They also will not hold you back from making any progress at all. They simply can make progress occur more or less quickly, in which case it is important to practice patience and stick-toitiveness.

The leaner you currently are, the more likely you are to see noticeable changes in your progress photos. Conversely, someone who weighs pounds at 10 percent body fat, will look much leaner after losing five pounds of body fat.

As you get leaner, each pound of fat loss makes up a larger percentage of your total fat mass, making visual changes much more apparent.

Therefore, it is important to be more forgiving on your first few months of progress photos, especially if you have significant fat to lose. We recommend taking progress photos one to four times monthly.

Because taking progress photos can be an annoyance, you should get into the habit of taking them on the same day each week, or on the same day every month. The problem with shooting pics too frequently is that changes will be less detectable.

The THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 26 problem with shooting too infrequently is that you may start forgetting to take photos at all. The bottom line is finding a sweet spot that allows you to be consistent with this very important progress tool.

Include front, back and side pics. If you can perform mandatory bodybuilding poses, they are ideal for assessing muscular THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 27 detail and balance.

FOOD SCALE Tracking macronutrient fat, carbohydrate and protein intake is a very powerful and effective way to manipulate body composition. While progress can still occur using these intuitive or autoregulated eating methods, we think that this approach may be too blunt for those with body recomposition goals.

If you just so happen to be eating the appropriate amount of each macronutrient, body recomposition can still occur without tracking macros. However, we think that to optimize your results, you need to be more intentional and proactive about your intake.

For this reason, we recommend a fairly rigorous tracking-based approach when body recomposition is the goal. We highly recommend you use a food scale when possible rather than using volumetric tools such as a measuring cup.

Volume metrics can be much more inaccurate and unintentionally over or under consuming calories can slow your rate of progress.

Due to the dehydration effect cooking has on many foods, we recommend weighing food raw before cooking since this is a more precise way THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 28 to measure.

As an example, consider one serving of oatmeal. Typically, it is listed as 45 grams or one half of a cup. If you were to use a measuring cup, you may end up with 60 grams of oats for the same half of a cup.

This unaccounted mistake might lead you to consuming an additional 58 calories 1g fat, 9. If you were to make such a relatively small mistake with many of your food sources, incrementally, you could be missing your calorie and macro goals by a fairly large margin. It is essential that you track your protein, fat and carbohydrate intake from all foods you eat.

For the food sources that have nutrition facts labels, there should always be a specified weight that corresponds to each serving size. If you plan on eating out frequently, make an effort to stick to lower fat meals, which will decrease the margin of error between the reported nutritional content and the actual nutritional content.

SKIN CALIPERS While not as accurate as some of the more high-tech tools we will discuss next, a skinfold caliper is still an incredible tool for estimating body fat percentage. In fact, it is the only tool that directly calculates subcutaneous body fat the fat directly underneath your skin — exactly the type of fat we are most concerned with losing!

If your skin-fold thickness decreases, you will look leaner, no question. There are several different types of skin fold calipers available including disposable, plastic, digital, professional and scientific models. This can then be used to estimate body fat percentage by use of formulas that extend beyond the scope of this book.

Skinfold measurements can be taken from different sites on the body, although for consistency purposes, we suggest pinching one inch to the side of your belly button.

Simply measure changes in thickness in mm over time in that same spot to measure how your level of body fat is changing over time. THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 30 Using the tracking sheet provided see Supplemental Materials — Chapter 17 , you can complete either a three-site or seven-site skinfold assessment to estimate body fat percentage.

If you decide to use the three site assessment, pinch the belly, tricep and anterior thigh. If using the seven test assessment, pinch the chest, belly, thigh, tricep, subscap, hip and midaxillary areas.

We recommend taking skinfold measurements as frequently as once or twice per month or according to your personal preference for tracking. Roughly speaking, because fat mass and lean mass have different densities, the electrical current will travel at different speeds through different body tissues to register information about body composition.

Although different models vary with regard to accuracy, BIAs are fairly accessible and often quite cost effective. The body scale option will only collect information from the lower body and use that information to estimate the bodyfat percentage of your entire body.

As a result, if you store more fat on your legs than your upper body, the body fat reading may be higher than the true value. The other common BIA tool is a handheld device which only sends a current through the upper body and then creates a full body estimation off that information.

