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Sassy69
New member
OK see if this makes sense - your goal is to build muscle but lose bodyfat right? So what resources do you have to work with:
Nutrients: protein, fat, carb
Training: resistance training, cardio.
It takes protein to provide the stuff to build muscle, takes carbs to fuel the muscle building. But I'm not sure you can determine exactly how much to consume for exactly only muscle building and not fat depositing. This would also require knowing & executign exactly how much training to do to burn exactly the amount so all the energy is put into muscle building and none deposited as fat.
Carb cycling seems to be a great way to minimize muscle loss while cutting fat -- it provides energy to fuel training, if you eat enough protein, that continues to support muscle maintenance. But again - is it enough to drop bodyfat but also build muscle ? Again I think you'd have to have it down to an exact science.
Like we've said before, if you are new to the whole diet & training thing, you can probably pull off both muscle building and fat loss simply because these are two functions that your body wants to do because it wants to run efficiently, but if you've spent your whole life eating poor quality foods and too much or not enough, your body will probably fly right into this new adventure of getting all the crap cleaned out & runnign efficiently in response to the new demands on it & the cleaner fuel. But this only happens for a while. Eventually when you have set up an efficient burn rate, it can't really pull off one or the other.
But its also not really like its ONLY one or the other - increasing muscle mass also promotes more efficiently burning of fat.
As far as building muscle while doing an hour of cardio - you could sort of think of it as dropping the bodyfat to better expose the muscle you do have. Especially for women, that does achieve the usually goal of "toned" look. If you are seriously looking to increase your muscle mass, say for example, you've done a competition, stripped down your bodyfat to see what God gave you to work with - being the natural shape you were born with including where you tend to hold more bodyfat and where are your wearker muscle groups and then you decide you need to build up your lats for a more balanced top to bottom symmetry -- you just can't really make a significant change in the mass of muscle in your lats if you dont eat to fuel growth, eat to provide the stuff to build that muscle and then train to build those specific muscles. Then you are back to finding that completely optimized balance to build muscle but keep bodyfat to a minimum. And to that end, if you aren't sure how much muscle you want or how fast you want it to develop, you still need to eat to support that growth potential and not let insufficient nutrients limit your growth / strength.
At this point I also have to defer to Shadow or someone w/ a little more info about what one might call the "secondary" level of muscle building / fat burning. These dont' just happen while you are training - the processes also continue after you are done, during the recovery time, etc.
So I guess in summary - the reason is that you can't know the exact optimum amounts of each nutrient and training / recovery / type of training to do nothign but exactly the goal you are after - so there will either be a fat burning w/ a small cost in muscle mass or muscle building w/ a small cost in excess fat deposited. Because these are two slightly contradictory goals, they are just not conducive to trying to do at the same time. So for better, more predictable results, you do the off season / on season - bulk / cut phases.
That said, doesnt' mean you have to gain a whole shitload of fat while building muscle.. you can keep these limited - but you can't expect really amazing muscle growth on a restricted diet. I'd probably also reference a restricted diet in terms of minimum variety of nutrients - e.g. enzymes from fruits - if you are increasing your protein and other stuff for the building process, common sense says you will also have more by product of the metabolizing of all these nutrients as well - so you need your body's garbage clean up system to work efficiently as well. A restricted variety diet won't respond well in that area. So again looking at the phased approach - you can do a phase of "detox dieting" after a phase of restricted diet to get your system back in optimal order.
Nutrients: protein, fat, carb
Training: resistance training, cardio.
It takes protein to provide the stuff to build muscle, takes carbs to fuel the muscle building. But I'm not sure you can determine exactly how much to consume for exactly only muscle building and not fat depositing. This would also require knowing & executign exactly how much training to do to burn exactly the amount so all the energy is put into muscle building and none deposited as fat.
Carb cycling seems to be a great way to minimize muscle loss while cutting fat -- it provides energy to fuel training, if you eat enough protein, that continues to support muscle maintenance. But again - is it enough to drop bodyfat but also build muscle ? Again I think you'd have to have it down to an exact science.
Like we've said before, if you are new to the whole diet & training thing, you can probably pull off both muscle building and fat loss simply because these are two functions that your body wants to do because it wants to run efficiently, but if you've spent your whole life eating poor quality foods and too much or not enough, your body will probably fly right into this new adventure of getting all the crap cleaned out & runnign efficiently in response to the new demands on it & the cleaner fuel. But this only happens for a while. Eventually when you have set up an efficient burn rate, it can't really pull off one or the other.
But its also not really like its ONLY one or the other - increasing muscle mass also promotes more efficiently burning of fat.
As far as building muscle while doing an hour of cardio - you could sort of think of it as dropping the bodyfat to better expose the muscle you do have. Especially for women, that does achieve the usually goal of "toned" look. If you are seriously looking to increase your muscle mass, say for example, you've done a competition, stripped down your bodyfat to see what God gave you to work with - being the natural shape you were born with including where you tend to hold more bodyfat and where are your wearker muscle groups and then you decide you need to build up your lats for a more balanced top to bottom symmetry -- you just can't really make a significant change in the mass of muscle in your lats if you dont eat to fuel growth, eat to provide the stuff to build that muscle and then train to build those specific muscles. Then you are back to finding that completely optimized balance to build muscle but keep bodyfat to a minimum. And to that end, if you aren't sure how much muscle you want or how fast you want it to develop, you still need to eat to support that growth potential and not let insufficient nutrients limit your growth / strength.
At this point I also have to defer to Shadow or someone w/ a little more info about what one might call the "secondary" level of muscle building / fat burning. These dont' just happen while you are training - the processes also continue after you are done, during the recovery time, etc.
So I guess in summary - the reason is that you can't know the exact optimum amounts of each nutrient and training / recovery / type of training to do nothign but exactly the goal you are after - so there will either be a fat burning w/ a small cost in muscle mass or muscle building w/ a small cost in excess fat deposited. Because these are two slightly contradictory goals, they are just not conducive to trying to do at the same time. So for better, more predictable results, you do the off season / on season - bulk / cut phases.
That said, doesnt' mean you have to gain a whole shitload of fat while building muscle.. you can keep these limited - but you can't expect really amazing muscle growth on a restricted diet. I'd probably also reference a restricted diet in terms of minimum variety of nutrients - e.g. enzymes from fruits - if you are increasing your protein and other stuff for the building process, common sense says you will also have more by product of the metabolizing of all these nutrients as well - so you need your body's garbage clean up system to work efficiently as well. A restricted variety diet won't respond well in that area. So again looking at the phased approach - you can do a phase of "detox dieting" after a phase of restricted diet to get your system back in optimal order.
So informative!
I wanna do those pullups!!! Grr ...
