Why Would You Re-Comp? (As A New Lifter)

What the heck is "Re-comping"? Re-comping is the Art of Body Recomposition. Re-comping, hopefully, means building muscle while you burn fat. Although there's no specific definition, Recomping is generally accepted to mean "exchanging one pound of body fat for one pound of muscle, while remaining the same weight". If you start out weighing 150lbs (68kg), after a year of recomping, you would still weigh 150lbs. (I might extend the definition to suggest you could transit slightly up or down, maybe .5lb/month would be the cut-off. One pound gain per month is still "lean-bulk" territory. If you went from 150 to 162 in a year's time, you slow-bulked, you didn't recomp. But going from 150 to 155; ehh, maybe? I'll say that counts).

So, why would anyone do this? (Spoiler: I sit squarely in the middle of this issue! There's a time & place for re-comping). I must admit, however, it sounds appealing to use stored body fat to fuel your workouts; eat just enough to synthesize new muscle protein, while you build muscle & burn fat at the same time! That would be the "Unicorn" of Aesthetic Gains, right? Keep your abs the entire time, never have to go through the discomfort of cutting, grow forever? Sign me up! Full-stop, here, Gainers: If re-comping was this simple and effective, EVERYONE WOULD BE DOING IT. Repeat, we would all be on board with it. You would also see it happening "accidentally", if it was readily possible. You would see many, many more successful body-transformations of people who had harnessed the power of the Recomp. But alas, we do not.

Simply put, it's just too slow to make meaningful changes. Or let's say you're skinny-fat, you know you need to build muscle & burn fat, why not "kill two birds with one stone"? That's the appeal. But that bird-murder metaphor, while commonly employed to mean "a more efficient use of time", or "convenient", is anything but. The statistical odds of success waiting for those two birds to line up in a straight line, coupled with a trajectory precise enough to slay them both in single shot, is anything but simple or effective. It would be a miracle shot. No, to kill two birds with one stone, you're going to have to use the same stone twice. You take the time to line up separate shots with dedicated aim. Throwing all your effort into only one bird or the other will always yield greater likelihood of nabbing both birds, eventually. Waiting around for the perfect dual-shot, quite bluntly, is a shitty use of your time. THIS is why only bulking or cutting is recommended. Pick one bird.

Just As Difficult With A Rifle!

If you're just starting out, you stand to add roughly 25 lbs of muscle to your frame in the following year or two (doing things right, not fucking around etc.) You will gain the most muscle at the outset of your lifting journey, with less muscle added each following year, despite consistent effort and calorie surplus. (By some estimates, you can gain 18-27 lbs in your first year. This should be typical & expected. You might gain half this amount the following year, or 9-14 lbs; at the end of the third year, half again, 5-7 lbs; then, after lifting for 5 years, you may only put on 1-2 new pounds per year... Them's the facts!) No one who lifts consistently with a good program, eating & sleeping well, puts on 25 new pounds of muscle in the 4th year of lifting as an un-enhanced natural lifter. Size and strength gains inevitably slow down over time. This is why you should add your first-year size steadily, without reservation. If you started out at 125 lbs, and haven't added 20 pounds at the end of your first year of lifting, you messed up. I don't know what else to say.

Shepherd Gains. Natural?

Look at this statue of David. Did Michelangelo start with the abs? Did he carve out the details and fine features right at the beginning? Most certainly not. Large chunks of marble were removed, large amounts of mass were dealt with. Great big changes to rough out the basic shape first. There's simply no other way to get there. Is there any point worrying about "vascularity", when the arms don't even exist yet? That would be silly. Definition is cool, but it's not the point you start from. You need to make the big, huge, sweeping changes first; you only pursue the exquisite details after you get most of the way to your goal.

Think about how you get to school or work. If it's 10 miles, are you really going to want to walk those ten miles? True, you could travel exactly to the place on foot, but would this be more efficient than a bus ride that "overshoots" your destination by a couple miles? Let's say the bus travels 12 miles out, requiring you to back-track the last 2 miles on foot. Isn't this still going to be much, much faster than the first option? Trying to re-comp your way to your goal would be like walking ten miles, when you're pressed for time, yet also have access to a vehicle. There's no good argument for walking instead. It would be excruciatingly slow and tedious.

If you would benefit from gaining 20 lbs of muscle, and losing 10 lbs of fat, those are two entirely different destinations. They're effectively miles apart, and in the opposite direction. One is 20 miles North, and the other is 10 miles due South. You can't catch those two birds with one stone, when there's 30 miles between them. (Had you already made the bulk of your gains, those goals might seem closer together and in a similar direction. If Bulksville & Shred-town were only 3 miles North, and a mile apart, you could definitely visit them more often!) But bulking and cutting do not really co-exist well simultaneously. They are opposite processes. On one hand, you have AMPK-signaling pathways which regulate fatty-acid oxidation. On the other hand, you have mTOR which governs muscle protein synthesis. I won't pretend to have an deep understanding of them; all you need to know is sticking with one modality enables you to build momentum in that particular direction.

