What Goal Is Harder?

Training Bodybuilding
21

In my novice experience, losing fat is much easier. I went from 211lbs, to 143lbs in about a year, thanks to a drastic change in nutrition and lots of hard work mainly in the cardio dept. I did weight training too, but focused on cardio and nutrition.

I’m now at 160lbs @ 12%BF and am completely focused on gaining mass, I want to hit 175-180lbs @ 9% within 3 years. As I read in a post a while back “It’s a long, very steep hill that we are trying to climb with no end in sight”. I’m following the Eat, Lift, Sleep, Repeat plan and it’s a rewarding but tough climb.

22

I find that dieting for fat loss is easier for me becasue I know what I can and cannot eat. Very specific guidelines. (is that an oxymoron, specific guidelines?)

BUt, if I’m trying to build muscle mass, then I have to be very careful on what I eat or I’ll gain too much fat. The mentality is that you can just eat everything you want and for an FFB you just cant do that. I have to pay more attention while gaining muscle than I do while losing fat.

I agree with N3wb on a the technical level though, you can lose fat 4x times faster than you can gain muscle.

23

I have always struggled to get lean. The funny thing is, I was always a skinny kid throughout most of my life (except for one year when I made myself fat because I was tired of being skinny - I was 13-14 at the time).

It’s interesting because I spoke with Ellington Darden a couple months ago and asked him for some advice in regards to my training. I sent him some photos of when I was really lean, and some more recent photos when I was 18-20% (which is where my body likes to stay for some reason - and it’s always in my stomach! Nowhere else!).

His response after viewing my photos and some info on me was the following:

[i]Okay, I looked closely at your pictures. Your blue eyes are a problem - really. I rarely see a blue-eyed bodybuilder who is extremely lean.

Most blue-eyed people come from the colder regions of Europe where they needed extra fat for protection against the cold. Thus, you probably have inherited several times as many fat cells as the dark-eyed really lean guys.

As a result, I don’t believe you can lose fat and build muscle at the same time. You can definitely get leaner, but is it worth going against your genetics? You’ll have to answer that. It will be even harder to keep it off!

My experience with guys like you is that your muscle-building capacity is greater than your ability to get lean and cut.[/i]

That may explain why I’ve always had difficulty getting and staying lean, but I can gain weight fairly easily. But the problem is that I put on a ton of fat in my stomach and pec region. And because I have a short torso and long, lean limbs, it always makes me look like shit.

And unfortunately, I don’t put on muscle as easily as Dr. Darden believes either. I’m just stuck in the middle where I have to bust ass for both goals and end up only doing one or the other, but never both at the same time.

24

It’s easier in theory to lose weight, since your body is more limited in the amount of muscle mass it can build per week/month/etc. than the amount it can lose in fact.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always true. I can gain muscle easily, but I have to eat extremely clean with few to no cheat meals to lose fat even slowly. I’ve gained muscle on a restricted calorie/restricted carb diet before, though I only lost a tiny bit of fat.

Unfortunately, I’m not trying to gain muscle mass, because I want to stick to my weight class for a powerlifting comp in Sept.

25

losing fat is relatively easy for me, losing fat and keeping LBM - thats more difficult!

in losing fat it’s the need to use up more calories than you ingest consistently over quite a long time that’s mentally tough, the actual fat loss will happen if you do it though.

26

Building muscle is easy, even if it’s slow. You just have to lift heavy and eat a lot. Durrrr. Losing fat is very hard because there is a great deal of planning, macronutrients, timing the food correctly, cardio (which is MUCH more intensive than lifting weights), the expense of healthy food, time spent cooking, the rest of the family complaining about “bland” healthy food, and having to do this for many months on end. I imagine it’s hard to go back to normal once it’s finally over.

Pain just has to come with pleasure, it seems. The lifting is pleasure, but having to lose fat is very difficult.

27

[quote]Higher Game wrote:
Building muscle is easy, even if it’s slow. You just have to lift heavy and eat a lot. Durrrr. Losing fat is very hard because there is a great deal of planning, macronutrients, timing the food correctly, cardio (which is MUCH more intensive than lifting weights), the expense of healthy food, time spent cooking, the rest of the family complaining about “bland” healthy food, and having to do this for many months on end. I imagine it’s hard to go back to normal once it’s finally over.

Pain just has to come with pleasure, it seems. The lifting is pleasure, but having to lose fat is very difficult.[/quote]

Yeah, I’ve always noticed how those weights just seem to lift themselves.

