Body Recomposition — Can and Should You Aim For It?
We often want it all, but let’s look at if and when this goal makes the most sense.
Spark Notes:
Body recomposition has become a more common goal recently. It’s often been said that we need to pick either fat loss or building muscle as separate goals, but research has shown that gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time is more common than we may think.
With that being said, your training status and body fat % may dictate how realistic this goal is or the magnitude of how much recomposition you may be able to achieve.
If this is your goal, this article breaks down the three key variables you’ll want to focus on in order to maximize your likelihood of success.
Achieving body recomposition seems to be on a sliding scale between “Not really worth it” to “the most likely outcome” depending on your individual training/body composition status.
Give the rest of this article a read to see if it’s a worthy goal to focus on and how you may achieve it.
Do you want to gain muscle? Do you want to lose body fat? Better yet, do you want do both at the same time? This has become one of the most common goals that I see now a days. Which led me to want to write this — to clear up any misconceptions and lay out how realistic of a goal this could be for you.
When it comes to body recomposition, there is no shortage of confusion amongst the average fitness enthusiast. I’d say that right now we're in a state of overcorrection surrounding this topic. Conventional wisdom used to say that you gotta pick one: build muscle or lose fat. But, as the research and our in the trenches experiences has piled up, it became more clear that achieving both happens more often than we’d expect.
This has seemed to lead to a lot of folks thinking that “recomping” is now the best strategy and that we don’t even need to spend any time in a calorie surplus in order to build muscle. This is where I’d say the overcorrection has punched above it’s weight class.
Recomping is a viable and perhaps inevitable outcome to plenty of folks in the gym. Especially if you’re a beginner, losing weight from a high body fat percentage while focusing on lifting as your main exercise intervention or taking some of those special supplements that they don’t sell at GNC.
With these categories in mind, what does this mean for the rest of us? Does this mean that more novice/intermediate/advanced lifters can’t recomp? Or that leaner folks can’t recomp? No. It doesn’t. It just means that recomping is less likely for these folks and that the magnitude of the recomp will also be lesser.
In fact, Chris Barkat did a great review recently on how more trained individuals have experienced body recomp in several studies. It’s not that recomping is only for beginners, it’s not. We’ll just get to why there is more obstacles you’ll face as you become more trained or leaner.
So let’s breakdown how you can recomp and whether it’s an appropriate strategy for you.
The Math of Body Recomposition
When it comes to gaining muscle and losing body fat, it’s key to understand the difference in metabolizable energy between the two tissues of muscle mass and body fat.
One thing that can be confusing is to understand that 1 pound of each will yield differing amounts of stored energy. A way to simplify this is to remind you of the macronutrient basics.
We use grams to quantify our macronutrients. Yet, calories per gram are not equal amongst them all.
Fat = 9 calories per gram
Protein = 4 calories per gram
Carbohydrate = 4 calories per gram
Even though they all weigh the same (1 gram), the calorie content is different between fat and protein/carbs.
So it should be no surprise that even amongst the same weight of two different tissues, the stored energy in them will be different.
The reason the energy in muscle is so low is due to how much fluid is in muscle tissue. One pound of pure muscle (body protein) would have about 2140 calories according to that paper, but for practical purposes, muscle tissue is mostly water and will only have about 825 calories of metabolizable protein per pound.
Given the huge difference in energy per pound between the two, you could very realistically be in a calorie deficit over a period of time and lose zero pounds of body mass if you were also gaining muscle.
Say over 2 months you gained 2 lbs of muscle and lost 2 lbs of fat. Here is what your energy deficit would be:
2 pounds of body fat = approx 8500 calories
2 pounds of muscle mass = approx 1650 calories
Net defecit = approx 6900 calories
In this scenario, you’d be in a 6900 calorie deficit over the 2 months, but your actual body mass would have not changed.
This is something I see with newbie clients more often than not. The scenario where the scale won’t move, but inches or dropping, they’re looking and feeling leaner and clothes are fitting better.