Even though these devices will not be percent accurate, they are still quite useful for tracking changes. As you lose bodyfat in the coming months, the estimated THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 31 reading drops to 17 percent which implies that your true body fat is now somewhere around 12 percent.

The specific numbers are not of particular importance. It is the trend we observe by tracking changes over time that makes this tool useful. The best BIA tool to date is the InBody technology that analyzes both upper and lower body information to give you specific skeletal muscle mass data, fat mass, and body fat percentage.

Since these InBody scans are becoming more readily available, it may be worth doing a simple search to see if you can access this technology locally. Similar to the caliper measurements, you can optionally use a BIA device to estimate body fat percentage as frequently as once or twice per month, or according to your personal preference for tracking detail.

Typically, the scan takes about six minutes to complete and most importantly, is painless and safe. Because it uses X-ray energy, we advise against pregnant women using this tool.

Granted, the level of radiation from a DEXA scan is not particularly concerning: It provides a similar level of radiation as a flight from NY to Boston. Watch the full vlog from that day.

If you are looking to get really objective and accurate with your tracking and have the ability THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 32 to get a DEXA scan, this is a tool we suggest you use.

Similar to the other special tools, it is by no means required to assess whether or not body recomposition is occurring. Five years ago or so, it was a near daily occurrence in online fitness circles to see two bros going at it over whether or not you can get just as lean eating nothing but junk food as you can eating a chicken-and-broccoli diet, as long as calories are matched.

Flash forward to present day, and I think most people who engaged in this grand debate can confidently say that neither side got it perfectly right. Clearly calories and macronutrients matter for body composition, but we definitely cannot THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 35 say that they are the only things that matter.

As such, we will quickly outline the fundamentals of energy balance as the foundation upon which to build our tower of nutritional knowledge. In a nutshell, energy balance is the relationship between the calories you consume by eating food and the calories you expend by exercising, having a heartbeat, digesting food, fidgeting at your desk, running to the car, et cetera.

A calorie is simply a unit of energy. Over a specific time scale, energy balance is said to be positive if you are storing more calories than you are burning. Generally speaking, this means you are in a caloric surplus and should gain weight. Conversely, energy balance is said to be negative if you are burning more calories than you are storing.

In this case, you are in a caloric deficit and should lose weight. Again, for the most part, bigger caloric surpluses will lead to faster weight gain and bigger caloric deficits will lead to faster weight loss. Imagine you have two different bank accounts.

Because muscle is made up mostly of water, it has much less stored energy than fat does. One kilogram ~2. The point to take home here is that despite being in a net caloric deficit, muscle was still gained, proving that the energy balance equation does not imply that fat loss and muscle gain cannot occur at the same time.

They simply CAN! THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 38 MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LAB When many people in the fitness industry talk about body recomposition, they typically mention how it is most common under the four circumstances we outlined in Chapter 1: beginners, detrainees, obese individuals, or steroid-users.

There is a popularly referenced study by Maltais et al. On average, the subjects lost 2. I Chris see body recomposition occur frequently with subjects in the lab, with clients of mine, and even in collegiate athletes.

Consider some of my published scientific data for instances of body recomposition. In , I was a co-investigator on a very interesting training study at the University of Tampa. We were looking at the effects of different training regimens on collegiate female volleyball players THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 39 One group lost nearly six pounds of fat mass while at the same time, gaining six lbs of lean mass over just seven weeks!

Granted, while this level of recomposition is impressive, it is dealing with one specific population: elite female volleyball players. This study also used training styles focused on improving explosive power and muscular performance on the court, not high-volume resistance training like the typical gymrat reader of this book would use.

And, while these subjects were incredible athletes, they were likely best classified as intermediates, having only a few years of training experience.

Yet, this data demonstrates the power of an evidence-based nutritional approach subjects were consuming approximately 0. Having seen that recomposition is certainly possible, even common, in the literature, can it happen in more advanced trainees?

This was actually the first research project I was a co-investigator on during my graduate studies and I think it has some really interesting pieces of data.

As a side note, the point of the study was to figure out if autoregulating exercise selection would impact strength and size gains. More to the point, our subjects were 17 highly trained males with a minimum of three years of continuous training experience.

As a minimum standard, they also had to be capable of squatting 1. For example, if a subject weighed pounds, he would have to be capable of squatting at least pounds and bench pressing pounds to participate. These subjects spent the next nine weeks performing high volume, full body training sessions, THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 40 three times per week.

