Best exercises to build muscle and lose fat?

GillianMcK

People are advising to get your diet sorted, because you need the calories to build the muscle, you asked about building muscle and cutting fat, but you need the calories to do this.
It's valid advice, it's up to you if you want to take the advice or not, but you won't build muscle on 1200 calories, so you need to pick one, do you want to build muscle or keep on the 1200 calories a day and then ask for advice once you know what you want to do!!

MeanderingMammal

..... instead of running everyday ......

So what distance are you running every day, and at what pace? Are you only doing steady paced runs or are you including other types of sessions?

I'd also ask why you're running every day?

That said, I think you have a number of conflicting objectives, particularly given your calorie intake being very low, well under the recommended minimum for men.

Essentially while you're eating in deficit you're unlikely to gain significant muscle. If you're doing quality running sessions then you'll see increasing strength there, but you'd need to balance that out with other activities.

The caveat on this is that I run and cycle, so my thoughts are biased towards supporting that performance, rather than anything else.

Resistance training of some kind will help you retain lean mass while losing weight, so help mitigate for the very low intake. That could reasonably be bodyweight work; press ups, dips, box jumps etc but you could do it with weights and Stronglifts is very heavily evangelised on here as an initial programme.

When you reach your goal weight you're then in a position to start trying to build muscle, in which case you'll need to go into a bulk/ cut cycle and whilst bodyweight work will help, the gains are much slower than if you use additional weights.

Essentially you can't both build muscle and lose fat at the same time. to lose fat you train whilst in deficit, in order to retain lean mass and improve bodyfat percentage, to gain muscle you train whilst in surplus, but that will add both muscle and fat. Essentially it bcomes cyclic until you reach your goals.

But as upthread, this is all predicated on eating adequately to meet your goals. If your deficit is too extreme then your ability to retain lean mass is significantly hindered, similarly if your protein and fat intake is inadequate then the resistance work won't have the desired effect. fwiw when I was eating as low as 1600 cals per day I was really struggling to function adequately, completely underfuelled and my training wasn't effective.

All that said, from predominantly running and cycling I've reduced my bodyfat from about 30% to 20% in just over year. only I do some bodyweight work once or twice a week, depending on whether I feel like it or not. My running tends to be in the 10-16km range, four to five times per week with a combination of long steady runs, fast tempo sessions and high intensity intervals.