TLDR
- Understand what’s realistic before setting medium level goals. You’re likely underestimating what’s possible (in the long-term).
Overview
- Realistic rates of progress
- Setting medium level goals
Considerations
Going a step further, we need to break down mid level goals. At its most basic level it looks like this:
- Improve your training
- Eat healthier foods and more or less of it
- Increase your sleep
- Decrease your stress
By definition, your fitness goals have to fall into these categories.
The training really is the crux of the matter.
We could say the training itself breaks down into four sub categories:
- Improve health
- Increase lean muscle
- Decrease body fat
- Improve athleticism and sport performance
This is great to lay out a conceptual understanding. If you’re just starting out, you may want to stop here at this stage and use these categories. Arguably however, this may not be directional enough for the most useful mid level goals.
The health vs performance divide
This point is crucial and I want to especially call it out here.
For folks starting out, the means to improving health, increasing lean muscle, decreasing body fat, and improving athleticism and sport performance is the same. I repeat, the training methods are the same.
As you progress in your training journey, at some point there will be a divide between training for health and training for high-level performance.
Being an elite level tennis player is not healthy.
Being an elite level soccer player is not healthy.
Being an elite level CrossFitter is not healthy.
None of these are conducive to long-term (as in, multi-decade) movement quality and joint health.
However, two crucial caveats apply.
One, you are probably years and years away from this. Before this point, casual sports is of course healthy. Gym training is of course healthy.
Two, increasing lean muscle is probably one of the last attributes that compromises health. That is, competing in a sport at a high level will lead to a sacrifice of health earlier than building muscle safely in a gym.
So the notion that too much muscle is bad for your health is absolutely misguided. If you have this concept in mind you’ve most likely got a mental picture of a giant human being (think ‘I don’t want to look like Arnold!’). To put it bluntly, there is a world of difference between someone on performance enhancing drugs and someone without.
Since this guide pre-supposes you are not on PEDs – it is extremely unlikely that as a natural lifter you’re putting on excessive muscle that it compromises health.
The mental aspect
There’s also a mental shift to call out for folks starting out.
Right now you probably view fitness as a chore.
Realise that over time, we need a mental shift to make this sustainable.
It needs to fundamentally shift from a negative action to a neutral action. Hopefully one day you’ll find it morphs from a neutral action to positive action, but we don’t need to worry about that now.
In other words it needs to turn from a chore into something you just do, like brushing your teeth.
Yes easier said than done I know, and there isn’t a magic surefire way of achieving this (otherwise we’d put every productivity book in the world out of business). At the very least though, I want to call it out here so you have awareness of it.
Rates of progress
Before we proceed we need to have an idea of realistic rates of progress.
This is a chunky topic and one where your understanding will change and evolve as you get more experience.
At this stage we can really only go through some high level points; this is something to revisit regularly months and years down the line.
If you’re starting out, it’s safe to say:
You’re probably overestimating what you can achieve in 6 weeks, and significantly underestimating what you can achieve in a year.
A simple analogy is compound interest with investing money. To refresh your memory, if you look at the returns of your preferred investment after a month you’ll probably be disappointed. If you forget about it and check back in five years, you’ll most likely be quite happy with the returns. It’s the exact same thing with fitness.
On muscle gain
If your goal is to look ‘toned’, jacked, or just generally look like you lift, then you need to increase lean muscle tissue.
You can visualise this as a rough logarithmic curve, with spikes and plateaus throughout the months and years.
A typical guy starting at 70kg bodyweight may choose to put on 5-10kg of bodyweight in the first year. Of this, 3-5kg may be lean muscle. The second year they might choose to put on around 5-8kg, with 2-3kg of that being lean muscle.
Over many, many years of lifting, a typical guy training reasonably well may end up with 10kg of lean muscle. It might also be a lot more, dependent on genetics and training history and effort put in (or a little less, for the same reasons).
