How Long Does Body Recomposition Take? Timeline & Results

What is body recomposition? How long does it take? And what’s the best way to go about changing your physique for the better? Here’s everything you need to know.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:

• What Is Body Recomposition?
• Who Does It Work For?
• Is Body Recomposition Even Possible?
• How Long Does Body Recomposition Take?
• When You’re Better off With a Bulk or Cut
• How to Train and Diet for Body Recomposition

What Is Body Recomposition?

Body recomposition is a term used to describe fat loss and muscle growth that happens simultaneously.

Instead of focusing purely on weight loss, the goal is to change your body composition by losing fat mass, and replacing some of that lost fat with muscle.

In an ideal world, your body weight would stay the same, with every pound of fat lost replaced with a pound of new muscle.

Outside of a small number of scenarios, this is highly likely not going to happen. For most people, fat loss is going to mean weight loss.

How Is Body Recomposition Different From a Cut?

The main difference between the two is the rate at which you lose fat. During a recomp, the size of the calorie deficit will typically be smaller than it is during a regular cut.

This means fat loss will happen more slowly, which should allow for more muscle to be gained compared to a dedicated cutting cycle.

For many lifters, body recomposition is nothing more than a cutting phase done properly. Executed properly, a cut will lead to some degree of body recomposition, in that muscle will be gained while fat is lost.

Who is Body Recomposition For?

In general, people who can gain a substantial amount of muscle while losing fat at the same time tend to be:

1. Untrained beginners, especially those with a large amount of fat mass to lose.
2. People returning to training after an extended layoff.
3. Individuals taking anabolic drugs.

If you’re not in one of those three categories, you can still put on muscle while losing fat, but to a much lesser degree. 

That is, you might gain a pound or so of muscle while losing 10 pounds of fat. But you’re not going to drop 10 pounds of fat while simultaneously putting on 10 pounds of muscle.

In other words, while you can do both at the same time, it’s extremely rare to do both at the same rate. With very few exceptions, you won’t build muscle at anything like the same speed at which you lose fat.

Is Body Recomposition Even Possible?

Some say that it’s impossible to gain muscle in a calorie deficit, mainly on the basis that it’s incompatible with the laws of thermodynamics.

Anabolic processes like muscle hypertrophy require a calorie surplus, while catabolic processes like losing fat require consuming fewer calories than you need to maintain your weight.

In truth, while a calorie deficit is a requirement for fat loss, a calorie surplus isn’t necessary in order to gain muscle.

That’s because body fat is a reservoir of chemical energy, which your body can use to fuel muscle growth.

Even if you’re someone who’s skinny fat, and slightly underweight based on your height, you still have plenty of stored energy that your body can pull from to fuel muscle growth.

In one study, researchers rounded up a group of overweight and unfit men, and got them to lift weights three times a week [2]. On top of that, the men also did 30 minutes of cycling or walking in the same workout.

Because the men were in a calorie deficit, they ended up losing, on average, a little over 16 pounds (around 7 kg) of fat mass.

But that’s not all. As well as losing fat, the men gained almost 10 pounds of lean mass – a reasonable proxy for muscle mass – at the same time.

In other words, they gained a decent amount of muscle while also losing slightly more than one pound of fat per week.

Even with a highly restrictive liquid diet, where calorie intake was restricted to less than 1000 calories a day, weight training still led to an increase in muscle size in a group of obese women [7].

How Long Does Body Recomposition Take? Timeline & Results

So, how long does body recomp take?

There’s no fixed length of time that body recomposition will take. Everyone is starting from a different place, and will lose fat and gain muscle at different rates.

As a rule of thumb, body recomp is a slow process. Your progress in either direction is going to be slower than it would on a dedicated bulking or cutting cycle.

Here’s what I mean by that.

If you’re trying to put on muscle while in a calorie deficit, that muscle will be gained more slowly compared to being in a calorie surplus.

That’s because one of the things that slows muscle protein synthesis – the key driving force behind muscle growth – is a restriction in the availability of energy.

If you’re less than satisfied with your rate of muscle growth at the moment, be prepared for it to be even slower when you go into a calorie deficit.

You can still build some muscle while you lose fat. Just not as much as you would have done on a muscle-building diet that puts you in a calorie surplus.

The longer you’ve been training, the less likely it is that you’ll gain any muscle at all while losing fat.

If you’ve got more than a few years of proper training under your belt, you’ll know that gaining muscle is a slow process. 

Most people are doing well to finish the year with a few extra pounds of muscle than they had at the start. And that’s with a diet providing plenty of energy.

Fat loss is also likely to happen more slowly than it is on a dedicated cutting cycle.

That’s because your calorie deficit will be on the conservative side.

Large calorie deficits lead to fat being lost more quickly. But they also make it less likely that you’ll be able to gain muscle at the same time.

There are numerous calorie cycling methods that claim to hold the key to overhauling your physique. But even then, you’re not going to replace every pound of fat lost with one pound of muscle.

The best that most people can hope for is to generate a small muscle gain while losing a much larger amount of fat.

