Hello. I have been training for about 14 months and my lifts are all over the place. My best squat is 172.5kg, bench 77.5kg and deadlift 165kg. My BF% based on my own measurements is probably 22% or higher, and my waist circumference is around 95cm, this is at a height of 5’7 and weight of 84kg. For most of the time I spent lifting I was getting in significantly less protein than what I thought due to poor understanding of portion sizes and measurement, which in my opinion has lead to me gaining very little upperbody muscle mass in the past 14 months. I feel like due to my waist and bodyfat I should be planning on losing weight however I’m already a poor bencher and am worried that losing weight will only make it worse as I feel I need to gain muscle in order to continue making progress.
Jonathon,
Thanks for the post and I hope you’re well.
While I do think that eating the correct amount of protein does helps with garnering training adaptations, I think it’s unlikely that a low protein diet allowed your squat and deadlift were able to increase, but not your bench press. I think that’s mostly related to the programming. Depending on what you’re doing now, that likely needs to be changed.
Additionally, new individuals readily gain muscle mass when exposed to resistance training. If you were getting anywhere near 1.2-1.6g/kg/day of protein, I think your muscle gain was probably unaffected.
I also don’t think that muscle mass and strength are as tightly correlated as we’re lead to believe. I do think that increasing LBM over time still represents a reasonable strategy for increasing strength alongside appropriate programming.
In your case, I would recommend losing body fat and changing your program.
-Jordan