The whole reason we started our 16-week weight training is because she discovered, at her most recent body fat test, that she'd lost a quarter of a pound of lean body mass over the course of a year.
Yes, you read that correctly: over 12 months, SAJ lost a one fourth of a pound of muscle. Same as the amount of meat (I use that term loosely) in the popular McDonald's burger. Doesn't seem like a lot to fret over, does it? Unless you consider that she'd been working out a ton and changed her whole diet around while thinking that she was on her way to more muscle mass, not less. Losing anything, even a quarter of a pound, must have felt a bit like a smack in the face.
I've never really considered how much muscle I want to have on my body. I've really been focused on how much fat I've got, and how much I want to take off. Five years ago, when I first started exercising, I was completely focused on fat (and weight) loss. It's safe to say that I was only working out so I could eat a bit more while continuing to drop pounds. Exercise was a total means to an end for me.
Obviously, now it's completely different. Exercise is the means as well as the end -- with a fantastic side benefit that it helps me stay slim. If I gain a few pounds, I don't necessarily address it with exercise anymore (I can't really fit any more workouts into my life); instead, I start strategizing about how I'm eating and how it relates to my workouts.
Anyway, when I was first embracing exercise, I had one of those half-assed body fat caliper tests that trainers provide in a lot of gyms. Not very accurate, but it gave me a sense of what my body fat percentage was. Did it even cross my mind to consider the inverse -- what my percentage of lean body mass was? Not at all. I just wanted to know about the fat.
Fast forward five years, and I'm suddenly less concerned with fat and more interested in muscle. Perhaps that's because my percentage of body fat feels manageable to me. Or perhaps it's because SAJ has me all fired up about the importance of lean body mass -- let's call it LBM from now on -- and how it can benefit us as recreational athletes. (I'm embarrassed to call myself an athlete in any way; not sure if it helped to put "recreational" in front of it or not.)
Finally getting to the point of this post, I realized recently that I didn't know how much LBM was ideal for me. SAJ kept talking about the importance of 100 pounds of LBM -- but I had no idea what that number was based on. So I asked her.
Turns out she was referencing a formula, which I'll post a link to here:
Uh oh. I just re-read the page. The formula isn't about ideal LBM, it's about ideal total weight. (Pause while I email SAJ to tell her about the misunderstanding, and to look around for info about ideal LBM.)
OK, I can't find a single online source that talks about ideal LBM in terms of pounds. Instead, it's all about percentages. And here's where I can finally say something definitive:
"When in ideal shape, body fat will make up about 15% - 18% of a male's body weight and 18% - 22% of a female's."
Here's where I found it:
This, at least, gives me something to work toward. My body fat percentage is currently 23.1. I'd like to get it down to 22% so I can fit within the range listed above. At 22% fat, I'd have 78% LBM. At my current weight, that would translate to just about 125 pounds of LBM. Right now I've got 123.
So, after a lot of rigamarole, my official goal is to add 2 pounds of LBM during this 16 weeks of weight training. Ideally, without increasing my total weight. In fact, I'd love to drop 5 pounds.
How to do that? Other than following the program, eating right is going to have a lot to do with it. Since this post is already long and complicated enough, I'll save nutrition for the next one.
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