How Body Re-comp at Maintenance Works
... and what you can realistically expect after those initial newbie gains
What is recomp?
To level set the terminology here, let’s define recomp for the sake of this post.
Body Recomp = Body Recomposition
*specifically when eating at maintenance calories
This means changing your body fat % while maintaining the same body weight.
How? By building muscle and losing fat simultaneously, eating maintenance calories.
Recomposition can also happen by going through nutrition periodization.
By going through fat-loss and muscle-building phases, you can also end up at the same bodyweight, but with a very different muscle to fat ratio.
So, which is the best route to take?
What does eating at maintenance look like?
Eating at maintenance is when your range of caloric intake matches your energy expenditure and your bodyweight stays the same.
recomp at maintenance
Now let’s say you have some days where your activity is higher or lower, thereby causing a small calorie deficit on some days and a surplus on others.
Assuming you’re following a quality training program, you may build a tiny amount of muscle + lose a tiny amount of body fat on weeks like this. Assuming your hunger cues don’t compensate for the higher activity
Comparing to a fat loss phase
In a fat loss phase, you intentionally set your calories lower than your maintenance needs to create a significant-enough deficit to ensure fat loss.
By dialing this in and monitoring scale weight you can ensure you are consistently losing body fat during that time period.
what about a Muscle building phase?
In a muscle-building phase, you intentionally set your calories slightly higher than your maintenance to create a small surplus and give your body the building blocks required to add mass.
Paired with a solid training program and quality effort, this should result in an increase in muscle mass (with some body fat gain as well).
recomp at maintenance CONTinued
Now that you’ve seen the significant difference between a targeted building phase and a fat loss phase, you can infer how much slower it is to achieve “recomp” at maintenance calories.
In the example below, you have just 2 very small deficit days, meaning that, at best, you’re making 1/7th of the progress you would make in a targeted fat loss phase.
Additional thoughts
Note that this is all pertinent to body recomposition changes after your newbie gains phase.
During your first 6-12 months of strength training, the muscle-building stimulus is so new and strong that it overrides your body's want to stay at homeostasis.
If you want to change your physique, achieving those changes via body re-comp at maintenance will extend the timeline significantly and make progress nearly impossible to detect in the short term.
Rather, if we have the time and energy to dedicate to specific muscle-building and fat-loss phases throughout the year, we can attack those goals as our calendar and lifestyle allows.
Therefore, it “speeds up” the body recomposition process overall.
