Let’s face it: the journey to achieving health and fitness goals can be long and difficult.

While many people want to be the fittest, strongest, and healthiest versions of themselves, dramatic body composition changes rarely happen immediately, which can be discouraging. It can also be confusing and overwhelming, especially if you’re used to focusing on weight-only goals. 

In this article, we’ll outline seven of the most common mistakes that can get in the way of your quest to improve your body composition, plus how to avoid them.

Why Body Composition Goals Are Important

Body weight is one of the most basic metrics we use to judge our fitness. It’s also the most popular metric, perhaps because it’s so easy to track — and, unfortunately, obsess over!

However, if you’re looking for how to change body composition effectively, you should consider making body composition goals in addition (or even instead of) weight management goals. This is sometimes referred to as body recomposition. 

Unlike traditional weight loss, your body composition takes into account several factors that contribute to your total body weight, such as your muscle mass, body fat mass, and percent body fat.

Making body composition goals, rather than losing weight alone, means building or maintaining lean muscle mass, which has been linked to protection from diseases like cancer — and even a longer lifespan! 

Furthermore, paying attention to your body composition can also help you to better understand your overall health and health risks.

For example, making body composition goals instead of weight goals can prevent the “metabolically obese” scenario, when you’re technically a healthy weight but still have more body fat than is optimal for your health. 

7 Ways to Improve Your Body Composition

1. Optimize Your Diet

Many people think that the best way to accomplish a fitness goal is to exercise and hit the gym. While exercise is crucial—especially for increasing muscle mass—your diet plays an equally important role in achieving body composition improvement.

To successfully achieve body composition change, your body needs adequate nutrition so that your muscles can recover, repair and, ultimately, grow.

While exercise burns calories and promotes fat loss, poor dietary choices can easily cancel out progress. Without the right balance of nutrients, it becomes much harder to optimize ways to improve body composition effectively.

A 2012 study on post-menopausal women highlights the impact of diet and exercise:

• Exercise alone led to an average 2.4% weight loss.

• Diet alone resulted in an average 8.5% weight loss.

Diet + exercise together produced a 10.8% weight loss over 12 months, with significant improvements in body composition change, including lower body fat percentage and waist circumference

2. Focus on Nutrient Quality, Not Just Calories

On a related note, if you’re trying to change your body composition, it’s important to take a holistic look at your diet and consider factors beyond just the number of calories you eat every day.

If you’re coming from a mindset where you’ve only ever focused on weight loss, you might be familiar with the old mantra: calories in versus calories out. While this principle holds true—consuming excess calories leads to fat storage, and a calorie deficit promotes fat loss—body composition change involves more than just weight management.

When it comes to body recomposition, it’s also essential to focus on your diet quality so that your body has all of the building blocks it needs. Eating a high-protein diet while in a calorie deficit can lead to better diet quality and reduced loss of lean body mass, helping you to tackle multiple body recomposition goals at once. 

But other macronutrients also play a vital role:

• Protein – Essential for building and preserving muscle, preventing muscle loss in a calorie deficit, and supporting recovery.

• Healthy Fats – Provide long-lasting energy, support hormone function, and help with nutrient absorption.

• Complex Carbohydrates – Fuel workouts, aid in muscle recovery, and prevent energy crashes.

3. Follow a Structured Workout Plan for Muscle Growth

Achieving body composition improvement generally involves building muscle in addition to losing fat, which means that you need to have a workout plan that adequately addresses both targets. In many cases, this means implementing a combination of various workouts into your day. 

Cardio workouts, such as running or cycling, are great for increasing calorie expenditure and supporting fat loss. However, cardio alone isn’t enough to build significant muscle mass. To build and maintain muscle, resistance training is essential.

Muscle growth happens when your muscles experience repeated stress from heavy resistance exercises. These workouts create small tears in the muscle fibers, which then rebuild stronger with adequate nutrition—particularly protein.

This phenomenon was highlighted in a randomized trial called STRRIDE AT/RT, which was designed to compare the effects of aerobic training alone, resistance training alone, and a combination of the two:

The researchers found that aerobic training was the best for losing weight, but that resistance training was necessary to increase lean mass in its participants. 

4. Track Your Body Composition Progress in Multiple Ways

Traditional body weight scales are the most common tool that people use to keep track of their fitness. However, when it comes to body composition, a traditional scale can’t tell you much about the progress you’re making. 