Their average protein intake was 1. At the end of the nine weeks, we found that both groups gained lean body mass and fat mass on average. Similar to what we outlined in scenario three from Chapter One, because the subjects gained more muscle than fat, their body fat percentage decreased.

They built muscle while getting leaner on a relative scale. In our opinion, this can be said to count as body recomposition. More importantly, what truly fascinated me at the end of data collection was the drastic individual differences between subjects! Five out of the seventeen subjects did in fact lose fat AND gain muscle at the same time.

The most incredible recomposition from this study came from a subject who gained over eight pounds of lean mass while at the same time losing over four pounds of fat mass! Keep in mind, this was only a nine week transformation! This is not an outcome anyone wants to see after nine weeks of intense training.

We speculate that this was due to being under-recovered or over-trained. Or perhaps their protein intake was too low to promote full recovery. Perhaps their sleep quality was poor, or there were outside stresses negatively impacting their recovery. If we were actually trying to create recomposition in these subjects, we could have done things differently and more optimally.

For our purposes in this book, the take-away from this study is to show that body recomposition can and does occur in highly trained individuals. Before we wrap this section up, I want to share some fresh new data from our latest training study. At the time of this writing, it has yet to be published and will be presented at the NSCA National Conference.

Aube et al. Publication date TBD In this study, we examined the effects of different training volumes 12 sets, 18 sets, 24 sets per week on highly trained individuals. This was a lower-body training study in which subjects trained legs twice per week. Once again, we tracked their nutritional intake to ensure subjects were getting enough protein to support their training demands.

This time, after 10 weeks of training, all three groups experienced true, undisputed body recomposition where lean body mass was gained AND fat mass was lost. For example, the group with the best results doing 12 sets of legs per week, for the record gained nearly four pounds of lean mass while losing 1.

Again, as before, a few individuals saw the opposite effect where they actually lost lean mass. This is pretty normal in training research because despite everyone having a unique recovery ability, every subject in any given group will be running the exact same program.

Again, our goal in outlining this data is not to prove that everyone experiences body recomposition, but rather to show that recomposition is certainly possible — even in highly trained lifters.

He walked into our lab looking like a well-built college basketball player and left looking like a professional natural bodybuilder, ready to battle with the best. I Jeff often hear in lifting circles that one of the advantages of staying natural not taking steroids is that you will be able to maintain your physique forever.

In my 13 years of training experience, I can confidently say that this is complete bogus. Throughout my training career I have noticed that my level of muscularity, hardness and definition waxes and wanes with the peak and valleys in my training and nutrition protocols.

In other words, when I am very serious and disciplined about training, my physique improves. When I am taking my training and nutrition less seriously, my physique worsens.

This could eventually derail what you worked so hard for. Obviously there are limits to what the human body can do. No matter how much we believe in the possibility of human flight, without the aid of technology, we will simply meet the pavement every time we try.

When we refer to not imposing self-limiting beliefs we are referring to opening yourself up to what the evidence actually suggests. If you think you can only gain one pound of muscle per year, well guess what?

At the time, society as a whole submitted to the belief that it was humanly impossible for anyone to run a mile in less than four minutes. That was until , when Roger Bannister broke through this barrier of perception. Although we no longer struggle with belief in the four minute mile, in the fitness industry it is still commonly thought that we cannot build muscle while losing fat.

We believe this is due to reductionist thinking about energy balance, lack of research data awareness and the inevitable groupthink effect. Body recomposition is ultimately achieved through the construction of one new tissue muscle and the breakdown of another tissue fat.

Straight ahead, we will turn our attention to the topic of metabolism. When scientists or fitness enthusiasts speak of metabolism or metabolic rate they are usually loosely referring to total daily energy expenditure TDEE : the total number of calories you burn each day.

It is sometimes referred to as your net metabolic rate. As shown in the chart below, three key factors determine the number of calories we burn each day. Basal Metabolic Rate BMR 2. Physical Activity Level 3. BASAL METABOLIC RATE BMR. Your BMR is essentially how many calories your body burns per day in order to perform all of its basic metabolic functions and maintain its body mass at rest.

As shown in Figure 4A above, BMR typically accounts for percent of your daily energy needs. Since your BMR comprises such a large portion of your total daily energy outflow, it is worthwhile to determine roughly how many calories it contributes to the total daily burn.

