few questions

nmarcus

Hi All,

I am new to the group and had a few questions.

1. If i increase my calories but lower my fat percent to 15% will that prevent me from gaining muscle without the fat?
2. I have a rotator cuff injury. How can I build(tone) chest and shoulders?

Thanks
Nathan

HeidiMightyRawr

I don't quite know what you mean about the calories and fat.
Basically, to gain muscle you need a calorie surplus, if you're new to lifting and/or obese you can gain a little on a deficit but it won't be much. On a surplus you will gain fat as well, but you can cut later on and get rid of that, while maintaining your muscle Fat content has little to do with gaining/losing weight, it's all about calories pretty much. Fat is great for other things though, especially when lifting, 15% sounds quite low, mine is 35% at the moment and I haven't gained a disproportionate amount of fat when gaining muscle.

About your second question, I know that one thing that can aggravate/lead to a rotator cuff injury is lifting off yourself when benching. If you've only had the injury a short while, I'd just rest it up and let it heal. If it's an ongoing problem, I'd see someone about that like a doctor, but in the meantime if you feel it's relatively ok to exercise with, and the doctor's ok with it, definitely get someone to help you lift off on bench press. Not sure about other shoulder exercises, sorry

ilovedeadlifts

Hi All,

I am new to the group and had a few questions.

1. If i increase my calories but lower my fat percent to 15% will that prevent me from gaining muscle without the fat?
2. I have a rotator cuff injury. How can I build(tone) chest and shoulders?

Thanks
Nathan

1. Why are you lowering your fat percentage?

2. How bad is the injury? Have you had surgery?
If its nothing major, I'd reccommend doing appropriate warmups. (I do band pull aparts with a reistance bands, and shoulder dislocations with a pipe or a band).
Start light with bodyweight stuff. And you might be able to bench depending on how bad the injury is.

TrainingWithTonya

1. It's not actually the increase in calories that gives the ability to gain muscle but the availability of protein to the muscles. We don't burn every calorie we eat for our activity. Some of them are used for various processes in the body and stored for energy later, while some of our current body tissue is broken down for energy. Even on a slight deficit you can gain muscle if you have adequate intake of the macros needed to replenish what is used from food and the stores of glycogen for fueling weight training. If you have enough carbs in your diet to do those things, then the protein you ingest is then not needed to be broken down the aid with fat burning, so it can be used for muscle repair and growth, enzyme production, etc. You can cut fat to help with fat loss if you want, but you have to have fat for certain processes in the body too, including making the cell membranes. If you expect to grow new muscle cells, you have to have adequate fat too. I wouldn't cut it below 20% for that reason unless you have a disease that calls for a lower fat diet.

2. It depends on how it is injured and how far into recovery you are as to what you can do. I would recommend asking your doctor to prescribe physical therapy and once you've completed physical therapy for it then you can slowly progress to more and more activity for that area. I had a torn subscapularis (one of the rotator cuff muscles) a few years ago and definitely had to modify the movements at first after PT. When you start back, you'll want to do very light weight at first and do a lot of reps and then slowly progress to heavier weight and lower reps so you rebuild the strength in it.