Can you lose fat and build muscle at the same time?

Yes, yes and yes!

Your body can gain fat and burn muscle at the same time… You don’t need to be in a caloric surplus to gain muscle; I repeat, you don’t need to be in a caloric surplus to gain muscle.

Your body needs the following things to build muscle

1) Enough Protein

Up to 1.8g/kg of BW is the highest limit one should go for.

2) Stimulus

This is done by lifting heavy weights. When you lift heavy weights doing compound lifts in the rep range of 5–7 you create maximum muscular tension. In order to build muscle, you need to keep getting stronger in the above rep range.

3) Enough Calories

As I said earlier, you don’t need a caloric surplus to gain muscle. Your body is a very adaptive being. Once you provide a strong stimulus, your body can use the fat reserves and direct them toward building muscle tissues. This is called caloric partitioning.

Say you are at 10% and weigh 180 lbs. It means you have 18 lbs of fat reserves, and we know that 1 lb of body fat has 3500c calories, so that’s 63,000 calories that the body has in reserves. It can use that energy towards anything that demands attention.

And when you are getting stronger and lifting heavy weights, it’s a good enough reason for your body to direct calories toward building muscle tissue.

Now There Is A Caveat To This

-Once you have crossed the beginner’s phase, gaining muscle and losing fat becomes relatively tough. But I would say even if you have a few years of training behind you but still haven’t gained much muscle, then you can lose fat and build at the same time.

-You need to manage your calories intelligently and do training in different phases to keep the body guessing. Create a large enough deficit, and your body goes into alarm mode and shuts off its metabolism. This also causes you to lose your strength rapidly.

On the other hand, if you don’t create a good enough deficit, then you don’t lose enough fat that can count as progress. I cover this quite nicely in my course Lean- The Ultimate Skinny-Fat Solution.

Related Course:

I have undergone many transformations and so have hundred of my clients. From experience, I can say that Heavy lifting + Intelligent managing your caloric intake can allow you to go from 20% body fat to 10% body fat in 3-4 months while building lean muscle.

You will also learn the 3 top mistakes you may be making when trying to do the above and overcome them, leading to your success.