Muscle Growth on 1000 Deficit?

There is no precise formula, it will depend on many other factors (newbie or experienced lifter, individual propensity to build muscle, protein intake, training program...)
Building muscle in a deficit is already somewhat defying the odds (more likely to happen if you're a newbie to lifting), but a deficit of 1000-1500kcal per day (on average) is huge, especially when you aren't even obese (at 170, I can't imagine you have much weight to lose). Maintaining muscle mass would already be an accomplishment IMHO, with that kind of deficit. You can't just compensate for a huge deficit by throwing extra protein at your diet and hope one cancels out the other
There are factors that promote and hinder the likelihood of building muscle, so you're kind of playing the odds - in the end your concrete results will tell you what your individual needs are, but you're definitely not helping the odds by having a deficit like that (if it's consistently that high, I don't mean the occasional individual high deficit day).

(PS: to judge progress, don't rely solely on the weights your using - you can get stronger without gaining muscle mass, most notably newbies).

At your stats you’ll be lucky to have enough energy to train and recover properly and potentially be less active outside of the gym which will negate a good part of the deficit that you perceive to have.

It depends on your maintenance calories. Someone with a 4K daily maintenance will most likely be fine at 3K however someone with a maintenance of 2,500 will be hard pressed to consistently consume 1,500 without issues with a decent training program.

Muscle gain or loss will be determined by several factors however the lower the calories, the more likely to not gain or actually lose.

If someone is in a deficit and regularly weight trains the best that can be accomplished if protein quality and in sufficient quantity is maintained is hopefully not too much lean muscle mass is lost. imo.

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

neanderthin wrote: »

If someone is in a deficit and regularly weight trains the best that can be accomplished if protein quality and in sufficient quantity is maintained is hopefully not too much lean muscle mass is lost. imo.

That is not true, especially for a new lifter which he says he is. I would agree, and already stated earlier, that he's less likely to gain muscle on a large deficit. He should keep doing what he's doing, but have more realistic expectations of the outcome.

Ok, I was just responding to his first post and I did qualify by saying if someone was weight training regularly. Regardless though, it's wishful thinking for the most part and the bigger the deficit and the longer that deficit is maintained the less likely someone is going to gain mass or maintain any that was gained. But yeah, it's possible, anything is possible.

EDIT: I see you said basically the same thing, and I agree with you. cheers.

Goals good. Approach excessive.

If you were obese and first months aiming for large deficit may have made some sense

170 to 160 is not quite rounding error but literally there is zero health benefit to whether you achieve it in three, six, 12 or 29.9 months.

If you're willing to train, fuel your training and your recovery right now

Already some fat loss will be hiding because of exercise induced and water weight so the 3500 is close but not absolutely correct.

That said it's also irrelevant. Don't introduce big spikes and troughs if you don't have to

Use weight trend app to gauge overall weight level progress

Do not try the be good on the weekends routine together with a large deficit to go faster

But not only do try the good on the weekend routine, but it would also probably be your path to the absolutely best long term results. Do try it but with small consistent deficits with only occasional spikes on a few special occasions (and not ever Friday to Sunday with very low weekdays to compensate)

Whether you feel it or not there is no evidentiary or logical backing to "I perform better with a large deficit as compared to with a smaller".

you may perform better after weight loss especially if and as your power ratio changes but that's because of the total loss not the size of the deficit

Smell the roses and put your effort in hard training but not into making it hard to train

robertgranholm wrote: »

i get it, no system is perfect and it’s a complex thing, it’s not even just what your weight has done but your body comp, i’ve only lost a few pounds in weight but i’ve gained about 7 in lean muscle mass according my scale, aura band and methreesixty scans

Hmmm, maybe. Or maybe not.

Anything MFP, a calorie calculator, or any fitness tracker tells you about calories is an estimate, basically an average for people superficially similar to you. In no way is it a measurement.

Most people are close to those averages, but it's possible to be surprisingly far off, high or low. (I'm one of those rare oddballs: MFP and my Garmin - actually 2 different Garmin models, both of which give accurate estimates for others - are about 25-30% off for me, compared with nearly 9 years of logging experience. That's hundreds of calories per day. It's rare, but it can happen.)

On top of that, even the most meticulous logging is also approximate. (I'm not dissing logging. Like I said, I've been doing it successfully for almost 9 years.)

