Weight loss and muscle building are two widely divergent fitness goals involving different exercise and diet requirements as well as widely different biochemical processes. A large number of people wonder whether it is really possible to lose unwanted body fat and build rock-hard muscles at the same time.

While building muscles requires more dietary intake of calories than what your body burns each day, burning of body fat advocates negative calorie intake, meaning that you will need to consume lesser calories than what you burn every day.

However, there exists a strong link between weight loss and building muscle and you can achieve both if you plan your workouts correctly. Once your muscles become strong enough due to regular workouts, you need to gradually increase the intensity of your workouts so that your muscles continue to grow. To enable your muscles to grow, you would need to supply them with more nutrients and ample rest. Since muscles are the most metabolically active tissues of your body, when you add more muscle mass to your body, your metabolic rate increases, as a result of which your body burns the excess fats faster.

If you are aiming at burning fat and building muscles at the same time, you must be able to source all the energy that your body needs (to build new muscles) from the fat stored in your body instead of sourcing it from the proteins (which is required for building muscles) and carbohydrates (which is required to meet your immediate energy needs) present in your body.

If your aim is to build powerful muscles, then you would need to take a high calorie and high protein diet, coupled with the correct resistance exercises to stimulate the multiple cells involved in muscle tissue development, along with adequate amount of rest to stimulate repair, recovery and growth of muscles.

Each time you workout, you must remember to go for progressive resistance, meaning that you gradually scale-up the weights used or increase the number of repetitions so that your muscles are able to bear the increasing amount of weights that are being thrust upon them.

Do not over-train your muscles because this can have counter effects on your muscle building program. Ideally, you need to workout at least three times a week and alternate it with two days of rest period to allow repair and growth of damaged muscles.

However, if muscle building is not your only priority, and you want to achieve both weight loss and muscle building goals, then you must adopt a different strategy. You must try to burn the excess body fat by taking a low fat diet and maintain the lean body mass by consuming a high protein diet (at least 2 gm/kg of body weight is recommended). You can even adjust the amount of protein intake depending on the intensity of your workout.