Achieving Bodybuilding Results - Tracking Your Bodybuilding Progress

by Heather Wojdyla, BS Exercise Science, NASM CPT

I am going to go ahead and assume that since you are visiting this website, you are either into bodybuilding already or you are looking for the motivation to get started on a healthy lifestyle change. Whatever your current fitness level is, you are probably looking to improve and become your absolute best. You probably set some bodybuilding goals for yourself and need a way to evaluate how far you are from attaining them. One of the hardest parts of evaluating your progress is the manner in which you do it.

Often, we are too concerned with the number on the scale. We jump on that scale each morning to see if we have lost those miracle pounds overnight.

While some of us can track our progress with the scale for a short period of time, it’s not the best idea for many of us. As you continue to read along, I will give you some ideas that you can use in order to help you track your and achieve bodybuilding success without getting frustrated and setting yourself up for failure.

Muscle Weight vs Fat Weight

One of the first things you need to understand is that muscle weighs more than fat. It’s a proven fact and a reality that many of us need to face before setting our list of goals. Once you begin hitting the weight room and working towards transforming your body, you need to realize that it’s normal, and common, not to see the numbers on the scale budge as much as you had envisioned. However, don’t freak out! There are many other ways to track your development and become satisfied with all of the hard work that you are putting forth.

Before we get started on setting up ways for you to track your bodybuilding progress, let me give you a little scenario to think about. It will help you put things into perspective and help you to understand that I’m not completely crazy with what I am going to suggest to you. Have you ever seen two people with identical scale weights yet they look completely different? Of course you have! One person might be 200 pounds of solid muscle while the guy standing next to him has a little extra baggage; I guarantee that the man bulging with muscle could care less what he weighs on the scale. He is a more compact version of 200 pounds and looks much tighter and smaller to the human eye. Most likely he tracks his progress in ways other than that silly scale that often affects how we view our progress. Keep this in mind, set your goals, and let’s evaluate our accomplishments in ways other than the scale weight!

Track Your Progress Every Two Weeks

Once you have set your goals for yourself, I often recommend tracking how far you have come every two weeks. This is a good window of time in order to see results if you are truly sticking to a regular bodybuilding routine. Of course some of us will see results in a few days and others will take closer to three weeks or a month, but two week measurements is a great place to start.