So we can use this to understand how body recomposition is possible. Your body can pull from your energy reserves of body fat from being in an energy deficit, while also using some of your energy intake to help build new muscle tissue.
The key thing here, is that the stimulus from your training needs to warrant this. Your body will not start building new muscle tissue while in an energy deficit if your training isn’t providing a sufficient stimulus to essentially demand this. Combined with feeding yourself enough (especially protein) to give your body the resources to do so. With this in mind, let’s get to some things you’ll want to focus on in order to try and achieve some body recomposition.
Key Focuses to Achieve Recomposition
There are several things you’ll want to focus on if you want to achieve body recomposition. But, some are more important than others. The first key on the list is a no brainer — emphasizing strength training.
Strength training
As I mentioned above, there needs to be a stimulus in order for your body to start using some of the resources you’re giving it (protein you’re eating) to start building new muscle proteins which will lead to more muscle mass. This stimulus is provided via resistance training.
Your training status will greatly impact the relative stimulus you’ll get from your training. This is why it’s easier to build muscle as a beginner than it is if you’re more advanced.
As a beginner, the threshold to elicit a sufficient stimulus from your workouts to promote muscle growth is much lower than if you were more trained.
Think of it like this:
If you’re completely untrained, doing anything will be a larger stimulus on your muscles than you’re used to.
If you train 4 times per week, you’ll have to add another day completely or make your 4 sessions even harder to get a greater stimulus. Keeping in mind you still need to be able to recover from these workouts and have the energy to train this hard and frequent to keep it up.
Obviously, the former will provide more bang for your buck. And with that being said, we often go from working out zero times per week to about 2–4 times per week when we begin lifting. As a more seasoned lifter, you could never make this much of a volume jump with your training if you already train multiple times per week. And if you did, your ability to recover effectively would likely hurt your gains significantly.
This will all make recomping more likely for lesser trained folks since it’s much easier to increase their training stimulus than it is for more advanced lifters.
A key piece of context here is that you’ll be doing this training while in a calorie deficit as well. So the likelihood of really ramping up your training intensities and volumes as an advanced lifter, while in an energy deficit is just another hurdle for more advanced trainees when seeking body recomposition.
While if we flip it, if you’re untrained or less trained, this task becomes a much easier one to do. Especially if your diet hasn't been a great focus. If you start to prioritize more protein and more nutrient dense foods for the first time, you may feel the negative effects of being on lower calories to a lesser degree which may help you keep training hard while being on a diet. These impacts may even be less prevalent if you’re starting from a higher body fat percentage.
Now, if you’re more advanced or on the leaner side, it’s likely you’re already making a highly nutritious diet a priority. Making this simply a task of trying to ramp of your workout intensities and volumes while being on lower calories. The leaner you are, the harder this will be too. All adding to the extra obstacles that more advanced and leaner folks will face if trying to recomp.
Another key point here is that if we look back at the Barakat paper I mentioned above, there is something that I think often gets overlooked:
People training in research studies are often training harder in the lab than they would on their own.
This is a big component of body recomposition — upping your training intensities to achieve a greater stimulus. One way to help you train harder, is to make your training environment one that challenges you or motivates you more. And training alone after after a full day of work, while scrolling on your phone most likely won’t be as motivating as it is to be in a lab with several other trained folks and being a part of a training study where the protocols are often that you’re training to failure while being supervised.
We can even look at a study I mentioned in a previous article where 160 men were asked how much they usually bench for 10 reps and then they tested what they could actually do in the lab. The average was 16 reps. Meaning they were leaving, on average, 6 reps in the tank. Interestingly enough, this was in trained individuals too. So we may think this discrepancy could be even higher in less trained folks. This just shows how we often are leaving more in the tank than we think we are. And if we want to recomp, we want to make sure we’re getting more out of our workouts while not being in an optimal state (an energy deficit).
In summary here are the key points you’ll want to get from your training to increase your likelihood of achieving body recomposition:
Keeping in mind, these points become more and more crucial as you become more advanced or are at a leaner body fat %.
Make sure your training is getting progressively harder. Adding load and increasing total training volumes during this period are some good metrics to follow.
