The fitness industry is rife with myths, one of the most pervasive being that building muscle and losing fat at the same time is impossible, necessitating a "bulking" phase followed by a "cutting" phase. Jeff Nippard, a bodybuilder, powerlifter, coach, and social media celebrity, challenges this notion with his science-based approach to body recomposition.
Introduction: The Science of Body Recomposition
Body recomposition refers to the simultaneous reduction of body fat percentage and an increase in lean body mass, particularly muscle mass. While traditionally considered difficult, Nippard's guide, co-authored with Chris Barakat, argues that it is achievable through a strategic combination of training and nutrition. The key is to optimize your approach by paying attention to details often overlooked in standard fitness advice.
Understanding Your Starting Point
Experience level plays a crucial role in determining the degree of detail required in your approach.
Beginner (0-2 Years of Lifting Experience): New lifters have the greatest potential for simultaneous muscle growth and fat loss due to their bodies being highly responsive to training stimuli. Muscle building is an energetically demanding process, and beginners can tap into stored body fat to fuel this process. For beginners, body recomposition is easier and simpler. Meeting three criteria will allow you to gain muscle and lose fat:
- A caloric intake that isn't too high or too low (a small caloric deficit or surplus).
- Adequate protein intake.
- Weight training with a focus on progressive overload.
Intermediate (~2-5 Years Lifting) to Advanced (~5 or More Years Lifting Experience): As you become more experienced, progress becomes harder to achieve. Optimizing results requires more attention to detail in nutritional science. Simply meeting the three criteria above may not be sufficient. Concepts like "calories-in versus calories-out" can be misleading and limiting to those with more experience.
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Circumstances Favoring Body Recomposition
Body recomposition is most commonly achieved under these circumstances:
- New Lifters (Beginners): The body is primed for growth when weight training is new.
- Detrained Lifters (Detrainees): Those who have lifted significantly but stopped can rebuild muscle quickly due to muscle memory.
- Obese Individuals: Large energy reserves (body fat) allow for a caloric deficit while fueling muscle building.
- Anabolic Steroid Users: These substances enable rapid muscle growth, similar to new trainees and detrainees.
The Jeff Nippard Diet Plan: Key Components
1. Caloric Intake: Finding Your Sweet Spot
A calorie deficit means that you’re consuming less calories than you’re burning. Your body burns many calories even though you may be just sitting or lying there. Even without moving, your body needs a certain amount of calories for living requirements such as keeping your heart beating, breathing, maintaining hormone levels, and growing and repairing cells. Calories are needed for exercise. Calories are required for movements and activities that aren't exercise. Chewing, digesting, and utilizing the food you eat burns about 5 percent of your daily total calories. Your body burns a relatively small number of calories every time you eat something, but the thermic effect varies between specific foods. Generally speaking, protein has the highest thermic effect and fats have the lowest thermic effect, with carbohydrates in the middle. There are no known foods that have a TEF so high that it takes more energy to consume them than they contain. As another example, instead of 3,000 calories, let’s say that you only ate 2,000 calories. Here, you ran a 500-calorie deficit for the day. As you can see, that’s all pretty simple. However, there's a very important part that many people miss. It’s important to realize that as you lose weight, the number of calories you burn will decrease. Keep in mind that in the scenario where you initially ran a 500-calorie deficit, you likely won’t have a 500-calorie deficit after a few weeks or months of dieting. Again, that’s because when you decrease the number of calories you’re eating, you also indirectly decrease the number of calories you’re burning. To account for Metabolic Adaptation, which will occur, you may need to lower calories a bit further to keep up with your desired rate of weight loss.
- Maintenance, Surplus, or Deficit: Whether you should enter a caloric surplus, caloric deficit or eat maintenance calories depends on your current bodyfat level.
- For Muscle Gain: If your primary goal is to build muscle and you're relatively lean (8-12% body fat for males, 18-22% for females), a slight caloric surplus of 5-25% above maintenance is recommended. Leaner, less advanced, and genetically gifted individuals can tolerate a larger surplus.
- For Fat Loss: If your primary goal is fat loss, a slight caloric deficit, slashing 10-20 percent off your maintenance intake.
- The "Skinny Fat" Dilemma: For those with a high body fat percentage and low muscularity, a recomp approach is ideal. Bulking will lead to more fat gain, while aggressive cutting will hinder muscle building.
To ensure that you’re losing around that ideal rate of 0.5 to 1 percent of weight per week then, I’d recommend a caloric deficit around 20 percent below your current maintenance.
Determining Maintenance Calories:
- Guess-and-Check: Track your body weight and caloric intake for two weeks, calculate averages, and find your maintenance based on weight change.
- Intuitive Eating: Track body weight and make common-sense, lower-calorie food choices. If you don’t want to track calories at all, you can instead focus on tracking your body weight while making intuitive, common sense lower-calorie food choices most of the time. For some people, those simple common sense choices will be enough to get things moving.
2. Macronutrient Targets: Prioritizing Protein
Set up macronutrient targets (start with protein, the most important macro for recomposition). Consider this 2019 study from Wang and Colleagues where they split 36 subjects up into two groups. Both entered a caloric deficit, but one group slept 60 minutes less, five nights per week. It’s worth mentioning that these subjects weren’t weight training, so lifting probably would’ve flattened out the results a bit.
