How to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle: Your Comprehensive Guide
Ah, the holy grail of fitness, losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time. Is it really possible? Can everyone achieve this? Who benefits the most from this approach? I'll do my best to answer these questions and provide a plan to help you succeed if this is your goal. I'll cover the fundamentals of fat loss, building muscle, nutrition, and lifestyle adjustments to support you on your journey.
Understanding Body Recomposition
What is body recomposition? It's the process of simultaneously losing fat and gaining muscle. The advantage is that you can achieve both goals at once, potentially maintaining the same weight while becoming leaner. This results in a faster metabolism, improved physique, and enhanced overall health and well-being, all without needing to drastically cut your calories.
Who does this work well for?
This approach won’t work well for everyone. If you’ve been consistent with your training for years, this becomes a lot more challenging to achieve, and it’s a much slower process. In a lot of cases it makes more sense to have dedicated seasons of cutting and bulking.
Some of the cases where this approach does work well:
Beginners
When you have minimal to no experience with weightlifting, your muscles are exceptionally responsive to the muscle-building effects of resistance training. This means you can be in a slight calorie deficit and still build muscle. Your body will use stored fat for energy, and use the calories you consume to build muscle.
A deconditioned Trainee
Maybe you used to be a gym rat, but you haven’t been consistent in a while, and have lost some of your progress. Thanks to muscle memory, you are primed to rebuild muscle more quickly the second time around.
An Obese/Overweight Trainee
If you have a higher body fat percentage, you have more stored energy. This allows your body to utilize that stored energy while still having enough left over to build muscle.
Sub optimal trainee
If you've been training for a while but not optimally or consistently, you may not have built much muscle yet, and might still be similar to a beginner lifter. Maybe you haven’t incorporated progressive overload, followed an effective training program, or kept your nutrition on track. If this is you, you still can have a successful recomp. Actually, this is a common one with my online training clients. They feel like they’ve been working at it for a while, but haven’t seen the progress they want. They hire me, we make a few tweaks, and BOOM progress starts to happen.
How to set up your plan?
First, a couple of important points. To achieve this, you must be consistent and dedicated to your plan. Remember, this is a slow process; you won't see results immediately. You'll need to invest time and effort to make it happen. Alright, let’s talk about how to do that.
Training
For your training, you want to make sure that you are following a good resistance training program that is designed to build muscle, and incorporates progressive overload. If you don’t have a program to follow yet I have a free one here!
A couple of factors that are important for building muscle are volume, frequency, and intensity. You want to train your muscles at least twice per week, for 10-20 sets per muscle group, and bring your sets within 1-3 reps shy of failure for best results.
If you are brand new I’d stay at the lower end of the volume range, and not worry as much about the intensity. Instead, focus on your form and improving that, and do a little bit more every week than you did the previous week. This means you should add either reps, sets, weight, or anything to make it more challenging week after week. This is how you get your body to change.
A couple of other simple rules to follow:
Take adequate rest between sets
No need to jump from exercise to exercise. You will have a hard time getting stronger and building muscle this way. Take anywhere from a 1-4 minutes rest between sets. 1-2 minutes for smaller isolation exercises, and 2-4 for bigger compound exercises is a good general rule to follow.
No combination exercises
Compound exercises are awesome. Those include exercises that utilize multiple muscles at once. An example of this would be a deadlift or squat. Combination exercises generally suck for building muscle. These would be something like a squat into a bicep curl. The reason why these don’t work well is because your legs are a lot stronger than your biceps. The weight you need to adequately train your legs is going to be much higher, so in this scenario your biceps might be getting a good stimulus, but your legs wouldn’t be.
Don’t worry about keeping your heart rate up or how many calories you burn
If you think of working out as a way to burn calories, it's time to shift your mindset, and think “I’m training to BUILD, not lose.” Focus on getting stronger and better at the exercises you are performing. Resistance training is for building muscle, while your diet can help with weight loss.
Nutrition
Your nutrition can be set up a couple of ways depending on your goals. Here are the things you’ll want to focus on the most.
Protein
Aim for at least 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Protein is crucial in the recomp process because the amino acids that make up protein are essential for building muscle. Without sufficient protein, no matter how hard you work in the gym, your body won't have the necessary building blocks to build muscle.
