Body Recomposition: How to lose fat while building muscle
If you're trying to build some functional strength, look better naked and improve your longevity, all you need is about 10-20 pounds of lean muscle, and that’s an achievable goal for almost anyone. Better still, you can do it while losing fat.
Welcome to the body recomposition (recomp). During a body recomp, you lose fat while simultaneously building muscle. In some instances, your weight on the scale stays the same. You just look wildly different. In other instances, you might lose some body weight. In either case, picture losing the belly, while building muscle in your arms, chest, back, legs, glutes and shoulders.
For most fitness generalists, a body recomp is not only achievable; it’s often the best option. Instead of cutting, bulking and counting calories, you get to focus on the same diet and lifestyle habits you’ll need to maintain your health, performance and your new physique for the long run. In other words, from beginning to end you focus on getting really good at eating healthy, training consistently and living well.
No more yo yo diets, and no more internet fad nonsense.
Wanna see how it’s done?
In this article I’ll explain:
Let’s get started!
Who can perform a body recomp?
First things first, are body recomps even a real thing?
Definitely!
I’ve achieved it for myself and seen it in my clients. But more importantly, it’s found over and over again in the scientific literature. For example, one study took untrained, overweight police officers and had them start a strength-training program. After 12 weeks of training, the officers averaged a loss of 9.3 pounds of fat while simultaneously gaining 8.8 pounds of lean muscle.
Not too bad for 12 weeks of work!
Perhaps you’re thinking, that’s all well and good for young, over weight, untrained police officers. But what about me? Don’t worry you’re almost certainly included.
Are you older? One study found a similar body recomp with men in their 60’s.
Are you already pretty fit? Another study produce a body recomp with elite athletes from a wide range of sports.
Are you already relatively lean? Another study saw elite, extremely lean gymnasts build some muscle while losing fat.
The typical fitness enthusiast can absolutely build muscle while losing fat. And unless you’re leaner than you want to be, a body builder or an advanced strength athlete, a body recomp is likely ideal.
In other words, unless you look like (or are trying to look like) this guy a body recomp is very achievable.
What should you eat to lose weight while building muscle?
Do you need to count calories? Should you track macros? Should you go low carb or high carb?
The beauty of the recomp is that you can forget all of that. Instead just focus on eating a healthy moderate protein diet with enough healthy fats to promote hormone health. In other words, focus on a healthy diet.
Food Quality
The first thing to do is improve the quality of food you eat, and by that I mean eat more whole food and less processed food. Processed foods are things like pizza, French fries, cookies, soda and white bread. Whole foods are things like fresh fruits and veggies, salmon, eggs, whole grain bread and avocado.
In other words, don’t eat like a frat boy.
There are three reasons for this. First, whole foods are more filling than processed foods. This means you naturally eat less food. One study confirmed this. Researchers had one group of people eat mostly processed food (think pasta, burgers, pizza and ice-cream). They had the other group in mostly whole foods (think salmon, steak salads, and fresh fruit). The whole foods group spontaneously ate about 500 kcal less food.
They didn’t count calories. They weren’t on a diet. They ate less, because whole foods are more filling.
Second, whole foods will help you lose weight EVEN if you eat the same number of calories. Many nutritionists have long suspected this to be true, and a recent study seems to have confirmed it. Researches had two groups eat the same number of calories. But one group at a high quality diet (think healthy whole foods). The other group at a low quality diet.
In just 12 weeks, the group eating the higher quality diet lost significantly more fat. This happened even though the two groups were eating the same number of calories. In other words, even if you don’t eat less food, eating higher quality food will still help you lose weight.
Finally, a high quality diet will reduce your inflammation levels. No only will this help you recover better between training sessions, but it will increase your rate of muscle growth.
Long story short, if you aren’t already consistently eating a healthy diet, then start there. It may be all you need to start losing weight and building muscle.
If you’ve already mastered the basics of a high quality diet and want to get even leaner, check out my article, 10 ways to manage your hunger for year-round visible abs.
Protein
To build muscle you need protein, and you need to get enough. Moreover, to recover from your training you need to eat enough protein. In other words, every meal should contain plenty of healthy lean protein. No surprises there.
