Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I build Evolo. Evolo is science-back strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evolo now for two weeks free if you visit evolofitness.com. Welcome to the Dr. Shannon Show, body recomposition capsule. There's so much fitness advice out there, and quite frankly, much of it isn't true. So in this 10 episode series, we're covering all the science-based tools for body recomposition. You may have heard me cover many of these topics before, and some things will be brand new. I wanted to create one organized capsule of information that will give you all the important concepts for improving your body composition, because we know improving your body composition isn't just external. It has incredible benefits for your health, energy, mood, and longevity. I'm your host, Shannon Richie. Welcome to the show. Welcome to episode two in our body recomposition season. So in episode one, I talked about why I love body recomposition as a goal. You can't be extreme with your nutrition or cardio, and you have to prioritize muscle. I wanted to do this episode about the timeline of change early on because it really helps set expectations. Building muscle and losing fat at the same time does take time. And understanding what benchmarks to look for, even if you're not seeing massive physical changes, can be super helpful. So in this episode, we'll talk about how long this process takes. I'll talk about expected fat loss and muscle gain, and I'll also speak to my personal experience of how long it took me the two previous times that I've done this. So let's first talk about the rate of fat loss that is to be expected. If you are in a small calorie deficit, which we will dive more into in the nutrition episode, you can expect about 0.5 to one pound of fat loss per week, sometimes maybe a little bit more and sometimes less or none at all. I don't recommend being super obsessive with the scale and tracking fat loss because it will fluctuate day by day. As far as muscle growth goes, that does take a little bit longer, typically about eight to 12 weeks to notice substantial changes in muscle growth. So let's go over kind of the changes to expect month by month in greater detail. So month one, when you're starting this, this is when you first implement the strategies for body recomposition as far as training, nutrition, cardio and recovery. You'll see maybe two to four pounds of fat loss over that month, maybe a little less, maybe a little bit more, and potentially some muscle swelling, which just looks like bigger muscles. But swelling is often predictive of muscle growth. So if you are noticing some swelling, it doesn't happen to some people, it happens more for some and less for others. But if you are noticing some swelling, that's often predictive of muscle growth. So it means that you're on the right track. You will also feel sore, especially in the first couple of weeks, but we don't want you to feel so sore that it like hurts to go down the stairs or hurts to stand up. If that happens, don't panic, because that still happens to me sometimes, but we don't want to try to get that sore because we have to be in this for the long haul. So if you're so sore that you can't work out for three days, you're missing giving your muscles enough consistent stimulus to grow. Even if you do the workout while super sore, your performance will decline and your overall stimulus is weaker. So don't panic if you get sore or if you don't get sore. Again, I still sometimes feel like I had a great workout and then I'm not sore at all the next day. And other times I again, I feel like I had a great workout and I'm super sore the next day. So we just don't want to put too much stock into soreness because it's pretty unpredictable. So in month two, this is when most people start to give up. So it's really important to understand what to expect so that when you're not seeing huge changes, you know to stay the course. So in month two, what's really cool is you'll start to see your strength increase. You will start to see strength increases before you see visible muscle mass differences. And this is because neuromuscular strength comes quicker than hypertrophy, but it's often that hypertrophy is right around the corner. So don't stop lifting or don't give up or don't think that you need to change course in month two. This is the month that you just keep going. You'll notice in this month that you can lift a little bit heavier and I want you to focus on that. So if you're noticing that, hey, I don't think I'm getting any stronger than I did after month one, maybe that means you need to train a little bit closer to failure, something that we'll talk about in the next episode. You'll also notice that you feel more comfortable and stable in exercises and they just feel more smooth and comfortable in your body. In month two, you may notice that your motivation is a little lower and it can truly be one of the hardest months to push through because not only have you not yet codified the habit of strength training and nutrition, but you likely haven't seen a ton of physical change in your body because muscle growth often isn't very visible until month three. At this point, you may have lost a little bit of fat, a few pounds, maybe four to eight pounds, maybe a little more, a little less if you've been consistently applying the nutrition principles. So the muscle that you do have may be more visible, but you likely haven't gained significant amounts of new muscle mass yet. This is a time to really stick with the basics, make it through this month, because if you do, things really start to change and you start to see visible changes around month three. So in month three, I love this month because this is when you're starting to get into a groove. I love the idea of make it to March if you're starting this process in January because typically by month three, that's when strength training and nutrition becomes more automatic and it's when you start to see visible muscle growth. If you're not starting to see changes by this month, it could mean that you need to tweak something. So maybe you train closer to failure, maybe you eat higher protein, or maybe you check in with your recovery. These are all things that we'll talk about in the episodes upcoming. The biggest mistake I see is that we think we're training close to failure, but we're actually stopping five, six, seven, eight, or more reps shy of failure. So if you're not seeing growth by this point, try pushing a little closer to failure, especially in the simple lifts like a bicep curl. We are going over this in greater detail tomorrow and I'll really teach you how to know if you're training to failure or close to failure. So make sure you come back for that episode. So truly those first three months are the hardest to get through. And then by month four and on, you're starting to see progress. It's starting to get fun to build muscle. You're starting to really feel good and starting to see the visible changes. So month four and beyond is when steady progress occurs and it's 100% normal to have plateaus or even regressions in this process. You'll start to learn what works from a training schedule, nutrition habits, et cetera. So how much muscle could you expect to gain in a year? I talk about this a bit in the volume and frequency episode on day four, but if you're doing eval-o in training with a moderate volume, which is about five to nine-ish sets per muscle group per week, you could expect around five to 10 pounds of muscle growth after one year of applying this information. Of course, how much muscle you start with, your genetics and your overall body size will