The key is maintaining or increasing muscle % of body weight.
Of course you’ll lose muscle mass, along with everything else. But it’s possible to increase the percent lean mass and especially your muscle:fat ratio.
The key is maintaining or increasing muscle % of body weight.
Of course you’ll lose muscle mass, along with everything else. But it’s possible to increase the percent lean mass and especially your muscle:fat ratio.
I don’t understand this: if I’m fat and I start exercising without changing my diet, I should be losing fat and gaining muscle mass. As a result, my weight can be going down.
If you don't change your diet, you will likely be building muscles, but your weight is unlikely to change. You can even _gain_ more weight once you start exercising.
It comes down to math. An hour of resistance training is just 200-500 calories above the baseline. That's just one sports drink worth of energy.
I think when you're in an energy deficit (aka losing weight), your body will attempt to reduce energy demand by metabolizing materials from the body.
It prefers to power the body from stored glycogen (carbohydrates), next it will try to metabolize stored fat, next it will go for protein sources (muscle and other tissues). In extreme deficits, it'll even start consuming material from the digestive track and other important stuff.
Many people lose weight, get stronger, get faster and surprisingly lose muscle mass at the same time.
But you can prevent that by eating enough protein, adding strength training, not overtraining or extreme deficit, fueling your workouts with carbohydrates, getting high-quality sleep, and minimizing non-meal, non-workout related simple carbohydrates.
#TLDR When you walk down the street, your body is doing all these things mostly carbs, some fat and a little protein. When you start pushing yourself, you burn more energy but in similar ratios. After about 90 minutes or at higher levels of effort, you'll shift to burning more fat and even more protein if you reach ketosis, as your body conserves remaining carb stores for important stuff like thinking.
AND as you exercise, especially as you reach your strength thresholds, you incur damage in your muscles. When you have your recovery meal/drink with carbohydrates after your workout , especially when resting, the insulin spike, triggers your body to consume protein to rebuild your muscles and add more mass/strength.
But if your workouts don't include enough strength training, your body may not get the anabolic muscle building signal, and it may instead focus on reducing weight (via fat and muscle), or increasing nutrient and oxygen flow to the muscles (building hemoglobin, growing capillaries), increasing muscle activation and engagement (new neural pathways), and/or increasing energy creation capacity (growing more mitochondria or expressing more efficient chemical pathways).
Which is why you can get faster, stronger with smaller muscles.
So my recipe for building muscle while losing fat: * Strength train each muscle group in sets of about 10 for 80 reps per week (I shoot for 2 days, whole body, 4 sets of 10 reps). * Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates and electrolytes * For workouts lasting more than 90 min, especially cardio/endurance, begin consuming carbs at 30 min and consume 90-12g/hr for high intensity (Zone 3 or higher) * Try to consume 2g of whole protein per kg of target body weight. Or 4g per kg of lean body mass. YMMV. these are all rules of thumb. * Wake up at the same time every day, and prepare for bed 9-10 hours before you have to wake up (have a last snack, some water, turn out the overhead lights, start relaxing) so that by the time bedtime rolls around you can fall asleep quickly and get 7.5-9.5 hours of quality sleep
If you're really hitting it hard and you've induced severe muscle fatigue, bump up the protein intake and get more rest and recovery time.
Thank you! That’s quite a lot of information to digest. What do you mean by “Prepare for every workout with some carbohydrates and electrolytes”? What should I prepare?