How to Get Bigger Muscles and Six-Pack Abs

"How do I get bigger and more cut?"

"I want to look like Brad Pitt in Troy or Gerard Butler in 300. What do I do to get bigger arms, broader shoulders and a six-pack stomach?"

"I'm skinny and I need to gain muscle. But I want to get rid of my fat belly at the same time. What should I do?"

If you want to get bigger and more cut... if you want more muscle and a six-pack stomach... if you want to get rid of your belly and fill out your skinny frame, you'll need to ask your body to do two things:

Building muscle while losing fat.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Well... I'm afraid not.

With very few exceptions, losing a lot of fat and gaining a lot of muscle at the same time is very hard to do. That's because of the opposing demands these goals impose on your body.

To build a lot of new muscle tissue, your body needs energy. In other words, you'll need to overfeed — to consume more calories than you're burning each day. To lose fat, you need to underfeed — to consume fewer calories than you burn.

If you do try to do both things at once, your progress in either direction will be so frustratingly slow that it won't be long before you feel like throwing in the towel.

It would be nice if the energy your body needs to build new muscle tissue came from stored fat. But, when your body is in a predominantly catabolic state (which it will need to be if you want to lose fat), gaining muscle is not its main priority.

Exceptions to the rule

Of course, there are exceptions, the most notable of which are beginners. More specifically, I'm talking about overweight beginners. And by "beginners," I mean people who are new to resistance exercise.

A relatively lean beginner who wants, for example, to go from 12% to 9% body fat isn't going to lose fat while they gain muscle, mainly because they don't have much fat to lose in the first place. The leaner and more muscular you get, the harder you'll find it to lose fat and build muscle simultaneously (I'll reveal a few "tricks" you can use to do this in just a moment).

And if you're a beginner trying to gain weight and build muscle by overfeeding, your body is in an anabolic state. You won't be able to lose fat while still consuming more calories than you burn.

However, overweight beginners on an exercise and nutrition program that's geared towards fat loss can gain a significant amount of muscle mass while losing fat.

A good example of this comes from research published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise [2]. For the study, researchers from the United States Sports Academy tracked a group of previously sedentary men (i.e. overweight beginners) who performed both endurance and resistance exercise three days per week for 14 weeks.

On average, the men lost 16.3 pounds of fat and gained 9.5 pounds of muscle. In other words, they gained a significant amount of muscle while also losing a large amount of fat.

One other reason that beginners usually respond better to resistance exercise is that they're a long way from the upper limit of what they're capable of in terms of muscle mass.

The closer you are to this upper limit — known as your ceiling of adaptation — the slower your gains will be. Someone who's been working out with weights for 10 years, for example, will gain muscle a lot more slowly than someone who's just starting out.

Anyone who's been in shape before will also find it easier to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously when returning after a layoff. When a muscle is trained, detrained and retrained, there is a faster change in muscle size during retraining compared to the initial training period from an untrained state [1], a phenomenon that some refer to as "muscle memory."

From a personal point of view, it seems easier to drop my body fat to a level that I've achieved previously compared to losing it for the first time.

In many cases, the people in the before-and-after pictures you see in the magazines are fitness models who have spent a few months "slacking off" prior to getting their "before" pictures taken. Because they've been in shape before, it's a whole lot easier for them to regain their old figure than it is for someone who's starting from scratch.

The use of anabolic steroids and other drugs will also make it a lot easier to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously. Of course, any such benefit has to be weighed against the risks associated with their use.

Whether or not you can build a lot of muscle and lose a lot of fat at the same also depends on how you define "at the same time." If you spend 5-6 weeks gaining weight, followed by 3-4 weeks losing fat, then you'll have lost fat and gained muscle at the end of the 8-10 week period (which some people might class as "the same time") but you'll have done it by alternating periods of muscle gain and fat loss.

So, what does all of this mean for you?

Rather than trying to build a lot of muscle and lose a lot of fat at the same time, you'll get better results by splitting your training goals into several phases, and working on one after the other. I suggest that you focus on one of two goals — building muscle while minimizing fat gain, or, losing fat while preserving muscle.

Once you've decided on your goal, you need to stick with it long enough to see results. Don't, for example, decide to bulk up and then give up after three weeks in a panic because you can't see your abs anymore. Or try to lose fat only to find that your strength is no longer going up as quickly as it used to.

If your primary goal is to build muscle, then it's quite normal to gain a little fat at the same time. Don't expect to stay extremely lean AND add large amounts of muscle tissue at the same time. Conversely, it's unlikely that you'll lose large amounts of fat while simultaneously gaining a significant amount of strength and size. These things just don't happen unless you're very gifted genetically, using drugs, or both.

