You can't do everything, where would you put it?

I read quite often -- in one form or another -- that you can't build muscle and burn fat at the same time.  I'm not completely sure that's true:  there have been some studies which have found those two things happening simultaneously, even if most of them are done on novice lifters.  And now and then you get a person -- often someone endorsing a product -- who claims to have discovered the magic muscle-gaining, fat-losing grail at last.

One hundred-percent impossible or not, I think the basic idea remains sound:  it's hard to burn fat quickly and build muscle quickly at the same time.  It's best to focus on one of those goals at once. 

Just don't do one thing for four years--getting enormous and fat--and the other for two, eating nothing but bean curd and whittling yourself away to a stick.  As I've written here before, the lion's share of fitness information comes to us via bodybuilding, but unless your idea of a good time is basting yourself like a turkey and flexing in front of a crowd in a thong-th-thong-thong-thong (and there's nothing wrong with that...I know a few people who have done it and it takes serious guts, literally), well, you don't want to follow that advice.

Besides, most people want to look good and feel good as much of the time as they can.  They don't WANT to look bloated for half the year, feeling like they couldn't slam another chicken breast down their gullets if their lives depended on it, and gaunt and starving for the other half. 

So to my mind the Holy Grail of Fitness IS a system that effects a good amount of fat loss--or perhaps, more accurately, control of fat--and, simultaneously, good gains in strength and muscle mass.  Compromise.  True, you're not going to get HUGE and, depending on how you eat, you're probably not going to get SHREDDED, but you're going to look and feel good. 

Then, come the time when you want to look bigger--if you're a guy; few women ever want to look bigger--or leaner, or get your tennis game really on point for the big tourney, or do a sprint-triathlon, or whatever your shorter-term fitness goal is--you can do it, and you're never too far out of shape to get there.

One can extrapolate this concept