Muscle mass before or after body lift?

Thank you for your question regarding muscle mass and timing in relation to your body lift. Achieving your desired weight and muscle mass before surgery is typically the best approach for optimal results. If you build muscle mass before your body lift, your surgeon will have a better understanding of your body’s natural contours and can tailor the surgery to enhance your existing muscle tone. This will allow for more precise skin tightening and contouring, leading to better overall aesthetics.

On the other hand, if you lean out as much as possible before surgery and plan to build muscle afterward, your results might be impacted. As you gain muscle mass post-surgery, the skin may stretch slightly, which could alter the final appearance of your lift.

See our Youtube video below of our patient's journey and how he continued to workout after his body lift.

Ultimately, the best results are often achieved when you’re at your goal weight and muscle mass prior to surgery. This gives your surgeon the clearest picture of your final shape and ensures that the surgery is tailored to your body’s needs.

I hope this helps guide your decision on when to focus on building muscle.

Sincerely,
Dr. Katzen

Hello VLopez.You should be as close as possible to your ideal weight and muscle mass before the surgery. You should also have your doctor check some blood work which can tell you about how well off your body is in terms of nutrition.Best wishes, Dr. ALDO

As a general rule we discuss BMI which is a measure of your weight relative to the body's surface area. Most providers will be more concerned about the amount of fat present when deciding on surgery.Muscle mass is a different issue. Hopefully when dieting you are maintaining and paying attention to your muscle mass. This will have an important impact on how well and how quickly you recover.Ideally you would be at your goal weight and be in good shape at the time of your contouring surgery. However, building muscle after surgery can only improve the way you look.Good luck and I hope this was helpful

Weight management and control of an elevated BMI (body mass index) before surgery is important to lower surgical risk and optimize the ability to remove maximal skin. Muscle mass is not going to impact the skin looseness or fat removal process significantly, so the timing of building of muscle mass is not as critical as the ability of the patient to MAINTAIN body weight. We usually recommend you plateau your weight  at some manageable number that subsequently can be maintained within +/- 5lbs after your surgery so that you are not crash dieting for surgery nor having surgery at an unsafely elevated BMI. Muscle building is good for surgical patients as protein intake is critical for wound healing/collagen development.

Thank you for your question.
On patients interested on building muscle ands having more definition . I do recommend on them to stay in their goal weight and start building muscle, but the surgery will be better if you're in the midway of building this muscle, because after the surgery will be more easy to define the areas of concern.
Hope this helps .

For most patients, I recommend being as close as possible to your goal weight and with a healthy amount of muscle mass at the time of surgery.  Bulking up to body-builder proportions before surgery would limit the amount of skin that can be removed.  However, healing from this operation is very demanding on the metabolism, particularly for protein.  Patients often lose muscle mass during healing because it is just not possible to eat enough protein to keep up with the body's increased needs.  It is important to start with enough protein reserves in your muscle mass, since lack of protein (malnutrition) can cause delayed healing of the incisions.