This basic approach works fine if you're new to exercise, or you're either very lean or very overweight.

But let's assume that you've been working out for some time, you're lean already, and you want to put on some muscle without losing the abdominal definition that you've worked so hard for. Or perhaps you've already packed on a decent amount of muscle, and now you want to strip away some of the fat from your belly so people can see how muscular you are. But you also want to continue gaining muscle, albeit at a slightly slower rate.

What do you do?

Although there are many different ways to tackle the problem, these are the two methods that I think work best for most people.

1. The Sawtooth Method

Method one involves gaining muscle or losing fat until you hit a predetermined body fat percentage. I call it The Sawtooth Method.

Let's say that you start out at 10% body fat and follow one of the step-by-step muscle-building exercise routines described in The Maximum Muscle Plan. In this case, you might decide to bulk up until you reach 12%. Then, you switch gears and follow Fight Fat and Win 2.0 until you're back down to 10%.

If fat loss is a priority, you can take the opposite approach and start by losing fat until you're down to 7-8% body fat. Then, you change focus and start gaining weight until you're at 10% again.

This type of eating produces a "sawtooth" pattern of weight gain and weight loss (hence the name), with the result that you end up with more muscle and less fat after several cycles.

If you don't have access to a reliable method of measuring changes in body composition, you can just use changes in weight instead. I'll also employ a number of more subjective (but, in my opinion, still extremely useful) ways to gauge my progress.

For instance, I know that it's time to start losing fat when my lower abs become hidden under a layer of fat and I can't see them clearly. Conversely, when I start to feel irritable, tired and de-motivated on a regular basis (which usually happens after an extended period of dieting), and I'm happy with the way I look in the mirror, then I decide to focus on gaining weight and building muscle.

2. The Bracketing Method

The Bracketing Method involves cycling your carbohydrate intake over the course of the week based on the type of training you're doing.

Let's say you train with weights three days a week. On non weight-training days, you consume a basic "fat-burning" diet (see How To Burn Fat Without Losing Muscle for step-by-step advice on how to set this up).

On the days you train with weights, follow the same diet but bracket your workout with extra carbohydrate and protein, following the guidelines for pre-, intra- and post-workout nutrition described in A Simple But Powerful Way To Trigger Faster Muscle Growth. What this means is that your calorie intake is increased on weight-training days.

One variation on this method, which is particularly useful for anyone wanting to drop those last few pounds of "stubborn" fat, is to maintain calorie intake at the same level and simply alter the percentage of calories coming from carbohydrate and fat. Protein intake is kept the same.

Like The Sawtooth Method, you can adjust the program depending on whether you want to emphasize fat loss or muscle gain. For example, this 4-day routine involves training with weights (or any form of resistance) on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. It's set up with an emphasis on muscle growth.

Monday: Lower Body (quadriceps dominant)
Tuesday: Upper Body (push emphasis)
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Lower Body (hip dominant)
Friday: Upper Body (pull emphasis)
Saturday: Off
Sunday: Off

This 6-day program, on the other hand, is designed with fat loss as the main emphasis. Only the Monday and Friday resistance workouts are bracketed with carbohydrate and protein.

Monday: Whole Body (upper body push emphasis)
Tuesday: Cardio
Wednesday: Cardio
Thursday: Whole Body (upper body pull emphasis)
Friday: Cardio
Saturday: Cardio
Sunday: Off

Because of the large amount of leg work being done during the cardiovascular workouts, some of which is probably going to comprise HIIT, the whole-body workouts have no lower-body emphasis day (the legs are still worked, albeit with a lower volume).

The bottom line

Yes, you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. But unless you're an overweight beginner, returning to exercise after a layoff, very genetically gifted or using drugs, you're not going to be able to do both at anything approaching the same rate.

In other words, it's far more realistic to lose 10 pounds of fat while gaining a pound or two of muscle, or to gain five pounds of muscle while adding a couple of pounds of fat. Losing 10 pounds of fat at the same time as replacing it with 10 pounds of muscle is the exception and not the rule.

References
1. Staron, R.S., Leonardi, M.J., Karapondo, D.L., Malicky, E.S., Falkel, J.E., Hagerman, F.C., & Hikida, R.S. (1991). Strength and skeletal muscle adaptations in heavy-resistance-trained women after detraining and retraining. Journal of Applied Physiology, 70, 631-640
2. Wallace, M.B., Mills, B.D., & Browning, C.L. (1997). Effects of cross training on markers of insulin resistance/hyperinsulinemia. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 29, 1170-1175