Gain muscle lose the fat?

I am not a personal trainer but I can give you insight on what I do.

For calories, I eat roughly the same amount. The only time I raise my calories for the day is when I do cardio. so you do both? then raise it by maybe 200 calories? I am giving an estimate. Personally I judge by my fitbit on eating more.

I do personal training twice a week for an hour, and is where I do most of my lifting. We do all around training circuits so it hits all different kinds of muscles. I find that less weight and more reps help the most. The longer you do it, in another month or so, you can up the weight and be able to do the same amount of reps. I only upped once as the reps are by minutes and not by actual reps numbers. It is pretty killer and you feel your body getting stronger.

Hope this helps.

I follow the TDEE-20% method. I am 5'8", weight 158-159 (I think... it might be lower), lift weights heavy for me 4 times/ week and do cardio 3-4 times/ week. I eat around 1700/day.

kojiro44705 wrote: »

I've gained about 8lbs of muscle in a month so far. Most of my activities are cardio though. I run on the treadmill for speed, weighted hula hoops for core strength, bo staff training for arms, chest, shoulders, and back, and then I do Insanity for everything else. I'm at about 1,600 calories with that. Doing cardio, though, I balance out my protein (build muscle), with carbs for energy. If I was lifting weights, I would back off on the carbs a little. I also noticed, if you drink more milk (2%), its easier to ease any joint pain AND the sugars in the milk keep your body full and happy.

Not to rain on your parade, but doing mainly cardio and some strength training while in a deficit there is no way you gained muscle, especially 8 lbs in such a short time, unless you are on 'roids or some type of testosterone. You would be lucky to gain 0.5lbs/week of muscle in a caloric surplus following a muscle building routine even as a beginner. Most likely any gain you saw was water being retained in the muscles do to new or change in routine.

kojiro44705 wrote: »

All me, baby. Not everyone is alike.

Believe that all you want, but don't try giving people advice based on it. 1600 Calories and a bunch of cardio-type work? No, you haven't gained 8 lb of muscle. In fact, I doubt that you've gained any muscle at all. As has been mentioned - you are simply retaining water.

umm if you are not working out you arent burning 1800 calories,are you wearing your fitbit all day? thats the only way you are going to get that high of a calorie burn and it wont be accurate because its what your body burns normally through every day activity and cant be counted as exercise calories. only wear your fitbit to count steps or calories when working out. otherwise your calorie burns are not that high.try burning those calories through cardio alone. you will see you wont be anywhere near the calories burned your fitbit is claiming

While it isn’t optimal in either direction, you can lose fat and gain muscle. This is quite easy as a beginner and gets more difficult as you go, and having a lot of fat to lose helps. It is very hard to keep this up, so a commitment is required. If you’re more stuck on weight, then I’d advise you to focus mostly on cardio and lift just to maintain muscle. If you’re interested in attempting both, read on.

Instead of eating at a 500 calorie deficit, try something closer to 250. This will slow your fat loss, but not put you in a catabolic state if your macros are good. Make sure you’re getting good quality protein and time your meals to feed for your training. If you’re lifting heavy, you’ll gain muscle.

As to your lifting program, I would stop the splits and go to three full body workouts per week using compound movements like squat, deadlift, bench press, pull ups/rows, and overhead press. Go heavy! That means around 3 - 6 reps (strength) for up to five sets per exercise. If you want to mix it up a bit, then drop the weight about 20% and go with 6 - 10 reps (hypertrophy) for one of those three workouts.

Get good sleep! This is critical for muscle gains and to keep cortisol (fat retaining hormone). You can do cardio on days you’re not lifting (if you want to do cardio on your lifting days, you might not be pushing yourself hard enough with the weights), but make sure you take one day off per week. Rest and recovery is when you’re building muscle.

Take measurements (chest, upper arms, waist, hips, upper legs, neck) and after four weeks of this, measure again. You can then look to tweak the food macros and timing to maximize your results.

jim180155 wrote: »

CharlieBeansmomTracey wrote: »

umm if you are not working out you arent burning 1800 calories,are you wearing your fitbit all day? thats the only way you are going to get that high of a calorie burn and it wont be accurate because its what your body burns normally through every day activity and cant be counted as exercise calories. only wear your fitbit to count steps or calories when working out. otherwise your calorie burns are not that high.try burning those calories through cardio alone. you will see you wont be anywhere near the calories burned your fitbit is claiming

Not true. All you have to do is to enable negative calories. I have to walk about 5,000 steps or a little under 2.5 miles just to break even. The steps over 5k start crediting me with extra calories burned. Since getting my Fitbit I average 7 to 8 miles a day. My record was over 15 miles.

What people without Fitbits (or with Fitbits but didn't enable negative calories) don't realize is that MFP's sedentary setting assumes you're going to walk a couple miles during a typical day, and if you're not getting those couple miles in you need to adjust your daily calorie totals down a couple hundred. Unless of course you're getting in a couple hundred calories of other exercise that you're not logging.

Buuuuut... the 1800 calories come from her fitbit account not her mfp account. So obviously she burns 1800 on an average day from walking around (with or without workout)

OP generally you have to decide what your main goal is. Gaining muscle or losing fat. While there is the possibility of some newbie gains on a deficit for the first 6 months or so of lifting you are not going to make any reasonable gains while losing fat at the same time.

fatcity66 wrote: »

TR0berts wrote: »

CharlieBeansmomTracey wrote: »

umm if you are not working out you arent burning 1800 calories,are you wearing your fitbit all day? thats the only way you are going to get that high of a calorie burn and it wont be accurate because its what your body burns normally through every day activity and cant be counted as exercise calories. only wear your fitbit to count steps or calories when working out. otherwise your calorie burns are not that high.try burning those calories through cardio alone. you will see you wont be anywhere near the calories burned your fitbit is claiming

1800 Calories is a perfectly reasonable daily expenditure (TDEE).

So that's what they burn for the entire day, not just exercise calories? That seems like a very low TDEE to me, but then, I am probably heavier than the OP.

Not all that low. Sit at a desk all day and don't exercise or otherwise move around much? 1800 (or thereabouts) sounds about right for an "average" woman. Maybe a little on the low side, but not unreasonable.

And I guess TDEE (which is generally averaged out over a week) isn't the right way of putting it - more like single daily expenditure.