C’mon, how hard is it to consistently eat the right foods in the right amounts? Especially compared to consistently busting your butt in the weightroom?

Cutting just requires making some choices and sticking to them. Building muscle requires a whole lot more conscious effort.

28

Me losing fat. I can gain muscle and, I gain fat. I work my ass off eat good, and I get more muscle and a little more fat to go with what I had. I would almost think that it was all fat, but my maxes increase.

I think it has to do with my lack of sleep.

29

Moving weight back and forth is a great mental release, almost sexual. It’s a time to shut the brain off and be a reptile for an hour or so: physical meditation. After a while, walking around being completely free of soreness just doesn’t feel right. Planning a diet, on the other hand, involves a lot of mental energy, research, and timing.

It’s a different kind of stress that just isn’t as pleasant. You get hit hard for planning it and going through with it properly and the physical effects of it also make it worse.

There is also uncertainty. You mentally wonder if it’s glycogen depletion, dehydration, instead of quality weight loss, but lifting 200 lbs is always lifting 200 lbs. The whole lifting angle is so much simpler than the diet, really.

30

[quote]Higher Game wrote:
Moving weight back and forth is a great mental release, almost sexual. It’s a time to shut the brain off and be a reptile for an hour or so: physical meditation. After a while, walking around being completely free of soreness just doesn’t feel right. Planning a diet, on the other hand, involves a lot of mental energy, research, and timing.

It’s a different kind of stress that just isn’t as pleasant. You get hit hard for planning it and going through with it properly and the physical effects of it also make it worse.

There is also uncertainty. You mentally wonder if it’s glycogen depletion, dehydration, instead of quality weight loss, but lifting 200 lbs is always lifting 200 lbs. The whole lifting angle is so much simpler than the diet, really.[/quote]

I’m betting right now that all these folks talking about how much easier it is to lose fat than gain muscle have not yet ever gained more than 10-15 pounds lean in their lives. Anybody who believes it easier to gain 50 lbs lean than it is to lose 50 lbs of fat will never be in danger of getting too big.

31

I think a lot of people that feel that gaining muscle is easier are perhaps deceiving themselves with regards to their actual gains.

Some people can put on say 3 or 4 pounds of muscle and 5 or 6 pounds of fat at the same time and still look very lean in doing it. It all depends on how you store fat, how tall you are, what type of frame you have. Heck, even how tan you are has an impact on the visual appearance.

I would be wary to believe someone that says they can put on muscle easier than they can lose fat without knowing exactly how they have determined just how much muscle:fat they have been gaining.

I think it is pretty easy to gain 10-20 pounds in a relatively short amount of time. Probably about as easy as it is to lose 10-20 pounds. But, the 10-20 pounds you gain is unlikely to be all muscle, even if you don’t look like you got much fatter in the process.

Overall, I think if you’re overweight, getting down into a more normal weight is going to be a lot easier than if you are underweight and trying to get into a more normal weight. Unless you completely disregard muscle and just eat to get fat, in which case I think both goals would be similar.

I know personally I have to gain at least 10 pounds to even look like I have changed at all. I’m 6’4 and I have a naturally big frame, but I have been very skinny my whole life, now I am more normal weight, and it has been a challenge, I probably gained more fat than I would have liked in the process, but you would barely be able to tell because I am so tall.

Likewise, some friends of mine are shorter and they can gain or lose a couple pounds and it is immediately noticeable, but they don’t necessarily gain or lose any faster than I do.

I do think that in general, people put far too much emphasis on losing fat than on gaining muscle. It seems like the majority of readers on this site are overweight trying to get trim versus underweight trying to get big. Even if that isn’t necessarily the case here, many of the articles seem geared towards that.

Which is not to say skinny guys are left out, just that there is a slight bias towards fatsos trying to lose weight, and I think that is unanimous across the fitness industry, and I think that is the case mostly because it is easier to do in less time, so it is easier to market and sell.

32

See how much easier it is to drop body fat when you have 50 more pounds of muscle to do it with. We have a whole generation of small people trying to shovel their fat into small furnaces and then complaining that it won’t burn.

33

Building muscle is one of the most difficult physiological tasks ever. More difficult than strength, than training for sport and far more difficult than loosing fat. Anyone who has put on over 50 lbs of muscle will attest to that.

The people who have trouble loosing fat either don’t know what dedication and effort are or just don’t want to change their lifestyle for a goal.