Young Woman and Weight Gain on Linear Progression

[jillingworth]

I am coaching a student of mine through linear progression (she will soon be trying out for the men's baseball team as a pitcher) and am a bit baffled by her lack of weight gain. In sum, she's 20 years old, six feet even, and started with a body weight of 144.5 pounds. We began training on 29 October of this year and have done three days a week since (except for a lay-off of 5 training days around Thanksgiving). Her weights, I think, have moved up fine: Squat from 60 pounds to 145; Press from 15 to 50; Bench from 30 to 75; Deadlift from 90 to 175; and we've started in with Powercleans recently. What throws me is that she's only gained 6.5 pounds of body weight in this time which seems low. Does this seem reasonable to anyone else who is in this demographic or who has trained people in this demographic?

[Dastardly]

Have you been monitoring her eating?

Her growth will be proportional to eating, even in the absence of weight training.

Feed her.

[Tamara Reynolds]

If she is still playing a sport and hasn't purposefully increased her calories by a significant amount, then there is no reason why she should be gaining weight.

Most of the women at my gym have seen considerable increases on their lifts without gaining any weight, and at least one has lost close to 15 lbs while increasing all of her lifts.

In order to gain weight, one must eat more.

[jillingworth]

She is eating more, but I can't quantify how much is "more." I've had her keep a food log, in her training book, and she's clearly been gradually eating more, but I don't know for sure how much she used to eat. Again, it's not something I terribly worried about as her lifts keep going up - just curious.

[Briks42]

I'm not sure she should be trying to gain any faster anyway. 6 pounds in 6-7 weeks seems pretty ideal.

[hbriem]

Indeed. Sounds good to me.

[StrongLiftMyBalls]

Also in the early stages the lifter can make neurological gains and so doesnt actually need to gain muscle mass/bodyweight to keep the lifts increasing. As these efficiency advances start to level off then weight gain is necessary to make improvements. So watch her performance over next few months and see if she starts struggling session to session progression. It could be she isnt eating enough to recover, or that she is but needs to eat more to allow for tissue-growth. (please no one shout at me if I got that wrong, i deliberately simplified a little)

[gtl]

Looks like 1lb/wk. That's a decent rate, IMO.. unless she just needs to put weight on at all costs for the position.

[grumble]

To be honest, if she's had no problems progressing, why would you want her to gain weight faster?

I agree with the above posters that 1lb/wk sounds solid to me. I'd also say that it's possible when someone's new to stay the same weight and still grow a lot of muscle tissue as body fat percentage decreases.

[jillingworth]

Thanks for all of these comments. She's the first person I've worked with who was seriously looking to get stronger and for a specific purpose. As a new and insecure "coach", I just wanted some second opinions on this as a lot of what I've read (while geared to male trainees) mentions more weight gain than I'm seeing. In my own case, I actually lost weight; but then I started out awfully fat.