I Thought Strength Training Would Change My Body. I Was Wrong.
I thought lifting weights would reveal the body I'd always dreamed of, but it showed me something else entirely.
A year ago I started strength training because I thought it would reveal the body I have always dreamed of. Twelve months later, I’m wondering why all that hard work didn’t get me the body I wanted.
Diets don’t work, right? We’ve all heard that before. How they are essentially scams with failure ‘built in’ so you keep coming back and spending more. But, the same can’t be said for the gym, especially when it comes to lifting weights. Effort equals reward. It’s basically physics.
That’s why I went into my new era as a gym-goer with a Del Boy ‘this time next year we’re going to be ripped and rippling, Rodders’ energy. I thought I was onto a sure thing, that doing full body strength training workouts three times a week was guaranteed to get me the gains I’d always dreamed of. I imagined turn of the millennium Britney quads, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 arms and JLo at any time ever abs.
I was so cocksure because I finally thought I’d figured out how to get my body to do what I wanted it to. After 30 years of yo-yo dieting, I’d cracked the secret to energy balance with diet and exercise and had not only lost 40lbs, I’d kept it off for years. I had the secret, I knew the answer, I’d discovered the Holy Grail. Adding heavy weights into the mix wasn’t just having the winning lottery ticket, it was cashing it in.
I was so confident, I didn’t mind the puffiness and swelling I could feel, and see, in those first few weeks because I trusted it was inflammation and water retention, and was very much a part of the process.
I chose to trust the process over the long-term, and that meant ignoring my usual metric of scale weight and focusing on the consistency and effort of my gym visits. I had nothing to worry about, right?
A year in, there’s only one significant change in metrics that I can share. I’ve gained six pounds. And, it’s six pounds that have taken me out of my ‘safe zone’. I’ve accepted that weight fluctuations are normal but mine have remained within the same three to four pound window for so long that to see the increase has taken me by surprise.
Several things could be happening at once. I may have increased my muscle mass, which would lead to a jump in scale weight, or I have been eating above maintenance. That’s what the science that helped me lose weight would tell me. So, I have to ask myself, if I’d maintained a deficit for the last year, would I be covering myself in fake tan, slipping into a tiny thong bikini and practicising my poses for Miss Olympia 2026?
Something else may be happening. I was already active. I was doing three to five workouts a week, albeit more cardio-based, and walking around 10,000 steps every day. The switch I made to heavy weights actually reduced how many calories I was burning. So, if we’re looking at it purely as a science experiment of energy in vs energy out, then the increase in scale weight makes sense.
This was always an exercise in working smarter not harder, so it’s been a bit of an emotional hit to realise I’ve been working dumber. Or, have I?
