At least once each week, I receive an e-mail that goes something similar to this:
“I’m skinny and I ought to know the best way to gain muscle. However I would like to get rid of my fat middle at the same time. Just what exactly is the best way to lose belly fat?”
This involves expecting the body to try and do a couple of things:
Building muscle while burning off fat.
And not just that, they would like to carry out both at the very same time, and they would like to know what to eat and the way to workout in order to make it happen.
If you’re reading this article, there’s a high probability you’d like the very same thing. You don’t want to pick one goal. You would like to know how to do the two as soon as possible.
So is it actually possible to lose fat and gain muscle concurrently?
The brief response is for sure.
But it’s something that’s limited to those people who are very fat and have never lifted weights before.
When you have moved beyond the overweight beginner stage, adding muscle while dropping fat is a target that becomes increasingly difficult.
People who are coming back to to exercise after an extended period of time doing nothing, where muscle memory comes into play, will also find it relatively easy to gain muscle while burning fat. People using anabolic drugs are also going to find it a lot easier to drop fat and build muscle than guys who choose to stay natural.
In other words, those folks who can lose fat and add muscle at the same time are:
1. Overweight novices
2. Those returning to lifting weights after a layoff
3. Individuals using anabolic drugs
Why can’t anyone outside of those categories drop fat and build muscle simultaneously?
To build a lot of new muscle size, your body requires fuel. In other words, you’ll need to consume more calories than you are expending each day. But to lose fat, you need to consume fewer calories than you expend.
If you do try to do both things at once, your progress in either direction will be so frustratingly slow that it won’t take long before you feel like throwing in the towel.
Of course, you will be able to add SOME muscle mass while you’re losing fat. But you’re not going to be able to do both at the same speed.
In other words, it’s far more realistic to drop 10 pounds of fat while gaining a pound or two of muscle. Losing ten pounds of fat and replacing it with ten pounds of muscle is the exception and not the rule.
Rather than trying to build a large amount of muscle and lose a lot of fat at the same time, you’ll get better results by splitting your training goals into several phases, and working on one after the other.
If you spend 5-6 weeks building muscle, followed by 3-4 weeks losing fat, then you’ll have burned fat and put on muscle at the end of the 8-10 week period, but you’ll have done it by alternating periods of muscle gain and fat loss.