Today, I want to talk about a subject that still seems to cause a great deal of controversy and confusion:
How do I lose fat and gain muscle at the same time?
Most people are not interested in doing one or the other.
They want to know how to do BOTH.
And they want to do it as quickly as possible.
So let me clear this one up once and for all.
With very few exceptions, losing a lot of fat and gaining a lot of muscle at the same time is very hard to do.
That’s because of the opposing demands these goals impose on your body.
To build a lot of new muscle tissue, your body needs energy. In other words, you’ll need to overfeed — to consume more calories than your body needs to maintain its weight. To lose fat, you need to underfeed — to consume fewer calories than your body needs to maintain its weight.
If you do try to do both things at once, your progress will be so frustratingly slow that it won’t be long before you feel like throwing in the towel.
It would be nice if the energy your body needs to build new muscle tissue came from stored fat. But when your body is in a predominantly catabolic state (which it will need to be if you want to lose fat), gaining muscle is not its main priority.
There are exceptions, the most notable of which are beginners.
More specifically, I’m talking about overweight beginners. And by “beginners,” I mean people who are new to strength training.
Just to clarify, if you’re a beginner trying to gain weight and build muscle by overfeeding, your body is in an anabolic state. You won’t be able to lose fat while still consuming more calories than you burn.
However, overweight beginners on an exercise and nutrition program that’s geared towards fat loss can gain build muscle and burn fat at the same time.
In fact, researchers from the United States Sports Academy found that a group of overweight beginners lost 16.3 pounds of fat and gained 9.5 pounds of muscle during a 14-week training program.
In other words, they gained a decent amount of muscle while also losing slightly more than one pound of fat per week.
But the leaner and more muscular you get, the harder you’ll find it to build muscle and burn fat at the same time.
For example, it took a group of elite Norwegian athletes an average of 8.5 weeks to drop 11 pounds of fat. They were able to gain muscle at the same time, but only 2 pounds of it.
Anyone who’s been in shape before will also find it easier to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously when returning after a layoff.
Why?
When a muscle is trained, detrained and retrained, there is a faster change in muscle size during retraining compared to the initial training period from an untrained state. This is a phenomenon that some refer to as muscle memory.
Of course, muscle tissue itself can’t actually “remember” anything. Rather, the number of nuclei (which play a crucial role in building new muscle) in muscle cells increases when you lift weights, even before the muscle cell itself starts to grow.
But those nuclei aren’t lost when you stop training and your muscles shrink. Instead, the extra nuclei form a type of muscle memory that allows the muscle to bounce back quickly when you start training again.
In many cases, the people in the before-and-after pictures you see in the magazines are fitness models who have spent a few months “slacking off” prior to getting their “before” pictures taken.
Because they’ve been in shape before, it’s a whole lot easier for them to regain their old figure than it is for someone who’s starting from scratch.
Then there’s the issue of drugs.
Recently, I received an e-mail from a reader who wanted my opinion on the training program followed by a guy who appeared on the cover of a popular fitness magazine.
The cover model in question claims to have gone from 216 pounds and 23.9% body fat to 202 pounds and 6.8% fat in just 15 weeks.
That means he lost 38 pounds of fat and gained 24 pounds of muscle in a little under four months.
But when I saw a few pictures of the guy in question, I’d say that he was almost certainly enjoying the benefits of a little “pharmaceutical assistance.”
Drug use is a lot more common in the fitness industry than you might think. It certainly isn’t limited to top athletes trying to get an edge over their competition.
Here’s an extract from the Holy Grail Body Transformation System, where author Tom Venuto discusses the use of drugs, not just among athletes, but people like you and me who go to the gym just to look and feel better.
Excellent training and nutrition programs help, of course, but training and nutrition alone can’t explain the extraordinary results some people experience.
Some supplements can be useful, but they don’t help enough to account for unusual gains either. More often than you’d imagine, steroids and other physique-enhancing drugs are the “mysterious” explanation.
And remember, most users don’t want you to know they’re “on the juice.” I know some 40 and 50-something men who take growth hormone and testosterone.
The drugs were legally and legitimately prescribed by a doctor for hormone replacement and “anti-aging” purposes. I doubt however, whether they are not enjoying the “side effects” of better body composition, and yet some of them claim to be natural, or simply don’t tell anyone.
In this short clip from the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster, top fitness model Christian Boeving (you might have seen him in some of the old MuscleTech adverts) discusses his use of anabolic steroids.
Christian was later fired by MuscleTech because of a standard clause in all MuscleTech contracts that prohibits the discussion of anabolic steroids.
I was actually surprised that he was so honest about his use of steroids. It’s rare to see anyone in the public eye give a straight answer to a straight question (which would immediately disqualify him from a future role as a politician).
According to an article in the New York Times, Christian didn’t think his comments would cause that much trouble, mainly because he thought it was “pretty apparent that the top people in the industry use steroids to look like we do.”
I couldn’t care less if someone uses drugs. We’re all given one body and should be allowed to do what we want with it. There are already plenty of finger-pointing, hand-wringing, “do-gooders” out there telling us how to live our lives. I have no interest in becoming one of them
However, I do think it’s important to know what goes on “behind the scenes” so you can set goals for yourself that are both realistic and achievable. Otherwise you’re just going to end up frustrated at the large gap between your expectations and your results.
The bottom line is that you can burn fat and build muscle at the same time.
But unless you’re an overweight beginner, returning to exercise after a layoff, very genetically gifted or using drugs, you’re not going to be able to do both at anything approaching the same rate.
In other words, it’s far more realistic to lose 10 pounds of fat while gaining a pound or two of muscle. Losing 10 pounds of fat at the same time as replacing it with 10 pounds of muscle is just not a realistic goal for most people.
For fast muscle building workouts, take a look at Muscle Gaining Secrets.
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