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The study is very misleading. I was excited to read about some scientific breakthrough because I saw the link from Hacker News, but this one crucial fact gave it away: > the McMaster researchers rounded up 40 overweight young men Of course they both lost weight and gained muscle. They were overweight to begin with. Anyone overweight who starts exercising loses a lot of weight and gains muscle simply because their bodies began to have higher caloric expenditures, and their muscles had to adapt to more mechanical stresses. If we're talking about someone whose body fat percentage is already normal, however, we'll go back to choosing between losing weight or gaining muscle, because you can't do both. When you exercise, you burn the carbs first, then the fat, then to a small extent, the protein, though these three are being used simultaneously to produce energy. You hit the fat-burning zone when your carbs can't produce as much energy (fat produces way more energy but requires way more intensity to burn), but since fat also takes some time to burn and you already need to produce energy to continue with the exercise, you use the protein too, which comes from your muscles. This is the reason why bodybuilders have a cutting phase and a gaining phase. They gain muscle or strength for 2-5 months, cut for 1-2 months, then go back to gaining muscle again. How do you gain muscle? You put on weight--meaning, you eat more. The weight that you put on will be about 5 parts fat and 1 part muscle, and that is why the cutting phase is necessary. Muscle is only gained with the fat and continued weight training, so burn the fat once you put on the weight. Whenever you attempt to lose fat, you will always inevitably lose muscle, so if you want to get buff, you can only do so much fat-burning exercises. That means keeping your runs at 10-15km, for example. In summary, you can't do both. You can only gain muscle and lose weight together if you're really fat to begin with. If you're within the average body fat % range, though, you still need to switch between cutting and gaining phases. |