As I typed it, I figured shadow could use this as well, so here is the post I did in my journal:
If you are eating in a hypercaloric state, meaning above maintenance, this means you have excess energy. If things are set up properly, this excess energy can be utilized to facilitate muscle growth. The key to remember is, you need this excess energy. While dieting you don't have it. Rather, you have a diminished pool of energy.
In the hypercaloric state, you can afford to train intensely across the various rep ranges, which all btw, serve a specific function. Pure strength training (1-2) reps serves to facilitate CNS efficiency and improve motor unit recruitment and rate coding which simply means, you get stronger without hypertrophy (muscle growth). Than there is intensive training (4-6 reps) which serves to stimulate hypertrophy of the contractile components of your muscle. This is where you actually experience hypertrophy of your muscle fibers, giving you the solid look. Then there is extensive training (8-15 reps) which facilitates hypertrophy of the other components of the muscle (non-contractile components) such as sacroplasm, glycogen, etc.
You can break this down even further, but you get the idea. You can lift really heavy shit and get strong due to neural adaptations. You can lift mildly heavy shit and get strong and make your muscle grow. And you can lift relatively light shit and still trigger some growth, but this is minute.
While energy intake is high, I believe all of these forms of training serve an important function, and should be utilized.
While in a caloric deficit though, you need to be very wise with your choices. Remember, you are running on a low tank of fuel. Would you drive 30 miles out of the way if your "low fuel" light was on in your car? Probably not.
Same goes for training. The idea is to get in the gym, train briefly and efficiently using heavy weights. Reason being: You are not going to be building any new muscle due to the lack of calories. So weight lifting serves the function of muscle maintenance. The only thing you need to use if for is to ward off catabolism (muscle breakdown). By training heavy and efficiently, you send all the right biochemical signals to aid in muscle maintenance. If you were to go beyond this, and train like you were for anabolism (hypertrophy) without the right amount of fuel to aid this process, you would be doing more harm than good.
Lengthy, but I was due for an informational post. Follow me?