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At least one time every week, I get an e-mail that goes something like this:

“I’m slim and I absolutely need to know the best way to gain muscle. However I need to get rid of my fat tummy at the same time. What is the fastest way to lose belly fat”

This involves expecting the body to do a couple of things:

Growing muscle mass while shedding body fat.

And not only that, these people really want to do both at the exact same time, and they also need to know what things to eat and the way to workout in order to make it happen.

If you’re reading this, there’s a high probability you’d like the very same thing. You don’t want to choose one particular target. You would like to know exactly how to do the two as quickly as possible.

For anyone wanting to know how to gain muscle and lose fat, the first question that needs to be answered is this: Is it even possible to do both at the same time?

The short response is definitely.

But it’s something that’s limited to those people who are very overweight and have never lifted weights before.

When you have moved beyond the overweight beginner stage, gaining muscle while dropping fat is a target that becomes harder over time.

Folks who are coming back to to exercise after an extended period of time doing nothing, where muscle memory comes into play, will also find it relatively easy to build muscle while losing fat. People using anabolic drugs are also going to find it much less difficult to lose fat and build muscle than guys who elect to stay natural.

In other words, those individuals who can lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously are:

1. Overweight newbies

2. Those returning to exercise after a layoff

3. Folk using anabolic drugs

Why can’t people outside of those categories lose fat and build muscle at the same time?

To gain a significant amount of new muscle tissue, your body requires energy. In other words, you will need to consume more calories than you are burning each day. But to drop fat, you need to consume fewer calories than you expend.

If you do try to do both things concurrently, your progress in either direction will be so frustratingly slow that it won’t be long before you feel like giving up.

Yes, you’ll be able to add SOME muscle while you’re dropping fat. But you’re not going to be able to do both at anything approaching the same rate.

In other words, it’s far more likely that you’ll drop 10 pounds of fat while putting on a pound or so of muscle. Dropping 10 pounds of fat and replacing it with ten pounds of muscle is a rare feat indeed.

Rather than attempting to build a large amount of muscle and drop a large amount of fat simultaneously, you’ll get better results by splitting your training goals into several phases, and working on one after the other.

If you spend 5-6 weeks gaining weight, followed by three or four weeks burning fat, then you’ll have burned fat and put on muscle mass at the end of the 8-10 week period, but you’ll have done it by switching between periods of muscle gain and fat loss.