Your actual weight change is much closer to a measurement, but how to look at that is somewhat complicated given that you believe you've added muscle and lost fat. More about that later.

One helpful thing about recognizing weight change as a key metric is that it somewhat takes into account any systematic error in logging. IOW, if I log intake of 2000 calories when reality is closer to 2500, and lose a pound a week, it's very likely that I can log 2250 and drop my loss rate to around half a pound a week even though my numbers are inaccurate (unless I happen to cut out the main source of my systematic logging error, which would be an interesting coincidence).

When it comes to body composition, your scale, auraband, and methreesixty are also indirect estimates, not measurements. Dexa might be closer to a measurement, but it still has error bars.

Some semi-factoids you might want to put in the hopper to think about, essentially estimates from research:

It takes about 3500 cumulative calories to gain/lose a pound of body fat. (You probably knew that.)

It takes roughly maybe 2500-2800 cumulative surplus calories to build a pound of muscle. (Some of those calories could come from body fat . . . but at this point you should begin to see the tension that arises when goals are to lose fat but gain muscle at the same time. You're literally trying to add mass while subtracting mass.)

Generally, gaining two pounds of muscle mass per month would be regarded as a quite-good outcome for a male under ideal conditions. Ideal conditions include hormonal maleness, relative youth, newness to strength training, good overall nutrition (especially but not exclusively adequate protein), favorable genetics, a good progressive strength training program faithfully performed, and a calorie surplus (plus probably some stuff I forgot ).

Advice?

I agree with others that your current protein intake is unnecessarily high. Excess protein is just expensive calories, pretty much. You can get a goal-adjusted researched-based estimate of protein needs and learn more about protein generally here:

https://examine.com/protein-intake-calculator/
https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/

Sure, if you like meat, go for it, as long as you're not short-changing other aspects of nutrition (fats, micronutrients, fiber, beneficial phytochemicals, pro/prebiotics, etc.) to get there.

Lietchi tucked in a nice bit of advice there about not mistaking strength gain (or even a bit of a pump in appearance) for muscle mass gain, as a relatively new lifter.

I agree with others that shooting for half a pound (or less) of fat loss per week would be more compatible with your goals. Two pounds a week is antithetical, unless you want to simply hold the line on muscle (maintain what you've got) until you're down to goal weight. I don't think that's the best route, given how light you are already, if nothing else because of the risk to energy level and general health from going that extreme.

I mention "half a pound (or less)" because I've actually done that myself: I lost about a pound a month on average over many months, to lose something around what you're trying to lose in total now.

Pros: It was virtually painless subjectively, and I noticed no difference in exercise performance or results. Cons: It's not going to work reliably IMO unless you have a pretty accurate estimate of your personalized calorie needs, and a well-tested logging habit. Also, it will take many weeks for the scale to confirm progress (amongst day to day water weight fluctuations of much larger magnitude), and even a weight trending app can be deluded temporarily, which many people would find frustrating.

I suspect that your generally ambitious routine (high activity, high formal exercise, high protein, etc.) is helpful, but it's also somewhat at odds with super-extreme calorie cuts. Exercise is useful stress, calorie deficit can be necessary stress, but high cumulative stress (sum of all physical and psychological stressors in one's life) isn't great for a body. I wouldn't, personally.

Main advice: Be more patient (slower), probably get better overall and long-term results.

But what do I know, I'm not a personal trainer, registered dietitian, or even much of a muscle gainer anymore. I'm just some random idiot on the internet who is maybe over-analytic and thinks this stuff is interesting.

Others will disagree with some of the above, probably.

Best wishes!

P.S. You said "I typically do need to back off the deficit every 4th-5th day, or on the weekends the diet goes to crap and I'm not hitting deficits which is a battle everyone knows, and so I'm not stringing together a month straight of 1500 deficit days...but I will lose that 2-3lbs give or take by Friday, then gain all or some portion back, then lose, then gain back...sometimes I'll have a better eating weekend and continue the losing/trim down...the never ending enjoyable battle."

There are various things in there that make me raise an eyebrow, but my best guess would be that in that lose/gain/lose/gain cycle you're giving too much credence to weight shifts that are actually water retention fluctuations and digestive waste in transit, not body fat changes. Uneven eating - calories and/or shifts in certain nutrient patterns and food volumes - will do that. I'm saying that as someone who eats unevenly myself.