A common fitness goal among many people in the gym is to change their body composition.
Changing your body composition requires you to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously.
In order to gain muscle and lose fat, an effective weightlifting routine is essential. Weightlifting is the best way for you to slim down and gain muscle while changing your body composition.
In order to successfully build muscle and lose fat, you need to learn some effective muscle gaining strategies.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to start building muscle and losing stubborn fat.
In this post you’ll find:
Why you don’t need hours of cardio to lose fat
A common misconception that many people have is that in order to lose fat, you need to be doing hours of cardio.
However, if your goal is to change your body composition, then cardio isn’t what’s going to give you a slim, toned body.
Why muscle building exercises are more effective than cardio exercises
In fact, if you do too much cardio, you risk becoming “skinny fat”.
Skinny fat is when you’re skinny, but look like you have more fat. Meaning you don’t actually weigh a lot, but your body still looks like you have a lot of fat on you.
As you can imagine, being skinny fat makes it nearly impossible to look toned. As a result, excessive cardio is not your best friend when it comes to changing your body composition.
Instead, prioritizing muscle building workouts is. The reason for this is because in order to look toned, you need to have muscle on your body.
Of course, you will need to lose fat to reveal this muscle, but if you don’t have muscle, then losing fat will only reveal more fat underneath.
And, it’s impossible to lose all the fat on your body. So instead, it’s much healthier and much more effective to start building muscle.
Why building muscle aids fat loss
Building lean muscle is a great way to change your body composition and effectively lose fat.
This is because the more muscle you have on your body, the more calories your body will burn.
Strength training burns more calories long term than cardio
A single weightlifting workout in itself won’t necessarily burn as many calories as a cardio workout will.
However, the more often you lift and the more muscle you put on, the more calories you’re body will burn at rest.
This means your body will start burning more calories throughout the day, even when you aren’t doing anything.
The reasoning behind this is that a pound of muscle burns more calories than a pound of fat. So if you were to turn five pounds of fat into five pounds of muscle, you’d still have five pounds, but the five pounds of muscle would burn more calories than the five pounds of fat.
This makes it much easier to be in a calorie deficit and burn more calories and fat throughout the day.
Gaining muscle while losing fat is known as… body recomposition!
I actually wrote a post on how to body recomp a while ago if you want to go check it out. I talk about exactly what body recomposition is and how to do it.
Body recomp is basically where you change your body composition by losing fat and gaining muscle simultaneously.
Doing this actually allows you to change the shape and appearance of your body.
The way you do this is by gaining muscle.
By pairing muscle building exercises and a diet that promotes muscle gain, you’ll be able to effectively body recomp. and gain muscle while also losing fat.
However, not everyone’s goal is to change the composition of their body. That’s why, in this post I’m giving you the best strategies to help you gain lean muscle mass.
These can be used to body recomp or simply to gain muscle on it’s own.
Effective strategies to gain lean muscle mass
These are some of the best strategies to start gaining muscle and losing fat.
Start a weight lifting routine
I’m sure you could’ve guessed this, but it’d be extremely hard to put on muscle without actually lifting weights. Your muscles grow when you exercise them!
As a result, the first thing you need to do to start gaining more muscle is to start a weightlifting routine.
Even if you aren’t specifically trying to gain muscle, there are so many benefits of weightlifting for women, I’d recommend anyone try it out anyway.
But for the purpose of this post, I’m assuming your main goal is to learn effective strategies to gain muscle.
Create a weightlifting routine with effective muscle gaining workouts
Creating a realistic and attainable weightlifting routine is one of the first steps to start gaining muscle in the gym.
It’s much harder to effectively gain muscle without a program that you can stick to.
A routine allows you to give your workouts structure and to structure your workouts so that you’re always working towards your goals.
Then, you don’t even need to think about your workouts every week, all you need to do is stick to your routine.
Make your routine achievable and realistic:
Your weightlifting routine should be something you’re able to stick to and works for you.
If you start by creating a routine for yourself that’s unrealistic and unattainable, it’ll be much harder for you to stick to it.
Instead, create a personalized routine for yourself that supports both your lifestyles and you’re goals.
Make your workouts more effective by lifting heavy
In order to gain a significant amount of muscle, you need to be challenging your body and training your muscles to lift heavy.
As a result, you shouldn’t be scared to lift heavy weights in the gym. It’d be much more difficult to gain a noticeable amount of muscle without actually pushing your muscles enough to grow.
Increase your training intensity to increase muscle gains
Just lifting weights won’t automatically mean you’ll gain muscle mass. You need to be lifting in a way that challenges your muscles and forces them to grow.
One of the best ways to challenge yourself in the gym is by training intensely.
Training intensely in the gym means you’re implementing progressive overload and training to failure. By doing each of these things, you’ll continue challenging your muscles every workout.
What is progressive overload:
Progressive overload means that you progressively increase the weight you lift or the number of reps you do over a certain period of time.
Progressive overload strategy:
One common strategy to practice progressive overload is to start at a weight where you can only complete 8 reps of a given exercise.
Then, keep doing the exercise at that weight until you progress to the point where you’re able to complete 12 full reps.
Once you can now complete 12 full reps, increase the weight to a higher weight where you can only complete 8 reps again.
When you continue doing this over and over again, this is known as progressive overload.
Notice how you progressively increase the weight as your body gets stronger and is able to complete more reps.
This allows you to keep the exercise challenging enough to stimulate maximum muscle growth.
What it means to train to failure:
Training to failure means you do a set until your muscles physically can’t do anymore reps for that set.
There are a couple ways to help yourself train to failure.
Strategies to train to failure:
The first strategy is to lift heavy weight so you’re able to reach failure in a lower rep range. This is a style of training to increase strength.