Muscle tissue weighs more than fat tissue but is much more compact in size. So, if you’re gaining muscle and losing weight, your weight may not change (or it may even go up), even if you’re actually getting closer to your body composition goals. 

Instead of tracking your health journey using your weight, it’s recommended that you use other means of determining your progress, in order to get a fuller picture of how your body is changing. Here are a few ideas:

• Measure your hip, waist, thigh, chest, and arm circumferences. These metrics can give you a better idea of how effective your training is than your weight alone.

• Discover your body fat and muscle mass percentages by getting your body composition tested regularly, via a BIA scale or DEXA scan.

• Track your daily steps and approximate calories burned with a wearable fitness tracker. Knowing how much you’re moving around may inspire you to get more active!

5. Set Specific and Achievable Goals

Most people attempting to improve their body composition have long-term goals that they are working toward. However, focusing solely on those big-picture goals can make you feel like you’ll never reach your target.

Instead of setting major goals that might take months or years to complete, some researchers have found that it can be more helpful to set smaller goals more frequently.

For example, if you’re struggling with your motivation, try setting incremental milestones (i.e., losing one percent of your body fat over a month versus trying to lose five percent of your body fat total). 

Smaller goals may help you to stay on target more easily and establish a realistic fitness roadmap. Plus, hitting those smaller goals can provide you with bursts of inspiration that ultimately cause you to meet your major goals over time!

6. Prioritize Sleep and Recovery

Because your diet and exercise are two of the biggest factors that determine your body composition, it probably comes as no surprise that people with body composition goals tend to focus on what they eat and how often they work out.

However, it’s also important to keep other aspects of your lifestyle in mind, like the amount of rest and sleep that you allow yourself. 

Sleep is an extremely important component of your health, and it can play a big role in your body composition. For example, your sleep habits influence the hormones that control your metabolism and appetite.

In fact, sleep is such an important factor for your body composition that researchers have found that sleep disruption can negatively influence your body composition progress, even if you’re losing weight at the same time.  

In a similar vein, it’s crucial to know when it’s time to let yourself rest. Allowing yourself a couple of days off per week from your workout routine is crucial to avoiding overtraining, which can actually set your progress back. 

7. Stay Consistent

Finally, there is nothing more important for reaching your goals (and maintaining your progress) than staying consistent! 

We’re often sold the idea that we can make huge amounts of progress within weeks of starting a new exercise routine or diet plan. However, the truth is that accomplishing a fitness goal usually takes months or even years to accomplish in a healthy manner. 

Rapid progress can actually be really bad for your body composition, because it can indicate that you’re losing muscle mass in addition to body fat, which is contradictory to most body composition goals. 

So, when it comes to improving your body composition, it’s key to understand that fitness is not a short-term goal. You’ll need to stay consistent for long periods of time if you want to make any meaningful progress. 

Even when you don’t see huge changes right away, staying on track will eventually get you to where you need to be — without compromising your health in the process. 

How Long Does It Take to Improve Body Composition?

The timeline for body composition improvement varies based on factors like diet, exercise, genetics, and consistency. Unlike quick weight-loss programs, changing body composition is a gradual process that focuses on reducing fat while building or maintaining muscle.General Timeline for Body Composition Change:

• Short-Term (4-6 weeks): Initial changes such as improved muscle definition, slight fat loss, and better energy levels.

• Mid-Term (3-6 months): Noticeable body composition change, including muscle growth, reduced body fat, and increased strength.

• Long-Term (6-12 months+): Significant improvements in body composition, leading to a leaner, more defined physique with lasting health benefits.

Key Factors That Influence the Timeline:

• Exercise Routine: Strength training and resistance exercises speed up muscle growth, while a mix of cardio and weight training optimizes ways to improve body composition.

• Diet & Nutrition: Adequate protein intake, balanced macronutrients, and a calorie-controlled diet are essential for sustainable body composition change.

• Rest & Recovery: Proper sleep and rest days prevent muscle loss and enhance fat metabolism.

• Consistency & Patience: Staying committed to healthy habits ensures long-term success in improving body composition.

Conclusion 

When you set a body recomposition goal, what it really means is that you’re making a commitment to eating well, exercising right, and tracking your progress for long-term success.Accomplishing your goal starts with understanding the main tenets of gaining muscle and losing fat, as well as avoiding these common mistakes along the way. Over time, your efforts will pay off!