3 Effective Ways to Lose Fat + Gain Muscle at the Same Time

All You Need to Know about Body Recomposition

How to get your body from having a high fat percentage to you ideal physique? Well, there are two options:

1. Go on to bulk, focus on building muscles and then focus on losing weight to strip off the excess fat afterwards.
2. Do the reverse. You focus on slimming down by stripping off the excess fat first, then only you focus on building muscles afterwards.

However, what if you can take a shortcut? What if I am telling you that you can build muscles while simultaneously lose body fat? This is the whole brilliant idea behind body recomposition, especially for those who have skinny fat and a higher body fat physique. It focuses on body composition rather than weight. Body composition is a way to define what the body is made of: including water; proteins; minerals; and fat. It provides a more accurate depiction of one’s health and a more accurate description of weight than the more commonly used method ‘BMI’.  If you begin exercising, within the first month you won’t be losing weight, you will gain weight – but don’t let this discourage you. That weight you just gained is lean muscle. Simultaneously, you will lose body fat, but that will be overshadowed by the lean muscle gained.

One of the ways to draw off excess body fat is to be in calorie deficit. However, the drawback of being in calorie deficit is that it severely compromises your ability to build muscles. Not only your performance in the gym will be negatively affected, multiple papers also show that your muscle protein synthesis is significantly reduced by about 20-30% . This is because there is no calorie to serve a fuel for your body to build muscles, which make building muscles while losing fat very difficult for your body to physiologically carry out when it is in calorie deficit.

Actually, the body is able to metabolize and use your own body fat to now to provide the necessary energy and need to recover and grow your muscles despite being in a calorie deficit. Hence, it causes you to lose fat and build muscle at the same time. Researches indicate that certain individuals are more likely to experience this and they are more likely to benefit from the suggestions that I am going to include in the following.

These individuals are:

• Beginner lifter with no or minimal training experience.
• Detrained individuals who spent some time off the gym
• Those who have high percentage of body fat (>25%)
• People who have never taken training and nutrition seriously

What Should You Do Now

If you are belong to the categories mentioned above or you simply just want to give these suggestion a try, then here is what you need to do.

1. The Body Recomposition Diet

Diet quality matters when it comes to losing fat and achieving body composition. Although it is true that you need to be in calorie deficit to enable fat loss to occur, researches show that the greater the calorie deficit, the greater the reduction of protein synthesis. Therefore, it is less likely that you will be able to able to experience muscle growth. For this reason, you should eat at a very slight deficit, roughly 5% to a maximum of 20%, which more most individuals this equals to around 100-500 calories below maintenance calories . If you are an individual with a higher body fat percentage (>25%), aim for  the higher end and vice versa for those who has lower fat body percentage (<15%). This way your body will:

• have sufficient energy for optimal performance in the gym and recovery
• experience a smaller decrease in protein synthesis for muscle growth
• be adequately fueled and hence will be able to achieve further fat loss by having a faster metabolic rate

Besides, you should try aiming for protein intake around 1g/lb of bodyweight to boost the likelihood of you building muscle and lose fat at the same time, especially if you are on the leaner side. All you need to do is to fill the rest of calorie with carb and fat. It is recommended to have more carb intake than fat to fuel your body for a better performance in the gym.

How to calculate your daily suggested calorie intake

Below is the way to calculate your suggested calorie intake:

STEP 1: Calculate the maintenance calories by multiplying your body weight in lbs by 14-16 (if in kgs, multiply by 31-35). Use the higher end of the range if you are leaner and the lower end if you have a higher level of body fat.

Example: 52 kgs x 33 = 1,716 maintenance calories

STEP 2: Subtract 100-500 calories to get your suggested calorie intake

Example: 1,716 calories – 300 calories = 1,416 calories

2. Switch Up Your Training

Here is the basic for building muscles:

• Train each muscle at a frequency of at least 2 times per week
• Train each muscle with 10-20 sets per week

Besides ensuring that you are training with the optimal muscle training frequency, you should switch up your training to provide a new stimulus for muscle growth. Below is what you should do:

• Switch your training split (how regularly you lift and which muscles you train)
• Change exercise execution (how you perform the exercise to ensure the effectiveness)
• Increase or decrease your muscle training frequency
• Switch up exercises

By doing this, you can Increase the likelihood that you stimulating new muscle growth, especially if you have been using the your routine for a certain period of time. You should use your new routine consistently and focus on gradually getting stronger to continue stimulate your muscle for growth.

3. Optimize Your Nutrient Timing

It is advisable that you evenly spread out your daily protein intake into about 3-5 meals throughout the day in order to keep your protein synthesis level elevated and optimized throughout the day. It is best at helping your muscles to recover and grow despite being in a calorie deficit.

Besides optimizing your protein intake, you should also optimize your meals around the workout. When you are in calorie deficit, we tend to experience decrease in protein synthesis level. Researchers show that by just ingesting adequate protein around the workout with a post workout shake for example, we are able to significantly increase protein synthesis compared to not having anything or just not ingesting enough protein. Thus, this increases the chances of us being able to develop muscles despite in a calorie deficit.

It is found in a study that subject that time their meal around the workout is able to significantly increase their strength and muscle gain while dropping the body fat percentage by 1%. On the hand, the other group that have exact pre and post workout meal but much earlier before and much later after the workout end up gaining less strength and less muscle mass and failed to lose any fat, despite having the same sufficient amount of carb and protein.

Thus, optimizing your protein intake throughout the day and the meals around your workout by having adequate carb and protein shortly before and after you train are equally as important.

Suggestion from us

If you have experienced any of the following, even if the scale is not decreasing, you have successfully improved your body composition by losing fat and gaining muscles at the same time:

• Waist circumference decreases
• Muscle circumference measurements increases
• Strength in gym increases
• Visually look better

We are offering trainings at Fightzonesg, we motive each other to become better.

Therefore, if you are serious about getting the body that you have always wanted, why not get a FREE TRIAL form us and try today. Register Now! Enroll today and get training.