How much muscle mass a newbie can gain while eating at maintenance?

[tronmate]

^^Title.
A rough estimate please, taking glycogen, water and skeletol muscle into consideration. Just wondering if I can gain some muscle mass while on a slight calorie deficit or maintenance.

[BeingPaid]

Read this OP:

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/mus...potential.html

[dmacdonal9]

^^Title.
A rough estimate please, taking glycogen, water and skeletol muscle into consideration. Just wondering if I can gain some muscle mass while on a slight calorie deficit or maintenance.

You can, yeah. Check this out: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/attach...1&d=1310193169

These guys were "elite athletes" in their respective sports, which means they probably had some level of experience with resistance training, but probably more sport specific lifting than bodybuilding style lifting. So I think it's reasonable to say they were toward the middle or end of what we'd call noob gains.

At a 20% calorie deficit, they gained about 0.27 lbs per week LBM over about 8 weeks, or a total of 2.2 lbs.

How much of it was skeletal muscle tissue is hard to determine. But when you consider that 10.8 lbs of fat was lost at the same time, it's still pretty impressive.

The other group in the study had a more aggressive deficit (roughly 35%) and lost more fat, but LBM was essentially unchanged.

[tronmate]

You can, yeah. Check this out: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/attach...1&d=1310193169

These guys were "elite athletes" in their respective sports, which means they probably had some level of experience with resistance training, but probably more sport specific lifting than bodybuilding style lifting. So I think it's reasonable to say they were toward the middle or end of what we'd call noob gains.

At a 20% calorie deficit, they gained about 0.27 lbs per week LBM over about 8 weeks, or a total of 2.2 lbs.

How much of it was skeletal muscle tissue is hard to determine. But when you consider that 10.8 lbs of fat was lost at the same time, it's still pretty impressive.

The other group in the study had a more aggressive deficit (roughly 35%) and lost more fat, but LBM was essentially unchanged.

Thats pretty impressive haha, and what if a complete newbie eat at high protein but at maintenance with heavy lifting and progressive overload, so he can lose fat and gain some reasonable amount of muscle. Especially being a skinny fat newbie, so the calories to build muscle would come from fat. How about this?

[tronmate]

Bump

[dmacdonal9]

Thats pretty impressive haha, and what if a complete newbie eat at high protein but at maintenance with heavy lifting and progressive overload, so he can lose fat and gain some reasonable amount of muscle. Especially being a skinny fat newbie, so the calories to build muscle would come from fat. How about this?

Well, sort of. The thing is, it' not as simple as calories being used to build muscle. Amino acids are used as building blocks (instead of being "burned" for energy), but aside from that, I would say it's better to think of calories as being "permissive" to muscle building.

Re: energy for building muscle, most people have a picture in their heads of energy being used to remodel the muscle tissue and carry out the metabolic processes to do so. I think that's true to a degree, but the other (larger) factor is that the cells will tend to reduce the rate of MPS when there is an energy shortage. There are pathways controlling this (AMPk on the energy demand side and ATP on the energy supply side). If there is no energy shortage, MPS will be carried out at the maximum possible rate.

So strictly speaking, once calories have been stored as fat, they're available as energy, but that energy is only tapped when you're in a net caloric deficit and you need fat to make up the difference. At that point, the fuel sensor is already telling the muscle cells that there's an energy shortage, and MPS will be curtailed a little bit. The deeper you go into an energy shortage, the more fat you're burning, but you're also depressing MPS to a greater degree.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9208914

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/15733742

So you can't really have it both ways. An energy shortage is required to burn fat stores, but it will also signal the muscle cells that this is not the best time to be growing. It's not a switch though, it's two competing mechanisms, and in noobs, even a slightly downgraded rate of MPS is enough to make solid gains because it overwhelms the energy shortage signalling. This is why a noob can make impressive gains at a moderate deficit.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat...ng-fat-qa.html

A more advanced bodybuilder has a harder time though, because his maximum possible rate of MPS is lower due just to his training experience and the fact that his available hormone levels can only sustain so much active tissue. That reduced rate is more easily overwhelmed by an energy shortage.