Recomp Isn't Only for Beginners

Most people have heard that you can only build muscle and lose fat at the same time if you're a beginner or carrying a lot of body fat. Once you've been training for a few years, the thinking goes, you have to pick one: grow in a surplus or get lean in a deficit. Practitioners call doing both at once body recomposition, or recomp. A 2020 review in the Strength and Conditioning Journal by Barakat, Pearson, Escalante, Campbell and De Souza went through the studies in resistance-trained people to see whether that belief holds up. Their answer is that it doesn't. Recomp shows up in many controlled trials of trained lifters. It is smaller than in beginners, it varies a lot from person to person, and it is easy to measure wrong.

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1. It has been seen in trained people many times

The review lists randomised trials in trained lifters where fat-free mass went up and fat mass went down over the same period. Several of them didn't control or even report diet, and recomp still showed up.

• Men who could already produce twice their body weight in an isometric squat trained 3 days a week for 8 weeks. One group did heavy circuits with short rests, the other did traditional sets with 3 minutes of rest. Both gained about 1.2 to 1.5 kg of fat-free mass, and both lost some fat.
• Men with about 3 years of training did the same weekly volume spread over either 2 or 4 sessions for 6 weeks. Both groups gained 1.2 to 1.4 kg of fat-free mass. The 2-day group also lost a significant 2.4 kg of fat.
• In a 6-week powerlifting study of well-trained men, training 3 or 6 days a week with the same volume, both groups gained fat-free mass (1.7 and 2.6 kg) and lost a small, non-significant amount of fat.