You start Crossfit on a journey to get more healthy. You start training three times a week. You start watching what you eat. You start sleeping better. The number on the scale is getting smaller and smaller. Your waist line is getting smaller and smaller. You’re killing it! You are encouraged to be able to see your progress in those numbers each day. Life is good. One day after a workout you step on the scale and the number didn’t change. You go back to the gym the next day and train some more. The number staring you in the face on the scale still didn’t change. Over the course of a few days you start to get discouraged, motivation drops and you feel like what you are doing isn’t working.
Sound familiar to anyone? See. Here’s the thing with “those numbers”. While they don’t lie and you are losing pounds and inches from your waist, there’s a whole lot more happening than what a couple of numbers can tell you. The scale and tape measure (or our belt notches) are great for tracking those very basic metrics. What if we take a look at numbers that aren’t so readily available and accessible to everyone. What’s happening to your cholesterol? To your blood pressure? To your body fat percentage? To your heart and respiratory rate? To your blood sugars?
I have heard members talk about the joys of seeing the pounds and inches come off. It’s a great feeling and validation of the work they are putting in. Eventually, the pounds and inches aren’t going to change a whole lot any more. Or they might slow down the rate of change. Or they may even reverse! At some point, those numbers are going to level out as we turn our old soft tissue into new muscle tissue. Through our client tracking, I can tell you from experience that what we usually see happen with someone who has weight to lose, is the scale number and the waistline number will go down pretty quick right off the hop. Then a little while later, the scale number stops going down quite as fast (or maybe even at all), but the waistline keeps trimming down. This means we are losing fat and gaining muscle. What is also happening at the same time, and even more importantly for our health; is our other biometrics are also changing. Our blood pressure is most likely dropping. Our heart doesn’t need to work as hard to push blood around so our resting heart rate drops. We have a more efficient oxygen uptake so our respiratory rate drops. A whole bunch of other biometrics in the blood start to change. We can’t (on our own anyways) see these numbers change. The scale might say the same thing still but our health is improving immensely.
So the next time you step on a scale and that number hasn’t changed, go a little deeper in the numbers. While going and getting blood work done might not be an option all the time, what about your mile run time? Has your deadlift gone up? Is your posture better? Do you “feel” more healthy? Those things are easily accessible for us to test and see changes in. Those are the numbers that matter more than stepping on a scale.
The numbers don’t lie but they are not the biggest or most important sign of your health and fitness.