There are multiple ways to assess and calculate your basal metabolic rate. In scientific laboratories, an expensive piece of technology called the metabolic cart can assess your THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 48 resting metabolic rate by measuring the exchange ratio between oxygen and carbon dioxide when exhaling at rest.

Fortunately, after assessing thousands of people, scientists have been able to create equations so that anybody can obtain a very close estimation of their BMR. For those of you who like math and objective numbers, we recommend using the Mifflin St.

Jeor formula below to calculate your BMR. As you can see, this formula takes four variables into consideration: gender, age, height and weight. However, there are additional variables that are not, and can not be accounted for. This is one reason why this formula is very good, but not perfect.

BELOW ARE THE MIFFLIN ST. If, for example, you took two individuals of the same gender, age, height, and weight but one was 20 percent body fat and the other was 10 percent body fat, the leaner individual will most likely have a higher BMR and require more calories to maintain their weight.

We also do not want you to get too caught up in the specific number just yet. Remember that BMR is just one of three components of metabolic rate. PHYSICAL ACTIVITY LEVELS. For most people, daily physical activity makes up percent of total caloric expenditure.

It includes the calories burned from all of your daily activities, including typing at your desk, bringing groceries to the car and singing in the shower.

The calories burned from these non-exercise activities make up NEAT: Non-Exercise Activity THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 50 Thermogenesis. NEAT can vary greatly between individuals, directly impacting the number of calories they burn through daily physical activity High levels of NEAT is advantageous from a fat loss perspective and is believed to be largely responsible for the massive differences in total metabolic rate we see.

Did you ever wonder why your friend who is exactly the same age, weight and bodyfat as you can eat 1, calories more than you and still stay just as lean? It also improves hormonal factors such as insulin sensitivity and may improve carbohydrate tolerance With this in mind, if you live a very sedentary lifestyle and have fat loss goals, it would be important to create some active habits to increase levels of NEAT.

For example, taking a walk first thing in the morning, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking far away from the grocery store, or even getting a standing desk can all assist in increasing total THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 51 daily caloric burn.

This component of metabolism also explains why there is a drastic difference in caloric expenditure when comparing someone who works a labor intensive job, such as a construction worker, to someone who is regularly sitting at a desk job. With these metabolic factors in mind, we will make specific recommendations for formal cardio in Chapter Interestingly enough, when in a caloric deficit for an extended period of time, your body senses the decline in food intake and automatically decreases energy expenditure by downregulating NEAT.

This can result in something as simple as fidgeting less, but can also present as severe fatigue if you diet for too hard or too long. This is part of the reason why your net metabolic rate is not a fixed number.

As you diet longer and get leaner, your body finds intriguing subconscious ways to preserve energy. This is a key driver of the slowed metabolism that you often see with chronic dieters and is one of the reasons why throughout the book, we recommend more moderate caloric deficits and surpluses.

In the next chapter, we will put this information to use by determining your caloric needs based on your net metabolic rate. see Chapter Five for details.

THERMIC EFFECT OF FOOD. Sometimes referred to as dietary thermogenesis, the third component of your Total Daily Energy Expenditure is the amount of energy expended by breaking down and processing food for use and storage. Simply put, your body burns calories as it digests, absorbs, transports and stores food that you eat.

Just as each macronutrient carbohydrates, fats or proteins provides us with a different THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 52 number of calories see Table 4A below , they also require different amounts of energy to digest, absorb, and utilize.

Because of this, each macronutrient has a different thermic effect. In fact, every food source is slightly different in this regard. Some foods require more energy to digest and absorb than others.

This means eating a higher protein diet will result in more calories burned because it requires more energy to digest and absorb that protein. This is one of the many reasons why high protein diets typically result in greater fat loss and better improvements in body composition, even when caloric intakes are equated.

Complex carbohydrates are primarily made up of long chains of carbs polysaccharides that need to be digested and broken down into smaller molecules disaccharides, monosaccharides before being used for energy. On the other hand, most simple carbohydrates are already in THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 53 a usable form and do not need to be digested per se.

They simply need to be absorbed and can be utilized for energy or stored right away. For example, grams of sweet potato and 43 grams of Gatorade will both deliver roughly 40 grams of carbohydrates.

However, the thermic effect of these two foods are quite different. Your body will expend more energy digesting and absorbing the carbohydrates from the sweet potato than it will the Gatorade.

We will revisit this topic in later chapters when we discuss carbohydrate sources and peri-workout nutrition. These are important truths to keep in mind as we move forward with setting up the diet and cardio protocols in the following chapters.

