Almost a year of writing this newsletter, and two questions come up more than any others: “how do I know if it’s working?” and “how long before I see results?”
I get it. I really do. I want results too, every time I start something new. I want to know the work is going somewhere and that I’m not wasting my time.
Lifting is never wasted time though. Besides whatever aesthetic goal you have (and yes, you’re allowed to have one), you start collecting the benefits the moment you pick up a weight, whether or not any of it shows up in the mirror. But being able to see your own effort still matters. It’s what keeps you going back on the weeks when nothing feels like it’s happening.
This is why you need a way to read your progress, especially when the scale and the mirror are both telling you you’re stuck.
My road to body recomposition wasn’t a straight line, and I want to say that first, because almost everything you read about it looks like a clean before and after with a tidy arrow in between, and mine was nothing like that.
At the start, I almost quit.
I’d done the reading. I knew what body recomposition was supposed to be and yet, I’d decided that six weeks in, I would see something. My body fat would come down, maybe I’d have a bit of definition in my shoulders, the scale would either drop a little or, best case, stay exactly where it was while my body rearranged itself underneath.
I was also eating more than I’d eaten in years, which, if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know wasn’t a small thing for me.
Six weeks in, I stood in front of the mirror and I looked exactly the same. I took photos. Same corner of the bedroom, same morning light, same gym clothes. I lined them up next to the ones from week one and I couldn’t find a single f* difference.
I’d be lying if I told you that, at that moment, I wasn’t seriously considering giving up.
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i was measuring the right goal with the wrong tools, at the wrong moment
Six or seven weeks isn’t enough time to build visible muscle. It just isn’t. Muscle takes months, and if you’re trying to build it while also losing fat, it takes longer, because you’re asking your body to do two jobs at once. I knew this in theory. I could’ve explained it to you over coffee. But knowing something and believing it at 7am in front of a mirror are two very different skills, and I only had the first one.
And the three tools I was using to measure my progress were genuinely terrible at that point. Let me explain.
(i) The scale can move a kilo or two in a single day depending on water, salt, where you are in your cycle, and how much food is currently sitting inside you; (ii) the mirror is even worse, because you see yourself every single day, which is exactly the frequency at which change becomes invisible; (iii) and the photos, which I thought were my objective measure, were being taken and judged by a person who was in a mood. Some days I looked fine, some days I looked like I’d gone backwards, and it was the same body in the same week.
So I had three sources of information, all three were lying to me, and I was making decisions based on them anyway.
One thing before I go on, because I don’t want you to close this and throw your scale in a drawer. None of those tools are actually useless. Weigh yourself if you want to. Just stop reading any single number, and look at the average across a few weeks instead. Keep taking the photos too. Take them, and then leave them alone for months, because two photos taken a week apart will always show you nothing, and two photos taken six months apart will sometimes show you everything.
So keep collecting. Every measurement you take now is data you’ll be able to read properly later, once there’s enough of it to mean something.
how a before-and-after post completely changed the way i measured progress
It’s going to sound strange coming from me, because I don’t like before-and-after posts and I don’t publish them. But a few years ago one showed up on my feed at exactly the wrong moment (or maybe the right one).
Same woman, two photos. And the caption said she weighed the same in both.
I went back and forth between them probably ten times. In the second one her whole body was different. Visible muscle, visibly less fat, shoulders and waist in a completely different relationship to each other. Same number on the scale but two different bodies.
And that’s the thing that finally clicked. If a person can look like that at the same weight, then weight was never the variable I should’ve been watching. All that time, I’d been staring at a number that was incapable of telling me what I actually wanted to know.
So I stopped tracking my body and started tracking what my body could do.
At my next workout, I opened the Notes app on my phone and wrote down every exercise from that session, along with the weights I used and the reps I did. Then I did it again the next time. And the next. (I now log everything in an app I’m building myself, but honestly, the Notes app did the job for a long time, and it’ll do the job for you too.)
A few weeks later I scrolled back to the first entry, and the weights weren’t the same weights anymore. The thing I couldn’t see in the mirror had been sitting in a note on my phone the whole time, and I hadn’t even noticed it happening.
And this is why those numbers matter more than they sound. If you’re getting stronger, two things are true at once: your training is giving your body a reason to adapt, and you’re eating enough to let it happen. You can’t really fake that combination. Strength going up is your training and your nutrition telling you they’re working together, weeks before your body gets around to showing it to anyone.
what i actually watch now & why
There are four things, and they arrive in the follwing order:
Weight at the same reps. This one moves first, usually somewhere between week two and week six, and it’s the simplest proof you’ll ever get. Same exercise, same number of reps, more weight. My Romanian deadlift was 35 kilos when I started, 40 on a good day. Six months later it was 60.