Following a resistance training program that is periodized and intended for maximizing muscle hypertrophy is strongly recommended.
Priortize strength training as your main focus of training. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any cardio, but if the goal is to recomp, then the meat and potatoes of your training should be lifting and cardio should be supplementary.
Setting up your training environment to be one that keeps you focused. It is likely your energy levels may take a hit from being on lower calories, so having a training environment that keeps you locked in can be key. This could mean having a great training partner, listening to a playlist that gets you hyped up and aiming to stay focused on the session rather than spending more time on your phone scrolling through social media (not me saying this is inherently bad, but it can get disrupt your “mojo” during your workout in my experience).
Nutrition — Appropriate Energy Deficit & Adequate Protein Intake
Once you’ve got your training down, the second focus I would say is on your nutrition.
There are two things I’d say you want to lockdown here:
Making sure you’re not in too large of a calorie deficit
Making sure you’re eating enough protein
When it comes to being in a manageable energy deficit, there is obviously some nuance to this, but I wanted to start by talking about a recent meta-analysis that came out about this topic. The subjects were on average older (51 years old avg.) and not extactly well trained, so this obviously comes with caveats. With that out of the way, this paper found that being in an energy deficit did start impede lean mass gains and predicted that at a 500 calorie deficit and beyond, lean mass gains would be fully blunted.
Above you’ll see the triangles represent training while in an energy deficit and the circles represent training without being in a deficit. Some increase in lean mass did occur, but mostly in the lower deficit ranges and to a lesser degree than the circles (who were not in a deficit).
A big caveat here besides the actual population this was done on, was that protein intake wasn’t mentioned in this paper. So they may have lost more lean body mass than they would have if they were eating higher protein intakes.
One study that really highlighted this was from Longland et al. 2016. Subjects were put on a 40% calorie deficit from baseline with everything controlled for, but with differing protein intakes. This was also a training intervention too with the same exercise protocols between groups.
The normal group ate about 1.2 grams of protein per KG of body weight, while the high protein group ate 2.4 grams of protein per KG of body weight per day.
The high protein group lost more body fat than the normal group (in energy matched deficits), but also gained 2.64 of lean body mass, while the normal group gained 0.
So this is evidence of how crucial of a role protein can play in the preservation of lean mass while dieting, or even the gaining of lean mass while dieting. These folks were on a pretty large calorie deficit (40% reduction from estimated maintenance) and the high protein group still gained 2.64 lbs of lean mass in 4 weeks. It seems protein was the biggest reason why since everything else was controlled and the normal protein group gained 0 lbs of lean mass.
This was also on a younger cohort and the exercise intervention was super intense and they were training 6 days per week. So this will obviously elicit different results than the paper on the older folks I listed above. So the 500 calorie limit is not a hard rule, but I do think it is key to understand that the larger your deficit, the more extreme your approach will have to be to still achieve body recomposition.
In the example above, it looked like eating about 1.1 grams of protein per pound of body mass (which is not easy while on lower calories) and training 6 days per week. Which is a strategy that is not very sustainable at all.
For some practical tips here, I’ll leave you with this:
Rock a manageable deficit — the recommendation that gets thrown around the most in this sphere is aiming for about a 20% energy reduction from baseline.
If you maintained on 2500 calories, that would look like eating 2000 calories as your target. But, this is not a hard range. The leaner you are, the lower you may want to go. Potentially down to even 10%. Which would look like a 2250 calorie target using that same maintenance number. The reason for this, is that as you get leaner, you have less body fat to utilize for energy. So breaking down lean mass actually becomes more likely for your body to use to make up for the energy deficit. This makes a more conservative deficit a more useful strategy in this context. The opposite can also be said. If you have a higher body fat %, then you can probably increase that deficit without losing more muscle. Using that paper I mentioned above, the average body fat percentage was 23%. Yet, they still recomped quit effectively. This was due to many reasons, but being at a higher body fat % most likely helped quite a bit. So I’d probably suggest a sliding range of a 10–30% energy deficit from maintenance. The scale would be dependant on body fat % and training status. The leaner and more trained you are, the lower I’d go and vice versa.
