Anyone else exercising regularly but still feeling puffy and a bit soft?

[BrownWoodenChair]

I strength train twice a week, do yoga for 1 hour, walk on an incline for 2x 30 minutes and do a circuits class x 30 minutes. Also walk a lot. Diet is fairly good. Drink a lot. However, I feel puffy a lot and soft ? Makes sense?

It's your weight. Keep at it with both exercise and diet and you'll get there.

I agree you have to decide if you want the sort of life that comes with a totally firm body if it’s not your natural shape. You’d have to be very restrictive with diet and probably increase your weight sessions to 4 a week.

Ive decided I want to be strong but eat like a normal person so I’m bigger than when I started training with weights but I am also much much stronger and with a more athletic build. Still puffy, but still visibly strong rather than fat. Spend a lot of time on Vinted buying clothes I love in bigger sizes so I don’t feel like I’m squeezing into anything!

I found that I got quite a lot of water retention from weight training. This is fairly new to me, but if I did a heavy session I would bloat, to the extent my upper thighs would get puffy etc. which I never suffered from before. I am 60 though and this only appeared in the last couple of years. This made me feel fat and puffy despite having quite good muscle tone (I can feel a six pack under the belly flab). Could that be what you’re experiencing?

For me personally I needed to intersperse with more cardio, which seems to be what you are doing. Not just running or walking but sessions of metabolic conditioning. I do those at home from YT videos with light weights (I’ve been following Heather Robinson). I still do the heavy weight sessions 2-3 times a week interspersed with Pilates and Metcon. I used to do weights only 4-5 times a week but lately I just end up in a ball of bloat, so need to break it down. This is me though, and probably age related. In my 40s I was in pretty good shape just on Jillian Michaels, which I suppose is a form of metabolic conditioning. It does seem to be what works best on me, maybe you need to find the combo that works for you.

obviously I don't mean that OP looks like Bichon Frise.
Fluffy is gym speak for when body composition has more fat than you're comfortable with.

@HeidiLite isn't that the same as being puffy?

Do you have scales which can analyse your muscle mass and body fat percentage?

Generally yes, even though you may use puffy when you are inflamed and struggling with water retention, like pp described. And fluffy if it's rather extra fat you're talking about.

Depends what you eat.

I'd say your body is about 30% exercise and 70% what you eat.
If your diet has ultra-processed food (and these days you have to read every label because even bread is ultra-processed), exercise will only get you so far.
And the current obsession with piling on protein while neglecting fibre is just another modern diet trend. A balanced diet beats chasing the latest nutrition fad every time.