How to Achieve a Full Body Recomp
Wiki Article
A common goal among active individuals is to cut excess body fat while also increasing skeletal muscle mass. This change in body composition carries several health and performance benefits and is particularly important for physique competitors.
Having a strong understanding of body recomposition enables trainers to craft plans that help clients simultaneously build muscle and reduce body fat. This can promote a healthier relationship with the scale, boost client motivation, and ensure sustainable results.
How it Works
While it may seem like a fad diet, body recomposition offers sustainable results. This method involves a gradual fat loss and muscle gain over time. It also requires a thorough understanding of physiology, nutrition and programming.
The key to body recomposition is building a modest caloric surplus for muscle growth San Diego Personal Trainer. This allows the body to use its stored fat reserves for fuel while still reducing overall body fat levels. It is also important to note that the body is best primed for nutrient partitioning when it is leaner. This means that you are better able to utilize your existing body fat stores for muscle growth as you get leaner.
It is not uncommon for a novice to intermediate lifter to take six months or longer to notice significant changes in their physique with this approach. This is especially true when a high percentage of the weight lost is fat. This is because the muscles are a more resilient tissue that can handle a greater number of calories than body fat.
Goals
There’s a lot to take into account when it comes to body composition, and even more factors that affect the sustainability of fat loss and muscle growth. For example, if you’re not training as often, the myonuclei that govern protein synthesis may have stopped working and slow down gains. This makes it harder to build muscle while simultaneously losing fat, but don’t get discouraged if you can’t achieve a full body recomp right away.
You can still achieve a positive body composition by eating at maintenance calories and training with proper technique to build muscle mass while simultaneously losing fat. This approach to fitness is less focused on the number on the scale and more about how you look, feel and perform.
Many people focus too much on weight loss goals when starting out, but the more important goal should be to increase muscle mass and lose fat at the same time. Achieving this “fitness holy grail” will give you long-lasting results.
Training
Many fitness enthusiasts equate body recomposition to simultaneously burning fat and building muscle. The goal is to achieve a weight that falls within the BMI-determined “healthy” range and maintain or increase lean muscle mass while reducing body fat.
This requires a higher-than-average protein intake (around 1 gram per kilogram of lean muscle) coupled with a progressive resistance training regimen that’s designed to enhance muscle growth and fat loss. Additionally, a calorie deficit is required. A calorie deficit is typically achieved by tracking calories consumed and expended using a fitness tracker or app (or both) or working with a nutritionist or fitness professional who can tailor diet recommendations to specific goals.
Conventional fitness wisdom suggests that recomposition is most achievable for brand-new lifters who are highly physiologically sensitive to change, hence the idea of “newbie gains.” However, the latest research suggests that recomposition is possible even after your “newbie gains” have been exhausted, though it becomes more difficult the leaner you get.
Nutrition
It takes 3,800 calories to lose a pound of fat and 1,600 calories to gain a pound of muscle. It is important to maintain a sufficient calorie deficit while also not restricting so much that it shuts down muscle growth. To do this, the majority of your calories should come from carbohydrates (e.g., rice, breads) and protein (e.g., whey).
It is also a good idea to incorporate some form of nutrient cycling into your training, for example carb backloading or intermittent fasting. A registered dietitian can help you determine how to best manage your calorie intake while achieving your body composition goals. Lastly, adding a high-quality pre-workout like Transparent Labs LEAN can be helpful to keep you motivated throughout your workout as it contains effective doses of thermogenic energy-enhancing ingredients and nitric oxide boosters. This helps you train harder and recover faster. As a result, you can build more muscle and burn more fat!