The dream body is usually only a layer of fat away: So down with the fat and a few muscles trained on top and ready is the beach figure? Or yet first put on muscles and then let the kilos fall? You can find many guides to losing weight and building muscle and there seem to be many ways to achieve your goal. Especially for food lovers who have one or two kilos too much on the scales, it often seems unimaginable to turn their excess body fat into muscle. But as for any other body type, this is of course possible! You just have to focus on appropriately individual training and nutrition methods.
The dilemma
To build muscle mass and a nice biceps and six pack, you have to give the body enough usable food. The muscle building phase is not only characterized by physically demanding training, but also by the targeted intake of proteins and carbohydrates. To ensure that the body always has enough raw materials for muscle growth, it is commonly advised to eat more calories than you consume. If you follow this advice, muscle training builds muscle, but at the same time fat mass increases, because the unused calorie surplus has to go somewhere. If you want to lose weight in return, you are advised to reduce calories. So the body should consume more than it takes in. In return, it rewards us with a loss of mass, i.e. it reduces fat reserves.
In short, you should eat more calories than your body needs to build muscle and less to lose weight. But how to combine both, i.e. to build up muscles and lose weight, i.e. to lose fat, at the same time?? To answer this question, let’s take a closer look at this body type and its path to the dream body.
If you’re overweight, your diet is usually largely to blame. There are also genetic predispositions, in which losing weight is actually associated with significantly more difficulties, but even in such cases one should not let the belly hang, but face the challenge to achieve a healthy figure. If you suffer from overweight, then the idea of a direct conversion of fat to muscle sounds naturally ideal. In practice, however, this process only takes place indirectly, but that’s not the point, because you can actually do something that other body types can only do with great difficulty. You can lose weight in a relaxed way and build muscle at the same time!
With these 3 key factors from raccoon to washboard
- Dietary change and control
- Strength training and endurance
- Long term life change
Dietary change and control
The most important condition for this is the change of diet. Sugar, alcohol and unhealthy fats must be reduced step by step. To achieve this, it is best to keep a simple food diary in which you write down what you eat during the day (and possibly what you eat during the day). during the night) has eaten and drunk everything. On this basis, a diet plan is drawn up with the aim of gradually reducing your daily calorie intake. As soon as you eat fewer calories than you consume, you start to lose weight.
Long-term lifestyle change
Hands off strict diets and jerky training actions! It has been proven that 95% of all people regain the weight they lost within the first 3 years, usually even more. One speaks also of the so-called Jojo effect. To avoid this, a slower rethinking and adjustment of the diet is necessary. The same applies to training. Do not overdo it at the beginning and make the training a fixed part of your everyday life.
Don’t forget the negative energy balance: If you want to reduce your body fat percentage sustainably, you have to keep the negative energy balance in mind. The body only goes to its fat reserves when it actually has to. Your body will only lose weight and burn fat if you eat fewer calories than you consume during the day. This negative energy balance is not achieved simply by eating less, but above all by eating the right food. So low calorie and healthy. For maximum success, combine this diet permanently with more sport and exercise in everyday life. With the calorie calculator you can easily and quickly calculate your individual basal metabolic rate.
Strength training and endurance
In order to lose weight faster and build up muscles at the same time, one should start with 2-3 strength and endurance training units per week. Both forms of training support weight loss, as they both initiate energy-rich physiological processes of the body. In untrained people, the body adjusts to the new loads in a particularly noticeable way.
Use the afterburn effect
The afterburn effect comes into play above all with intensive strength training. On the one hand, regeneration processes are initiated after muscle training such as z. B. The replenishment of glycogen and oxygen stores, the breakdown and recycling of lactate, and the repair of microtrauma. Depending on how high the training stimulus was, muscle growth is also initiated, as well as other physiological processes, which leads to a high energy requirement overall. The afterburn effect lasts between 24 and 72 hours after weight training and the best thing is that the energy is brought in via the fat stores, which is of course ideal for losing weight.
You can support your personal fat burning effect by not eating anything for at least 45 minutes after your workout and only eating light foods containing protein for up to 2 hours afterwards. In addition to the afterburn effect, you also increase your daily basal metabolic rate by increasing your muscle mass. Every additional gram of muscle mass increases your personal calorie requirement per day. Another important plus point for achieving quick success in healthy weight loss. For every 1 kg of muscle mass, experts estimate that the body consumes about 25-50 calories more per day.
Increase calorie consumption to the maximum with strength training
What everyone knows: you burn more calories doing any kind of exercise than at your desk. For several decades, endurance training in particular has been very popular, but often the hoped-for successes do not materialize and the superfluous kilos stick instead of falling off. This has several reasons. On the one hand, you always have to train for quite a long time to burn the desired amount of calories, and on the other hand, if you always do the same movements and cardio programs, your body adjusts to the load and intensity, so that it learns to work at maximum efficiency and, over time, calorie consumption even decreases. Muscle building through strength training challenges the body to a greater extent. You burn a lot of calories in a much shorter time, benefit from the afterburn effect and increase your daily basal metabolic rate. If you want to lose weight, strength training offers many advantages, because the fat goes to the collar several times at once.
HAMMER Expert Tip
Provide your body with enough protein and carbohydrates before and after training and reduce your calorie consumption on non-training days so that you consume fewer calories than you need. The body will then attack your fat reserves on non-training days to further build muscle in the afterburn effect.
The easiest way to burn calories is to train the large muscle groups intensively, such as the muscles in the back. B. the legs or the back. After all, 2/3 of the entire body musculature is located here. Furthermore, fitness equipment with which you train several parts of your body at the same time is suitable for losing weight. Particularly effective: the superset training, in which you target different muscle groups directly one after the other with compound exercise sequences (sog. Compound moves).