Building muscle or losing fat, it's usually recommended to do one or the other, especially if you're not a beginner, but is it possible to do both at the same time?
Two training routines dominate most fitness and bodybuilding circles. Bulking or eat at a caloric surplus to gain weight and build lean mass and cutting more or eat at a caloric deficit to lose weight and burn fat.
Usually you have to choose between one or the other, it's best to cycle them back and forth to reap their benefits. But there are some experts that promote the possibility of reaping the benefits of both of them at the same time.
Now for beginners, it's very possible to do both simultaneously because the body is at a state in which there's a lot of room for improvement on both ends of the spectrum.
Especially overweight beginners. Even if they eat at a court deficit, they are prime for building muscle, since they don't have much to begin with and burning fats as he has so much stored away.
For non beginners, however, this is much harder to achieve. You might have to resort to re-comp positioning or as fitness expert, Ellen Aragon calls it, culking, a play on words of bulking and cutting and such a routine comes in all different shapes and forms. Some become routine suggests a small bulking for a few weeks, alternating with a moderate cut for one week.
Some routines recommend switching between the two on a daily basis. Some try to influence the effects of P ratio, which deals with how your body breaks down or stores fat relative to muscle mass. Some recommend weekly re-feeding phases or cheat days, some suggest eating, just maintenance calories while maintaining some form of resistance training and other suggest eating at a surplus on your lifting days, any deficit on your cardio or off days, the concept for all are pretty much the same, no long phases of bulking, nor cutting and maintaining a specific desired weight range year round while burning fat and building muscle.
And for the most part, the science supports this possibility. In fact, the physiological changes, any re-comp routine is not much different than the changes from bulking and cutting during bulking hormones and body chemicals all start to shift towards anabolism, which is to say that your body becomes very good at growing. Only problem is that this means not only growing muscle, but also growing in fat.
Also muscle-building slows down, the closer you are to your genetic myostatin limit, which means you end up storing a lot more fat than building muscle the more fit you are and during the cutting phase the opposite is true.
The body's hormones shift to catabolic, which means breaking down body stores, using energy most of it is from fat.
But once you reach a level of leanness, your hormones begin signaling your body to keep as much fat for survivability sake while shifting to protein, and lean mass for energy instead, which means you'll lose muscle when doing both at the same time, because your body shifts between anabolism and catabolism.
This doesn't allow much time for your body to respond to the hormone changes. You end up getting the benefits of animalism as well as the bad and the benefits of cannibalism as well as the bed, but not at its most significant rates.
You can build muscle, but it will take you a longer time to do so compared to someone bulking, and you can lose fat, but it will take you a longer time than someone cutting.
And it only gets tougher and tougher the more lean and muscular you become. So to say that it can't be done would be a lie, but doing so, you have to understand that getting it to work takes careful planning and will be a slower process.