Food Calorie Surplus to Gain Muscle Mass…Really?

My hypothesis: Given appropriate exercise and protein levels, a person can build muscle mass while eating at a calorie deficit that will result in loss of body fat (and perhaps even weight loss). My contention is that the body fat contributes to the body’s calorie needs as well as food, and until there is insufficient body fat a person should expect to be able to gain muscle mass AND lose body fat and even body weight simultaneously. What think ye?

It's not enough to say all the pieces are available, the appropriate metabolic pathways need to be there, and the pathways need to be wide enough to support the load.

For example, an issue with fat stores is they release energy much more slowly than the body burns them during exercise. A 50 pound fat reserve will yield somewhere around 1200 calories a day of potential energy, but this energy is only accessible at a rate of around 50 calories per hour. This means the internal "batteries" (ie glycogen stores etc) are going to get hit during exercise. This in turn means a portion, possibly a significant portion, of caloric intake is going to restoration of glycogen etc. If you're in a high-protein, low-carb kind of regimen, this means burning ingested protein for fuel, instead of using it for muscle growth.

So to make your argument, you'll need to lay out the principle metabolic pathways, caloric intakes, etc, and demonstrate that Point A is actually connected to Point C, so to speak. Personally, I'd love to see someone lay out an energy balance map showing all this.

This is definitely food for thought. I like your approach to the issues, and I would also love to see the energy balance map.

I keep reading that in order to gain muscle mass, one needs to have a caloric surplus that includes appropriate quantities of protein (and of course muscle mass building exercises). My question focuses on the food piece of this equation – I want to know if body fat calories count toward the surplus.

My hypothesis: Given appropriate exercise and protein levels, a person can build muscle mass while eating at a calorie deficit that will result in loss of body fat (and perhaps even weight loss). My contention is that the body fat contributes to the body’s calorie needs as well as food, and until there is insufficient body fat a person should expect to be able to gain muscle mass AND lose body fat and even body weight simultaneously. What think ye?

I am looking forward to the debate as to why this may not be true and learning a few things along the way...

It happens all the time on "The Biggest Loser". I think the difference is that those people are overweight/obese. A thin person with virtually no muscle mass will probably have to eat a calorie surplus.

Did you just use a reality TV show as evidence for...anything?

Yeah, probaby a bad idea. But they were at a calorie deficit, and they have muscles at the end of the show. Well, most of them, anyway. I think someone earlier made much more sense though when they said that they likely had all that muscle to begin with carrying their 300 or 400 pound bodies, and losing the fat just made them visible. Now bulk? They wouldn't fit into most definitions of bulky because they look lean, not huge like a bodybuilder.

I want to know if body fat calories count toward the surplus.

yes. this makes it possible to "recomp". this highly depends on BF level and how long you have been training though and will always lead to much slower muscle gain than a (clean)bulk-cut approach.

instead i would suggest to focus entirely an strength while cutting. by way of neuromuscular adaptation you can gain strength even when loosing muscle mass. when you start focusing more on hypertrophy after you finished your cut and eat in a surplus your muscle mass will shoot up due to better muscle-recruitment.

DISCLAIMER... this is based on very little actual knowledge, a bit of logic, a lot of reading, and probably influenced slightly by what I want to believe.


The body is constantly adapting to conditions... burning cals, storing cals, directing blood flow, etc etc. The list could probably go on forever regarding processes that change based on need/conditions.

So take the average person who works out once per day, 3ish times per week. The energy needs during and following the workout (assuming you give any credibility to the whole anabolic window idea) are very different than those while the person is at work sitting in front of a computer all day.

So if the person feeds properly around their workouts, why couldn't they build muscle during that 4 or 6 or 10 hours when muscles are being worked, damaged, and repaired? Then if they ended up in a slight calorie deficit over the course of a week, why wouldn't there be fat loss? I'm not saying those gains would be the same as those seen during a traditional bulk, but seems like they would be more than the "negligible gains" most people are willing to concede when on a deficit.

Yes, clearly this is influenced by all the reading I've done on things like IFing, carb backloading, calorie cycling, etc. But much the way the lay person's logic says you can't build if you're short on materials, the same logic says you can build if you have the materials when the body wants to build.

