The scale is sprinting and my squat is grumbling

2026-10-10 00:12

Not going to pretend I'm not pleased, but I lift four days a week and I care more about my working weights than the morning number.

Down roughly 5 kg in a bit over two weeks. Protein is 185-200g, sleep is 7-8 hours, water intake is fine. The weird part: the first few sessions felt great, almost springy, and then last week my top set of squats lost a rep and my rows turned grindy in a way that isn't normal for me.

Could be a bad week. Could be recovery. Could be I'm not eating enough around training. Either way, I'm not interested in watching the scale fall while the barbell slides backward — that's the opposite of the recomp I actually want.

For the folks who've been at this a while: how do you separate a temporary dip from a real strength leak? Do you adjust food on training days first, or ride it out and watch the trend?

2026-10-14 09:12

five kilos in two weeks is mostly water, glycogen, and gut content. That can flatten your squat before real muscle loss.

Check your last three squat sessions: hours since waking, last carb meal, caffeine timing. Night shifts wreck me if I squat within two hours of waking. I track top-set bar speed.

When it nosedives, I bump carbs pre-lift and move squats to after a nap, not after a shift. How many of those bad sessions were post-night-shift?

2026-10-18 06:12

i’d split “top set dropped” from “whole session dropped.” I track 7-day bodyweight avg, top-set kg, back-off volume load (sets × reps × kg), and RPE. My squat top single can fall 5 kg while back-offs stay flat—usually bracing/leverage weirdness.

But if back-offs also lose reps, or the first rep feels heavy, that’s a recovery flag. Did both drop, or just the top set?

Also, 5 kg in ~16 days is ~0.31 kg/day; I’d compare that trend to your squat e1RM, not the daily scale. What’s your weekly rate looking like now?