WHY YOUR BODY SHAPE ISN’T CHANGING

The biggest tip I can share for supporting fat loss: Eat for muscle gain vs fat loss.

If you are seeking fat loss to change the way your body looks, you have it ALL backwards.

Gaining muscle will change your body shape MUCH more than losing fat will. Not to mention, you’ll improve your hormones and metabolism too. Talk about a triple win.

As a fitness and nutrition coach, I help women (and men!) to change their bodies. Whether that be for their wedding, postpartum, to decrease health concerns or simply enough to look and feel amazing, they often come to me from a lifetime of diets that have focused on fat loss and when their focus shifts to muscle gain instead of fat loss, their journey has a twist for the better!

Why Muscle Gain is Better Than Fat Loss

It’s a common misconception amongst women that strength training means getting bulky. But it’s been proven time and time again that isn’t the case. Instead, your body creates the shape you’ve always desired. I wrote a blog that goes into detail on toning up, have a read!

Most of you are overestimating what losing that 10 or 20 lbs of body fat will do for your shape/health and underestimating what gaining 5lbs of muscle can do.

Why not take the path that gets you to not only change your body easier and faster, but also do it in a manner where you keep your health and can sustain the results so you don’t need to keep searching for a ‘new way’, feel guilty for not staying adherent, or feel absolutely terrible while doing it?
The big reason that focusing on muscle gain is so important is not just due to the shape creation aspect but also the metabolic aspect. 

Side note: I always like to make sure my clients understand why they are doing something I recommend as it’s really an important component to choosing the behavior and to continue long enough that the change will happen. Beliefs matter greatly so they need to understand the science and believe in the actions they are taking. 

What’s important to know about muscle (and building more of it) is that it is metabolically active and burns more calories than fat tissue. 

This means that building muscle can increase your resting, or basal, metabolic rate (BMR), which is the number of calories your body will burn at rest. Muscle cells need energy to contract and relax, so they burn calories even when you're not moving. 

It is stated that with each pound of muscle you have, caloric burn is about six calories per day more at rest which is about 3x’s as many calories as a pound of fat would. Over time building muscle can help you burn 30–100 calories per day more, which might not initially seem like a lot, but with life being cumulative, this is one of the key components to how lean people stay lean!

Eat More Not Less

So how do you eat for muscle gain?

You need to eat enough protein and calories.

And likely, what you think is enough right now, feels like a lot, but it isn’t, it’s all perspective from the beliefs you’ve programmed over the years.

This is where objectivity can be helpful. The amount of food that is enough for you, is specific to you (your current hormonal health, metabolic health and history of dieting), there isn’t some magic number or calculation out there to tell you. This is why help from a professional can be really beneficial, especially if they are willing to help you learn and teach you so that you have the knowledge forever and ever.

Eating for muscle gain can be broken into ‘the what’ and the ‘how much’. Let’s start talking about ‘how much’ here. 

The majority of those I talk to who have a goal of muscle growth or tone, are under-eating. The most common cause I see of under-eating is fear of eating more and it’s actually the thing keeping the cycle of gaining and losing the same weight year after year without much change in your physique, going.

If you associate eating more with loss of progress or weight gain, you need to educate yourself.

Most of you reading this, probably need to spend the next 6-12 months NOT dieting. Taking this time to focus on fueling your body and gaining strength in the gym to allow you to add lean muscle. If you don’t take time to do this and you continue to diet chronically (or yo-yo diet), you will create health conditions (like hormonal or thyroid dysfunction), that will lead you to a place where you struggle to lose weight and instead, may gain weight no matter what you do (this is called metabolic adaptation).

This is why many new clients who work with us and want to be leaner, will start out in a healing or building phase. Many times your goals are not going to require a simple calories in, calories out equation. If you’ve been trying for results for some time and not seeing changes, you’re going to need to heal some of the damage you’ve created FIRST and take time to rebuild yourself metabolically.

This is Kacey above 👆🏼and she has done just that. Taking time away from dieting, supporting hormonal health and improving her stress and sleep have allowed her body to prioritize creating muscle so as we took her into a reverse diet and build phase, her training started to pay off much more.

Kacey has never given up, raising 3 boys, moving through stressful life events and restarting a career, she has truly embraced the day in day out habits that have added up over time. Can you imagine where she’d be if she didn’t continue trying each day… yet 2+ years later, effort over perfection has her with a shape that she is starting to carve out in a healthy fat loss phase.

