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My grip strength dropped and I noticed before the scale did

Started 16 October 2024 · 16 replies · 198 hearts · read 1.7k times

MaryamBirmingham, UK · 16 October 2024
1.8 years ago

A question rather than an update: My grip strength dropped and I noticed before the scale did

Anyone else navigating this? I feel as though every piece of advice I read was written for someone with a completely different week.

Every piece of advice I read appears to have been written for somebody with a completely different week from mine, so I am asking people whose weeks look like this.

What I am after is the version of this that works when nobody is helping, because that is my situation and most accounts assume otherwise.

This is the boring administrative kind of problem, which I gather is the kind that actually gets solved when you ask.

I will come back and say what I settled on, in case it is useful to the next person asking this.

66

PamSouthport, UK
#1

Nothing here is coaching or medical advice, and the fuelling side in particular is worth a proper conversation with a sports dietitian.

8

RenFacilitatorBristol, UK
#2

I want to say that a genuinely new practical idea is rarer than it sounds after two years of these threads. If you have an arrangement nobody has mentioned, it is worth the post even if it seems obvious to you.

25

TacitaRome, IT
#3

My coach and my prescriber have never spoken and I have relayed everything, and I would do that differently if I started again.

10

BertrandToulouse, FR
#4

Coming back to what Ren wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

The advice I got that helped most was to prioritise consistency over intensity for the first three months, and it was correct.

10me too 2

PolaGdańsk, PL
#5

What I found is that eating enough before a session was the hard part, and everything else followed from solving it.

15

RohanPune, IN
#6

Bertrand said something I want to sit with for a second.

My training did not change. My fuelling around it changed enormously and that took about four months to get right.

13

NadineLyon, FR
#7

Building on what Pola wrote rather than answering the original question.

Keeping what I had built was the whole of my concern and it turned out to be almost entirely about protein and lifting, in that order.

16me too 6

HarriSwansea, UK
#8

Coming back at two years to say the strength held, the training is unchanged, and the fuelling took a season to get right and then became automatic.

11

OndineLausanne, CH
#9

Gently disagreeing with Harri, or rather adding the other half of it.

My rest days matter more than they used to and I have stopped treating them as optional.

15

ClemmieNorwich, UK
#10

What I found is that the first six weeks were the worst for performance and that everything after that has been ordinary.

8

RinManchester, UK
#11

Picking up Harri’s point rather than starting a new one.

My experience is that this is entirely compatible with serious training and requires deliberate attention to fuelling.

7

BronLincoln, UK
#12

I would gently say that if training has become the thing you use to justify eating, that is worth saying out loud somewhere.

9

LenaMunich, DE
#13

Somebody in this circle said that grip strength is the most honest measure and I have tracked mine ever since.

11

MaritGroningen, NL
#14

The thing I underestimated was hydration. My requirements changed and I noticed it in the gym before anywhere else.

13me too 6

RenFacilitatorBristol, UK
#15

Adding a marker so it does not get lost: the most practical sentence in a thread like this is almost never the first one, and somebody arriving late will scroll straight past it.

16

BoWhitby, UK
#16

Building on what Lena wrote rather than answering the original question.

I keep a very simple training log alongside everything else and the two together tell me more than either does alone.

11