Quote:
Originally posted by Nathan
You can gain muscle while in a caloric deficit.
Sorry to bust the bubble, but unless you're born with mutated genes or have a completely different metabolism system than any other human being you can't gain muscle mass while in a caloric deficit. When newbies start traing and don't eat right their gains are more muscle volumizaton...Intracellular water, glycogen storage, sarcoplasmic fluid. The protein found in thier diet will go to repairing and building muscle, but the amount is miniscule and this effect is short lived. Ironicaly for bodybuilders muscle hypertrophy is the last process in a long line of "to do" jobs for the body. Building muscle requires loads of energy which can only be supplied through food stuffs. Not only is it energy expensive to repair and further grow muscle, but the metabolic requirements simply to support that muscle tissue are very taxing and again require a great deal of energy. This is why in order to gain muscle mass(true muscle, not water, glycogen compensation) you have to have an excess of calories and an abundance of amino acids availible not only to grow new muscle, but to support it. While in a calorie retricted state the body will slow it's metabolsim to prevent "impending danger" or starvation by catabolizing muscle tissue not only to meet energy requirements, but to take a metabolic burden off of itself. Because muscle is so very metabolicaly active excess amounts (what we all seek) is just not that simple to grow and maintain. With our easy access to myrid food choices in our society we are able to do things with the human body that nature really didn't intend us to do...Grow to be 250 pounds with 5%bf. Adding muscle doesn't mean adding fat so if you add muscle whilst simultaneously maintaining your current amount of fat mass you bf% will go down even though you havn't actually lost any fat. This law of ratios seems to ellude most and fools them into thinking they are loosing actual fat while building muscle. In rality they have simply changed the ration more in favor of muscle mass compared to fat mass thus the % will go down(change).