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For Beginners : First to Lose Weight or Gain Muscle Mass?
Many Beginners face a problem: there is no obvious excess weight, but the figure does not look fabulous. What to do first – lose weight or gain muscle?
Realizing that they will have to choose one thing, many choose to increase the muscles – they begin to eat and swing a lot. What will come of this?
About Gaining Musle Mass and Different Types of people
In an ideal world, 100% of the weight gained during the muscle gain phase would come from muscle mass. We gained 5 kg, and all five are muscles. In reality, this does not happen, and the amount of fat in the body always increases with muscles. How much muscle and how much fat will be in these five kg gained depends on genetics, hormonal levels, nutritional quality, calories and training program (exercises, sets, weights, progression in load, etc.).
The body fat percentage also plays an important role. From it in many respects will depend on what is gained “on the mass” – fat, and what – muscles. And it depends on it what is lost on the diet more – muscle or fat. The more fat a person has, the more fat he loses. The more “fat-free” he becomes, the more muscle he tends to lose on the diet.
With increasing weight, the opposite is true. Naturally slender people will gain more muscle and less fat. Overweight under the same conditions will gain more fat and less muscle.
From this one could conclude: having lost weight, a person acquires all the advantages of being slim, and now he can gain more muscle and less fat. Unfortunately, there is a huge difference in the physiology of the naturally slim and the thinner.
Slender people by the nature have a good hormonal background: the thyroid gland works perfectly, maintaining the metabolism at the level, and good insulin sensitivity. They have low to normal cortisol and decent levels of anabolic hormones. They burn more calories at rest and burn (oxidize) fat effectively. After overeating, their metabolism and activity increases. All of the above prevents you from gaining a lot of fat during muscle gain.
But this does not apply to those who have lost weight. Losing weight greatly heals the body and normalizes hormonal levels, but if the tendency to be overweight is genetic, it does not go away.
For example, poor insulin sensitivity can be caused by being overweight, but in some cases it can be genetically as well as the general set of traits called “slow metabolism.” Estradiol and prolactin levels can also be high and testosterone low. Thus, the metabolism is tuned to gain fat at the earliest opportunity.
The hypothalamus decreases sensitivity to leptin, a hormone that controls long-term energy balance. Receiving less signal from leptin, the body, through various metabolic adaptations (hunger, decreased activity of the thyroid gland, sympathetic nervous system, etc.) seeks to return what it has lost.
All these changes in conditions of prolonged lack of energy on the diet are needed to avoid starvation. And at the first opportunity, they will force the body to replenish fat reserves. And the set of muscles on which they usually eat more than the norm is just such a situation. This is fundamentally different from genetically thin people, for whom a low percentage of fat is the norm.
Reccomendations about Gaining Musle Mass
Muscle gain with a high percentage of body fat (25% or more for women) causes the body to gain more fat than muscle when more calories are supplied from the diet than is needed to maintain the current weight. It is not tuned in to gain muscle mass for the reasons described above, so first you need to reduce the% fat
(= lose weight).
The problem is that sometimes, with 25-27% fat, a woman does not look “fat”, does not consider herself to be such and does not think that she needs to lose weight. It is quite possible that it is, if the figure suits. But if the goal is precisely muscle growth and tangible relief, you will still have to reduce the % of fat with the help of diet.
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