How to build lean muscle and burn off excess body fat at the same time
Posted: under Members.
One or more times every week, I receive an e-mail that goes something like this:
“I’m skinny and I ought to know the best way to gain muscle. However I need to get rid of my fat gut simultaneously. Just what is the best way to lose belly fat?”
This requires asking the body to do two things:
Growing muscle mass while losing body fat.
And not just that, they want to carry out both at the exact same time, and they would like to know what things to eat and the way to workout in order to make it happen.
If you’re reading this, there’s a high probability you would like the very same thing. You don’t want to choose one particular target. You want to know precisely how to do the two as fast as possible.
So is it even possible to lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously?
The concise answer is absolutely.
But it’s something that’s restricted to people who are extremely fat and have never lifted weights before.
When you have moved beyond the overweight beginner stage, adding muscle while burning fat is a goal that becomes harder over time.
People who are coming back to to training after an extended time off, where muscle memory comes into play, will also find it possible to add muscle while shedding fat. Folks using anabolic drugs will also to find it a lot easier to lose fat and build muscle than guys who choose to stay drug-free.
In other words, those people who can drop fat and build muscle simultaneously are:
1. Overweight beginners
2. Those returning to lifting weights after time off doing nothing
3. People using anabolic drugs
Why can’t anyone outside of those categories drop fat and build muscle concurrently?
To build a lot of new muscle tissue, your body needs fuel. In other words, you’ll need to eat more calories than you’re burning off each day. But to lose fat, you need to take in fewer calories than you expend.
If you do try to do both things simultaneously, your progress in either direction is likely to be so frustratingly slow that it won’t be long before you feel like throwing in the towel.
Yes, you’ll be able to gain SOME muscle mass while you’re burning fat. But you’re not going to be able to do both at anything approaching the same speed.
In other words, it’s far more realistic to drop 10 pounds of fat while putting on a pound or so of muscle. Dropping 10 pounds of fat and replacing it with ten pounds of muscle is the exception and not the rule.
Rather than trying to build a lot of muscle and drop a large amount of fat simultaneously, you’ll see better results by splitting your training goals into several phases, and working on one after the other.
If you spend five or six weeks putting on muscle, followed by 3-4 weeks burning fat, then you’ll have lost fat and gained muscle size at the end of the 8-10 week period, but you’ll have done it by alternating periods of muscle gain and fat loss.
Jul 28 2011