Is it possible to get ripped in a day...Technically the longer you work out the more fat you burn and the more muscle mass you develop. Therefore if you were to workout for an entire day would it work?

Answer 1

The short answer is no, it is not possible to get ripped in a day, no matter how quickly you think you can burn fat or how much muscle you think you'll gain in a day. There are several reasons for this, which will be explained in detail.

The process of burning fat is not a speedy one. In order to burn fat, you must use more calories than you consume. Your body does this by converting body fat into a fuel usable for energy. There is a limit to how quickly your body can do this, and it's not fast. For this reason, it is possible for an overweight person to die of starvation, despite having an apparently-abundant energy source built-in.

It is extremely unsafe for most people to lose more than one pound of fat in a single day; the recommended schedule for most overweight people is one pound per week. Anything much more than this is considered a "crash diet", and will likely disrupt your metabolism and other necessary bodily functions.

The process of building muscle is not a speedy one. In order to build muscle, you must exercise your muscles in order to develop a physiological need for muscle growth. The process of muscle building (in overly-simplistic terms) is that exercise wears down your muscles, creating a need for them to rest, repair, and rejuvenate. The restoration process uses water, protein, and other substances to rebuild the muscle into one that is just slightly bigger and stronger. The process of repeating this regularly over a long time is what causes people to be muscular.

There is a practical limit to the amount of exercise, especially Weightlifting, that is beneficial in any given time period. Too much exercise can result in overtraining, a condition where the damage to your muscles is greater than the expected benefits. Overtraining also makes you more vulnerable to injury, such as tearing a muscle or tendon, getting stress fractures in bones, and exaggerated muscle stiffness and soreness for a longer time. When you get into overtraining, your muscles will be trying to restore themselves to the healthy state they were in before the damage, rather than trying to be bigger and stronger to meet the physical demands placed on them.

Finally, the day is simply not long enough, even if the dangers of extreme caloric deficit and overtraining are not considered. Besides the fact that the human body is not capable of performing the required changes in that short of time, it is not reasonable to expect that one day of exercise will burn enough calories or produce enough muscular duress to make a visible difference.

Consider that most people who go to their gym regularly (not body builders or professional athletes, just regular people) will exercise for about an hour per day, three days per week. In most cases (depending on the type of exercise and the person's genetic makeup), results aren't realized for at least 12 to 24 weeks. Even at the conservative edge of the scale, that's 36 hours (1 hour times 3 days times 12 weeks = 36 total hours) of exercise just to achieve modest results. On Earth, a day only has 24 hours.

The only circumstance that would make the premise of this question plausible (able to get ripped in one day) is if you are already a pro athlete in great physical condition, but carrying just enough water weight to soften the appearance of muscles enough so that you don't consider yourself "ripped", and you do what boxers and bodybuilders call "cutting weight".

Cutting weight is a process of strategic extreme dehydration brought on by use of exercise and heat to induce sweat and use of natural and chemical diuretics to flush out systemic fluid. This can be very dangerous except under the supervision of a trained physician or sports trainer. Please do not do this. Even so, this will not address issues of carrying too much fat or not enough muscle in order to be "ripped".