It’s happening. Spring is here. That means lighter mornings. Warmer days. And… clickbait. Yeah. This is the time of year people think about exercising more. Think about holidays. Beach weather. Being ‘Beach body ready’.
People are looking for quick fixes, and the internet knows it.
You can see how we get swept up in it, especially if your training has slipped during the winter.
But the claims in the ads out there now, things like: “Burn fat and build muscle with this 20-minute HIIT workout” or “The detox diet craze that burns fat and builds muscle”, are misleading, time-wasting, and potentially dangerous.
So let’s answer the question: Can you really lose fat and build muscle at the same time?
The short answer is: No. But here’s the long one.
Building muscle and reducing fat require two opposing things: to shed fat you must have a calorie deficit. Your body needs to be converting fat into fuel.
To build muscle the opposite is true, you need to consume more calories than you expend, giving your body enough protein and calories to increase the size of muscle fibres.
The two are opposing in their very nature. Trying to do both at once won’t work. It can’t work. They cancel each other out.
We all know this. It’s the biggest truth when it comes to fitness: there are no quick fixes. You can make it easier. You can eat right and train hard. But even then, change isn’t going to happen overnight.
But it will happen. And with fat loss and building muscle, you can still have it all. You just can’t have it all at once. Choose which problem to tackle first.
Do I want to focus on fat first, then build muscle, or start the other way around? There's no right answer, it's whichever is most important to you right now.
The end results are pretty much the same, but there will be some differences in your approach:
Losing fat means one thing: calorie deficit. But if you choose to lose fat first, keep the protein levels in your diet high, and make sure you’re resistance training.
Protein feeds muscle. You’ll be more likely to retain any muscle you already have, even if you are restricting your calories.
Focusing on retaining muscle will also ensure that you’re losing fat, not just weight. (more information on Fat loss versus Weight Loss here)
If you decide to bulk up and build muscle first, it’s all about pairing the right kind of resistance training with the right diet and calorie intake.
Get the balance right, and you can still build up muscle without adding on too much extra fat. Plus, your body is an engine. The more muscle you build, the more efficiently your body will lose fat.
If you build muscle first, at a higher rate than you gain fat, the fat you have will be spread over more muscle, and your body fat percentage goes down, even if the amount of fat you have slightly increases. You will look leaner.
There are always exceptions to the rule. But the likelihood that you fall into one of these categories is incredibly small.
If you’re going through puberty, taking steroids, are totally new to training, or are coming back from a long illness or injury, there is a chance that you can do both, but it’s rare, and definitely not typical or predictable.
The quick fixes are tempting, but as we’ve just demonstrated, are not scientifically accurate, and the bottom line is: they just won’t work.
Yeah, you might want to work harder to lose a bit of winter fat, that’s fine. But you don’t need to get ‘beach body ready’.
Our bodies are for life, not just for summer. You got this.
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