How To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle

Hi, my name's Nick Mitchell, I'm the owner of Ultimate Performance Personal Training here in London. Today we're going to talk about how to build muscle. We're going to look at various different topics and cover everything that we can to help get you the muscle mass, the muscle development that you want and to give you all the little tricks of the trade that helps make this personal training business here the best in the business.

Today, we're going to talk about losing fat and gaining muscle. A lot of people will tell you that it's impossible, physiologically impossible, to lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously. Now, I'm here to tell you that they are wrong.

Countless times here at our personal training gym at Ultimate Performance in London, we have clients who come in and gain considerable muscle and lose considerable fat at the same time. The higher up you go, the more experienced you become, the more things you do right, the harder it is to achieve this. I've been training for twenty years; hopefully, I do most things right.

It's pretty hard for me to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. But if you haven't got my level of experience and perhaps my level of knowledge, it is possible because the chances are you're doing more things wrong. So, you have to get everything right and you have to be consistent.

You have to get your training right. You have to train to stimulate muscle growth. You have to train four times a week, maybe three.

You have to bust your balls in the gym. You might have to do cardio, some people might not. The most important thing you have to do though, you have to nail your diet.

You have to nail your diet spot, spot on. Now, there are an enormous amount of variables from individual to individual in terms of getting the right formula for losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time. But a general rule of thumb is that you must eat the same amount of protein pretty consistently.

My preference for losing fat and gaining muscle is about one and a half grams per pound of lean body weight, maybe up to two grams if it's a man carrying a reasonable amount of muscle mass. The secret though is to cycle the carbohydrates intake. Some days you must go low, sub fifty.

One or two days, every ten, you must go high. The leaner you are and the more muscle you carry, the more often you must have what I call “spike days,” the more often you must consume larger amounts of carbs. The worse condition you are and the less muscle you have, the more infrequent these carb days must be.

The carbs that you should eat should be clean carbs. You don't go and have a box of Cocoa Pops for breakfast and think you're ever, ever, ever going to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. So it must be controlled cap carbohydrate intake and the timing must be right.

So you must eat the carbs post-workout. A small amount of fast acting carbs, maybe fifty grams, and then an hour later, you would have a meal. You could have chicken and rice.

Chicken and rice is a good meal that springs to mind. And you might do this one day a week, you might do this three days a week. It really depends on conditioning.

So my advice to you is you must go and experiment with your carbohydrate intake. Start low and then gradually add. Monitor your condition and you will get where you want to be.

So this is the way to do it: keep the protein the same, one and a half grams per pound of body weight, maybe a fraction less if you're a woman, maybe a fraction more if you're a muscular man. Start with very low carbohydrates and then selectively add around the times of your workout a small amount of carbs. Over time, you can gradually do that but you must play around with the variables.

I can't stand here and tell you what is exactly going to work for you because as you know if you look around, look around at all your friends, your neighbors, even your family, everybody's shaped differently, everybody resp