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Recap: Benefits of Focusing on Muscle Gain
In last week’s post I wrote about the benefits of switching your mindset from focusing on fat loss to muscle gain.
In that blog post I outlined several potential benefits that focusing on gaining muscle can have over focusing purely on fat loss:
- Focusing on gaining muscle removes the restrictive mindset when it comes to diet and shifts you to a mindset of eating enough and in a way that facilitates gaining muscle.
- Fat loss alone does not guarantee improvements to health while gaining muscle will certainly benefit your health in the short term and long term.
- Adding muscle requires you to exercise, while fat loss does not. When you lose fat without exercising you are actually negatively impacting your health because you will also lose muscle mass.
- Focusing on adding muscle will require you to also make sure other parts of your lifestyle are optimized such as sleep and diet while fat loss does not.
In addition, at the end of the blog post I made the case that without focusing on fat loss and by putting your focus on gaining muscle that you will almost certainly achieve your fat loss goals because you are forced to optimize your lifestyle changes in order to gain muscle. The downstream effect of optimizing your lifestyle to build muscle is a reduction in fat as well.
The Energy Paradox: Muscle Gain vs. Fat Loss
I am sure some of you were thinking..
“Hold on, don’t we need to be eating more food and be in a caloric surplus in order to gain muscle? How can you be in a caloric surplus and lose fat?”
These are great questions and it does sound contradictory on the surface.
As this image from @Wod_Science shows it takes quite a bit of energy (aka calories) to build 2.2LBs (1 KG) of muscle.
Since building muscle requires so much energy it is no wonder why being in a caloric surplus can be helpful.
In this blog post I am going to try and elaborate on how you can still gain muscle and lose body fat and apply some nuance to the discussion as well as what you should be doing based on where you are in your journey.
Can You Gain Muscle While Losing Fat?
First let’s back up a bit and consider if it is true that you cannot add muscle if you are dieting in order to lose fat (aka you are in a caloric deficit).
To answer this question the first thing we need to consider is where you are coming from, i.e. we need to know the context because the answer to this question can depend on two things:
- Your current level of body fat.
- Whether you have been strength training or have taken a long break/never strength trained before.
Factors Influencing Muscle Gain and Fat Loss
1. Current Body Fat Level
If you are overweight or obese and have not done any kind of physical activity in several years then you are more likely to be able to lose fat and gain muscle even in a caloric deficit.
Why?
The body sees strength training as a stressor that it needs to adapt to. When you are starting from a place where you are not doing strength training this is viewed as a big threat to the body so it will prioritize adding muscle to adapt to the stressor.
To create the muscle the body needs energy to do this.
Luckily individuals who are overweight/obese have an excess of energy they can extract from their body fat. If the body needs to take some of those calories from body fat and put it towards building muscle, no big deal because it still has plenty more energy to fuel all the processes in your body to keep you alive. This is why overweight/obese untrained individuals have the biggest upside when it comes to gaining muscle and losing body fat (Is an Energy Surplus Required to Maximize Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy Associated With Resistance Training, 2019).
While unfortunately a large portion of the population falls into the untrained, overweight/obese category what if that is not you?
Maybe you have some weight to lose but are not overweight/obese and have not done any strength training for the past few years?
If this is you, then you are also probably in luck!
Just like in the untrained overweight or obese individual, you are also going to greatly benefit from your body trying to adapt to the stress from strength training plus the extra weight you want to lose. Your body can use the additional body fat to make up for the lack of calories coming from food to fuel the additional muscle growth.
The people that are going to struggle with adding muscle mass in a caloric deficit are going to be the ones who have been strength training for some time now.
Unfortunately I can’t provide a threshold to you where you suddenly are considered “trained”. I am pretty certain that it would be impossible to come up with one. My hunch is that it is likely that you would probably see a gradual decline in rate of muscle gain as your consistently strength train until at some point you stop seeing any gains while being in a caloric deficit. Of course this will coincide with a gradual reduction of fat loss so we are confounding this problem with less energy available to put towards adding muscle.
I would say if you have been consistently training for 1 year or more you are considered “trained”, but I am really just guessing here, there is no data to point to.
