Is It Possible To Build Lean Muscle While Burning Fat On A Ketogenic Diet

While most of the bodybuilding community believe that you must have carbohydrates in order to build muscle and get stronger, new science is showing that the ketogenic diet is superior. It’s time to think outside of the box and ditch the old bodybuilding way of thinking to build muscle while losing fat.

Can you build muscle while burning fat on a ketogenic diet?

So many people in the fitness community will tell you that it’s impossible and that you absolutely need carbohydrates to build muscle.

In this article I’m gonna break down a lot of scientific articles.

I’m gonna give you four major peer-reviewed studies and at the in this article I’m gonna give you a very detailed breakdown with a very specific study that takes a specific look at the keto diet verse a traditional Western carbohydrate filled diet as it pertains to building muscle.

The first thing that you need to know when it comes down to the ketogenic diet is that you don’t need nearly as much protein and you don’t need that much protein to build muscle in the first place.

So I want to get that out of the equation first and foremost.

You simply don’t need nearly as much protein as you think.

Study #1

The Journal of applied physiology actually published a study that found that there was no difference between subjects that consumed a 0.64grams of protein per pound of body weight and those that consumed 1.1 grams of protein per pound of body weight.

What this tells us is that you don’t need nearly as much protein to trigger muscle growth.

What they did find however with that study was that protein oxidation increased.

What does that mean?

That means excess protein was oxidized, meaning there was too much protein than the body could handle.

The next thing that we need to talk about here is beta-hydroxy butyrate which is the main ketone body that is produced while you’re in ketosis.

A ketone is just an energy source alternative to carbohydrates.

In this particular case it’s been found that beta-hydroxybutyrate actually preserves muscle from breaking down.

So many people will tell you that you will waste away and lose all your muscle gains when you’re on a ketogenic diet. This simply is not the case at all!

Beta-hydroxybutyrate actually slows that process down as long as your calorie needs are in the right place.

You need to make sure that you have enough calories to make sure you’re not dropping too fast.

Study #2

In fact the Journal of Clinical Investigation actually published a study and this one’s pretty intriguing.

It found that the presence of beta-hydroxybutyrate promoted protein synthesis.

It didn’t just stop the breakdown of muscle or stop the breakdown of protein it actually promoted protein synthesis which means that having ketones in your blood encouraged your body to build more muscle.

Study #3

The next one I want to talk about is protein synthesis in the presence of no carbs.

It kind of builds off of the last one but what’s interesting is it finds that even when ketone bodies aren’t really present we’re still able to create just as much muscle in the absence of carbohydrates as we are in the presence of carbohydrates.

This study was also published in the Journal of applied physiology.

This study took test subjects for a period of six weeks and they gave them either a high carbohydrate diet or a low carbohydrate diet.

Well what they found is at the end of six weeks of resistance training both groups had the same level of protein synthesis.

Now one wasn’t necessarily a ketogenic diet, it was just low carb.

So this proves that even when beta-hydroxybutyrate (the ketone body) is not present we are still able to produce just as much muscle without the presence of carbohydrates as we are with the presence of carbohydrates.

I think we just get confused because carbohydrates make our muscles feel a little bit more full and sometimes give us a little bit more temporary strength which leads me to the next thing I want to talk about something known as the creatine phosphate system.

When we workout we have three different energy systems:

• The creatine phosphate system which gives us energy from the start to around the first three or four reps or maybe when you’re first starting out a sprint.
• Then we have the anaerobic system which utilizes carbohydrates (that’s the system that gives you energy from around 5-15 reps.
• Finally we have the aerobic system which is like your endurance work.

Well when you’re on a ketogenic diet you don’t have a whole lot of range in that middle group because you don’t have carbohydrates but you still have a lot of power with that first system the creatine phosphate system.

So your body actually has the ability to still utilize brute force to get those maximum heavy power lifts which will trigger muscle hypertrophy, it’ll trigger muscle growth.

Since we know that protein synthesis is still high when you’re in ketosis you can still have the stimuli by training heavy and still know that protein synthesis is going to occur to actually allow those muscle fibers to recover to thereby build muscle.

Now I would like to give you the big study that I am super excited to share with you that takes a look at the ketogenic diet versus the standard Western diet as it pertains to burning fat while building muscle at the same time.

Study #4

The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition took a look at 26 test subjects.

What they wanted to find here was the effects of the ketogenic diet versus a standard American Western diet on the effects of overall muscle and fat loss. Here’s what they did.

They gave one group a traditional ketogenic style diet consisting of 75% fat, 5% carbs and 20% protein.

The other group had 55% carbohydrates, 20%protein and 25% fat.

They studied them for 11 weeks and guess what they found at the end of 11 weeks?

Results

The low-carb ketogenic high-fat group ended up building 2.1 kilograms more muscle than the other group, not in total but 2.1 kilograms more than the other group.

However get this, they also burned 2.2 kilograms more fat than the other group.

So at the end of the study they built more muscle than the Western carbohydrate diet and they simultaneously burned more fat than the carbohydrate diet proving that you can build muscle and burn fat on the ketogenic diet!

So there you have it. Science doesn’t lie and we’ve got multiple studies that showed ketogenic diet won’t cause you to waste away.

What’s Next?

While the standard ketogenic diet is a very low carb/high fat diet, there are different forms of keto that may work better for you!

One of them is called, “TKD” or “Targeted Keto Diet.” Targeted Keto is great for beginners if you want to experiment with it before graduating to the standard ketogenic diet

Or… if you just miss carbs once in a while and want to gradually put them back in WITHOUT gaining the weight back.

References:

1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC303494/

2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22835211

3) https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/136/2/533S/4664398

4) https://ketogains.com/2016/01/protein…

5) https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/japplphysiol.00837.2015