Can you Build Muscle and Lose Body fat?
Wouldn’t that be nice right?
Not to mention it’s sold to you all the time.
This is referred to as Recomposition in the bodybuilding world.
The answer is both Yes and No, which in better words, it depends on the person.
When can you?
New to training volume and/or protein intake.
The body sees this new training or nutritional intake as a priority to adapt to this. Within the first 1-3 months of training (especially strength), body will see that it must build muscle to survive this new environment.
Therefore, people can tend to gain weight or don’t see the scale change much on the start of a good program. Because the coach should be providing them with the right number of calories to recover (not to shed pounds quick), and the body would still very likely be burning body fat as well at this time if they are in a calorie deficit.
However, after this ‘newbie’ gains phase, your body will adjust, and stop the gaining process. You’ll likely see less muscle growth.
Now assuming you have a larger desire to burn fat over build muscle. But you’re thinking “Can’t I still keep building?”
Remember it’s a context thing.
So, you could simply try to eat near your calorie maintenance. BUT most research has found this impairs both muscle gaining and fat loss.
Meaning, you don’t do either very quickly.
Building muscle is a very taxing thing and it requires a great deal of energy to keep it alive. In essence, you can consider it an expensive thing for the body to afford to keep around. So, during a deficit of calories in a fat loss phase, the body doesn’t really want to build that much more because It’s not in an environment that fosters building.
Because of this, a great deal of info will come out saying “You’re better off being okay will some fat gaining, during a muscle building phase. Then go into a fat loss phase, and you’ll see the definition you wanted.”
This is the old Bulk and Cut of bodybuilding.
Does it work? Of course.
But at a cost.
The psychological component of the bulk to cut is a risky thing.
If you’re someone who routinely has a habit of overconsuming calories and not controlling your appetite, a bulk is almost giving you a license to binge.
And if you’re the kind of person who Yo-yo diets, but can’t sustain programs, the bulk and cut play right into the extremes of you discipline habits.
So you’re thinking “Rhyland, this sounds depressing. You’re telling me I should never do a muscle-gaining phase?”
Not quite.
Growth phase option 1 – Vacations/holidays
I believe in the ebbs and flow of life, and I teach my clients this all the time.
Meaning during the week have lower calories, so you can have higher calories in social situations.
You can look at this a week-to-week basis but also as a social lifestyle basis.
Consider what time of year would it be less likely that you would want to hold back on eating?
Often we think of summer and holidays, maybe vacations right?
These are excellent opportunities to increase training volume and grow more. This isn’t going to be drastically substantial as a bulk, but it can fit into life while controlling eating habits well.
Growth phase option 2 – Slow Recomposition
Aim to use the recomposition model and hedge your bets in a few ways.
1) Eat just under what your calorie maintenance would be by 100 calories.
If you’re someone who puts on weight easy you want to assume you need to be more cautious about it. And mentally you know you must be more careful. When you think “F it, I’m in a surplus” you’ll likely overconsume and not count.
2) Use progressive overload to increase your volume much more than normal over time.
Make sure you track your reps, weight, set, and especially reps near failure. These are the effective reps. But the volume of sets near failure per muscle group is what drives muscle gains the best. So, keep track of this very diligently. Don’t just kind of do reps. You need this tracked so your body knows it needs to grow.
3) Increase your step count to about 12000 a day (consider this in your calorie maintenance).
Let’s assume your body likes to build. Meaning it build fat AND muscle well, right? But it doesn’t really like to burn unless it must. So, increasing the burning requirement is a good thing to do to again hedge your bet you’ll be burning body fat.
BUT notice I said step count. NOT cardio. Keep this to be low intensity and simple enough your body is recovering very well from the high-volume training.
Growth phase option 3 – Vary your volume
Vary your volume during your training. Plain and simple.
Say you normally do 3 sets, of 8 exercises in a workout. For about 4 weeks, lower that, but keep intensity (load) still pretty high, and do 3 sets of maybe 2 of them, and just 1-2 sets, of the other 6 exercises.
If you keep the intensity high you won’t lose the strength or muscle you’ve already earned.
Then after about 4 weeks, increase your volume progressively each week and keep it higher to 4 sets per exercise for about 3-5 weeks (until you feel you need a deload).
What you’re doing is you’re resensitizing yourself to volume and therefore muscle building.
Even in a calorie deficit, you’ll likely see some muscle building.
When I prepped for this photo shoot, the gyms had just reopened about 4-6 weeks prior and I could finally do heavy weights again. I didn't have a before photo for it, but I can tell you from watching the results, and seeing this photo my body grew despite the calories deficit.
This is because the increase in weight was a NEW stimulus rather than the push-ups and bodyweight stuff I had been doing before.
CAUTION
None of the above are as effective as just bulk and cut. There is a reason why pro bodybuilders do it all the time.
So, you could still do it that way, but you have to look at your tradeoffs.
I hope either way you look at the realization of what people are offering you when they say “Build muscle and lose body fat.”
It’s possible but not as easy or likely as you think.
And when you decide to do a build, make sure you consider accountability in the process all the same, so you keep consistent with the lifestyle you aim to live.
Build smart my friend.