If you’re uncertain of how much protein is enough, check out my blog, Protein made simple.
Healthy Fats
To build muscle you need plenty of sex hormones, and to build sex hormones you need to eat enough healthy fats. Higher fat diets tend to increase your production of anabolic hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone and IGF-1. Omega 3 fatty acids (e.g. fish oil) can increase testosterone production.
If you’re uncertain of how much healthy fat is enough, check out my blog Dietary fat made simple.
What kind of training leads to muscle growth?
What causes muscle to grow?
The primary cause of muscle growth is intense, prolonged mechanical tension. When you lift weights, it puts biomechanical tension on your muscles, and when there’s enough tension, you get growth. This means you can effectively forget about muscle damage or metabolic stress. It doesn’t matter how sore you feel the next day or how pumped you feel after lifting, although neither is a bad thing.
What matters is how much tension you put on your muscles. And here’s where things get interesting. You can measure and track how much mechanical tension your training is generating.
What does growth-stimulating tension look like?
Picture doing pull ups. Maybe the first 5-7 are relatively easy. The next 2-3 kind of suck. And the last 1-2 are pure hell. In fact, on those last two, you get slower. The bar seems to creep towards your chest as you fight for every inch.
Now picture doing some pull ups with 20 pounds on your back. You get to skip the 5-7 relatively easy reps, and instead you jump right into 1-2 that kind of suck. At rep three, you’re already slowly fighting your way to the bar.
Finally, picture doing assisted pull-ups on a machine. Now the machine makes you 20 pounds lighter, so you get 15 relatively easy reps at the start. Then you have 4-5 that kind of suck. And finally there’s 1-2 that are that familiar slow hell.
Notice first that it doesn’t matter how much weight you lift, eventually you experience slow, painful difficult reps. And of course the process terminates in failure. Eventually, you can’t do another pull up. Your muscles become incapable of another rep. It may take you 3 reps to get there or it may take 15. But if you keep going, you will eventually fail.
This is fatigue setting in, which forces your muscles to recruit more and more muscle fiber. In other words, on the first pull-ups, you only need a portion of your muscles to do a pull up. But by those last few reps, you are recruiting every last inch of muscle in your back, lats and biceps to get up to the bar.
If you have some experience with strength training, this should be a familiar experience, and it highlights growth-generating tension.
Growth generating tension is the reps you do in that fatigued state. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you do 8 pull ups with 20 pounds on your back, 13 pull ups with just your body weight, or 20 pull ups with machine assistance. So long as you experience those difficult final 2-5 reps, you will stimulate growth. For this reason, the final four or five reps are sometimes called “effective reps”.
How to maximize your effective rep count
Let’s imagine that you do 12 pull ups. The last 2 are pure hell. You rest for a minute or two, and then you go for another set. Can you still do 12 reps? Probably not. This is especially true if you were within 1 or 2 reps of muscular failure.
Does it matter if you only can do 10 reps on the second set?
Nope. That’s normal. That’s how it’s suppose to work. If you’re training hard and keeping close to failure (1-2 reps in the tank), you will do fewer reps on subsequent sets. That’s how it’s suppose to be. But you want to avoid a massive drop off in reps. For instance, you don’t want to go from 12 to 6.
There are two ways to avoid a big drop in reps. First, you need to rest adequately between sets. If you’re seeing huge drops in reps, try resting a little longer.
Second, you want to avoid training to full muscular failure. It’s probably just fine on your last set, but when it’s one of your early sets, it can impair the rest of your work out. Instead of dropping from 12 to 10 reps, you might see a big drop. Consequently, I recommend leaving 1-2 reps in the tank, and only hit failure on your last set.
In other words, stimulating muscle growth is a balancing act. One the one hand you want to train hard, leaving only 1-2 reps in the tank. On the other hand, you don’t want to train so hard that you see a huge drop in reps. You want to perform as many “effective reps” as possible.
Practical takeaways:
If something is so heavy that you can only lift it 1-4 times, it’s not going to cause much muscle growth.
If you can lift something more than 25-30 times, it isn’t going to cause much muscle growth.
The last 2-5 reps of a set are the “effective reps”. These are the reps that cause the most muscle growth.
