💪How to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle💪

26 Dec , 2017

It’s very hard to do, but it can be done!

The two studies I’ll refer to are done by researchers at McMaster University and Garthe, et al in Norway.

1️⃣High protein: 2.4g/kg of body weight was found to be optimal for accomplishing fat loss and muscle gain simultaneously. Keeping protein high will signal your body to hold onto your current muscle as well as build more.

2️⃣Lift heavy weights: Utilizing heavy, compound movements require more muscles to be used which requires more energy to be spent. Also, utilizing supersets will keep your heart rate up which furthers the energy expenditure it appears from the studies.

3️⃣High intensity cardio: Researchers at McMaster had participants do HIIT 2 times/week on the days they weren’t lifting which helped burn the most amount of calories for the time spent.

4️⃣Full body workouts: Stimulating muscles multiple times per week has been shown to result in better muscle growth than one day per week. This will be key to accomplish this goal and is what was done in the McMaster study.

5️⃣Calorie deficit: Garthe, et al. Found that slow weight loss of 0.7% BW per week resulted in more lean body mass gain and essentially the same fat loss that 1.4% BW per week at the end of the study.

6️⃣Special populations: Researchers also found that losing fat and gaining muscle is best done in overweight, de-trained, or steroid enhances individuals. If you are in one of these, it will be much more likely to happen and will be much harder if you’re not. Researchers presume this is because if you’re overweight, the food you eat will help fuel muscle gain and the calorie deficit will take care of the fat loss. For de-trained people, anything will make your muscles grow essentially, since it’s such a large stimulus for any beginner and you’re body adapts quickly. For steroid-enhanced individuals, nearly anything can happen so we’ll leave it at that since I’m assuming no one reading this is on steroids 🤔