can you lose fat while gaining muscle at the same time this is one of the age-old fitness questions that people continue to be curious about and for good reason these are both excellent goals for one's overall health and fitness but there can be a little bit of confusion with this many say that you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time While others say that you can't and need to alternate between phases of bulking or muscle building with phases of cutting or fat loss so which is correct well it is possible to lose
fat and Gain muscle at the same time but it depends on multiple factors it doesn't work well for every single person so today we're going to discuss what type of person this can work well for talk about the best strategies on how to do it from calories to strength training and even get into if cardio is a good idea for trying to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time so let's get into this anatomical and physiological awesomeness losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time is known as body recomposition you are changing
the composition of your body tissues and in this case decreasing the amount of fat while increasing the amount of muscle now some may Define true body recomposition as changing the proportions of these body tissues while maintaining the same total tissue Mass so in other words if you had a 180 lb person that person would stay at 180 lb but eventually less of that weight would be coming from fat and more of that weight would be coming from mus muscle but again you'd stay at 180 lb however there are situations where people may not want a
complete pound-for-pound swap of fat for muscle and I'll give an example of that a little bit later on but what are some of the challenges with losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time well first losing this stuff atap POS tissue or fat requires a calorie deficit you need to burn more calories than you consumed so that your body starts to tap into the stored energy that is in the fat and as a reference a pound of fat F contains about 3500 calories so if you wanted to lose a pound of fat each week
you'd want to average a calorie deficit of about 500 calories per day however building this tissue skeletal muscle tissue typically requires a calorie Surplus giving your body extra calories and energy to repair and grow muscle tissue after workouts and so obviously these seem to be contradictory goals because you can't be in a calorie deficit and a calorie Surplus at the same time another reason why body Rec composition is a difficult goal is because you can usually burn fat at a faster rate than you can build muscle just go back to that example again of losing
fat if you were in a calorie deficit of 3500 calories per week for 8 weeks you could potentially lose 8 PBS but imagine trying to add 8 lbs of muscle in that same 8we period that's difficult to do even in a calorie Surplus when someone is not trying to lose weight however there are situations where body recomposition does work and so let's cover some of those situations there are pretty much three categories of people that body recomposition works pretty well for the first category is beginners to resistance training and if that beginner is also a
young person like in their teens and early 20s that further gives an advantage because of those raging pubescent hormones but with any beginner their bodies are so primed for muscle development because when the body is first exposed to such a powerful new stimulus like resistance training it creates an extremely strong drive for protein synthesis that it's almost as if the person is on natural steroids and you've probably seen someone or maybe notice with yourself that you gain strength and size very quickly in the beginning beginners can follow almost any resistance training protocols and get great
gains in strength and size and so because of this strong drive for protein synthesis that beginners benefit from even in a calorie deficit the body will continue to liberate the energy from the fat in order to continue to provide the energy and resources to promote muscle growth begin could successfully burn fat and gain muscle for over a year in some cases but eventually this is going to be harder and harder to do which we'll address in just a second but the second category would be people that are returning to training so if you took a
long break from exercise when you return you kind of benefit from those beginner gains again but this doesn't last as long as those true initial beginners gains because you typically gain muscle back more quickly than when you first gained it you could consider this a form of muscle memory and we actually have a whole video video explaining how you gain muscle back faster in our muscle memory video that I'll link at the end of this video the third category would be individuals with higher percentages of body fat if you have a higher percentage of body
fat you'll obviously have more stored fat and in a way your body isn't going to respond to a calorie deficit the same way as if you had like 15% body fat with the extra fat your body can more easily tap into those fuel reserves while still building muscle and again if this person is highly overweight or obese most of the time the person usually isn't looking to do a pound-for-pound swap of fat for muscle usually the goal is to lose much more fat than the amount of muscle that they want to gain which also makes
this body recomposition more doable in this particular situation but with all these situations they will only take you so far because as someone has less fat to lose and gets more and more advanced or in other words those that have been building muscle for an extended period of time these people know that it takes much more effort to continue to gain muscle even in a caloric Surplus let alone in a caloric deficit and so this is where it starts to make much more sense to focus on one goal at a time or shifting to this
idea of going on a bulking phase where the focus can be purely on building muscle alternated with a cutting phase where the focus could be purely on losing fat and maintaining the muscle that was gained during the bulking phase because it is a much easier task to maintain muscle during a caloric deficit than it is to build muscle but if you find yourself in one of these three categories where losing fat and gaining muscle is feasible there are a few things that need to be done while attempting this first you must do resistance training now
I know that seems like one of the more obvious ones but I've got to be thorough here because you could lose fat from a caloric deficit without working out but that would do nothing for your muscles and you would actually likely lose some muscle with the fat if you didn't combine the caloric deficit with resistance training because there is no way to get significant muscle growth without a strong stimulus and again that strong stimulus is lifting weights compound movements are going to be your biggest bang for buck here such as squats deadlifts bench press shoulder
press pull-ups Etc you can throw in some isolation exercises as well but again the foundation should start with those compound movements you also want to apply the principle of progressive overload which is trying to add a little more weight to the bar every week or so Progressive overload could also come in the form of increasing the Reps and or overall volume and there are multiple ways to fit this into a given week you could potentially pull it off with two days of resistance training a week but those would likely need to be longer sessions 3
days a week is a place that I often start with many of my patients but we have some more detailed videos on how to build muscular size and how to implement this into your routine that I'll link at the end of this video next we need to start messing with the calories and even the macronutrients specifically the protein like we mentioned earlier a deficit of about 500 calories a day will cause you to lose about a pound per week but I usually recommend a 300 to 500 calorie deficit when you're first starting out and of
course you need to make sure you're getting enough protein now protein recommendations are anywhere from 1.2 to 2.2 gam of protein per kilogram of body weight per day and the higher end of 2.2 is usually recommended for athletes and bodybuilders that are serious about putting on muscle now many of you may not consider yourself a major athlete or a bodybuilder however since we are in a calorie deficit some of the ingested protein will likely get pulled and utilized for energy instead of muscle building so because of this you would still want to hedge towards the
higher end of 2.2 gam per kilogram of body weight which for us non-metric people just a gram of protein per pound of body weight to do the trick now a quick word on cardio I love cardio there are obviously some incredible fitness and health benefits to doing cardio one of those that it can be an effective way to lose fat and again a whole bunch of other benefits so I almost always recommend it however if the main goal is to lose fat while also stimulating muscle growth we need to be a little careful with how
we implement the cardio there is such a thing as the interference effect which is if you were to perform cardio and strength training in the same exercise session the cardio could potentially interfere with maximal muscle growth now key word there was maximal muscle growth it's not going to completely blunt all muscle growth so so if you absolutely have to combine cardio and strength into the same workout it won't be the end of the world but we are already adding something else that can blunt muscle growth which is the calorie deficit so it's probably just going
to be best to do your cardio and strength training on different days or if you have to do them on the same day try to do them in different workout sessions separated by hours at a time for example there are a couple days a week where I do two a days where I'll go for a run in the morning and then 6 to 8 hours later I'll do some strength training but a split I often start my patients off with is something like strength training on Monday Wednesday Fridays and then cardio on Tuesday Thursday Saturdays
and taking Sundays off so hopefully that gave you some useful information on if body recomposition is right for you as well as a good starting point and thank you for supporting the channel let us know what you thought of today's video in the comments and we'll see you soon
