Have you been exercising and eating healthy, but when you step on the scale, it says you've gained a few pounds? "That's normal, and it doesn't mean that your workouts are not effective", says Jeffrey A. Dolgan, an exercise physiologist in Miami Beach, Florida.
"A person's scale mass (质量) is a combination of muscle, fat, bone, blood, and even the air that we carry in our lungs," he says. "Immediately after a workout routine, the percentage of mass in each body part can shift as much as 15 percent. So if you're gaining weight while working out and eating healthy, it's probably not the type of weight gain that you think it is."
The scale can't tell you how much of your body weight is muscle or fat, which means if your goal is to improve your fitness level, the scale is not the best tool for measuring improvements. When you start to change your body composition with your workouts— by building more muscle mass and decreasing your body fat — your scale weight may increase, while your body fat percentage may decrease. These changes happen over weeks and months (not hours or days) so the scale is useless when tracking them.
You may argue that you weigh a few pounds less after a high intensity (强度) training class. Don't get too excited— it's just water loss due to sweat. Water makes up approximately 65 to 90 percent of a person's weight, and variation in water content of the human body can move the scale by ten pounds or more from day to day.
So ignore the scale and pay more attention to objective measurement tools like body composition. Keep in mind that if you're exercising but gaining weight, you may actually look slimmer.
