Let’s get something straight right off the bat: As much as might think you can, you can’t flex fat. You can do all kinds of other things to it—gain it, lose it, jiggle it, inject it, get it sucked out, tan it, pierce it, tattoo it—but no matter how many mirrors you stand in front of or filters you slap on, fat doesn’t striate. It doesn’t separate. You can’t contract it, and no veins pop out of it. It just sits there and obliterates everything worth looking at—from a bodybuilding perspective, of course.
That being the case, the goal of any competitor in the body sports (“bodybuilding” hereafter) is to build/maintain as much muscle as possible while burning away as much fat as possible. Since we all know—or should know by now—that fat mass and muscle mass take up much different volumes. Muscle is denser than fat and therefor takes up less space.
Fat, by comparison, is not as dense and takes up much more volume. Therefore, if you’re getting ready for a bodybuilding competition—with the goal to come in shredded, i.e., extremely low body fat—and because fat is more voluminous than muscle, losing it would reduce, not only your body weight, but also your size—losing fat means you’re getting lighter and smaller. Yet, people keep thinking they’re losing muscle during prep.
“I’m getting smaller,” they cry. “I must be losing muscle!”
No, bro. You’re losing fat—the problem you’re having with it is that all the fat you gained in the off season isn’t deposited under your skin. Some of that fat is in the muscle—like a well-marbled steak. Simply put, you’re not as big as you thought you were. (Nobody was.)
Here’s how it works: Fat gets stored in two main places—subcutaneous (under the skin) and intramuscular (inside the muscle). Now, think prime rib. That giant lump of white stuff between the cap and the eye? That’s fat. That’s the stuff that’s marbled throughout every single muscle on your bones. It makes you look bigger because it’s taking up space in the muscle—like nature’s synthol. That being the case, go back to the prime rib—cut out that glob of chub and push the steak back together. It’s smaller isn’t it? But did you lose any muscle?
When your body starts burning fat—through diet, training, drugs, or any combination thereof—it doesn’t focus on one spot like like everyone wishes it would (so long as you could specify where). It’s a systemic burn. That means it pulls fat from everywhere simultaneously. Subcutaneous, intramuscular, visceral—it all gets dumped into the bloodstream and oxidized. You can’t target one over the other. And you sure as hell can’t keep the stuff that made your arms look like they belonged in a Marvel movie while only ditching the chub around your low back.
Are You Really Losing Muscle?
The best metric to know if you’re losing muscle? Strength. This is especially important for the first time competitor. If you’re still strong, you’re good. If you’re lifting close to what you were when calories were in a surplus, you’re not melting away. You’re just getting peeled—which is what you want.
Will you feel weaker in a calorie deficit? Yes. Will you be flat, depleted, and foggy? Sometimes. But that’s part of the grind. It doesn’t mean you’re shrinking. It means you’re finally seeing your bodybuilder’s body for the first time.
What freaks out most people is that as the fat leaves, the scale drops, the fullness dips, and the panic sets in. “I’m smaller!” Yes—but in the best way possible. Smaller and harder isn’t worse. Bigger and softer is worse. Watery is worse. Dry and hard makes size largely irrelevant.
The Storage Game
So when does fat storage actually happen? As soon as your intake exceeds your need.
There’s one caveat, though: much has been made of what’s known as “the optimal window of assimilation.” This occurs about 1–2 hours after a hard workout, when your body preferentially oxidizes fat and carbs for recovery. Some say you can utilize up to half your daily caloric allotment during that window more effectively than spreading it out over the day.
But watch out for those cheat meals! A cheat meal is an opportunity to give into a craving, not hurt yourself—one of my clients once proudly told me his cheat meal was a large double-meat pizza, three orders of tacos (nine tacos total), and a dozen wings.
That’s not a cheat meal—that’s a cry for help.
Such reckless excess spills into fat storage and drags tons of water with it, faster than your last progress pic hits Instagram. It will take you days to recover, assuming you went right back to the grind.
Think about it: If you train your ass off, eat precisely to the gram to recover, and stay just under your tipping point, your body will use food to build and repair. Go over that line, and it stores the extra. Every time. The body only uses what it needs. And you can’t force it to use more than that—well, you can, to some degree, but, let’s just say, it’s not for everyone.
The tragedy? Most people are walking around 30 to 40 pounds over stage weight thinking they’re jacked. And they are—if you want to count the marbling. Getting peeled is the only way to know what you’re working with. Each contest prep after that gets easier because you know the truth going in. And that knowledge can seriously reduce the psychological torture of prep.
The Hard Truth
Bodybuilding isn’t just about building. It’s about separating, shaping, detailing… revealing—showcasing what you built. And that means coming to terms with several genetic factors that rear their head during prep—especially the first one, where you finally pull back the curtain and see what’s underneath.
One of the many harsh realities you’ll face? The “muscle” you thought you built might’ve been mostly manteca.
But you never know until you go low.
One of the biggest obstacles to next-level conditioning for first-time competitors is the abject fear of shrinking. They spent months walking around with their lats flared, wearing three hoodies, and becoming Golden Corral’s worst nightmare—all in the name of “getting huge.” And now they have to cash in most of it?
Yeah, that’s a tough one. Especially for someone already mentally irregular enough to want to be a bodybuilder in the first place.
Don’t fear getting smaller—fear being soft. Condition will always trump size—especially from the back. Don’t chase fullness at the cost of definition. And for the love of all that is holy, stop calling fat “size.”
Because if you don’t, one day you may face the mirror, the stage, or the photographer’s glass, Flexing a blob you tried to pass off as lean mass. Everyone knows real muscle mounds up and striates when you flex it, like a 22-inch Olympian gun. Fat, my friends, flexes none.