Eat adequate protein — The range that is most often used in the evidence based sphere is to eat about 0.7–1.1 grams of protein per pound of mass per day.
Again, this is not a hard range, but it is a solid one. That paper I mentioned is surrounding off-season recommendations for bodybuilders. I mention this because the need for protein does change depending on energy status. If you’re at energy maintenance, protein does become a little less important if you’re still training. For bodybuilders, optimization is still a main focus so hitting this target is still important. But for the average person, it may not matter as much. Until that is, when you’re on lower calories. That’s when this range becomes more crucial, even for less trained folks. As any time to enter caloric restriction, you run the risk of of losing muscle. As mentioned before, resistance training and higher protein intakes can help prevent this. So this range is one I recommend for most folks with the same sliding scale caveat. The leaner you are or the larger your deficit, the higher I’d go on this range. The more body fat you have or if you’re taking a more conservative approach (and not because you’re leaner), then you’re probably fine to hang at the lower ranges.
Recovery & Adequate Sleep
The last thing I’m going to cover is about getting enough sleep and managing your recovery.
As I mentioned before, an important part of recomping is being able to train as hard or harder while the cards are stacked against you. One way these cards are stacked against is you because you’re on lower calories than if you were at maintenance or even eating at a surplus. Another way you can stack the cards even more, is having your sleep takes a hit. If you’re on lower calories and under-rested, the idea of you training hard enough to gain muscle with less resources becomes a much taller order.
This makes prioritizing your sleep and aiming to manage your stress and recovery even more important while shooting for this goal.
One study by Nedeltcheva et al. 2011. had some interesting findings for this topic. There was no training intervention so that is a big caveat, but every subject (small sample size of 10) went through both 5.5 hours of sleep opportunity per night and 8.5 hours of sleep opportunity per night while in what the researchers called a moderate energy deficit (90% of resting metabolic rate).
Even though the energy deficits were matched, the 8.5 hours of sleep per night intervention yielded similar amounts of weight loss, but a pretty meaningful increase in fat loss and fat free mass preserved than the 5.5 hours of sleep per night group did.
The 8.5 hour group preserved 2.2 lbs more of lean mass than the 5.5 hour group, while losing 1.54 lbs more of fat mass than the 5.5 hour group during the 14 day interventions.
This was in energy matched diets with the biggest difference being in sleep. So even though it’s a small sample size, the findings were quite robust and help us see that sleep really can play a role in the composition of weight being lost during energy restriction.
Another interesting study from Jåbekk et al. 2020 had two groups of men (avg age of 33 & 35 respectively) go through a 10 week training intervention. The big difference was that one group was given some sleep education to try and improve their sleep during the intervention. This study did not have a dietary intervention so I’m not sure what their protein intakes looked like.
Regardless, both groups technically achieved body recomposition (which isn’t a surprise since they weren’t trained), but the exercise + sleep group gained an insignificant amount more of lean mass and lost a significant amount more of fat mass than the exercise only group did.
Adapted from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32141273/
Here you’ll see that the recomposition was greater in the exercise + sleep group. For lean mass difference, we can’t hang our hats on it too much since they difference wasn’t significant, but the sample size was small, (n=23) so this may be due to that. Also, the findings are pretty in line with what we’d expect based on previous literature. So to say the difference may have been meaningful wouldn’t be a stretch.
With all of this in mind, I think it’s safe to say making sure you’re getting enough sleep will only have a positive outcome when it comes to achieving body recomposition.
This also touches on managing stress levels too. While getting adequate sleep, being active and not diving into too intense of a diet can all help here, there are other strategies you can apply too.
But before that, I want to bring up and important point:
If you are currently heading into a very stressful period of your life, embarking on a more challenging fitness goal is not a great idea.
As this will just be one more stressor into your entire stress bucket. Even though fitness is often “positive stressor”, it’s still a stressor that needs to be recovered from. So if you’re already in over your head in your current life, be cautious with how lofty your fitness goals are.
