Why You Weigh more After Training?

Just an interesting Tid Bit I thought I would share. Ive been telling people this for years but I finally have a graph to share that proves the point.

have you ever noticed that the day or days following an aggressive resistance training bout that your scale weight goes up? Or had that, usually female client or no recently male meterosexual, client who is stuck on scale weight come to you and and notice that after one session they have magically added lbs to them and they think they are going to get HUGE and bulky. Well sorry not even I am good enough to add a few lbs to you in one day.

What is happening is a fluctuation in hydration. It is two fold. The first i often tell people is that they have caused a stimulus for inflammation. Think of inflammation externally what first comes to mind aside from pain?? Swelling, swelling in large part due to excess fluid flooding to the area. The same is true to the muscle tissues you train and the inflammation you cause them. Your going to carry a bit more water as these tissues heal which then will subside.

Now onto the graph and sweating














The start at the right is plasma Volume PV (which is 50% dependent on hydration water) baseline prior to exercise. At the start of hard training you see an immediate drop that continues for two hours. After that and for the next 48 hours you see a sharp incline in your stored water, Hydration, to levels well above your norm. Water is heavy hence the scale weight increase. This increase is a natural response to our hard training and a safety mechanism to reduce chance of harm. Its pretty cool really, our blood volume adapts to anticipate future stresses and sweating, loss of hydration we may put upon it.

This is also why if your looking to gain you need to keep cramming your pie hole the days after a hard session even if you made this miraculous 4 lb jump to hit your goal.

Its not real weight, its temporary and natural.

So there you go there is your answer to that pesky scale swing after hard training. This should arm you for your own questions, those of scale addicted clients, or aid you in dropping weight for a competition by giving you even more evidence of why it is beneficial to halt all hard training about 1 week out.