Can't Build Muscle while at a Deficit - Revisited

This is the root of your misunderstanding. You can gain strength without building muscle. Gaining strength is based on neuromusular adaptation. An oversimplification is; you are recruiting existng muscle fibers and training your neuromuscular system to lift more weight. Thus get stronger. There is only a slight relationship with getting stronger and building muscle. At some point you would max out and not be able to get stronger without building more muscle tissue. (hypertrophy)

Building muscle is hypertrophy. You can do this and not nessesarily get stronger. (though you likely will slightly) This is an anabolic process, thus it requires a calorie surplus. When you are in calorie deficit, you are essentially in a catabolic state. Your body can perform anabolic functions in a catabolic state.

Let's also make a distinction between GAINING MUSCLE and LOSING FAT. Many people think that they are gaining muscle but in reality, they are losing fat. Getting leaner will make you look bigger. That's why so many Hollywood celebrities concentrate on losing fat when they go for a big role.

Probably also good to make the distinction of gaining LBM which includes muscle, and actually gaining muscle.

You could do total cardio training and gain weight and LBM in a deficit, as the body responds by storing more glucose and water - but it would be about impossible to gain actual muscle with that workout.

You could gain say 1 lb of LBM in a month, no muscle, and drop 1 lb of fat.

At least in that case your metabolism goes up slightly, so still of benefit.

Link here for the metabolism aspect of increase with LBM increase, nothing to do with eating in deficit or gaining muscle, though that likely happened.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/778012-potential-muscle-gain-lifting-and-metabolism-improvement

Bump

Bump to follow.

What I would have to input has already been covered.

Sarah did you seriously unfriend me because I disagreed with you on this topic. What is wrong with people here?

Just a "shot in the dark" but it's because of how you come across. You keep asking "what's wrong with people here" when you're one of the people here. Calling something "cult beliefs" when they are providing information as well as sources isn't exactly tactful.

It's an online friends list... you're awfully worked up about this.

crump

It's possible. But only given two conditions. Either 1. you have been stagnant for a long time and have just started to weight train or 2. you are a previously trained individual that has taken a break and come back to it.

after your "noob gains" period...varying between 3-6 months (estimated), your body will catch on to what you are trying to accomplish.

view the human body as a system of inputs and outputs. if you are trying to gain muscle, the inputs must at LEAST match the outputs. Let's say you want to gain a pound of muscle. For that 1 pound gain, you must input a pound of food, at some point. This is physics...and it is undeniable. Afterall, you cannot generate a pound of weight gain without first supply it with 1 pound of raw material. Funny thing is fat. We do have some raw material stored within us to perhaps lead us to the FALSE assumption that we can generate muscle out of thin air.

The reason "noob gains" happen is because of the fact that 1. hormone levels spike when suddenly weight training comes into the picture. This recruits and signals a great deal of endocrine changes. testosterone is affected, and so is glycogen uptake. Cortisol will spike, and to counteract it, growth hormone (IGF-1, and others). You will "fill out" with water, and ATP within mitochonria will be more available. Not to mention the fact that your nervous system will have ingrained the first "bench press" you did, and store it into the memory bank for later....almost immediately increasing your progression in that movement.

Six months down the line, your nervous system has adapted. your glycogen uptake will have stabilized, and your joints will have been primed for load bearing kinetic chain exercise. lastly, your muscles will have been accustomed to increased loads, and will look for protein synthesis to increased power output. The body will then ask the question..."if you want me to get stronger, I need more inputs." Wherein lies the golden rule, you cannot gain any sustainable muscle/strength in a caloric deficit. The body will allocate calories you eat to the necessary life processes and prioritze "muscle gaining" very late. In the situation of a very crazy deficit, the body will start to oxidize fats and current muscle to maintain it's performance. I'm not saying that you cannot get stronger in a deficit and perhaps retain muscle...but six mo or 1 year into training, you will not be able to GAIN muscle in a deficit, guaranteed.

Now, anyone who will argue me on this is physiologically retarded. Physics-wise also retarded. But I know where they would be coming from. "bro, I'm so much bigger at 155 than I am at 170". True, cool. that's because musculature is an illusion of the ratio of muscle to fat/skin. The more muscle you have the more fat is stretched blow it, providing the illusion of size. This is common in the bodybuilding arena not just pertaining to size, but proportion, flow, symmetry, and lines.

yeah i agree with that.. if you work out more you should eat more

Make no mistake, in a deficit even simple things like healing from bruises and cuts will take longer. Even your immune system can and will be compromised. Recovery from workouts is significantly impacted. I've noticed this first hand, myself. You're basically starving yourself in a controlled manner to force your body to utilize your fat reserves. Everything slows down as a result.