Leave 1-2 reps in the tank. If you train to complete failure on your first 1-2 sets, you will create so much fatigue that your following sets will not cause as much muscle growth.
If you’d like to learn more about the principles of successful strength training, check out my article Is your strength training going to get results?
How much training is enough?
How much are you training? Is it enough? How are you tracking it?
Coaches and researchers use the term volume to quantify how much an individual is training. You can think of volume as the total amount of work a muscle does per week. To track volume, all kinds of complicated methods have been suggested and even used. For example, some researchers multiply the total number of reps by the total number of sets by the total amount of weight lifted. (sets x repetitions x kilogram)
Fortunately, there’s an easier way. You can simply count the total number of sets per muscle group per week. This makes perfect sense given the concept of “effective reps”. So if you do 4 sets of pull ups on Monday and 3 sets of chin ups on Thursday, then the weekly total is 7 sets for your lats, biceps, rear delts and upper back.
In 2018, researchers conducted a systematic review of the scientific literature to test this system. They concluded that it worked so long as you kept two rules in mind.
First, all sets should be taken close to failure, ideally 1-3 reps from failure. Again, failure is defined as the inability to complete a repetition. For instance, consider pull-ups. Maybe you can do a max of 12 pull-ups. The 13th pull up is completely impossible. Anything between 9 and 12 pull-ups is going to count. Of course, as you fatigue, your max will decrease. So maybe on set three you're only doing 7 pull ups, and yet you’re still within 1-3 reps of failure.
Second, the weight should be heavy but not too heavy. Ideally, you should be able to lift it between 6 and 25 times. If you can only lift it three times, it’s too heavy to count as a set. If you can lift it 35 times, it’s too light to count as a set.
How much training is enough?
One team of researchers put together a killer study to look at exactly this question. The study compared the effects of training for 3, 9 or 15 sets per week. They tracked improvements in strength, explosiveness, muscle endurance, body composition and muscle size over a six-month period. They used military personal with no prior weight training experience as participants in the study.
They found that 3 sets per week improved in strength, body composition and explosiveness but did not build much muscle and did not improve muscle endurance. The groups that trained for 9 and 15 sets per week improved everything. And in terms of muscle growth, the 15 set per week group improved the most.
This is pretty consistent with what you see in most studies. Here are some key concepts to keep in mind.
There’s a dose response relationship with muscle growth and training volume. In other words, 12 sets will cause more growth than 9 sets.
There’s a minimum effective dose. You probably need something like 6 sets per week to make any progress. 3 sets won’t do much.
There are diminishing returns. 12 sets is better than 9, but the difference isn’t a big as the difference between 6 and 9. As you increase the amount you train, each additional set contributes less growth.
Can you train too much?
As you train and build muscle, you can handle higher and higher volumes. Your muscles become resistant to damage and fatigue, and thus the minimum-effective dose and optimal training volume increases. In fact, it’s common for dedicated strength athletes to complete 25-30 sets per muscle group per week.
Another factor is going to be sleep and stress. When you’re facing chronically high levels of stress, it significantly reduces your ability to build muscle and increases the time it takes to recover.
Similarly, sleep deprivation will destroy your ability to build muscle and recovery from training. When you don’t get enough sleep, your body produces less growth hormone and less testosterone, which impairs your ability to recover and build muscle. In one study, women were given melatonin to help them sleep better. After one year, the women who slept better increased their muscle mass and reduced their fat mass. This was independent of exercise or dietary changes.
Having said that, most fitness generalists should aim for between 9-12 sets per muscle group per week. If you are stressed or sleep deprived, you should aim for less, maybe even just 6 sets. If you are less stressed, sleeping adequately and able to recover well, 15 sets per week may be optimal.
Anything beyond that is unlikely to help, and it may even hurt. If you train too much, you’ll stop recovering from your workouts, lose strength and stop building muscle.
Let me close by saying that consistency is the single most important factor. Even small improvements—if done consistently—will get results. You can get results with just a few small improvements to your diet and a couple of training sessions a week. But you need to do it consistently, and you need to be patient enough for the results to accumulate.
Thanks for reading!
Would you like help getting off the sidelines and into your own adventure? Check out my online coaching.