A session of resistance-training doesn't even burn a significant amount of calories. A rough figure might be 150-250 calories burned after an hour of lifting. (So if you're hoping to re-comp, without also including some cardio, fat-burning is even less likely to happen!) Weight-training will burn a little fat, but you're also burning through muscle sugars, as heavy lifting draws heavily on glycolytic reactions. And although stored fat is a fuel source some of the time, these stored triglycerides don't convert to glycogen. (Excess sugars can sometimes be stored as fat, but stored fats don't become sugars). Stored fats are really only burned for fuel, they don't serve to replenish muscle glycogen. You require a surplus of calories to recover after a workout, not stored fats. Adequate calorie surplus is a requisite for building new tissue.

How Would Re-Comping Affect My Caloric Requirements?

TDEE Approximation For 150lb Male

A point of fact few people consider is this: You should not find yourself eating at maintenance throughout a recomp. If the calorie intake required to "maintain" your identical weight does not steadily increase over time, you cannot confidently assert that you've gained muscle. "Eating at maintenance" isn't the same thing as "maintaining your weight". Does that make sense? If you start out at 150 lbs and 15% bodyfat, and need 2200 calories each day to stay at that weight, you will require even more calories than this, to sustain 150 lbs and 10% body fat, in the future.

Muscle is Metabolically Expensive.

On the left is the Katch-McArdle revision to the TDEE estimate for our vaguely-inactive, 150lb, 18-year-old male. (He is actually 20% bodyfat, but let's humor him and assume he's 15% for the benefit of the doubt). Well, at 15% body fat, his TDEE equals roughly 2230 Calories. (Just a hypothetical estimate, of course.) If he continues to eat 2230 for months on end, while training properly & sincerely, he will never hit 10% body fat, at the same calorie intake. This is because he will require roughly 2331 Calories just to "maintain" a 10% body composition (at the identical activity level), should he ever reach it. Instead, his strength gains will slow, then eventually stall, if he does not eat the elevated calorie requirements to fuel growth. This is also called "spinning your wheels". And here's the other sad fact: It requires even more energy (calories) to synthesize new muscle tissue, than it does to retain that same muscle, once you've built it! So, not only does he need 100 more Calories per day to hold onto (more) muscle at 10% body fat, it will take even more Calories than that, to add it in the first place!

What does this mean for our hypothetical 150lb "re-comper" in the example above? It translates into this: A Calorie requirement of 2230 at the start of the year, 2331 + (125?) at the end of the year's re-comp (roughly 2,456 Calories to sustain 10%, plus the minumum required to still stimulate new growth); while in the middle, at the 6-month mark, his body would only need 2343 Calories (this is to both maintain current weight, and maintain current rate of growth). Oh, and this is assuming the recomposition process is perfectly flat & linear, dietary Calorie intake is tracked with total accuracy, output of Calories due to daily activity, exercise activity, and thermo-regulation remains perfectly constant... And this person is expected to make seamless calorie micro-adjustments every several weeks to drive Calories steadily upwards over time? All of this, without being able to rely on any accurate body composition estimates, with nothing but a bathroom scale to guide him, by trying to keep himself the "same" 150lb bodyweight? (Some days or weeks he'll eat a little too much and still accrue fat, while other weeks, he will inevitably eat too few calories to meaningfully stimulate muscle protein synthesis, and this will result in sub-optimal recomposition). Whew! This sounds like a recipe for failure.

Can you see how much of an uphill battle this would be? Even more so, when you consider how difficult it is for most people to track calories with any semblance of accuracy. You are far more likely to build muscle while burning fat, while losing weight, than build muscle & burn fat, while staying the same weight. For the truly overweight who want to drop fat, who also begin lifting concurrent with calorie-restriction, recomping plays a role on the way down, as their scale-weight drops. Gaining 10-15 lbs of muscle in the process of losing 50-80 lbs of fat can be somewhat realistic. But for the skinny guy hoping to drop just 10 lbs of fat, when he still has yet to put on at least 20+ new lbs of muscle, it is an entirely different phenomenon. It really would be an uphill battle, I don't know how else to put it. If your goal is to stay the same weight, and eat the same calories, you can't gain a significant amount of muscle. So what does it matter, if you are skinny without abs now? You don't get abs first. You need to chisel out the first 40 pounds of marble. Pack on mass first, then whittle it down later.

Don't Bother Re-Comping In The First Year...

Because You're Too Damn Skinny!

This Guy Wants To Re-Comp. He Ought To BULK.