With my injury mostly healed minus physical therapy and some incision issues its time to hit the bricks again. I’m ready to get back to being active and moving toward my personal fitness goals. To be able to judge my progress I want to set some baseline stats.
I don’t know about you but I hate scales. The fact that they have become such a marker for results makes me sad. Perfect example is me right now. I’m about ten pounds heavier than I was before the accident. Being 6’2” that might not seem like drastic weight gain but my fitness and strength level before the injury versus now is dramatically different. I might only have gained ten pounds on that scale but its not showing me my muscle loss.
So with that said this time around I want to use a two-step approach to measuring body results. First I want to measure multiple points on my body to get baseline size recordings. This will help in knowing what’s growing and what shrinking as I have a hard time seeing results in myself and probably would let my biceps grow to the size of my quads and still think they were small. This way if I gain an inch in my biceps I cant argue with the numbers, or at least I’m not planning to. The second step I want to take is I’m ordering my very own skin fold calipers! I’ve done a little reading and I feel this is the best way that I can record my body fat, as I’m also not a fan of the BMI. According to the BMI system I’m obese, really obese? That just pisses me off!
So Friday I’m recording my numbers as I get ready to work back into my workouts. I’ll post them to share, it will be a humbling experience for me. Check out this link to read a good article on skin fold calipers.
How do you track your body’s progress? Should I weight myself as well? Let me know I’m interested to hear from you.
FitnessClyde 
I still weigh myself, but take it with a grain of salt. I also use measurements and body fat percentage to create a whole picture. If I lose inches, but not lbs, great, I am changing my body composition efficiently!
Yeah I don’t know if I will be able to break the urge to weigh myself…. I’ve decided to take a base weight and not step on the scale for the first two weeks. Thanks for the input it makes sense to me!
Scales…so many people have told me that I shouldn’t have a scale or weigh often, just listen to my body. Problem is that n the past I wasn’t a strong enough person to do that whole listen thing. Not having a scale caused me to make excuses and give up. Up until last week I was weighing at my parents house once a week. My trainer has suggested I go back to weighing at home and more often to keep better control of what I am eating and how my body reacts to that food. Week one with the scale in the house again…I’m down three pounds already this week. That’s huge for me. 93 to go. i will get there. Stay strong…and you will too.
My problem with listening to my body is that sometimes it lies to me….. I need to have some form of measurment but I do feel that scales are the wrong way to go if you truly want to measure results. I honestly dont care what I weight but I do care about strength, stamina and definition. Put the scale away grab a measure and caliper!