have a huge impact on how much muscle mass you build, but that's a very realistic goal for the year. By the end of the year, you will have accumulated so much data and information about what works for you and what doesn't. You will stop yo-yoing and you'll have the tools that you can carry with you for the rest of your life. So in this episode, I talk about my personal experience and timeline, not that you need to compare, but just so that you have an anecdote to kind of turn to. So I am now doing this for the third time. I did it once before my first pregnancy, that was in 2022. I did it once between my pregnancy. So after I had lived and before I got pregnant with Jack, and that was only seven months in between, and now I'm doing it after my second pregnancy. I've been in the fitness industry for 15 years, and I have done every workout under the sun. I've taught every workout under the sun. And it really wasn't until I started applying this information that you're learning in this season that I was able to body recomposition, but it was a journey. So the first time I did this, I would say that it was really two years in the making. Like it took me two total years for body recomposition. And here's why. Before I started Evelo, I did what most people were doing to get toned. I would do lightweight workouts, lots of cardio. I was lifting, but I likely wasn't lifting very close to failure. And I was addicted to using my fitness watch to make sure I was burning enough calories. And using my fitness watch to track calories burned was just not effective for so many reasons. Number one, it framed exercise as punishment and that I needed to earn a meal or burn off a meal. And number two, fitness watches are just very inaccurate. So it just wasn't good for either my mental health or my results. It just pinned exercise as punishment. When I finally got off the hamster wheel of more exercise and less food, my chronic pain went away. I also started fueling more, so eating more and probably eating better, but I wasn't training close enough to failure. And because I was eating more, I was in a calorie surplus with my food, so I did gain weight. But that was about a year. And I needed to go through that to let my body heal from the years of overuse and under-eating. And once my body felt better and I learned the science of body recomposition, I was finally able to be successful and not only be successful over that year, but really maintain a lot of the strength training nutrition habits that I implemented for the first time. It was so much less of a yo-yo behavior and it was really sustainable for me. But I think it truly took backing off, healing both physically and mentally, and then focusing on muscle growth and some fat loss at the same time in 2022. So after I felt better and I was in a groove, I decided to set the goal of building five pounds of muscle over the year. This was that 2022 year. And over that year, I gained almost eight pounds of muscle and lost about five pounds of fat. I actually didn't have a fat loss goal at that time. I was mostly focused on muscle. So I started tracking my food for the first time and I was just trying to eat at my maintenance calories. And I ended up losing fat, even on my maintenance calories. Likely what was happening is that my maintenance calories were not actually my maintenance calories because if you're losing mass, your calories in are lower than your calories out, right? That's just basic thermodynamics. So likely I had calculated my maintenance calories using a total daily energy expenditure calculator and they were actually lower than what my maintenance calories actually were. So likely I was eating in a small deficit. So during that year, I lost most of that fat, maybe about four pounds-ish of fat over like three months. And muscle growth happened slower for me, but more linearly. So throughout that year, I built a few pounds of muscle in the first half of the year, then kind of plateaued mid-year and then built a few more in the second half of the year. So that was the first time I body recompositioned and that was a lot of learning, experimenting, trying to find what worked and that took me two years. I don't think it needs to take you two years because hopefully you're learning from me and learning what to do in this season. So hopefully it won't take you that long, but if it does, that's okay too. The second time I did this was after I had lived, so my first pregnancy. I started focusing on body recomp about five to six months after she was born. And over the span of about three to four months, I lost about eight pounds of fat and gained about four pounds of muscle. And then I got pregnant again and had to stop tracking my muscle gain at that time. But during those few months where I was body recomping, I saw muscle come back much quicker than the very first time I body recomped in 2022. And this is a well-known phenomenon that I talk about all the time because I think it's so cool. We think that muscle is easier to build after you've lost it because the tissue keeps their myonucleia or the brain of the muscle. So even after you lose muscle, it comes back quicker when you stimulate it again. So the very first time you build muscle is the hardest time, which is just such good news because it means it's such a high quality investment. So now I'm at a point where I will be five months postpartum when this episode comes out. And I've actually retained more lean mass in this postpartum experience than I did with live. I did a post on my social media about why I think that happened. But to summarize, I think the biggest difference was in how I recovered postpartum. I just did not rest enough after I had my first baby and that influenced my pelvic floor recovery, which kept me from lifting heavy enough to build muscle after she was born. So it took me just a little bit longer to get back into training close to failure and also just the big lifestyle change of having a baby. So now I'm at a point where I have been able to recover faster after I had Jack and I'm working on building five pounds of muscle over the next year. So over 2026 and if I'm able to do that, that will be the most lean mass I've ever had. I highly recommend that you give yourself a full year for this process because it means you're not in a rush, you're not going to do crash diets or crazy workouts where you're working out twice a day and grinding your body into the ground. I highly, highly recommend taking your time and applying things that you're going to be able to sustain. So just to summarize the timeline of what to expect. Fat loss can happen pretty much immediately if you're applying the correct nutrition principles, but we don't want fat loss to happen too rapidly because that often means your calorie deficit is too big and you may be losing muscle alongside fat, but expecting maybe 0.5 to one pound of fat loss per week, sometimes less, is absolutely normal. As far as muscle growth, you'll notice some swelling in the first month that tends to go away and then you'll notice true gains after about eight to 12 weeks. So by month three, if you're applying things correctly, body recomposition will start to be noticeable. I recommend committing to it for at least a year to see how much muscle you can build over that year span. Okay, that's it for tomorrow's episode. We are talking about the most important aspect of body recomposition right next to nutrition and that's training to failure. Make sure to listen to the episode, even if you've been in our world for a while because I'm giving you lots of tips and education that will help make this even more efficient and effective for you. We'll see you tomorrow.
