You look in the mirror and aren’t impressed by what you see. Though, unlike a lot of your friends and family members, you’re not overweight by any means, nor do you look fat or massive in clothes. Instead, the opposite seems to be true. When you’re wearing clothes, you actually look skinny and frail. People even tell you that you look skinny and thin. Hell, they’re not even lying because, it’s true! People only know half the story and base their opinions about your appearance on what they see when you’re dressed. They tell you that you look great and that you shouldn’t work on your physique because they don’t know what you look like shirtless.
Truth is that you should definitely work on your physique because when you take your shirt off, you don’t see any muscle size, nor muscle definition. The mirror reflects a frail, frame, with skinny arms, a flat upper chest, with a lot of cushioning resulting in small man boobs and a soft, pot belly.
Sure, you’re not obese in terms of your weight to height ratio, but you’re unsatisfied with the way you look because of your body composition. While your weight is just fine, the ratio of muscle mass to fat mass in your physique is not optimal. In harsh words: you don’t have enough muscle mass and you carry too much fat mass.
The term used to describe a frail person who is flabby and has a lot of fat on a thin frame void of muscle mass is ‘skinny fat’. Skinny fat people have body fat percentage that is too high, but because of their narrow frame and lack of muscle mass, they don’t give that typical chubby look like other people that carry too much body fat. They can hide their flab quite well in clothes. Their flabby body only gets revealed when they take their shirts off.
Your physique is a representation of your lifestyle. It is the result of the activities you do routinely and of the quality of other lifestyle factors such as your nutritional habits, sleep quality, stress levels etc. In skinny fat people, their body tells us that they don’t perform any hard physical activity that challenges their muscles and it tells us that not enough quality protein is being consumed.
Aside from being overweight or being rail thin, the skinny fat syndrome is another extremely common phenomenon which a lot of men are unhappy about. But just as there is a solution for obese people and for skinny people who want to improve the way their body looks, there is a simple, yet effective solution for skinny fat people as well to achieve the body they can be proud of.
THE SKINNY FAT SOLUTION
To address is the issue of being skinny fat we need to determine what the biggest issues here are. In this case, the skinny fat syndrome is caused by a combination of carrying too much body fat and lacking any significant amount of muscle mass.
Most people who you will ask on how to address this issue will tell you that you need to bulk up and need to eat a calorie surplus to gain as much mass as possible, but I disagree. When you’re skinny fat, despite your physical size, you’re already fat. Eating in a surplus, even while lifting weights will only make you fatter if you overfeed your body at this point.
Besides that, most people who are skinny fat have never lifted weights, or at least have not consistently lifted weights, in their lives. This means that they have all this untapped potential for ‘noobie’ muscle gains, which don’t require the same nutritional strategy as someone who has been consistently for an extended period of time.
In fact, there was a time where I myself was skinny fat. I started out as an obese teenager, and went on a ‘diet’ to lose weight. Surely, I lost weight because I was in a calorie deficit by only sticking to what I considered to be ‘clean foods’, but since I didn’t perform any resistance training and didn’t consume enough protein in my diet, along with the fat I lost I lost muscle as well. What happened is that I transformed from a fat, massive guy to a skinny fat guy. I wasn’t big anymore, but when I took my shirt off, I was flabby. Instead of a body with some sharp muscle definition, I had smaller man boobs and a small soft jelly belly. I remember being extremely frustrated about this result.
The solution for skinny fat people is not to to go on a bulk, but to go on a body recomp phase. Recomp stands for recomposition, in which we will alter the distribution of the amount of muscle mass and body fat you carry. The goal of a recomp phase is to lower your body fat percentage levels and to increase your body’s percentage of muscle mass. Doing so will make you end up looking sharp and more defined. At the end of a successful recomp phase, you will sport a lean, athletic physique with some decent muscle definition and increased muscle size.
The reason we want to go on a recomp first is because it will take you faster to your goals and will give you an already visually pleasing body relatively fast. If you’d buk first while being skinny fat and go on a cut afterwards, you’d spend more time in a fatter state, which will delay achieving an aesthetic physique even longer. After a succesful recomp phase, you will have a fantastic physical base to then proceed to go on a lean bulk, which allows you to pack on more muscle size to your frame without putting on too much additional body fat. For a full article and more detailed information about lean bulking, click here.