Calories
You should keep your calories close to maintenance. Maintenance calories are the amount you need to maintain your current weight. If you have a lot of fat to lose then I recommend being in a small deficit. Somewhere around 10-15%. This means if your maintenance calories are around 2000 calories then you’ll want to eat around 1700-1800 calories. If one of those other factors I listed above are true for you then you should be able to lose fat and gain muscle at this small of a deficit.
Sleep
While everyone knows that sleep is important, not everyone fully understands its significance. If they did, they would prioritize it as much as their training and nutrition. I encourage you to do that. Consider sleep to be just as essential as every other aspect of your fitness journey.
Getting enough sleep is crucial for optimal recovery from your workouts and effective muscle building. During sleep, your body releases Human Growth Hormone (HGH), which plays a key role in muscle protein synthesis. This process repairs damaged muscle fibers and helps build new muscle tissue. Conversely, insufficient sleep can create a catabolic state in which the body begins to break down muscle mass. In other words SLEEP! Get it in! It’s extremely important!
Clues that you are on the right track
How do you know if it's working? One of the most challenging aspects of recomping is that it's a slow process. The scale may not move much, if at all, which can sometimes make people feel like they're wasting their time. I assure you, you're not if you're sticking to the plan. It just takes time. Here are some indicators that you're on the right track.
Your getting stronger
This one is my favorite! If you are consistently improving and progressing in your training, you’re doing great. One of the best aspects of this metric is you'll notice improvement faster than with others. You should be able to do a little bit more every workout until you become more experienced. If you focus primarily on getting stronger in the gym and set performance goals rather than aesthetic ones, everything else will eventually fall into place. This approach gives you something fun to strive for and helps keep you motivated.
You’re losing inches
Take measurements of yourself to track your progress. This will help you see changes even if the scale doesn’t move. I’ve had clients who’ve gained weight on the scale, but lost inches around their waist. Some have told me that if it wasn’t for the measurements, and pictures they would have gotten discouraged with the scale going up, so it’s important to get initial measurements to compare.
You look different in pictures
Take progress pictures. Sometimes you don’t even notice the changes you’re making until you see the differences side by side.
Client Examples
Here are some examples of clients who knocked it out of the park, and had successful recomps.
This is Laurie. Laurie is a badass. She was in the sub optimal trainee category. She wasn’t eating enough food to fuel her workouts and build muscle. We brought her calories up, and gave her an optimal training program. Since then she’s done little mini bulks and cuts, but for the most part is staying around the same weight, and eating around maintenance.
In picture one she’s 133lbs. In picture two she’s 138lbs. As you can see, she gained weight but has lost inches and fat. She’s leaner with more muscle. This is the magic of recomping.
To keep this client’s privacy I’m going to call her Becca. Becca was another badass client, and one who wasn’t eating enough food. We upped her protein and calories, and put her on an optimal training plan and she saw results pretty quickly.
Becca’s weight is almost the same between these pics. She’s around 1lb heavier in the second. You can see an improvement in her posture, and muscle tone.
Important points to remember
This is a very slow process, and it works best for newer lifters or people who are primed to build muscle. If you’re a more intermediate lifter, who’s been consistent for 1-3 years then this is going to be an even slower process. If you are more advanced I would recommend doing seasons of cutting and bulking instead. Either way results are not going to happen quickly. This is not a “transform your body in 30 days” plan. It’s more like years. I would recommend this approach to a newer lifter though, because honestly, it’s the best! It’s amazing to be able to eat adequate amounts of food, get stronger, build muscle, and lose fat all at the same time.
To successfully recomp you need to follow a good training program, hit your protein and calorie goals, and be consistent. Consistency is the most important factor when it comes to any fitness plan. You can have the most optimal plan, but if you only follow it 40-50% of the time you’re not going to get to where you want to be as quickly compared to a slightly suboptimal plan that you follow 80-90% of the time. Notice how I said 80-90%. You don’t need to be perfect, just stay in the game and try to be as consistent as possible. Good luck! And as always, if you have any questions you can contact me, and I’ll be sure to answer them.
