Gaining lean muscles and reducing your body fat is the ultimate dual goal for most people. Unfortunately, few can achieve it, as it requires proper nutrition, effective exercise, and lifestyle adjustment. Achieving the right balance in the kitchen (with your diet) and the gym (with your workouts) can be challenging, but with consistency and dedication, you can start seeing the progress you desire. Here are some effective ways to reduce body fat and increase lean muscle mass.
- Eat enough protein for muscle growth
Protein is the muscle’s building block. But it does more than that; it can also aid in muscle repair and recovery – two important elements of building lean muscles. Many experts recommend eating 1 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of your body weight daily.
But remember to eat slightly more calories than usual to gain weight if you’re already leaner. You can support your muscle growth with the right body definition. On the contrary, you’ll want to reduce your carb intake while increasing your protein if you’re overweight.
- Adopt and stick to a new carb-protein-fat guideline
After tweaking your macros and diet to reach a desired weight and body definition, it’s time to adopt a new diet guideline to help you maintain that weight. Most experts recommend adopting and sticking to a specific carb-protein-fat guideline of 70% protein, 15% fat, and 20% carbs per meal. Your high-protein meal should include lean animal products, shrimp, lobsters, chicken, turkey, and egg whites. The carb content will support your muscle-gaining process without causing excess weight. The small fat content is necessary for hormones like testosterone, another building block for muscle growth. And this leads to the next point.
- Boost your testosterone
Several conditions like too much body fat, testicular injury or cancer, medicine side effects, low thyroid function, and certain chronic disorders can affect your body’s testosterone levels. Also, age and problems with glands in the brain that control hormone production can cause low testosterone and make it difficult to build lean muscles. So find ways to boost your testosterone, depending on your condition. For example, if you’re a man, you can consider testosterone replacement therapy from online clinics like Male Excel.
- Engage in weight training to increase lean muscle mass
Weights are muscle builders, and it’s almost impossible to build lean muscle mass without weight training. So, while working on your diet and testosterone levels, start hitting the gym for some weight training. If you’re a beginner, start with compound movements like squats, then move on to deadlifts and bench presses to target multiple muscle groups. Start with an ideal weight for your size and gradually increase it as you progress.
- Track your calories and weight gain
It helps to know how many calories, protein, fat, and carbs you’re eating daily. Without tracking these, making the necessary tweaks to your diet may be difficult. The goal here is to eat more of one thing and less of the other to optimize your body composition. In other words, you don’t want to be too small or too big. For example, suppose you easily gain muscle and fat (or more fat than muscles) rather than reducing fat. In that case, knowing your macros regarding your protein, carbs, fat, and calorie consumption is important. Then you can decide how much of what to eat.
