Building muscle and losing body fat ??

Gaz

Sorry if this is a stupid question but some one please clarify for me ...

Can you make significant muscle gains and lose unwanted body fat at the same time, for example im trying to build muscle and get more defined , now im doing weights and cardio about 4 times a week and my diet is quite good.

But after reading the various stickies i get that you need a calorific deficit to loose fat , but im also picking up that you need to eat more to gain muscle ???

Should a persons goals only be lose weight OR gain muscle ??

My body fat is about 17% and i only have a small abount of fat around my stomach that I would like to lose but how can i unless i have a calorie deficit and by having a deficit will this not ruin any weights work im doing to gain muscle in other ares !!!

Im lost !!! Please help

ali.c

My understanding is that its difficult and slower to do both but it is possible. Just speaking from my own experience, i cleaned up my diet and took up weight lifting, kept my cals just under maintenance and i built noticable muscle and lost noticable fat.
Weight training on a calorie defecit makes it a priority for your body to retain muscle, thus the only fuel it has is fat! So it is not wasted work.
my advice would be to keep an eye on how your feeling and how the scales is moving, if its going down too fast your losing muscle, if its going down at a steady pace of 1-2lbs a week then your burning fat. If the scales stays around the same but visually there is a difference then you are building muscle and losing fat. if you eat more on training days and less on non-training days, your body will use the surplus on training days to build muscle AFAIK.
Everyone is a bit different, play around with it and see. If you not getting the results (say in 2 weeks or so) you want then changes things around a little. Though personally i found eating well and training hard to give great results!

BossArky

• Cut out high levels of carbs (bread, pasta, spuds .. unless just 90 mins before gym)
• Eat buckets of tuna (i.e protein to build and sustain muscle) after work outs.
• Drink tonnes of water (to stay hydrated).
• Bust yourself on bench, squat and dead lift (all compound lifts).

I'm sure someone else can give a more detailed and elegant response.

Hanley

Darth Homer wrote:

Can you make significant muscle gains and lose unwanted body fat at the same time, for example im trying to build muscle and get more defined , now im doing weights and cardio about 4 times a week and my diet is quite good.

Yes, you can. But it isn't easy and requires a truly disgusting amount of effort in the gym.

I'll use myself as an example, I've put on 2kg in the last 4 weeks, my bodyfat's dropped 1-2% (about 1mm skinfold drop). And I've done it while eating choclate and lucozade everyday, and eating fast food at least 4x a week and sometimes 2x a day.

It was not a healthy approach, and I would not recommend it because to be honest I don't know very many people who can put enough effort into training (think 3 hours a day, 4 days a week, ALL with weights) and are prepared to walk around with permanent joint pain for that period of time. If you can tolerate it then you can pretty much eat whatever the hell you want, gain muscle and still lose fat.

My point is you can out train a bad diet, but it'd would be impossible to do it for any great length of time. The reason I got away with it was because the workload was so truly immense that my body NEEDED the 4-5000kcals I was giving it perday jsut to survive. It wasn't gonna be storing it for fat.

So basically, yes, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time. And it can be done while eating chocolate, drinking coke and lucozade AND eating fast food. But the chances of someone doing it without being prepared to be inconstant pain are HIGHLY unlikely and ther's far easier ways to do it but require more careful nutrtional planning.

daveirl

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