Build Muscle and Burn Fat  

Do you remember those wonderful beginner times when it was so easy to build muscle and burn fat? When you naively thought that you were going to become a pro-bodybuilder?

Unfortunately, after a year or so things got more complicated, and progressively your magical metamorphosis came to a halt.

And ever since, you've been oscillating between getting fatter and losing the same fat without any net development, which can be a continual source of frustration on a winding road to nowhere.

First you should know that it's difficult to build muscle and burn fat because these are two mutually exclusive processes with different requirements in terms of nutrition, hormones etc.

For this reason, is difficult to even maintain your lean mass while cutting, or conversely bulking while keeping your leanness.

Most folks, especially the typical guys and gals that you see at the gym, don't give a damn about the physiological mechanisms (such as insulin and leptin sensitivity, thyroid conversion, cortisol and testosterone levels, etc) that generate this adaptation.

If that's you, then don't bother with elaborate details, and just blame it on evolution!

But knowing what's going on is important for devising a practical solution, so you can get out of this maze.

For this purpose, our capitalism gives us a good analogy. So let's make a little exercise of imagination, and picture the human body as a corporation; and you...the president.

Each bodily tissue would be a different department, and all are competing for the same limited resources as each one has its specific needs.

And to make things worst, your company runs a budget deficit (the economy sucks), so you need to make some drastic decisions.

Periodically, the muscle department has the opportunity to engage in a series of extravagant projects that may have a tremendous potential in the future, but are also very costly as experts has to be contracted and trained.

In other words, synthesizing new muscle tissue is an expensive process that is greatly impeded when calories are restricted.

At the beginning, the situation is not that terrible as you can easily layoff personnel from the administrative department (alias fat department), which is operating above its capacity anyway.

However, cutting expenses beyond a certain point from this department becomes problematic because of its vital importance. Not to mention that in comparison with the training given to the high-tech specialists, the administration doesn't require nearly as much resources.

So you have no choice but to suspend any new projects, and maybe even give away some of the existing ones in order to keep your company alive.

However, the parent company, which has a financial stake in yours, has to regularly make capital infusions so you can undertake at least some of the important projects.

This means that the body may afford to build new muscle tissue if you train hard enough to disrupt its homeostasis, and also increase temporarily calorie/carbohydrate intake to sustain an anabolic state.

In other words, temporarily, you may be able to simultaneously build muscle and burn fat.

It would be nice to think that fat could suddenly turn into muscle but this is not possible. (I'm sure you knew that, right?) You, as the president of the aforementioned corporation, don't expect a secretary to become a PhD overnight.

My point is that the only way to build muscle and burn fat is to increase calories (predominantly carbohydrates) slightly above maintenance on your workout days (while keeping, of course, an overall weekly energy deficit).

This non-linear intake is nothing revolutionary, but becomes even more important when you are close to your genetic potential for an optimum calorie partitioning.

In my observations, repeatedly wobbling between bulking and cutting is the marker of a beginner who doesn't have control over his/her diet.

As you get closer to your genetic potential, there is no point in making this compromise in the hope of accelerating your muscle gains. For most people, bulking is just an excuse to pig out on calorie dense foods. Don't do the same mistake.

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