We all know someone who is able to consume insane amounts of food without any noticeable change in weight. Meanwhile, there are people who scratch and claw away every pound and experience significant changes when they fall off the rails for just a couple of days. Disclaimer: Everyone, regardless of body type, can gain muscle and get lean. The degree of focus that will be required to reach a lean body fat percentage is where your body type comes into play.
Three Body Types: Ectomorph, Mesomorph, and Endomorph.
As referred to in What to Eat for Gains, ectomorphs are those who find it relatively difficult to gain weight, typically including muscle. Some see this as a blessing more than a curse, being that they tend to lose weight by slacking off on their diet. However, the curse of the ectomorph is in building muscle, which isn’t easy for anyone. An ectomorph will find muscle building particularly difficult without stuffing his or her face with food every couple of hours.
Meanwhile, there are others who seem to live their lives in a constant weight-loss effort. These people, endomorphs, have a much higher tendency to store excess calories as body fat than their ectomorph counterparts.
Of course, the majority of the population falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes and is referred to as mesomorph. The typical mesomorph would lose fat easier than endomorphs and build muscle easier than ectomorphs, but lack a particular inclination for either of them.
What does this mean to you?
All training and nutrition advice needs to be taken and understood with your body type in consideration. An ecto-mesomorph and an endomorph, both with a fat loss goal, will have a very different journey to reach the leanness they desire.
You’ll also notice that as you build muscle and lose fat, the body has a tendency to reset itself towards mesomorphic norms. This is due partly to the body’s ability adapt to stimulus, but also to the role muscle mass plays in metabolism. As I will address further in a later article, muscle has it’s own fat-burning effects. While fat doesn’t convert to muscle and muscle doesn’t turn to fat, muscle requires much more calories to be maintained than fat does. In other words, the more muscle mass you have, the less calories will be available to be stored as body fat (in a hypothetical surplus).
I'm sure you have some experience, opinions, or questions about this. It’s your turn to let me know what you think!
What are your goals?
What’s holding you back?
What questions do you have?
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