Strategies for body recomposition -
Carb and calorie cycling allow you to support both muscle building and fat loss at the same time. To achieve body recomposition, you need to create a calorie deficit to promote fat loss while providing enough nutrients and energy for muscle growth. It can also be achieved by alternating between a caloric deficit and a surplus carb and calorie cycling.
It's important to monitor your progress and make adjustments as needed. The time required can depend on your starting body composition, genetics, and how consistently you adhere to a proper nutrition and exercise plan. When embarking on a journey to body recomposition, look at it as a long-term process rather than expecting immediate results.
Progress may take several months to a year or more. During the body recomposition journey, it's crucial to avoid certain pitfalls that can hinder progress. Avoid extreme calorie deficits, crash diets, and excessive cardio, as they can lead to muscle loss, nutrient deficiencies, and slowed metabolism.
Additionally, prioritizing sleep, managing stress, and maintaining hormonal balance are essential for optimal body composition changes. Aim for hours of quality sleep each night to support muscle recovery, hormone regulation, metabolism, and overall well-being.
Chronic stress can hinder progress and affect hormone levels. Incorporate stress management techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, or engaging in hobbies you enjoy.
Implement regular strength training workouts that challenge your muscles with progressive overload. Progressive overload gradually increases the weight, frequency, or number of repetitions in your strength training routine. This challenges your body and allows your musculoskeletal system to get stronger.
This helps to build and maintain muscle mass, boost metabolism to lose fat, and support body recomposition. Include moderate amounts of cardiovascular activities to increase calorie expenditure, lose fat, and enhance cardiovascular health.
Avoid excessive cardio that may compromise muscle gains. Whether body recomposition is better than cutting depends on the individual and how much body fat they have to lose. Body recomposition offers a unique approach that focuses on simultaneously gaining muscle and losing fat, leading to a lean and defined physique.
Traditional cutting phases often involve significant calorie deficits to promote rapid fat loss. Cutting diets place less of an emphasis on maintaining lean muscle mass.
Studies have shown that people with more muscle mass tend to be healthier. Muscle mass is also a predictor of longevity and well-being in older adults. For most people, body recomposition is better than cutting because it prioritizes the increase or maintenance of lean muscle mass, instead of just worrying about how to lose fat.
Cutting diets may also result in increased loss of muscle mass, which could be detrimental to body composition. While specific food choices may vary based on individual preferences, dietary restrictions, and cultural considerations, incorporating nutrient-dense whole foods is essential.
Consider the following food sources when planning your meals:. Protein plays a crucial role in body recomposition and should be the main focus of your nutrition plan. Protein stimulates muscle protein synthesis and also minimizes the amount of muscle lost when in a calorie deficit.
Protein also keeps you feeling fuller for longer. Eating at least 20 grams of protein with meals can help you can reduce hunger and cravings, making it easier to adhere to your nutrition plan and maintain a calorie deficit to lose fat.
Protein has a higher thermic effect of food TEF compared to carbohydrates and fats, meaning your body burns more calories digesting protein, helping you make progress toward your body composition goals.
While the TEF is minimal, eating more protein can potentially boost your metabolic rate and increase calorie expenditure, which is helpful for losing body fat. Carbohydrates are the body's primary source of energy. When you lift weights and do other physical activities during body recomposition, carbohydrates provide the fuel necessary for optimal performance.
Adequate carbohydrate intake supports energy levels, enhances workout intensity, and promotes overall athletic performance. Carbs often get a bad rep when it comes to losing body fat, but it's not that simple.
In fact, if you're looking for a long-term body composition approach that is sustainable, then you should include carbs in your plan and focus on whole-food sources of carbohydrates.
For one, if you want to gain muscle mass for body composition, carbohydrates are crucial for replenishing muscle glycogen stores after a workout.
They are also protein-sparing, which allows the protein to be used for muscle repair, growth, and maintenance. When choosing carbohydrate sources, opt for complex carbohydrates such as whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes. These provide a steady release of energy, along with valuable vitamins, minerals, and fiber.
While simple carbohydrates like sugary foods and refined grains can be enjoyed in moderation, they should be balanced with nutrient-dense complex carbs for optimal health and body composition improvements.
Fiber is essential for digestive health and overall well-being, and not only for body composition. It increases fullness and satiety, aids in proper digestion, and helps regulate blood sugar levels. Protein supplements can help increase your protein intake if you have difficulty getting enough protein from food.
Tracking macros macronutrients and calories can be a valuable tool to ensure you're meeting your nutrition goals during the body recomposition process. To calculate your daily macronutrient and calorie needs, consider factors such as your body weight, activity level, goals, and preferences.
One of the things to keep an eye on is your protein intake. People often undereat protein for their goals, and whether you want to lose fat, gain muscle mass, or both, a high-protein diet can help.