A typical girl starting at 50kg bodyweight may choose to put on 3-5kg of bodyweight in the first year. Of this, 2-3kg may be lean muscle. The second year they might choose to put on around 3-4kg, with 1.5-2.5kg of that being lean muscle.
Over many, many years of lifting, a typical girl training reasonably well may end up with 5kg of lean muscle. It might also be a lot more, dependent on genetics and training history and effort put in (or a little less, for the same reasons).
All of these are rough estimates. Three big factors come into play; your genetics, your training background, and how hard and smart you actually apply yourself over the years.
If you visualise the bell curve for a moment and realise there are statistical outliers on both ends of the spectrum, you’ll realise these approximate guidelines are just that.
There’s no specific number here, and you certainly shouldn’t get mentally bogged down by some specific imaginary range.
Will progress stop?
You can be also guaranteed that progress wont be entirely linear. Again, just like learning a sport or a language or a musical instrument, there will be periods where you don’t seem to progress.
Purely to illustrate the point (again, don’t fixate on the specific numbers), there are two classic scenarios:
- The beginner plateau after ‘newbie gains’ after ~2 years of lifting
It’s common to see a beginner have their progress stall at the 2 or 3 year mark. If they make the right changes and apply sufficient effort, there will be another spike in progress.
- The intermediate plateau after ~5 years of lifting
Another common time point is for intermediates to stall at the 5 year mark, give or take a year or two. There are certainly physiological reasons why muscle growth may slow down here, but I would strongly argue it’s also psychological. A common statement thrown around in some communities is that you exhaust all muscle gain after 5 years as a natural. Muscle gain certainly will slow after 5 years but it’s by no means finished.
Now at some theoretical point, obviously you will reach a point where your actual age has enough of an impact of your muscle gain that no amount of training can surpass.
But it’s certainly not after 5 years of training.
And you can certainly gain muscle in your 30s and 40s (and later too, though progress will inevitably not be the same).
What do these numbers mean?
We also need to frame into perspective how little lean muscle tissue you need to have a pretty dramatic transformation.
Two popular amusing analogies:
- Think of slapping chicken breast from the supermarket on your body. If you’ve got 5kg (for girls) or 10kg (for guys) of meat attached to you, that’s a drastically different look. Even half of that is pretty impressive. This analogy encompasses both lean muscle and also muscle swelling and increased water retention and so on.
- Think of adding slices of baloney to each muscle group on your body. Just a couple of centimetres of actual muscle tissue is a lot. Here we are literally talking about pure lean muscle tissue.
On fat loss
If your goal is to lose bodyweight in order to ‘look good at the beach’ or some such variation, then you probably need to increase body weight to gain muscle, then decrease body weight to lose fat.
Let’s get this out of the way now:
Reducing body weight by itself probably won’t give you the physique change you are imagining.
Having said that, it’s still worthwhile to understand approximate rates of reasonable weight loss.
A typical guy above 15% body fat can probably aim to lose around 1kg a week for 8-12 weeks.
A typical girl above 24% body fat can probably aim to lose around 0.5kg a week for 8-12 weeks.
If you’re already decently lean and below these body fat numbers, you might expect weight loss to be two thirds or half as slow.
Again, these are approximates and only meant to present a very high level background information. See the relevant sections for more details.
The social media landscape
Much has been written about social media and I don’t mean to rehash all that here.
We all know social media has skewed our understanding of average and outstanding.
I’ll leave it at this; if you’re going to compare yourself to people online (which obviously you shouldn’t), then at least make sure it’s a level playing field.
Realise that with a physique photo or video social media are taking into account:
- Flattering lighting
- Ideal camera angle
- Probably after just getting a pump on the right muscles
- Possibly even video editing touch ups
In other words, take it as inspiration but not as a comparison.
Setting medium level goals
Having gone through that context, we return to setting more directional mid level goals.
Some examples might look like:
- I want a beach body I’m proud of for my own sake.
- I want to be able to play with my grandkids.
- I simply find training de-stressing and intrinsically enjoy it as a hobby.