CALORIE INTAKE: As mentioned previously, whole body changes in energy balance will be driven primarily by total calorie intake. In this chapter, we will determine how many calories to eat for body composition based on your personal needs. In Chapter Eight we will set up the best ratios of protein, carbs and fat to optimize muscle mass and training performance.

This will be the topic of Chapters Nine and Eleven. FOOD SOURCES: Where our calories and macronutrients are coming from also matter for driving positive body composition changes forward.

We will discuss this in the context of nutrient quality in Chapter Nine and Ten. Before digging into calorie intake, it is important to establish that these nutrition recommendations are intended to optimize body composition.

While having a relatively lean body composition is strongly linked to positive health outcomes, the hierarchy is arranged in the particular order above with the goal of optimizing body composition. As such, while we do not want to undermine the importance of eating for health, our attention will be focused on eating for body recomposition.

Of course, these two goals can and should be in perfect sync with one another, even if their primary areas of focus slightly differ.

CALORIE INTAKE: HOW MANY CALORIES SHOULD I EAT? Exactly how many calories you need to eat for body recomposition will depend primarily on three individual factors: your primary goal, your current body composition and your level of training experience.

Although these three factors are outlined with specific examples in Table 5A, it is important to understand their conceptual basis first. YOUR PRIMARY GOAL Obviously, the goal with body recomposition is to build muscle AND lose fat not to pick one or the other. However, we think it is important that even if you have the goal of achieving both, it is still important to pick what goal is more important to you.

For example, if you currently feel small and lacking in the muscularity department but are also already decently lean, even though you may want to remain lean, you might decide that building muscle is a more important goal to you.

But, if you are currently overweight, even though you want to be more muscular as well, it might be more important that you get leaner. Even in this situation, it is important to decide what is most important to you. Will your primary goal be to look more muscular or to look leaner?

The reason we insist on choosing a primary goal is that it will contribute to the determination of how many calories you should eat. If your primary goal is to lose fat, we recommend a moderate caloric deficit, whereas if you mostly want to build muscle, then a moderate caloric surplus is best suited for your goal.

If both objectives are equally important, eating at caloric maintenance is our suggestion for you. While this is simple enough, we will see that your current body composition and experience level can also influence how you set up your calorie intake.

Surely, people with a higher starting body fat percentage will be wise to select the primary goal of losing fat and people with a low starting body fat percentage will be wise to select the primary goal THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 58 of building muscle.

Still, for the sake of being as thorough as possible, we have separated these factors into separate categories because your primary goal may not always be obvious to you. For example, at 12 percent body fat, Joe may be satisfied with his level of leanness and decide that building muscle is more important to him.

In this situation, Joe would want to favor a slight caloric surplus, while Jim would want to favor a slight caloric deficit, despite being at the same body fat percentage and training age.

If an already lean individual was to enter a caloric deficit, or even stay at maintenance, he or she would inhibit the ability to build muscle at an appropriate rate. This could end up in the person not making any significant progress with either muscle gain or fat loss.

In this case, a caloric deficit will ensure that fat loss occurs as the progressive resistance training and adequate protein intake facilitate muscle growth. As a third scenario, some of you may fall in between these two body fat categorizations into a sort of moderate body fat classification.

In this case, we recommend staying closer to maintenance calories, with the goal of losing fat and building muscle being on roughly THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 59 even footing. In this case, you can also default to your primary goal determinant to decide whether you should stay at true maintenance, or enter a slight surplus, or a slight deficit.

Conversely, someone who is still relatively new to weight training will be able to gain muscle mass much faster. This is important to keep in mind because it implies that beginners can use larger surpluses to build muscle without accruing excessive fat mass.

In other words, the more advanced you are, the more likely it is that large caloric surpluses will lead to fat gain rather than muscle gain since you will be more resistant to muscle gain. Physique progress is evident every couple of months usually years of lifting. Because their body is so primed for muscle growth, a relatively large 25 percent caloric surplus will return much more lean gains than a 25 percent caloric surplus would for an advanced trainee.

Compare this with someone with five years of lifting experience. Because they are much closer to their genetic muscular ceiling, a large caloric surplus will yield more fat gain than muscle gain - not ideal for someone with a body recomp goal.