So if the person feeds properly around their workouts, why couldn't they build muscle during that 4 or 6 or 10 hours when muscles are being worked, damaged, and repaired? Then if they ended up in a slight calorie deficit over the course of a week, why wouldn't there be fat loss? I'm not saying those gains would be the same as those seen during a traditional bulk, but seems like they would be more than the "negligible gains" most people are willing to concede when on a deficit.

I think we were typing the exact same thing at the exact same time.
THIS.

Any muscle mass that is gained while eating at a deficit will be minimal, and will only happen for the obese, those who have never trained, and those who are returning to training.

Again, it will be minimal. Muscle density may change (less intramuscular fat) but if someone is seeking to alter the overall dimensions of the muscle, then it is necessary to eat at a calorie surplus.

Strength is a whole different ball game, and people often confuse mass growth with strength increases. Many new lifters will note remarkable (for them) strength increases and will note some change in dimensions and believe it is adding to muscle mass and volume when it isn't.

My thoughts on this were along the lines of this:

The question then is....how tight can you get those timeframes? Can you do this on a week to week basis? At what point are you cycling so fast between bulking and cutting that the benefits of either/both are lost?

and this:

Yes, clearly this is influenced by all the reading I've done on things like IFing, carb backloading, calorie cycling, etc. But much the way the lay person's logic says you can't build if you're short on materials, the same logic says you can build if you have the materials when the body wants to build.

I think there is something to the idea of calorie cycling for building muscle. Nobody would really argue about the effectiveness of bulk and cut cycles, but I have the same question about timeframes. How narrow can you make them?

If you were doing a bulk for 8 weeks and then a cut for 8 weeks, that doesn't mean that your body is anabolic for 8 straight weeks and then catabolic for 8 straight weeks. But you could average everything out and say, "Hey, during these 8 weeks I was in a surplus, and for these other 8 weeks I was in a deficit." But on a day or weekly basis, how often can you go in and out of a "surplus?" If I was in a surplus for these 12 hours and in a deficit for those 12 hours, yet over the course of the day I was technically in a deficit, could I not have built muscle in the time that I was in the surplus?

So I guess my question is how prolonged a surplus really must be in order to facilitate muscle growth.

I don't know if there are any studies about this kind of thing, so we might be stuck with speculation (please do enlighten if you know of one). I thought it was worth pondering anyhow.

I keep reading that in order to gain muscle mass, one needs to have a caloric surplus that includes appropriate quantities of protein (and of course muscle mass building exercises). My question focuses on the food piece of this equation – I want to know if body fat calories count toward the surplus.

My hypothesis: Given appropriate exercise and protein levels, a person can build muscle mass while eating at a calorie deficit that will result in loss of body fat (and perhaps even weight loss). My contention is that the body fat contributes to the body’s calorie needs as well as food, and until there is insufficient body fat a person should expect to be able to gain muscle mass AND lose body fat and even body weight simultaneously. What think ye?

I am looking forward to the debate as to why this may not be true and learning a few things along the way...

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, from an evolutionary perspective, for the body to use fat reserves to build muscle when eating at a deficit. We didn't evolve in an environment where high carb, high fat food was available over the phone without someone even having to get their lazy butt of the sofa. In evolutionary terms, eating at a deficit = food shortage, and in a food shortage, fat means being able to survive longer. Burning fat to build muscle would be a huge liability, i.e. you'd starve to death much more quickly than people whose bodies didn't build muscle in a food shortage. i recently read about a study, where analysis of the bones of neanderthals showed that 75% of them had suffered from a food shortage at some point in their lives. That suggests that the ability to survive a food shortage was a major factor in human evolution.

So any genes for building muscle while eating at a deficit would have been lost from human populations, due to natural selection, because people who had them died early on in food shortages, and we're descended from the survivors of food shortages, not the ones who died first.

Exceptions to this rule (e.g. noob gains in people who have a too high body fat percentage when they start training) are less relevant in evolutionary terms, because it would be extremely hard to have a too high body fat percentage if you only have palaeolithic technology, additionally, no-one would be sedentary.... so what happens to the bodies of people who are sedentary and have a too high body fat percentage is not something natural selection could act upon, because it didn't happen in our evolutionary past.