With that out of the way, engaging in some sort of stress management is a wise idea. Especially if you’re on the more advanced/leaner side. Since the cards are as I’ve mentioned, already stacked against you, managing your stress is just one more positive focus you can have to aid this goal. As mentioned before, if you’re untrained, you might just stumble into recomping just by training itself.
Some helpful strategies here could be:
Adopting a meditation/mindfulness practice
Journalling/working through your current stressors
Getting out in nature and engaging in light activity
Adopting better sleep hygiene (less screeens before bed or a having a regular sleep schedule)
Or generally anything that helps you relax and unwind without adding more stress to your plate (alcohol may help you relax, but it ain’t helping your recovery)
Combining some of these stress management strategies with a better overall sleep practice could be pivotal in you increasing your liklihood of recomping. As we saw with those studies above, sleep alone can be quite powerful in improving body composition during training or dieting.
Final Notes
By now, I hope I’ve covered the question of whether or not body recomposition is for you and how you can focus on achieving this goal. As I’ve mentioned several times, body recomp will often be inevitable for some folks. If you’re untrained and begin lifting, it’s likely you’ll recomp at least a little bit. If you add in a dietary intervention with high protein and intentional energy restriction, it’s even more likely.
While for some us, it is a less likely goal to achieve or better said, it will take much more effort to achieve it. More I’s to dot and more T’s to cross for the more trained individual. But as I’ve mentioned, it’s definitely still possible — it will just take more precision.
I’ll re-list the key focuses here with some general suggestions to go along with them.
Key Focus #1: Prioritize Strength Training
Make lifting the meat and potatoes of your exercise program.
Make sure to focus on getting stronger and applying progressive overload along the way.
Set up your training environment to be one that pushes you to train harder (training partner/coach, the right playlist, finding a good time to train etc.)
Key Focus #2: Have a Manageable Calorie Deficit & Eat Adequate Protein
The larger your deficit, the more likely you’ll lose more lean mass. A general guide would be between a 10–30% calorie deficit from maintenance. The leaner you are, the lower you should go and the higher your body fat% is, the higher you can go — I still don’t recommend going too high.
The general guide of 0.7–1.1 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day still works with this goal. The leaner you are, the higher I recommend you go and the higher your body fat, the more likley you’ll be fine on the lower range. With that being said, you can probably go slightly higher without seeing any negative effects.
Key Focus #3: Get Adequate Sleep & Try to Manage Stress
Research consistently shows that less sleep is not ideal for optimizing fat loss. 7–9 hours of sleep per night is a super general framework to follow, but more importantly, assess your own sleep needs and make sure you’re meeting them.
Focusing on improving sleep hygiene is also a good strategy. This may look like less screens before bed, adopting a wind-down routine, having a regular sleep schedule etc. Whatever helps you get to bed a regular time and feel ready for bed is great here.
Managing your life stress is a great focus too. This also means not setting lofty goals during stressful times in your life. Your goals should be in line with what you can actually give to them. Whatever helps you manage your stress without adding more (alcohol is a common example) should be prioritized here.
Happy lifting, 💪🏽
-Coach Dylan 🍻
References:
1. Body Recomposition: Can Trained Individuals Build Muscle and Lose Fat at the Same Time?
https://journals.lww.com/nsca-scj/fulltext/2020/10000/body_recomposition__can_trained_individuals_build.3.aspx
2. What is the Required Energy Deficit per unit Weight Loss?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2376744/
3. Self-Selected Resistance Exercise Load: Implications for Research and Prescription
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29112055/
4. Energy deficiency impairs resistance training gains in lean mass but not strength: A meta-analysis and meta-regression
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sms.14075
5. Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609?login=false
6. Nutrition Recommendations for Bodybuilders in the Off-Season: A Narrative Review
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6680710/
7. Preserving Healthy Muscle during Weight Loss
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421125/
8. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951287/
9. A randomized controlled pilot trial of sleep health education on body composition changes following 10 weeks’ resistance exercise
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32141273/