For the most part, beginners and veterans to the weight room will not differ in their ability to lose fat. For this reason, experience level only impacts the recommended size of a caloric surplus, not a caloric deficit. OTHER FACTORS While the three primary factors outlined above will mostly determine how many calories you should eat whether you should be in a caloric surplus, deficit or at maintenance , there are still a few other factors that may influence this decision.

Throughout the process of recomping, it is important to pay attention to biofeedback your recovery and hunger. If your training volume or intensity is higher than normal for example, it may be necessary to increase your caloric intake during this period of increased training demands.

Also, sometimes an amplified training stimulus will result in an increased appetite, perhaps as a signal that you require more nutrients to fuel proper recovery. THE DETRAINEE. Body recomposition is extremely common for those who previously resistance trained, built a lot of muscle, but later stopped resistance training for an extended period of time and ended up losing muscle as a result.

Back in the day, bodybuilders simply noticed that it happened. Today, we have a much deeper understanding of how and why it works. When we weight train and cause muscle fibers to grow in size hypertrophy , we also increase the number of nuclei myonuclei in the muscle You can think of myonuclei as the control center of the muscle fiber.

Even though the muscle fiber itself loses size atrophy when we skip the gym for too long, these control centers myonuclei are never lost As soon as THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 62 we get back to training again, myonuclei that were built months or years ago can now start cranking out commands to ramp up the production of new muscle much faster than if you had never trained in the past.

Once the bear resumes normal eating again, she quickly regains that lost body mass as both muscle and fat. This would be comparable to someone training for 10 years and getting close to their genetic potential in terms of muscle mass but then completely abandoning their training regimen for a year or two.

While it will depend on the other factors we have just outlined Does the detrainee have THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 63 a specific primary goal? Are they starting at a high or low bodyfat?

In many respects, the detrainee can be treated more like a beginner in the sense that they are often able to achieve impressive recomposition in a relatively short time frame. HITTING YOUR TARGET When it comes to making nutritional recommendations for weight loss or weight gain, it is common to see a specific number of calories added to or subtracted from maintenance.

These suggestions are usually based on the concept that there are calories in one pound of fat, however, research indicates that this figure often overestimates predicted weight loss and undermines the adaptive nature of our metabolism It is also common to see weight gain recommendations based on a target percentage of bodyweight gain per month.

For example, one popular model suggests that lean beginners aim to gain 1 - 1. While these guidelines are valuable as rough approximations, they undermine the fact that the rate at which our bodies are capable of transforming is not the same from person to person.

So for example, if we simply recommend that all lean beginners gain A gain of This is a reasonable ballpark figure for many beginners seeking lean gains. However, this particular THE U LT I MAT E G UI D E TO B O DY R E C O M P O S IT IO N 64 beginner might have been capable of gaining five pounds of lean mass per month!

That would amount to 20 pounds of new lean mass in four months of training. So if you want to gain both benefits, which road will you take? But the caloric deficit you should be in should be minimal in order to lose fat while still gain or maintain your muscle mass.

The should target around to caloric deficit. Doing the computation might not be your cup of tea, so you can google caloric calculators such as this one. Because ,like we said earlier regarding workouts, each individual is different.

This also applies to diets. Each diet should be personal to your own body. Yes, I have to mention this three times all caps to stress how much protein plays such an important part in building muscle and fat loss. In order to build muscle even in caloric deficit while losing fat, you have to include a good amount of protein to your diet.

Studies support the highly important role of protein to your goal. Protein assists in helping you feel full. It will be easier for you to stay within the calories you are set to eat. It also helps in breaking down fat for energy that your body needs for day-to-day functions.

So you really have to take in a good amount of protein. Of course, too much protein would also be detrimental to your goals and overall healthy.

Aim to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. You could also go high with 1. You still need to have a complete proper diet to have healthy gains. DRINK WATER. So you thought your getting stronger during your workout?

You actually get stronger during your rest; when your body is recovering from the stress you applied onto it. During sleep, your body repairs the micro-tears and traumas in your muscles that came from your training. Your body focuses on repairing itself and growing.

So you might want to cut back on browsing through the internet. Lack of sleep will not help you grow. It will also cause you to get hungry even more. The number of sleep is one factor.

You should also have hours of good quality sleep. This means, it should be continuous and consistent. To do this, the best you can do is to build a good habit for your sleep.

You just have to keep in mind these three things to start getting traction with your fitness journey:. If you need help with your training, The Movement Athlete Academy is always ready to guide you on your fitness journey. Lose fat, build muscle and much more for a lifetime by training with The Movement Athlete.