- Protein Intake: Usually, 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, or 0.7 to 1 gram per pound is a good target to aim for.
- Sliding Model: Nippard recommends a sliding model for protein intake based on lean body mass. The leaner you are, the closer you should be to 1.6 grams per pound of lean body mass.
- Protein Absorption: Your body can absorb an enormous amount of protein in a single meal, likely more than you could even comfortably eat.
- Protein Timing: In reality, as long as your pre-workout and post-workout meals are within roughly four- six hours of each other, you’ll be maximizing the anabolic response to training. Perhaps a more important, but less discussed, timing variable is consuming protein before bed.
- Protein Quality: Since three grams of leucine is a decent ballpark figure for maximizing the anabolic response to a meal, let’s take a look at how much of different protein sources you need to eat to hit that three grams benchmark. In the table below, you can see that whey protein comes out on top. Note that with just 29 grams of whey protein, you’ll be getting three grams of leucine for just 145 calories. As a general trend, animal sources of protein are higher in leucine than their plant-based counterparts, especially per calorie. However, this issue nearly goes away once we introduce vegan protein powders like soy, pea, and brown rice isolates which also offer three grams of leucine for less than 200 calories.
Vegan Considerations: Chapter 9 of Nippard's guide discusses protein considerations for vegans, such as consuming complete proteins with all nine essential amino acids.
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3. Training: The Driving Force
Recognize that training is the driving force of body recomposition in any scenario. As an analogy, think about a car. We can think of our training as the engine and our nutrition as the gasoline to fuel the performance. The better the fuel, the better the performance we can expect. However, without the engine, the car simply won’t move, regardless of the fuel’s quality.
Nippard's training programs often incorporate:
- PPL (Push, Pull, Legs) Routine: This splits workouts into push (chest, shoulders, triceps), pull (back, biceps), and legs days.
- High-Volume Training: A typical PPL routine can consist of up to 22 sets.
- Progressive Overload: Incrementally adding weight, volume, or improving technique over time.
- Functional Exercises: Starting workouts with multi-joint exercises and finishing with isolation movements.
4. Cardio: To-Do or Not-To-Do
The guide addresses the role of cardio, including the type (LISS, HIIT, or both), timing (before or after weights), and fasted cardio.
5. Supplements: Optimizing Results
We can also turn to supplements to further optimize, but it’s worth noting that there aren’t any recomp supplements that just cause recomposition on their own.
Nippard identifies three Tier 1 supplements:
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- Protein Powder: Especially important for vegan lifters (Vegan Whey, a blend of rice and pea protein). Whey Protein can be used at any time of day to help make meeting total daily protein goals easier.
- Creatine: A well-researched supplement for muscle mass and strength (3-5 grams of creatine monohydrate per day).
- Caffeine: For increasing strength, prolonging time to fatigue, and increasing acute fat oxidation. However, unlike creatine, caffeine is susceptible to tolerance so it might be smart to reserve it for your heaviest or most demanding training sessions.
6. Sleep and Recovery: The Dark Horse
Chapter 14 emphasizes the importance of sleep for muscle repair and recovery and provides tips for improving sleep quality. Consider this 2019 study from Wang and Colleagues where they split 36 subjects up into two groups. Both entered a caloric deficit, but one group slept 60 minutes less, five nights per week. It’s worth mentioning that these subjects weren’t weight training, so lifting probably would’ve flattened out the results a bit.
Beyond the Basics: Strategies for Long-Term Success
From here, most people turn to short-term strategies to try to get that fat off as quickly as possible; but this is a mistake.
- Slow and Steady Wins: Aim for a weight loss of 0.5 to 1 percent per week. Because I’ve taken my sweet time with it, the weight loss itself has felt incredibly easy. In fact, it’s been ridiculously easy. I’ve been eating out at restaurants, enjoying a sweet treat from time to time, and going out with friends for pizza and sushi.
- Realistic Targets: No matter how slowly you go, you simply can’t expect to maintain six percent body fat all year round.
- Habit Building: An often underutilized strategy for making your actions more automatic and less dependent on motivation is to make modifications to your everyday environment.
- Environmental Modifications: If you find the time that it takes to cook healthy meals overwhelming, you can make Sundays your meal prep day so that your fridge is always ready to go, ahead of time.
- Post-Diet Plan: At the end of the diet, over the course of several weeks, it’s common to gradually increase your calories from your deficit intake, up to your maintenance intake. Known as reverse dieting, the practice can be as bad as the first mistake, if it drags out the diet unnecessarily.
- Dynamic Maintenance: You should instead think of your maintenance as a dynamic range. This means that you might be able to maintain your weight by eating anything from 2,600 to 3,000 calories.
MacroFactor App: A Tool for Success
I’d like to take a minute to recommend the MacroFactor app. It’s another tool that you can use to help you reach your fat loss goals.
- Adaptive Macros: MacroFactor uses your data to adapt your macros to your metabolism.
- Fast Food Logging: Log foods faster than any other app. Scan barcodes, import recipes from URLs, or simply snap a photo.
- Science-Based Algorithms: MacroFactor's algorithms and recommendations are based on proven nutrition and behavioral science.
- Adherence-Neutral Adjustments: MacroFactor is the only app that makes calculations and adjustments based on what you actually did, not what you were supposed to do.