Most people who say they gained weight or packed on ‘mass’ when they started strength training are getting wrong. 

This behaviour is akin to blaming a scammer for the loss of 500 bucks when you have a spending problem that sees you waste 50000 bucks. Strength training being the scammer and your eating habits being the spending problem. 

They introduced a new activity in their life. Said activity led to fatigue. Fatigue led to perception of hunger. Hunger led to eating too much. And the energy derived from eating too much deposits as visceral or adipose fat. 

Most people like to believe that they trained hard, ate the usual amount of food and they quickly packed on muscle. 

But this is not true. Muscle is incredibly hard to pack on. 

The training intensity required to put on muscle is much higher than most people imagine. A few curls or squats are not going to cut it. It’s multiple exercises performed at a fairly high intensity with reasonable load. Sweating a lot, stretching a lot or working at an elevated heart rate is not the same as training a muscle sufficiently to grow. 

The problem is you’re eating too much. You are overestimating how much energy you spent on strength training. Worse yet, you have no clue how much energy you spent on training or activity through the day and you ate far too much relative to what you spent. 

The most objective way to tell if you are actually carrying muscle ? Get a DEXA scan on a properly calibrated scanner (some Indian clinics are poorly calibrated). The results will puncture the egos of many a skinny fat folk who delude themselves as only carrying 12 percent or 15 percent body fat.