Speaker 0: 0:00

Hey everyone, philip here with a quick Sunday bonus episode because I want to talk about body recomposition. I get asked about this all the time. Probably one of the most common questions is can I build muscle and lose fat at the same time? And it comes from, sometimes, a fear of not wanting to gain too much weight, but it also comes from the idea that you don't wanna be in a big calorie deficit and a big fat loss phase either and you want to kind of walk the line of both. And so if you've ever asked yourself the question can I do this, can I lose fat and build muscle at the same time? The answer is yes if you do it the right way. But most people miss this because they either think you only have to cut or bulk or, more likely, they're bouncing back and forth and never really liking how they look or feel in either one, and then they say, okay, I want to recomp. Can we do that? Let's do that one. So the answer is yes.

Speaker 0: 0:53

I'm going to come from it from the positive lens of how you would do it, because true body recomp or body recomposition happens when you are fueling enough to recover and build muscle while training in a way that signals your body to hold on to or and here's what we want even add a little bit of lean mass, at the same time dropping fat. And for some people it kind of sounds impossible. Or you might have heard influencers say you know that takes a long time, only certain people can do it. So I want to bust some myths really quickly. The first one is that you can only recomp if you're a beginner, and that's nonsense. I've worked with intermediate lifters who've had incredible body recomp results and I think the evidence supports that there is a broader range of training levels that can do this. Second, you need to eat in a big surplus or a big deficit and actually still do a bulk or cut. It's just slower, also wrong. I think you could do this while pretty much being at maintenance. And then, third, the scale is the best way to measure progress.

Speaker 0: 1:53

A lot of you who listen to the show know I already advocate that you use other measures beyond the scale. And when it comes to body recomp, you can't use the scale really other than to avoid significant weight gain or significant weight loss. And what actually happens during successful body recomp is you might maintain the same weight or even gain a tiny bit of weight, but you're completely transforming the physical dimensions of your body. So it's how you look and also how you feel, because there's a recovery aspect to this, there's a metabolic aspect to it. Your clothes will fit better, you're stronger in the gym, you have more energy, and so you really can't be looking at the scale for that, even though that is one tiny measure that supports the overall picture.

Speaker 0: 2:38

Now I've had clients who are kind of all over the place and get the result they want, and what I mean by that is I've had clients who gained three pounds on the scale during a recomp and they might be freaking out a little bit, thinking they're gaining fat, but their measurements show that, you know, they lost two inches off their waist, they gained an inch on their arm and they actually, you know, gained four pounds of muscle. So for that three pounds of scale weight, they gained four pounds of muscle and they must have lost a pound of fat, right, that's where it gets confusing, because most people are doing one of the specific things I just mentioned, wrong or not doing it, and they get frustrated, right, they're either under eating, so they can't build muscle because their metabolism is kind of lagging. They're doing maybe too much, too much cardio. They don't have enough recovery and remember, you're not in a surplus here, so your recovery is limited to an extent. It's not as bad as in a deficit, but it's not as full as when you're in a surplus.

Speaker 0: 3:32

Or they're chasing scale weight right, even even at the expense of chasing um maintenance, scale weight instead of body composition, meaning it. You don't necessarily want to just hold your weight, that is, I'll say, in the ballpark of where you want to be, but it's okay to drift a little bit if the other things that you care about are moving in the right direction, right. And then the other big pet peeve of mine is people who just train randomly, don't follow a good program, don't use progressive overload. So the result of that approach is lots and lots of frustration because, okay, I don't want to bulk, I don't want to cut, but then I don't know how to recomp properly either. So if this sounds familiar, then you've come to the right place, because what I teach instead on this show in Physique University is what I call aggressive maintenance. It's slightly above your normal maintenance calories to support recovery and muscle growth, but still allow for fat loss, because the muscle gain is going to drive your metabolism up a little bit, and so the fat loss kind of happens under the surface.

Speaker 0: 4:35

The math is hard to understand, but it's happening. And so this is where having enough protein and, you know, balancing your fats and carbs, supporting your training demands eating what you like to fats and carbs. Supporting your training demands eating what you like to eat and being flexible about it. Right, there's nothing magic about all of that. The when people, I think, go wrong here is they don't track the right things. They don't track the right data, and that's what we're all about here. That's why I created a tracker called the Physique and Biofeedback Tracker. We use that with our group program and that calculates lots of things. That calculates body fat and lean mass, muscle to fat ratio. I even have an advanced tracker that calculates how much of your lean mass is muscle tissue specifically, helps you track your measurements for context, helps you monitor your feedback like sleep, energy recovery and so on. All of that stuff tells you if your approach is working, in conjunction, of course, with a proper training and nutrition plan.

Speaker 0: 5:26

So when body recomp is happening, you are going to see lean body mass going up, fat mass going down over time, the scale might drift a little bit or it might stay the same. It really depends. Your biofeedback stays mostly positive, right. There are some places where you could have challenges. If you're, for example, not eating enough food volume, you might have hunger where someone else wouldn't, even if you're not in a deficit, right. So there's lots of little levers that we can turn and the whole thing needs to be sustainable. Now compare that to traditional, you know, just going after fat loss or going after bulking, where there's more challenges to deal with, depending on what you're doing Like, you might be more tired, hungry, miserable. When you're cutting right or when you're in a surplus, you're dealing with the fears of gaining fat and trying to avoid gaining too quickly.

Speaker 0: 6:13

So I'm actually going to dive deeper into this topic tomorrow. On Monday's episode. I'm going to break down the science behind how body recomp works without a traditional calorie deficit, some of the mechanisms that make it happen from that kind of nerdy engineering perspective, like in the body, what's going on, and then some details on that aggressive maintenance approach approach I mentioned and that. So that's kind of the podcast variety of this. And then, if you want to implement this, if you want a training plan, if you want to understand how to set up your nutrition and phase this out over 90 days, I'm doing a live workshop Tuesday this Tuesday, august 19th. It's at noon Eastern. The replay will be included if can't make it, and I'm going to walk you through a 90 day roadmap for body recomp. You're going to get the tracker I mentioned.

Speaker 0: 7:03

Training template I'm going to actually propose a very specific template that I think is really good for 12 weeks of body recomp. You're going to get by by joining the workshop you're effectively in physique university at the same time for no extra cost. So you're going to get a custom nutrition plan and your first month in Physique University all for that price, so for 27 bucks. And if you don't think that's a steal, then maybe you know. Go listen to another podcast, because I'm practically giving this stuff away. Anyway, if this sounds like what you're looking for, go to livewitsandweightscom or click in the show notes. Go to livewitsandweightscom. You can sign up If you're already in physique you. You're going to get it for free anyway as part of being in the program. But if you want to do the workshop on the 90 day body recomp workshop this Tuesday, august 19th and get the replay. If you can't make it, no-transcript.