Body Recomposition: Everything You Need to Know

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If you’re interested in losing fat while gaining muscle, you might want to learn more about body recomposition. Throughout this guide, we will discuss everything you need to know about body recomp and how to lose fat while building muscle.

What is Body Recomposition?

Body recomposition simply means changing your body and refers to the process of lowering body fat while gaining muscle mass. Body recomposition can be accomplished in a number of ways, including reducing your fat gain and increasing your lean body mass, decreasing your fat mass and maintaining your lean body mass, or decreasing your fat mass and increasing your lean body mass simultaneously. Usually, when people discuss body recomposition, they’re referring to decreasing their fat mass and increasing their lean body mass.

Body Recomposition vs. Weight Loss

It’s important to keep in mind that you probably won’t lose weight during body recomposition. Instead, if you’re cutting fat while building muscle, you’ll probably either maintain or gain weight on the scale. 

Body recomposition refers to the process of decreasing the proportion of body weight made of fat and increasing the proportion of body weight made up of lean body mass. Because muscle or lean body mass tends to be more dense than body fat, you’ll most likely weigh more after body recomposition, whereas during weight loss, you obviously weigh less.

How to Gain Muscle

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Wondering how to body recomp? Most people have a really hard time losing fat while building muscle at the same time. However, there are two groups of people who are more likely to  see body recomposition results:  

  • people who are overweight with little to no fitness ability or are just starting out in the fitness world
  • people who are experienced in fitness, recovering from an injury, or  just getting back into fitness after taking some time off from it

The first step is working on building muscle while avoiding gaining any fat. In order to do this, you need to have a lot of patience, consume plenty of protein and calories, and focus on strength training while prioritizing a progressive overload. There are a number of benefits to this strategy, including feeling stronger without having to starve yourself. While the temporary weight gain can be uncomfortable, keep in mind that you don’t need to put on too much weight in order to see muscle growth. You typically don’t need to gain more than 7 to 10 pounds.

How to Lose Fat While Gaining Muscle

While you’re working on gaining muscle weight, you should also be focused on losing body fat. This means optimizing your diet for a calorie deficit while strength training. You need to have realistic expectations while strength training intelligently and carefully. For this method, you should focus on strength training, caloric expenditure, a calorie deficit with enough protein intake, and most important of all, patience. 

Losing body fat means that you’ll lose some weight, but you’ll also likely be hungry and hit a plateau in your strength gains. That being said, keep in mind that you’ll likely have less energy the less you eat, so don’t use this time to “go hard” while you’re working out. While you’re losing body fat and weight, your main focus should be your diet.

Body Recomposition Diet

Body recomposition truly all comes down to your diet and what you eat. Changing the way you exercise can definitely help, but changing your diet is the best way to approach body recomp. When it comes to your diet, cycling refers to changing specific parts of your diet and nutrition on specific days. Nearly all diets involve some form of cycling, including traditional intermittent fasting, carb backloading, or the keto diet. With these examples, you tend to eat more calories and carbohydrates on the days you work out than on the days you rest. 

If your goal is body recomposition, you need to eat more food, calories, and carbohydrates on the days you’re working out and less of everything on the days you don’t exercise. The main purpose of this cycle is recovery and energy utilization. You need to consume more energy on the days when you use more energy. This cycle is great for body recomposition, but it also helps with hormonal optimization. Calorie cycling can also help extend your life expectancy. 

MAGNAK Makes the Difference

If you’re looking for something to take your body recomposition diet and workouts to the next level, the search is over. MAGNAK’s Electrolyte Powder is a great addition to a balanced diet when working towards body recomposition. It’ll also give you the boost you need to sustain your endurance during workouts. If you want to make sure your body is receiving the appropriate nutritional supplements for body recomposition, choose MAGNAK. 

Train harder. Recover faster. Trust MAGNAK.

sourabh 1
Dr. Sourabh Kharait, MD, PhD.
Dr. Kharait’s sports nutrition blog is created from his “real-world” clinical experience as a Renal and Electrolyte Specialist (Nephrologist). An author of multiple, original peer-reviewed journal articles within this field for the last decade, and an inventor of numerous patented electrolyte formulas, he strives to be on the leading edge of electrolyte science for both athletes and those suffering from gut disorders. Learn more about how electrolytes interact with our body, including calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium. Blog posts and articles related to performance and health are here to help, educate, and inform.