Very true.

Unless someone takes a couple weeks of diet break and lifts the same, likely to not even notice because there is nothing to compare to.

Even better I've found. Take an exercise break one week and get fully recovered.
Then back and hitting the exercise hard, and that week take a diet break, really use those extra calories.

I'm sure someone could really shock themselves going from a diet week to a surplus week and really see how well the body works then.

The fact that on a deficit you can, grow your hair, heal wounds and repair muscle, tells you you body can make cells while on a deficit. A healing wound and building of muscle is the same biological process.

This is an interesting comment. Isn't muscle hypertrophy a response to microtrauma to the muscle cells? Why would the body be able to create scar tissue, skin cells, bone cells, scabs, blood cells, etc. after a traumatic event but not muscle?

It's very simple really. The body cares about survival above all else. So it will repair your wounds to your skin and to your muscles because that's a matter of survival. However, it will not CREATE new muscle mass when you're not even taking in enough calories to survive (ie: caloric deficit). It doesn't WANT to pull from your fat reserves but it will to keep you living. Muscle is expensive to create and maintain, and in a deficit your body will prioritize repairs and general survival over giving you more mass.

Make no mistake, in a deficit even simple things like healing from bruises and cuts will take longer. Even your immune system can and will be compromised. Recovery from workouts is significantly impacted. I've noticed this first hand, myself. You're basically starving yourself in a controlled manner to force your body to utilize your fat reserves. Everything slows down as a result.

But isn't adding muscle tissue a survival and/or healing response to the repeating trauma to those muscles? It seems similar to forming a callous. I realize that healing functions slow down in a deficit situation, but I'm still trying to grasp why this particular process would shut down due to eating at a deficit while the other healing processes wouldn't. Not trying argue for the sake of arguing, it's just that the original comment made me curious about this.

The fact that on a deficit you can, grow your hair, heal wounds and repair muscle, tells you you body can make cells while on a deficit. A healing wound and building of muscle is the same biological process.

This is an interesting comment. Isn't muscle hypertrophy a response to microtrauma to the muscle cells? Why would the body be able to create scar tissue, skin cells, bone cells, scabs, blood cells, etc. after a traumatic event but not muscle?

It's very simple really. The body cares about survival above all else. So it will repair your wounds to your skin and to your muscles because that's a matter of survival. However, it will not CREATE new muscle mass when you're not even taking in enough calories to survive (ie: caloric deficit). It doesn't WANT to pull from your fat reserves but it will to keep you living. Muscle is expensive to create and maintain, and in a deficit your body will prioritize repairs and general survival over giving you more mass.

Make no mistake, in a deficit even simple things like healing from bruises and cuts will take longer. Even your immune system can and will be compromised. Recovery from workouts is significantly impacted. I've noticed this first hand, myself. You're basically starving yourself in a controlled manner to force your body to utilize your fat reserves. Everything slows down as a result.

But isn't adding muscle tissue a survival and/or healing response to the repeating trauma to those muscles? It seems similar to forming a callous. I realize that healing functions slow down in a deficit situation, but I'm still trying to grasp why this particular process would shut down due to eating at a deficit while the other healing processes wouldn't. Not trying argue for the sake of arguing, it's just that the original comment made me curious about this.

that's a valid and feasible question. but it is far out of scope. there is no point in comparing callouses to muscle adaptations and here is why. callouses form in general locations in response to stressors that force them to occur. I have them on my hands....because I am gripping bars quite often.

however, they react to a local and immediate stress, and they grow in correlation to that continued stress. Imagine if you were scraping your entire body against something every day. some parts (where the body is prepared for callousing) will develop callouses. Other parts will not. You can test this, but I know it to be true. This is an evolutionary pattern. The hands will callous, the knees, but the back of the neck...will not. The upper thigh either.

Muscle behaves in a similar way. Some muscles which bear slow twitch fiber, and are acquainted to endurance work, will perform all day. Other larger muscle groups that are compiled of much more fast twitch fiber, will not. The adaptive patterns of each kind of muscle are also different. They all react to stress, but beyond a reasonable level, they do not overreact. What modern bodybuilders are trying to do is get them to grow beyond what they are intended for. This is where the problems will lie.