Body recomposition is widely viewed as the holy grail of physical transformation: losing body fat while simultaneously adding lean muscle. It’s also often dismissed as either impossible or reserved exclusively for complete beginners. The logic appears fairly convincing.
To lose fat, you need to consume fewer calories than you burn. To build muscle, you need enough energy to construct new tissue. One requires a deficit, the other seemingly demands a surplus.
Pick a lane: bulk first, cut later. Strength and physique coach Gareth Sapstead disagrees. In a detailed breakdown published on his website, Sapstead explains how he helped father and business owner Mark Schadenberg transform his physique ahead of a Men’s Health Netherlands photoshoot—losing fat, adding visible muscle and finishing just 4 pounds lighter after 11 weeks.
The scales barely budged, but his body changed dramatically. Build the muscle, then reveal it.” Sapstead accepts that fat loss requires an energy deficit, while building muscle requires energy. However, he says the apparent contradiction comes from treating your body like a single energy account.
Sapstead points towards research examining simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain. According to Sapstead, the phenomenon appeared consistently across the research and wasn’t simply a beginner-only fluke. He also references studies in which participants consumed between 400 and 800 additional calories each day, all from protein.
By conventional logic, those extra calories should have resulted in weight gain. Instead, Sapstead says the participants either maintained their weight or lost fat while gaining or preserving muscle. He was running a business and raising a family—a familiar combination for many of us—that had gradually pushed training, nutrition, and recovery down his list of priorities.
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