Body weight is frequently used as the sole metric by which we gauge progress during a transformation challenge or weight loss journey.
But, your body weight is just a number, it doesn’t reflect how much lean mass or body fat you’re carrying around, both of which are far more meaningful when assessing the results from your fitness and nutrition plan as well as your overall cardiometabolic health.
Today, we’ll discuss the basics of body recomposition and how you can use it to improve fitness and nutrition habits.
What is Body Recomposition?
Body recomposition is the process of transforming your physique (and health) by focusing on building lean, strong muscle and shedding body fat. Focusing on body composition as opposed to pure body weight shifts the emphasis from focusing solely on a number on a bathroom scale to the ratio of the amount of lean body mass (muscle) vs the amount of body fat.
How Focusing on Body Recomposition Impacts Exercise and Nutrition Choices
This also helps to inform your nutrition and exercise habits. When focusing purely on weight loss, you may excessively restrict calories with little consideration to the quality of food or macronutrient contents just so you can see the number on the scale go down.
But, when your focus is on building lean muscle and stripping away body fat, you should construct your meals in such a way as to support muscle gain and fat loss. This means making protein the center of each meal/snack. Protein supports both muscle gain and fat loss.
For starters, protein supplies your body with amino acids -- the building blocks used to build and repair muscle, synthesize hormones, create neurotransmitters, and build healthy hair, skin and nails.
Protein also helps keep you feeling full, which is important when dieting for fat loss to prevent unnecessary snacking. Your body also has to expend more energy to digest protein than either carbohydrates or fat, which can also help you maintain the calorie deficit needed to shed body fat.
How Much Protein
Current recommendations for individuals interested in body recomposition are to consume between 1.6-2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. This averages out to ~1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.
So, if you weigh 175 pounds, you’ll want to consume 175 grams of protein each day. Ideally, this would be evenly distributed across 4-6 meals, depending on your availability and preference.
Benefits of Improving Your Body Composition
Improved Metabolism
The more muscle (and less fat) your body has, the more calories your body burns, even at rest. This is because muscle demands more energy to sustain itself than fat does.
Lower Risk of Chronic Lifestyle-Induced Conditions
Being overweight or obese has been associated with a number of adverse health outcomes and increases your risk for a host of chronic conditions, including hypertension, type 2 diabetes, hyperglycemia, heart failure, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease.
Being proactive with your fitness and nutrition plan to strip away excess body fat and build lean muscle improves your body’s ability to utilize and store carbohydrates (glucose), reduces the burden on your cardiovascular system, and takes stress off of your joints, ligaments and connective tissue.
Increased Mood & Confidence
Being fit improves your self-confidence and overall mood, there’s no other way to say it. When you look good, you feel good. Friends, family, co-workers, and even random people in public will take note of your hard work, and quite often will compliment you on your hard work and impressive results.
We’re not saying you should improve your body composition solely for compliments and an ego-boost, but it is a nice by-product.
5 Tips for Body Recomposition
Eat a High-Protein Diet
Muscle building, fat loss, or body recomposition, consuming enough protein has to be prioritized. As we mentioned above, it provides your body with the raw materials it needs to recover from intense resistance training workouts and build new lean muscle. Protein also helps keep hunger at bay and increases how many calories your body burns during digestion.
Aim to consume ~1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight from high-quality protein sources, such as:
- Lean red meat (beef, bison, elk, venison, pork, etc.)
- Poultry (chicken, turkey, duck, etc.)
- Fish & Shellfish (Alaskan salmon, mahi-mahi, redfish, shrimp, oysters, etc.)
- Eggs
- Greek yogurt
- Cottage cheese
Protein powders, like whey protein, egg white protein, or vegan protein, are also outstanding options to help you meet your daily protein requirements. They’re convenient, affordable, and a staple in the diets of many fitness enthusiasts.
Perform Resistance-Training Workouts 3-4x Per Week
Cardio is great for general health and burning calories, but to build muscle and strength, resistance training is essential. Put another way, your muscles only get stronger when they're forced to lift more weight and do more reps than they’re used to doing.
Challenging your muscles can be accomplished with free weights (barbells, dumbbells, or kettlebells), machines, resistance bands, or bodyweight exercises like push ups, pull ups, dips, rows, and lunges. You can use any of these methods or a combination throughout the week.
Need help figuring out the right workout for your goals and preferences? We’ll help you, for FREE!
Open up the 1UP Fitness App, and we’ll provide customized training (and nutrition recommendations) to help you accomplish your body recomposition goals.
Maintain a Slight Calorie Deficit
To shed body fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. The reason for this is that your body requires a certain amount of energy (calories) to maintain its current size. Eating below this amount forces your body to turn to its stored energy reserves (body fat, lean muscle tissue, etc.) to make up for what it’s not getting from food.
To tilt things in your favor, meaning it burns body fat for energy and not your precious, hard-earned lean muscle, you have to do two things: consume enough protein and perform resistance training. These two things send a powerful reinforcement to your body that it needs the muscle it has and can burn through fat for any additional energy needs.
For body recomposition, you’ll want to use a slight (modest) deficit of ~10% below maintenance calories. This is a big enough deficit to force the body to burn fat without putting you in such a large hole that you can’t build muscle at the same time.
Don’t Neglect Cardio
Effective body recomposition is a dual process: building muscle and reducing body fat. Resistance training and a high-protein diet help your body build lean muscle. To lose fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. While this can be accomplished through calorie restriction alone, adding a little bit of extra cardio during your recomp can further help your fat loss goals.
Cardio of any kind, be it steady-state or HIIT, increases your daily energy expenditure. Performing a few cardio sessions during the week will allow you to eat slightly more calories while maintaining the deficit your body needs to shed fat.
Make sure to separate your cardio and resistance training sessions to limit the possibility of the “interference” effect. Ideally, you would perform cardio workouts and resistance training workouts on different days, but if that’s not possible, try to separate the sessions by at least 4-5 hours, such as morning fasted cardio and a lunchtime or evening resistance training session. If you only have time for one session each day, perform your resistance training first followed by your cardio. This way, you are at your freshest mentally and physically for the heavy lifting portion of your training.
Use the Right Supplements
Diet, training, and sleep are responsible for the bulk of your results. But, the right application of supplements can make the process more efficient and enjoyable. 1UP Nutrition offers a versatile line of premium supplements to help you where and when you need support.
Need help pushing hard in your weight lifting workouts?
We’ve got research-backed, gym-proven pre workout supplements for men and women as well as a stim-free pre workout for late night training sessions.
Want some extra metabolism support and appetite control?
We’ve got you covered there too with our best-selling thermogenic weight loss aids, Make Her Lean Max and Pro Ripped Max, as well as a stimulant-free appetite suppressant.
