personal training & body fat question

S

spazzy

0
Hi guys,

I'm new here but I've been working out (with a trainer) intensely for the past two months. I am 5'6" and was at 163 lbs when I started personal training. At that point in time my body fat was at 34.46%. A month later I got re-measured and lost a total of five inches (they measure your body at different parts and the total difference came out to five) and my body fat went down to 30.00% flat. Now (another month later), I had my measurements today. I weighed 157 lbs but my body fat went up to 31.50%. My "hips" measurement went up by 1/2" and my bust went up by 1/2". Bust i can understand because I've begun to focus on building chest/arms to do pull ups. I've also been mixing my workout with a LOT of lower ab work. Ideas on why this may have happened? I'm working harder and harder but my dumb belly doesn't seem to want to shrink and my BF is up again so I am a little discouraged. Last month was really encouraging but I just cant figure out why out of all things my hip size & my body fat went up.

FYI, I was 163 lbs until last week when for some reason I checked the scale and for the first time ever saw the 157. I was 163 lbs until then.

Thanks
 
all that sounds wonderful, but what about your diet?
what you eat, and how much, has a lot more control over fat loss than how much you are exercising.

diet, cardio and weights all have an effect on metabolism, fat loss, muscle growth...but if the diet isn't good, cardio and weights won't make up for it.
 
The accuracy of even the best body fat measuring methods is probably no better than +/-10%, so at around 30% body fat the accuracy is +/-3%, so whoever is measuring/calculating your body fat to 2 decimal places is overly optimistic about their measuring accuracy.

Other factors can cause slight variations in your measurements as well. Did you just have a cheat day or weekend? What is the temperature and humidity? What time of the month is it? What time of day is it? How much water did you drink the last few days?

Don't worry too much about small changes from measurement to measurement. Just keep eating good and exercising and you will progress toward you goals in the long term.
 
if you stayed on the same program it would have been easier to complete therefore not as many calories were required to fuel / recover from it although you were probabaly consuming the same amount which means you'd have taken in more than you put put and wholla!!!! fat gain
 
I shoulda mentioned this originally: even a properly administered skinfold test can still be off by 1%, which accounts for the discrepancy you see. If it was 1% low the first read, and 1% high on the latest reading, you could still have lost .5% bodyfat and the test isn't showing it.

how was your diet the day or two prior to this last test? possibly high in sodium? excess water stored due to increased sodium could throw a bit of error in the test too.
 
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