This is Optimal Health Daily.

Should I Lose Weight Before Building Muscle by Eric Bach of Bachperformance.com.

And I'm Dr. Neal, your host and personal narrator.

I read to you every day from the best articles online with a little bit of my commentary at the end.

So with that, let's get right to today's post and start optimizing your life.

Should I Lose Weight Before Building Muscle by Eric Bach of Bachperformance.com.

If you're like most in the gym, you'd like to lose weight and build muscle ASAP.

But what kind of weight and muscle, and how soon?

Most would say they want to drop 15 pounds of body fat and replace it with lean muscle, yesterday.

Before you start down this road, here's sage advice I wish I had received when I first started training.

Chasing fat loss and muscle growth simultaneously ensures you'll struggle to do

either. There is a fine distinction most lifters miss. At any given point in time, like this very

second, you're either anabolic, meaning building, or catabolic, meaning breaking down. During a

training phase, you'll have periods of both. However,

if you try to do both simultaneously, progress is almost non-existent. When you don't see progress,

you lose motivation. When you lose motivation, you stop being consistent and change programs and diets

to the point where it's impossible to make progress.

The fastest way to lose fat and build muscle is to get lean first, then build muscle.

Take a trip down memory lane. When you started training, you probably built muscle and lost fat.

As a beginner, resistance training and healthy eating are a shock to your system,

and body recomposition is possible. You make the fastest gains of your life and you often expect to

continue on the same trajectory. Unfortunately, making progress gets harder the longer you do it.

...