Reps at the same weight. If you train with dumbbells you already know the problem: the next pair up is a two kilo jump, and two kilos is enormous when you’re pressing ten. So you sit at the same weight for weeks and it feels like nothing’s happening. But if you did eight reps in week one and you’re doing twelve in week six with the same dumbbells, that’s progress. Write it down.
Recovery. This is one of the clearest signs the work is landing. When I started, I used to lose half my reps by the last set, and then one day I noticed my third set had stopped falling apart. Which meant I was getting stronger and recovering faster after each workout. I also stopped needing two days to walk down stairs like a normal person after leg day. Nothing about me looked different, but my body was very obviously handling more.
Your waist against your hips. It’s a ratio, not a weight, so measure both and watch the relationship between them. When your waist holds steady while your glutes and shoulders start filling out your clothes differently, that’s your sign that body recomposition is happening. It will always be the slowest one, so please, please be patient.
how long this actually takes
It depends. I can’t tell you how long it’ll take for you to see results, because everyone’s different and there are a lot of variables involved: your genetics, how many times a week you train, what your nutrition actually looks like, how much you sleep, and so on. What I can give you is a rough idea of what happens for most people.
The first two months are mostly your nervous system getting better at the movement. You’re learning to use what you already have, which is why strength can climb quickly while absolutely nothing visible happens. Months three and four are where the structural change starts. Around month six you can usually see it yourself, if you know where to look.
That’s normal and that’s not you being slow. I know it’s not what anyone wants to hear, including me. But it is what it is. And that’s also why I now give a program (here’s how you can create yours) at least twelve weeks before I judge it. Anything shorter, and I can’t tell the difference between a real signal and a bad day.
Before you ask whether your program is working, count how many sessions you actually did against how many you planned. Not how many you meant to do. How many you really did.
If you planned sixteen and you did nine, the program isn’t what failed, and no amount of clever measuring is going to rescue that. I say this with love, and also because I’ve been the woman with nine out of sixteen and a very detailed opinion about why the program was wrong.
three exercises are all you need to track your progress
I said three exercises to track your progress, not the only three exercises you’re doing. Your program stays exactly as it is, with all the accessory work and everything else you like in there. You’re just picking three movements out of it to follow closely, so that you always have something to compare against.
Three, because two isn’t enough to show you a pattern and five is enough to make you quit. I’ve tried logging every single exercise of every session and I lasted about three weeks before the notebook became the reason I dreaded going.
Here’s how I’d choose them.
Go for compound movements, meaning the ones that use several joints and a lot of muscle at the same time. They respond to progress much more clearly than isolation work, and they move in whole kilos instead of tiny fractions, which makes the change obvious when you scroll back. A bicep curl going from 8 kilos to 9 is real progress, it’s just a small, slow signal. A squat going from 40 to 50 is very hard to miss.
Pick things you can load precisely. A barbell or a machine works better here than a band or a bodyweight movement, because 2.5 kilos is a step you can measure and “the band felt harder today” isn’t. Nothing wrong with bands and bodyweight exercices, they’re just difficult to use as a ruler.
Cover your whole body with the three: one lower body, one upper body push, one upper body pull. If you want a set that works for almost anyone, here’s where I’d start:
for lower body, a squat, a deadlift (or Romanian deadlift), or a hip thrust
for pushing, a bench press, a dumbbell press or an overhead press
and for pulling, a barbell (or dumbbell) row, or a lat pulldown
Mine are a Romanian deadlift, a lat pulldown and a shoulder press (which I do on a machine).
Then pick things you’re willing to keep in your program for at least twelve weeks, which mostly means picking things you don’t hate. There’s no point choosing the technically perfect exercise if you’re going to swap it out in a month, because the second you swap it, your comparison goes back to zero. You can’t measure progress on something you’ve done twice.
What you’ll write down: The date, the exercise, and the weight x reps of your heaviest working set. You don’t need every set and you don’t need a note about how you felt. Three lines a session, plus sessions done against sessions planned at the end of the month. It takes less than five minutes.
Six years later, I still can’t stop thinking about how this method helped me stay focused and not give up. It’s also really fun to look at the entries you wrote years ago, compare them with the ones you wrote last week, and see how much strength you’ve gained.
So if you’re six weeks in and nothing has changed, it’s entirely possible that everything is already changing and you just have no way to see it yet. My evidence was wrong, not my training, and I nearly threw out something that was already working because I was reading the wrong data. Start writing it down today, because the version of you in three months is going to want to scroll back and see where she started.
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That’s all for now,
—Glicia
We're totally on the same page! I used AI tools in Google Sheets to make myself a monthly 1RM tracker with 5 different lifts that I do regularly, and then I have a reminder on Google Calendar at the beginning of each month to log my best one rep maxes from the month for my chosen exercises so I can see the progress month by month. :)
Sooooo helpful for someone in the middle of the journey right now, and asking these exact questions!