As you climb the ladder of leanness, eventually you’ll reach the point where the best you can hope for is to maintain muscle mass while you drop fat.

Your body becomes less willing to pull energy from fat stores the leaner you get.

A natural bodybuilder, for example, who is closing in on the upper limits of his natural muscular potential will do very well just to hold on to the muscle he currently has when moving to a single digit body fat percentage in preparation for a physique contest.

Why Body Recomposition Is Easier for Beginners

Take a group of people who have never lifted weights before and put them on a diet and training program that’s geared towards weight loss. They’ll have a much easier time with body recomposition than someone who’s moved beyond the beginner stages of training.

A good example comes from a study carried in the Journal of Applied Physiology, which tracked changes in body composition in group of 30 men who were new to lifting weights [4].

The men were assigned to one of three groups:

• Group one spent three days a week doing cardio (running for 25-40 minutes at 65-85% of their age-derived maximum heart rate).
• Group two trained with weights three times a week.
• Group three did both cardio and weights on the same day of the week, always doing the weight training first, followed by cardio.

The resistance-training program, an upper/lower/full-body split involving a combination of free weights and fixed resistance machines, looked like this:

• Monday: Upper Body
• Tuesday: Rest
• Wednesday: Lower Body
• Thursday: Rest
• Friday: Full Body
• Saturday: Rest
• Sunday: Rest

After 10 weeks of training, here’s what happened:

The runners lost a little over 4 pounds of fat, but they also lost a small amount of muscle.

The men who trained with weights gained around 5 pounds of muscle while losing almost 2 pounds of fat.

The group combining cardio and weights saw the best results, adding 7 pounds of muscle while losing almost 6 pounds of fat.

In other words, their body weight increased, but they actually ended up getting leaner.

However, even though these individuals weren’t overweight, they were beginners in terms of strength training.

It’s in the first few months of lifting weights that most people make their fastest gains, and the results aren’t going to apply to someone who’s been training properly for some time.

RELATED: How Long Does It Take to Build Muscle?

Body Recomposition and Muscle Memory

Anyone who’s been in shape before will find it easier to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously when returning after a layoff.

When returning to pre-season training after the off-season break, a group of elite rugby union players lost 3 pounds (1.4 kg) of fat, while simultaneously gaining 4.4 pounds (2 kg) of muscle [5].

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 [3]. This is a phenomenon that some refer to as muscle memory.

Of course, muscle tissue itself can’t actually “remember” anything. Rather, the number of nuclei (which play a crucial role in building new muscle) in muscle cells increases when you lift weights, even before the muscle cell itself starts to grow.

But those nuclei aren’t lost when you stop training and your muscles shrink. Instead, the extra nuclei form a type of muscle memory that allows the muscle to bounce back quickly when you start training again.

When You’re Better off With a Bulk or Cut

More advanced lifters are better off focusing on fat loss or muscle growth, using a traditional bulk or cut approach.

In most cases, the advanced trainee trying to recomp will see slower results than alternating between distinct bulk and cut phases.

On a bulk, the idea is to increase your calorie intake so you’re in a caloric surplus. A caloric surplus means that you’re taking in more calories than you’re burning off. The end result is that weight – usually a mix of fat and muscle – is gained.

During a cut, you put yourself in a calorie deficit. This means that you’re burning off more calories than you’re taking in, which leads to fat being lost.

If you spend 6-8 weeks on a smart bulk, followed by 3-4 weeks on a cut, you’ll have lost fat and gained muscle at the end of the 9-12-week period. But you’ll have done it by alternating periods of bulking and cutting.

How to Recomp

If you have a high body fat, and you’re a novice who’s just starting out lifting weights, returning to training after a layoff, or using anabolic drugs, then you’ll be able to gain some muscle while losing fat.

Your body weight might not change by much, but your body composition will. By that, I mean fat will be lost while muscle is gained.

This doesn’t require any complicated diets, expensive supplements or fancy training programs.

You just have to put yourself in a slight caloric deficit, train with weights 3-5 days a week, apply the principle of progressive overload to your workouts, and eat enough protein.

If you want to lose fat and gain muscle, you’ll need to make sure you’re eating enough protein.

Alongside resistance training (while making sure to apply the principle of progressive overload), ensuring adequate protein intake is right up there in terms of importance when it comes to gaining muscle while losing fat.

In one study, Canadian scientists rounded up a group of young men and put them on a diet providing just 60% of their maintenance calorie requirements [8].

The men also trained hard for six days out every seven, lifting weights and doing high-intensity interval training (HIIT), alongside various other forms of intense exercise.

Half the men ate a high-protein diet, which provided roughly one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. Whey protein supplements were used to bump up the protein content of their diet. The rest of the group received just half that amount.

After four weeks, both groups got leaner. But it was the high protein group who saw the best results, shedding 11 pounds of fat, compared to 8 pounds in the low-protein group.

What’s more, men on the high-protein diet ended up gaining muscle, finishing the study with almost 3 pounds of additional lean body mass (a reasonable proxy for lean muscle mass).

While the low protein diet didn’t lean to any muscle loss, there was no muscle gained either.