2. Training History
So if you are trained, and want to gain muscle but also have some body fat to lose what are you to do then?
Well not all hope is lost when it comes to gaining muscle and being in a caloric deficit even for trained individuals. Research has shown that you can continue to gain muscle even in a caloric deficit up to about a 500 calorie per day caloric deficit. Here is a graph that nicely illustrates this from a meta-analysis on the topic (Energy Deficiency Impairs Resistance Training Gains in Lean Mass but Not Strength: A Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression, 2021).
If you notice the slope of the line is linear in the above graph, meaning the steeper your caloric deficit the less muscle you will add (and once you cross the 500 calorie per day deficit threshold you will start losing muscle mass).
So even if you are trained and you keep the deficit relatively modest, say in the 100-300 calorie range, you can still lose body fat and gain muscle. Given what we know about gaining muscle and losing body fat in overweight and obese individuals I am willing to guess that trained overweight or obese individuals will have better results doing this than a trained normal weight individual.
That said, the rate of muscle gain (and also fat loss) may not be what you want. It might be so slow that you might be better off choosing one path or the other, either fully commit to a caloric deficit and accept the inevitable muscle loss (which will be minimized by your strength training) or commit to being in a caloric surplus and accept the potential for some additional fat gain.
The next point I am going to make should seem obvious at this point but I am going to state it anyway….
If you are trained and already lean, trying to gain more muscle while in a caloric deficit is likely a fruitless effort. While it’s not impossible for everyone, most will see very little or slow results. I recognize that few people are in this situation, but if you are lean and hoping to lose more fat while adding muscle, I’m sorry to say that unicorns don’t exist.
Practical Takeaways
So what are the applicable takeaways from this blog post?
First you need to decide which category you fall into:
Are you trained or untrained?
If you are untrained are you overweight or obese?
If you are untrained and overweight or obese then you can put yourself in a pretty decent caloric deficit and add in some strength training and you will be able to gain muscle and lose fat.
If you are untrained and just have some weight to lose then I think you can also put yourself in a caloric deficit and strength train and you will be able to gain muscle and lose fat however your runway until you stop seeing the results you want from this might be shorter.
If you are trained and are overweight you can try to put yourself in a 100-300 calorie deficit and see how this works in terms of weight loss and gaining muscle. You might have some decent success but don’t be surprised if you don’t notice results quickly.
If you are trained and normal weight, I would suggest you do a traditional fat loss and muscle gain cycle where you pick one goal or the other and focus on that exclusively. Either commit to the fat loss goal and accept the fact that you won’t be gaining muscle while you do that or commit to the muscle gain goal and accept you won’t be losing fat. Once you get to a decent place with your fat loss or muscle gain goals, you can swap to the other goal (if you want to) and work on that for a while.
And if you are trained and lean, sorry, unicorns don’t exist and you should probably commit to eating in a caloric surplus and accept that you might gain some body fat while you attempt to add muscle to your body.
Nutrition and Lifestyle Considerations
I echo what I said in last week’s blog post: if you’re trying to gain muscle in a caloric deficit, you don’t need a restrictive diet, especially if you’re in the overweight/obese category. Focus on gaining muscle, which will improve your diet quality and naturally create a caloric deficit. Make sure you are eating enough protein, around 1 g per pound of body weight (2.2g per KG). In addition, optimize lifestyle factors like sleep, stress management, and recovery to assist with your fat loss goals.
Conclusion
I hope you were able to take something away from this discussion on the benefits of gaining muscle and how you should approach doing so depending on your own individual situation. There is so much about health that requires nuanced discussions and I find the best way to provide this information is through my newsletter. You can only convey so much information on social media so for the most comprehensive actionable information sign up for my newsletter using the form below. My goal is to give you the information to help you reach your goals, and my newsletter is the best place to get that information!
References
Energy deficiency impairs resistance training gains in lean mass but not strength: A meta-analysis and meta-regression. (2021, October 13). PubMed. Retrieved August 28, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34623696/
Is an Energy Surplus Required to Maximize Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy Associated With Resistance Training. (2019, August 20). NCBI. Retrieved August 28, 2024, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6710320/#B55