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Which is why a lot of the approaches advocated for ‘gaining muscle while losing fat’ aren’t very effective.  In fact, I’d tend to argue that most people’s attempts to achieve the above results in them simply spinning their wheels, making no progress towards either goal.  Because invariably they set up a situation where neither training nor diet is optimized for either fat loss or muscle gain.  Calories are too high for fat loss and too low to support muscle gains and outside of that one overfat beginner situation, the physiology simply isn’t going to readily allow what they want to happen to happen.

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But none of those approaches generate a muscle gain to equal the fat loss, at best they generate a small muscle gain in the face of a much larger fat loss (e.g. someone might lose a lot of fat while gaining a pound or two of muscle or what have you).  But for the non-beginner/non-returning from a layoff trainee that’s about the best you’re going to get.  Potential rates of muscle gain are never going to approach the potential rate of fat loss once folks are past the beginner stage.  Even in the beginner stage, it’s generally always easier to lose fat much faster than you can gain muscle.

So the idea of replacing every pound of lost fat with exactly one pound of muscle will be essentially impossible for the intermediate/advanced trainee.  There’s simply not enough fat/the fat cells dont want to ‘give up their calories’ and the ability to stimulate rapid muscle gains isn’t there any more.

The level of aggressiveness of the method of surplus or deficit depends on the individual’s goals & current status. Some folks don’t necessarily care about not getting significanty fatter while bulking, but a good portion of my clientele wants to (or in some cases, like actors & models) need to look good all year round. Thus the alternation of looking somewhat chubby while bulking before leaning down really isn’t an option. On the other hand, I think that people in general think I’m opposed to putting on any fat at all while bulking, or they think I’m not into the idea of separate cutting or bulking cycles, which isn’t true. With some clients, I choose a very specific & aggressive focus. For example, I’m building a plan for a natural BBing champ that’s specifically geared toward off-season gains. After that phase is done, it’s cutting time. With others, it’s more of the culking/recomp scenario involving less agressive surpluses or deficits. Not everyone gets the same treatment, because everyone is at a different place in their development, and people’s goals/objectives differ. One thing I want to get clear is that I’m not opposed to traditional cutting & bulking alternation, it’s actually best for some, and I do go that route with certain client cases that it’s well suited for. And I don’t disagree that the culking effect happens to a more pronounced degree in beginners with more fat to lose & more muscle to gain.