Eat more than 25 grams of protein four times a day. Train your strength at least three times a week. If learning how to lose fat and gain muscle were easy, everyone would. Unfortunately, it's not a simple concept, since the methods used to achieve any of the objectives often work at odds with each other.
Protein plays an extremely important role in muscle maintenance. When you have a caloric deficit with the goal of losing fat, eating enough protein will give your body the best chance of retaining muscles in the process. To lose fat, you must eat with a calorie deficit. However, the best way to build muscle is to consume excess calories during training.
Beginners in the gym with a higher percentage of body fat tend to lose fat while gaining (or at least maintaining) muscle. And with a higher percentage of body fat, their bodies have more energy to spare and spend on muscle gain. You also need to eat enough protein so that your body can create new muscle tissue, and you should do regular weight training to provide the necessary stimulus. If you lower your calories too much, it will be much harder to retain muscle, let alone build it.
Lift weights regularly, with progressive overload, to send a signal to your body that your muscle is being used and that you need to hold it. But you do want your body to use new calories to repair the muscles that you broke down during weightlifting exercises. Beginners in a weightlifting program, athletes who have taken a significant amount of time off, or people with a lot of weight to lose are some. The progressive element of this is essential for muscle growth, since by using the principle of progressive overload (it opens in a new tab), the body will make adaptations to allow it to withstand greater tension, in this case, increasing the size and strength of the muscles worked.
In most cases, you'll first need to focus on losing fat and then reverse your diet to slowly add more calories and gain muscle mass. Most people who have been “eating healthy” and exercising regularly may have difficulty building muscle and losing fat simultaneously. Consuming maintenance calories on a day of cardiovascular training ensures that you have a slight deficit to promote fat loss, but not a deficit so large that your body begins to use muscle tissue for fuel. To lose fat or weight, your body needs to have a caloric deficit, which means you eat fewer calories per day, making it difficult for your body to maintain its current weight.
With a goal like body composition, it's important to be patient and measure your progress in ways other than the scale, since you're not just trying to lose weight. But what about gaining muscle? To build muscle, you actually need to have excess calories, which means eating more calories than you burn.
