain, a whole bunch of different minerals, your blood, some water and probably a few other minor components that make up the totality of what makes you you

Depending on which type of tissue we’re talking about, we’d find massively varying amounts. Skeletal muscle can make up 25-40% of someone’s total weight, fat can range from less than 10% of the total in extremely lean individuals to 40-50% in the morbidly obese. Everything else I listed accounts for some proportion of your weight as well. The average brain is about three pounds, organs take up some space, blood weighs so much, you get the idea. If you add up the weights of all of these individual parts, you would end up with the total weight of your body. When you get on the scale, that’s what it’s telling you, the sum total of every different bit of your body and what it weighs.

Body Weight vs. Body Composition

When you talk about dieting and diet books (or even weight gain for those who are trying to increase rather than reduce weight), it’s safe to say that the majority of information out there focuses on weight loss. People want to see the scale drop, the faster the better. Diet books talk about weight loss, quick weight loss centers try to get the scale to go down as quickly as possible, even the TV show The Biggest Loser, which should be doing more to educate (and less to try and kill its contestants) focuses only on the weekly weigh-in to determine success or failure. It’s all about weight.

Why is this a problem?

Let’s say you step on the scale after dieting or exercising for a few weeks. And, happy days, the number has gone down by a few pounds (or kilos for my foreign readers).

Now, unless something very strange is going on, odds are it wasn’t bits of your brain or organs, it’s not likely to be bone either. But was it body fat? Was it skeletal muscle? Was it just water? Did you just have a rather large bowel movement that morning and that’s why you weigh less?

The typical bathroom scale that only measures weight can’t answer those questions. All a typical scale can tell you is whether or not your weight has gone down or up (if that’s the case). It can’t tell you what type of tissue (e.g. muscle, fat, water) was gained or lost.

That’s where body composition comes in.

Models of Body Composition

Recall from above how I listed a whole bunch of different tissues in your body that comprise your total body weight. Well, researchers, depending on how difficult they want to be, will group those organs in various ways and use that to develop body composition models. There are a number of different ones ranging from simple 2-component models to far more complex models involving 4 or more components.

Thankfully, for the majority of non-research applications (e.g. dieters or athletes), the 2-component models are just fine. In that model, the body is divided rather simply into:

Fat Mass: This is the sum total of all of the fat in your body. I’ll discuss this in detail in another article but there are three or four different ‘types’ of fat in the human body. All of it goes under fat mass.

Fat Free Mass: This is simply everything else. Everything that isn’t fat mass, including muscle, bone, organs, minerals, blood, etc. is fat free mass (often abbreviated FFM). I’d note that both glycogen (carbohydrate stored in the muscle) and water count as FFM; I’ll explain why in a second.
Put simply: Total body weight = Fat Mass + Fat Free Mass.

And even that simple 2-component model gives dieters and athletes the tools that they need to far more accurately track what’s happening in their body. As I mentioned above, it would generally be rare for people to be losing bone, brain or organs in any significant amount. So if someone is losing weight and they are not losing fat free mass, that means that what is being lost is fat mass (body fat). That’s good.

However, in some situations (including diets with insufficient dietary protein, or without the right type of exercise), it is possible to lose fat free mass; and since brain, organs, etc. aren’t likely to be going down, a decrease in FFM often means a loss of muscle mass.

This is generally (but not always) a bad thing, for reasons beyond the scope of this article. I would note that water loss can show up as fat free mass on certain types of diets and this can cause athletes and lean dieters to get very concerned; they think they are losing skeletal muscle mass but they really aren’t. This is a topic I’ll discuss in more detail in a later article.

I’d note that measuring body composition can also be useful when someone is trying to gain weight. An athlete usually wants to be gaining muscle mass, not body fat. By tracking body composition while in a gaining phase, they can determine what is actually being gained.

You might be wondering how body composition is actually measured. There are a number of methods available ranging from very low- to very high-tech and low- to high-cost. Many gyms will use skinfold calipers (small pinching devices which measure fat thickness), there are also handheld monitors and specific scales (such as Tanita) that use body water to estimate body composition. I’d note that, for the most part, I don’t find Tanita scales terribly useful. Other methods such as DEXA scans (a very high-tech method) and others exist. This will be the topic of a forthcoming article with specific recommendations.

In any case, by looking at changes in body composition, rather than just changes in weight, it becomes possible to tell what is actually changing in the body. Is muscle being gained or lost? Is fat being gained or lost? Are the changes just water being shifted on and off the body? While only looking at weight can’t tell you any of that, measuring and tracking changes in body composition can.