Most people who go to the gym to burn out their extra fat also want to increase their flexibility, build greater muscular strength and endurance, reshape and tone their bodies and add some lean muscle mass to it. Now you must be wondering whether burning fat and building muscles simultaneously is possible at all or not.



Muscle building (anabolism) requires more calorie intake than what gets exhausted everyday; while on the other hand, losing extra weight requires fewer calories intake than what you are able to burn each day.

There exists a very fine link between losing weight and gaining muscles. In order to develop big powerful muscles, you will need to undertake strength training exercises to improve your muscular strength and endurance. As a result of your training, your muscles start to get stronger and bigger. As your muscles continue to grow strong and big, they would require more nutrients and rest. Muscles are metabolically very active and as you continue to develop more muscle tissues your body's metabolic rate increases and the fat burning process becomes more efficient. As a result, you tend to lose unwanted fat from your body and gain lean muscle mass.

While you are trying to lose the excess body fat, you must be careful about not losing your lean body mass. You need to preserve your muscle mass and your energy levels by taking in adequate amounts of protein and carbohydrate drinks to compensate for the proteins and carbohydrates lost during or immediately after a workout while you are on a low calorie diet.

If your aim is to build powerful muscles, then you would need to take a high calorie and high protein diet, coupled with the correct resistance exercises to stimulate the multiple cells involved in muscle tissue development, along with adequate amount of rest to stimulate repair, recovery and growth of muscles.

For best results, every bodybuilder must aim at exerting the muscles a little bit harder than the previous workout session either by increasing the amount of weights used, or by doing more number of repetitions. This is known as taking progressive overloads and helps improve the muscular strength and size.

Muscles can grow faster when you take sufficient rest between subsequent workouts to allow repair, recovery and replenishment of energy supplies to your muscles. Therefore, take at least 2 days rest between subsequent workouts.

If you are ultimately interested in losing weight as well as in building muscles, then you must engineer your diet regime in such as manner that you do not allow the proteins to be used up for energy production in your body. Rather, the proteins must be made available for the repair and growth of the muscle tissues in your body through protein supplements. Most experts recommend consuming a mixture of protein and carbohydrate immediately after a workout session in order to provide the body with sufficient energy as well as to facilitate maximum muscle repair.