Online calculators and professional guidance from a registered dietitian can help you determine an appropriate starting point. The best way to determine your calorie needs to is track what you are currently eating for days to determine your average caloric intake for body weight maintenance.
Once you determine your average daily intake, subtract calories from that to determine calorie needs for a moderate deficit. For example, if you determine that your estimated daily intake is calories, then a moderate deficit would be - calories daily.
Tracking calories involves recording the number of calories consumed from different foods and beverages throughout the day. This can be done using smartphone apps like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer, online food databases, or keeping a food diary.
Tracking calories can be a bit of a pain but ultimately essential if you want to lose body fat and achieve your ideal body composition. Smartphone apps and nutrition-tracking websites simplify the process by providing a database of food items and their macro breakdowns.
If tracking macros and calories feels overwhelming, there are alternative approaches. Focus on making mindful food choices, prioritizing whole foods, and portion control. Aim for balanced meals with an appropriate distribution of protein, carbs, and fats.
Seeking guidance from a registered dietitian or nutritionist can also provide personalized strategies without the need for detailed tracking. This will be the most sustainable approach long term to lose fat, gain muscle, and achieve the body composition that you're looking for. Contrary to what many people might think, running on the treadmill for hours at the gym each day is not the best way to lose weight.
Remember that you want a holistic approach that will facilitate gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time. Plus, as you gain muscle through resistance training, you'll improve your metabolism and burn more calories throughout the day naturally.
Add that to a high protein diet, and very soon you'll start seeing noticeable change. If you want to gain muscle, you have to do resistance training. There's really no two ways about it. Compound lifts are the most efficient use of your time and effort because they involve multiple muscle groups and joints, maximizing calorie burn and muscle gain.
While running on the treadmill every day is not the answer for building muscle and losing excess body fat, avoiding cardio altogether is also not the answer. The ideal training program will include mostly resistance training to stimulate muscle growth, and cardio in the form of HIIT workouts.
The best thing to do is to talk to an experienced personal trainer who can assess your training history, where you're currently at, and what you want to achieve, and create a personalized plan that is best for you.
If you don't have access to a trainer but want to get started right away, then build a simple training plan for yourself. It could be something like a full-body resistance training plan for 3 days a week that involves compound movements like push-ups, pull-ups, squats, etc.
If you need a basic guideline to get started, you can check out our in-depth body recomposition workout plan. You can also gain up to 0. Add those two together, and your net weekly calorie deficit is Note that pretty much everyone will end up needing to be in a caloric deficit for recomposition.
In short, calorie cycling means eating more calories for a while after you lift weights, and fewer calories at other times. You also want a high per-muscle training frequency, which means none of those ridiculous four- or five-way splits.
Your workouts should either be full body, or an upper-lower split. Each workout should consist of 20—35 sets if training full body, or 15—25 if doing an upper-lower split.
Spread these workouts as evenly as possible throughout the week. According to a study by the Neuromuscular Research Center, doing cardio and weight training together makes both of them less effective.
This interference effect, as it is known, will reduce both muscle and any cardiovascular health benefit you get from the cardio.
Here are three ways to keep your cardio from interfering with building muscle:. If you do perform cardio in conjunction with weight sessions, follow an upper-lower split and do upper-body cardio like a rowing machine on your leg day and lower-body cardio like running on your upper-body lifting day.
Calorie cycling, simply put, means that you eat more calories in this case, a small surplus for a certain time period following your workouts, and fewer calories in this case, a moderate deficit for the rest of the week. You want to do this because the more recently a muscle has been resistance trained, the more it will be primed to grow; muscles do most of their growing in this time period.
A study found that the length of this post-workout anabolic window depends on your training status. The more advanced you are, the shorter it gets. Consider the following a rough guideline:. That means his re-feeding window includes dinner the day of his workouts and breakfast the next morning, or six out of 21 meals each week.
Those extra calories will be added to the six meals that do fall into the post-workout window, with more of them going to the meal that occurs earlier in the window—dinner in this case.
That still works out to a 4,calorie weekly deficit. Sleeping well and keeping stress to a minimum are both critical for body recomposition. Without these parts of your health in place, you can easily end up gaining both muscle and fat, or more likely losing both.
Here's How. Unsurprisingly, people who sleep poorly tend to lose muscle and put on fat. During body recomposition, you should aim for eight to nine hours of sleep a night. This Spartan article explains how to optimize your sleep. A study found that the difference between high and low-stress levels can mean up to a twofold difference in your ability to put on muscle.
And as we all know, the stress hormone cortisol makes the body store more fat, particularly around the belly. The best way to fix stress in the long run is to change your lifestyle so you experience less stress, for instance by working shorter hours.
A more feasible solution for most people, particularly in the short term, is to start meditating. You can build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
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