Working out would be so much more straightforward if you could get real-time, instant feedback from your body. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could come home from the gym and immediately see clear signs of muscle growth? Unfortunately, that’s just not how it works.
Building muscle takes time, so instead of trying to track muscle growth by staring at yourself in the mirror every day, there are some more accurate and telling methods you can employ to make sure you’re on the right path.
1. You Can Do More Reps
The first way to tell that you’re building muscle is if you find yourself gradually increasing the number of reps of an exercise you can do in a set with the same amount of weight.
For this to be a good indicator, however, other variables need to be consistent. First, this is assuming that you’re always training to a similar level of fatigue, which ideally is to or close to failure. Otherwise, you might find yourself doing more reps simply because you’re pushing yourself closer to failure than before.
Proper technique should also be consistently utilized at all times. The number of reps you can do isn’t a good indicator of strength if on those last few reps, you’re sacrificing form and not using a full range of motion. Not only is this not productive for building muscle, you also risk seriously hurting yourself.
2. You Can Lift More Weight
Besides steadily increasing the number of reps you can do, being able to increase the weight over time is another clear sign that you’re getting stronger. Of course, just like I previously stated, this is assuming you’re working out with the same intensity and still maintaining good technique.
Increasing the reps you perform and the amount of weight you lift are two of the main ways to achieve progressive overload, which is what you should strive for if you want to build muscle. You might not be able to consistently increase both simultaneously (your reps might decrease initially when you increase the weight), but if you’re generally trending in this direction over time, this should be a clear sign that you’re experiencing muscle growth.
3. The Scale Says So
Numbers don’t lie. Keep track of your weight by weighing yourself every day, every few days, or every week.
If your weight is gradually increasing, yet when you look at yourself in the mirror, you don’t seem to be gaining fat and might even appear to be losing fat, this likely means that you’re increasing the amount of muscle mass in your body.
In theory, this makes sense. However, it can be somewhat unreliable in practice. Just like how it can be hard to notice gradual muscle growth, it can also be difficult to notice gradual fat accumulation. Especially if you have a decent amount of body fat to start, it would be quite difficult to notice if you put on another 1-2 pounds of fat over the course of a few weeks.
It’s certainly something you can reference, but in the end, if you’re just going off of a basic scale, it can be rather difficult to determine just how much of your weight gain is actually coming from muscle or fat.
4. The Pictures Back It Up
Lastly, I recommend that you take photos of yourself periodically. It’s not necessarily to obsess over how good you look or show your physique off on social media, but rather to document your transformation and have reference points to determine how much progress you’re making.
As I was just saying, you won’t be able to see gradual changes to your physique day to day, but having pictures to look back on easily solves that problem.
Even if you feel like you haven’t made much progress after a while, you may surprise yourself when you look back at yourself from weeks and months ago and realize that you’ve in fact gotten a lot broader and certain parts of your body look much more developed.
Signs You Shouldn’t Rely on
While we’re on this topic, I also want to go over some things that aren’t good indicators of muscle growth, despite popular belief.
Muscle Soreness
It’s true that soreness can be an indication that you trained very hard, which is obviously conducive to building muscle. However, just because you don’t experience soreness after a workout doesn’t mean it wasn’t an effective one; in fact, you should experience less soreness over time as your body adapts to the exercises you’re performing. As long as you’re still training to failure and achieving progressive overload, your muscles will undergo hypertrophy.
Muscle Pump
If you’ve ever noticed that your muscles temporarily increase in size right after a workout, that’s what’s known as a muscle pump. It’s caused by an excess of blood that accumulates in the muscle when you exercise. While it looks very nice and can help with muscle recovery, it doesn’t have a direction correlation with muscle growth.
Therefore, you don’t need to “chase the pump” in order to effectively train your muscles. Likewise, having a better pump doesn’t necessarily mean you had a better workout.
Trust the Process, but See It for Yourself Too
Even though you need patience if you want to achieve your fitness goals, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see improvement along the way. If anything, seeing your efforts slowly start to produce results can be very good for your confidence and motivation.
Seeing progress can also be reassuring, since it confirms that what you’re doing actually works. You don’t have to resort to blindly stumbling about and praying that you’re headed in the right direction. If you’re new to working out and this is a legitimate concern of yours, you may also find some useful tips in my post How to Get Started in the Gym.