SETTING UP A SUCCESFUL RECOMP PHASE
Now that you have come to the conclusion that committing yourself a successful recomp phase is an effective way to get rid of the skinny fat syndrome, we will establish the set up of what a successful recomp should entail.
There are three important factors when it comes to setting up a recomp phase. These factors are resistance training, protein intake and calorie intake.
Resistance training
A lack of muscle mass is a huge contributor to being skinny fat. The best way to increase the amount of muscle you carry on your frame is to consistently perform a well designed resistance training routine with a focus on performing big compound exercises such as the bench press, chin up, overhead press and squat.
The goal is to become stronger at those big compound exercises by applying progressive overload. This means that as your body becomes more efficient at performing these movements and your muscles get stimulated to grow and to handle more weight in a certain repetition range, you should aim to perform the exercises with more weight. Over time, after lifting heavy consistently, your body will have no other choice than to grow larger muscles.
The beautiful thing about a recomp is that your muscles are primed for growth because they are currently in an untrained state, hence the lack of muscle size. Therefore, it will be easy for you to gain muscle size for the first couple of months, even without a calorie surplus.
Protein intake
Whereas resistance training provides our muscles with a stimulus to grow, protein will provide us with the building blocks to create new muscle mass.
A reason why you’re skinny fat in the first place is because your diet is void of protein and you overeat on calories coming from carbs and fat. If you focus on eating about 0.8g of protein per pound of body weight each and every day, you’re providing your body with an optimal amount of an essential macronutrient to optimize your body composition.
Thanks to consuming a sufficient amount of protein, your muscles will be able to recover from your resistance training workouts and you will feel more satiated after eating a meal, since protein is more satiating than other macronutrients.
To give you an example of how you should calculate your protein requirements for a recomp, we will imagine a 170 pound man using this formula: 170 x 0.8 = 136g of protein. The man will need 136g of protein to maximize his muscle building capacity as a natural trainee.
Calorie intake
When it comes to weight management, calories in vs calories out is the most important factor. To do a successful recomp phase, we should eat either at maintenance calories or in a slight calorie deficit.
Personally, I prefer the latter of the two, since it will speed up the progress significantly. Eating at maintenance will take you longer to recomp. Eating at a slight calorie deficit will speed up the fat loss process and cause you to be leaner faster, which will allow to you then proceed to a lean bulk phase quicker.
Calculate how many calories you currently need to maintain your weight and apply a calorie deficit of about 20%. This moderate calorie deficit will still allow you to eat a good amount of food on a daily basis and will make the process of losing fat sustainable. Using crash diets or taking extreme measures will not be optimal for long term success, since extremes are often times unsustainable.
As mentioned before, 0.8 of protein should be consumed per pound of bodyweight for optimal results. The remaining calories should be coming from a mix of carbs and fats. About 50-60% of your calories should be coming from carbs and about 20-30% from fats. This will allow you to feel satiated, to fuel your workouts and to keep your hormone levels in check.
To calculate your calories in the most simplistic way, multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 15. E.g. our 170 pound man will have to multiply his weight by 15 (170×15) which gives him an estimated calorie maintenance requirement of 2550.
To maximize the recomp effects, we will take 20% off of that which will lead to a deficit of 310 calories. 2550 – 310 = 2240 calories. 2240 calories is the new daily calorie target our man should eat to recomp his physique.
CONCLUSION
A body recomposition phase is where you increase the percentage of muscle mass you carry and lower the percentage of fat mass you carry on your body. It’s a simple matter of combining resistance training with an adequate protein and calorie intake.
Your workouts should be centered around performing big compound exercises such as the bench press, chin up, overhead press and squat to maximize the muscle building process. These exercises stimulate a lot of muscle growth in multiple regions of the body with only per exercise and give you the most bang for your buck. To give extra attention to lagging body parts, you can throw in accessory exercises such as bicep curls, lateral raises and calf raises.
Eating enough protein is crucial for building muscle optimally and retaining muscle. Combined with some solid calorie management, you can manipulate your body to grow more muscle and decrease the amount of fat you have.
Like anything worth having in life, it takes time and patience. Work hard consistently and follow the plan on your quest to have an aesthetic physique. I can guarantee you that in a matter of months, you will be pleased with what you see in the reflection of the mirror if you stick to the plan.
Kevin Mahjoubi