Shape change takes time - but what else are you going to do with that time? Might as well use it to do things that make you feel good and help you build confidence in life and body!

You can see more of our client’s transformations here. We would love to help you do the same!
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3 Important Exercise Tips For Faster Results

Nutrition is important for a weight loss journey, but if you’re gonna build muscle, you’re gonna need to strength train effectively.

So, let me see your bicep! (seriously, do it, flex)

That right there, is tip number one.

Tip #1. How You Move

I know many of you want to just "get it done" but you are doing yourself a disservice, especially if you are going through all the efforts to do a workout in the first place. Since you are going to do a workout anyways, reap ALL the results of it.

Instead of just moving through a motion, contract your muscle. For example, you just flexed your bicep, do that when you are training biceps, think about squeezing your bicep to make your hand move towards your shoulder. Use that for all the exercises. The goal is to lengthen and shorten a muscle, not move through a motion.

So first, what is the goal of the exercise? Do you know what muscle you are training? And are you actually training that muscle or are you just moving through motions? If you don't know what muscles you are training, you're doing yourself a pretty big disservice and wasting a lot of your efforts. Start by trying it with your bicep, then begin to work that into other positions too. 

Tip #2. Train A Muscle, Not A Motion

It's the most common thing I see in the gym. Someone trying to complete an exercise or motion instead of  contracting a muscle.

What I mean is this:

As you become tired in an exercise, you are going to be challenged to complete the same motion. Instead of trying to complete that same motion, allow that shorter motion to happen and continue to use the goal muscle, it's okay that your hand doesn't come all the way up to your shoulder in a bicep curl! 

Remember, we are after training a muscle NOT a motion. For example, on rep 1, 2, 3, you most likely are able to fully contract your goal muscle completing the range of motion (aka exercise) for that muscle, but as you come up on rep 9, 10, 11... you are much more tired (as you should be) and, you can no longer move the weight the same distance...that's OK! That's what should happen.

But what I see happening instead, is that many of you are still focused on moving the weight to a specific place which is forcing other muscles to jump in and help (other non-goal muscles) just to be able to complete those reps. Who cares about the exercise! Seriously. We want to train muscles, not motions. Allow your reps to get shorter, but keep your position strong. Compensating can lead to pains, injuries, the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker. 

Tip #3. Train YOUR Body

Not your instructors, the famous instagrammer who's exercises you follow, or the person who's body your eye catches at the gym who's body you idolize.

Just because someone else is positioned a certain way doesn't mean you should. Learning how to position your body to train YOUR body is important. You could literally be doing squat after squat after squat and NEVER actually be training your butt! Positioning is KEY. 

(If you have longer femur bones or a longer spine, your squat positioning for your butt muscles is going to be different than someone who has shorter femur bones.)

Structure dictates positioning and positioning dictates the results you are going to get from training. I really encourage you to take the time to learn this - learn it once and you can then apply it to all your workouts and classes. It's an investment of time and maybe $ but the cost of not learning is the cost of not getting results and possibly injuring yourself in the process. 

We are an all encompassing coaching squat. We help you create action and ‘just do it’, then we help you do it with intentionality or purpose. And finally we help you do well with intentionality and optimize working hard. The better you get, the better your results get, we’re here to help! Reach out.

Next Steps To Building Your New Shape

You might not feel ready for a health coach and that’s fine. So for now, take the time to learn what you should be eating to support your body in your shape change journey. 

Start with figuring out just how much you need to be eating to maintain and grow muscle. 

Next, make (or find an expert to make) an exercise plan specific to you. You’ll  need to focus on the same muscles for a period of 6-8 weeks to be able to build up enough progressive overload to create ‘more’ muscle so make it a fun “you vs you” challenge of getting stronger in the gym so your mind doesn’t see it as ‘boring’. 

Then, use my three tips above when you’re lifting weights to make the most of your training session.

Ultimately, getting professional guidance is the safest and most effective route to your body goals, so if you want to find out more please do get in touch. We find 9 times out of 10 our clients have run circles around their goals, never to actually achieve them, and… they tell us once they start they wish that they had asked for help much MUCH sooner (advice from them to you!).