Burd, N. and Phillips, S. The Journal of Physiology, doi: Physiological reports. Nedeltcheva, A. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Annals of internal medicine, 7 , — Nóbrega, S. Is Resistance Training to Muscular Failure Necessary?.

Frontiers in physiology, 7, Effect of Range of Motion on Muscle Strength and Thickness. Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy but Not Strength in Trained Men.

Medicine and science in sports and exercise. PloS one. Why are calisthenics is so effective for fat loss? Drop the flab and build natural physique of a gymnast If you are a few pounds off you still will need a clean diet regime.

Now we will look more into details of how to optimise your training for fat loss. You can: Lose weight through your diet with caloric deficit — eating less calories than your body needed to maintain weight Caloric deficit while doing cardio or Lose weight through caloric deficit while implementing resistance training.

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Smoking cessation. Body recomposition: how does it differ from just losing weight? How to adjust the proportion of fat to muscle mass.

Myth 1: When you lose weight you are only losing fat. Myth 2: If the scale does not decrease, you are not losing fat. Just eat less! Check your ideal body composition stats by gender and age. You may also like.

Weight Loss. weightloss , exercise. WANNA LEARN MORE?

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. 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.

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 kcal less food.

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.

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. It may be all you need to start losing weight and building muscle.

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. To build muscle you need plenty of sex hormones, and to build sex hormones you need to eat enough healthy fats. Higher fat diets t end to increase your production of anabolic hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone and IGF Omega 3 fatty acids e.

fish oil can increase testosterone production. The primary cause of muscle growth is intense, prolonged mechanical tension. This means you can effectively forget about muscle damage or metabolic stress.

What matters is how much tension you put on your muscles. You can measure and track how much mechanical tension your training is generating.

Picture doing pull ups. Maybe the first are relatively easy. The next kind of suck. And the last 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 relatively easy reps, and instead you jump right into that kind of suck. 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 that kind of suck. And of course the process terminates in failure. Your muscles become incapable of another rep. It may take you 3 reps to get there or it may take 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. So long as you experience those difficult final reps, you will stimulate growth.

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? But you want to avoid a massive drop off in reps. There are two ways to avoid a big drop in reps. First, you need to rest adequately between sets.

Second, you want to avoid training to full muscular failure. Instead of dropping from 12 to 10 reps, you might see a big drop. Consequently, I recommend leaving 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 reps in the tank.

These are the reps that cause the most muscle growth. Leave reps in the tank. If you train to complete failure on your first sets, you will create so much fatigue that your following sets will not cause as much muscle growth.

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. You can simply count the total number of sets per muscle group per week. 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.

Experiment with different ratios to find the one that works best for you and is sustainable in the long run. The frequency of meals is a matter of personal preference.

Some people thrive on three square meals daily, while others prefer smaller, more frequent meals. I like to look at nutrition across the whole day rather than meal by meal. We need to get in the right overall calories and a balance of macronutrients to really see progress, but it is important to honor your natural hunger.

There has been an ongoing debate in the fitness world about how meal frequency affects body composition, but limited research supports the idea that eating more frequently boosts metabolism significantly.

Instead, focus on meeting your macro and calorie goals consistently throughout the day. As you embrace your personal journey! Achieving your ideal body recomposition is a transformative process that requires dedication and patience.

Remember that your body is unique, and what works for someone else might not work for you. Embrace your personal journey, listen to your body, and make sustainable choices that align with your long-term goals. I have put together a sample Meal Plan for a women that wants to gain muscle as she loses bodyfat to give you an idea of what to expect when you are looking for a body recomp meal plan.

Goal: Achieve body recomposition by losing 20 pounds of fat while gaining 5 pounds of muscle. Note: This meal plan is designed for a moderate calorie deficit to support fat loss while providing sufficient protein and nutrients for muscle gain. Individual needs may vary. For a plan specific to your body, needs, and goals, reach out to Julie directly about Online Personal Training!

Remember to stay hydrated throughout the day by drinking plenty of water. Additionally, prioritize regular exercise, incorporating both strength training and cardiovascular workouts to support your body recomposition journey.

Always consult with a healthcare or nutrition professional before starting any new diet or exercise plan. Good luck on your body recomposition journey! Body Recomposition Diet Demystified: Achieve Your Dream Physique with my Body Recomp Meal Plan for Women.