The second strategy is to lift a lower weight where you reach failure at a high number of reps. This is more of an endurance style of training.
The third strategy is to combine the two and do a moderate weight where you reach failure in the 8 to 12 rep range. This is probably the most common way to train to failure in the gym and is known as hypertrophy training.
Hypertrophy training means you’re training for muscle growth.
Implementing these strategies into your routine will allow you to keep challenging yourself every workout.
That way, instead of allowing your body to become comfortable in your routine, each workout you push yourself as hard as you can.
Prioritize a diet for muscle gain
Eat enough food
In order to gain muscle in the gym, you NEED to be eating enough food. I see way too many women trying to gain significant muscle but consuming way too little calories throughout the day.
You make it so much more difficult for yourself to gain muscle by not eating enough foods.
One of the biggest reasons why people don’t see result from their strength training efforts is because of a poor diet.
It’s important to be aware of the impact of your diet on your fitness results.
Keep in mind your body needs a lot of calories and nutrients in order to grow and recover. As a result, you shouldn’t be afraid to eat a lot of nutrient dense foods throughout the day.
Food gives your body energy to workout
Regularly eating too little food leaves your body deprived of both nutrients and energy.
Without nutrients and energy in your system, you’ll most likely experience a lot of fatigue and brain fog.
Both of these make it extremely difficult to work out. Think about it, how can you push yourself in the gym if you’re extremely tired?
Most likely, you can’t!
Having more energy ready and available for your body to use means a better workout where you’re able to push yourself even harder. This means more muscle gains!
Not only that, but food gives your body energy to recover (and grow!)
Not only does your body need tons of food and energy to workout, but it also needs these to recover.
Your workout isn’t the only thing that’s extremely taxing on your body. Your body works extremely hard both during your workout and afterwards when it’s trying to repair any muscles that you’ve damaged.
So why not give your body everything it needs to successful repair itself and grow?
Sufficient calories and nutrients means better recovery and more growth!
Food provides your body with both energy and resources that it needs to repair itself.
When you’re body has enough of these to fully repair itself, that’s when you’re muscles will grow.
As a result, if you’re stingy with the nutrients you provide yourself, your muscle gains will be stingy as well.
That’s why it’s so important to eat enough food in order to sustain your body during your workouts and during your recovery. Doing this will allow you to see the most muscle growth.
A high protein diet supports muscle gains
Not only do you want to be eating enough food, but you also want to be eating the right foods.
I wrote a previous post on exactly how you need to be eating as a weightlifting women. This post goes more in depth on how important aspects of your diet that keep you healthy during your weight training journey.
One of the biggest aspects of your diet that supports muscle growth is your protein intake!
The importance of your protein intake for muscle growth
In order to see the most muscle growth in the gym, it’s important to be eating a high protein diet.
This is because proteins are broken down in to amino acids by your body. Then, these amino acids are what are used to rebuild and grow your muscles.
How to get more protein into your diet
If you struggle with eating enough protein, try making it the center of your meals. Next, fill in your sides with plenty of fruits, vegetables, carbs, and anything else you may want to include in your meal.
Increasing your protein intake in each of your meals is one of the best ways to increase your overall protein intake each day.
Prioritize hydration for muscle growth
Just like your diet is extremely important for your muscle growth, so is staying hydrated.
Your body requires tons of water in order to function throughout the day. Just like your body needs food for almost every process, it also needs water.
And it needs even more water when you’re someone who works out and is active.
Keeping a high water intake is a great way to increase muscle gains.
What happens when you start drinking enough water
When you start properly hydrating your muscles, you’ll notice a couple changes in your body and your workouts.
Number one: Your workouts will feel much better
Drinking more water will allow you to be much more focused during your workouts because your thinking will be so much clearer.
It’s so hard to work out when your brain is foggy and you’re feeling tired. I’m all too familiar with this feeling. However, one of the main culprits of this is dehydration.
Drinking more water will help you stay more focused during your workouts and allow yourself to push yourself even harder.
Number two: You’ll be able to perform better
Water gives your body more energy to perform in the gym.
Additionally, since it also helps you focus better and think more clearly, it also allows you to push yourself harder during each exercise.
Which means you’ll be able to progress quicker in the gym and see much better results.
Number three: Your muscles will look much fuller
Drinking water helps your muscles look much bigger and fuller. The reason for this is because your muscles are made up of mostly water.
So it makes sense that once you start drinking more water, you allow your muscles to fill themselves out more.
Number four: Your body will store less water weight
The more water you drink, the more your body flushes through water in your body.
Because your body doesn’t hold on to as much water, it allows you to look more toned and feel less puffy.
Prioritize rest and recovery
The final key to increase your muscle gains in the gym is to prioritize rest.
I talk about this a lot on here, but rest is extremely important for women who lift weights, and anyone really.
The reason for this is because rest is when your body recovers and your muscles grow.
You can be doing the best, most intense workouts in the world. But if you aren’t allowing your body proper time to rest, you won’t be seeing the right results.
If you’re going to put all the effort in at the gym, you might as well be putting the effort in to allow yourself the time to rest.
You’d think resting would be the easy part, but it’s importance is so often overlooked.
Many of us weightlifters get into a toxic mindset where we have a constant need to be working out and improving ourselves. But this is extremely counterproductive if you want to see the proper results from your effort.
Instead, focus on allowing yourself 1 to 3 full rest days every week.
Takeaways
If you’re looking to gain muscle, the first thing you need to do is start weight training. It’s important to start a weight lifting routine that works for yourself and is achievable, that way you’ll be able to stick to it.
However, there are many aspects that go into muscle gains besides your workout routine.
By pairing together intense training sessions, efficient rest, and a proper diet, you’ll allow yourself to make more progress than ever before.
More of my posts on weightlifting:
4 Essential exercises you NEED for glute growth