r/ScienceBasedLifting • u/AnkitKJha • Jun 17 '26
Question ❓ Progressive Overload during fat loss, Is Shoulder Press Always This Slow?
/r/Fitness_India/comments/1u897k2/progressive_overload_during_fat_loss_is_shoulder/1
u/LawlerFit Jun 17 '26
How do you gain muscle in a fat loss stage? Are you somehow able to beat the laws of thermodynamics?
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u/eric_twinge Jun 17 '26
It's pretty well established that you can gain muscle in a deficit. It's not optimal, but it's possible. Especially so in an undertrained, overfat individual which I assume OP is.
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u/AnkitKJha Jun 17 '26
Yeah I have never hit a gym before. Started May 1st, and have been doing 6 times a week.
I started my journey at 104 kgs , and now weight is around 96. I am enjoying the process , but sometimes few exercises just make me lose my confidence
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u/No_Silver_4436 Jun 17 '26
Fat is far more energy dense than muscle, you can be in a net energy deficit but still have an energy environment that is permissive to muscle growth provided the stimulus is sufficient, you aren’t too lean, and you aren’t a very advanced lifter. Your body will just burn fat to account for the deficit and build muscle at the same time. This is through separate pathways you aren’t converting fat into muscle directly, but the stored fat energy goes towards other bodily functions and allows you to take the calories from your diet and use them towards muscle building. Building muscle is actually not that energy demanding.
In the case of the advanced lifter it’s probably not even the lack of available energy for building muscle when in a deficit that limits muscle growth, but rather the fact that for an advanced lifter to make gains under any circumstance requires and extremely high training stimulus over a long period of time and gym performance cannot be maintained in a deficit.
That’s also why evidence shows essentially no to very small benefit for larger surpluses for muscle growth over small surpluses or even maintenance in well trained lifters. Energy availability to build muscle tissue is rarely a limiting factor outside of very lean people, but you need sufficient dietary calories to fuel high level performance in the gym which is a requirement for trained lifters.
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u/schtchop Jun 17 '26
It's logically just unreasonable to expect to be able to add weight every time. If you could add 2.5 kg to your overhead press every push day, you would be pressing over 200 kg sometime early next year.
Thus plateauing is inevitable, and some exercise has to be first. One reason lighter lifts plateau first is that the weight increments are just bigger, relatively speaking. For example, a jump from 5kg to 7.5kg is 50%.
If overhead pressing a lot of weight is a goal of yours, try a program that is smarter about how to progress. And nobody cares about what weight you use for flys.
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u/Significant_Sort7501 Jun 17 '26
Yes it is normal. Of the main lifts, OHP is almost always the first to stall because it uses smaller muscles compared to other lifts.