Does Building Muscle Burn Fat?

The argument for building muscle to lose fat seems to be a straightforward one.

For each and every pound of muscle you build, your metabolism will increase by between 50 and one hundred calories per day.

As a result, building only a few pounds of lean muscle is going to burn off as many calories as jogging 25 miles each week.

All while you’re sleeping, seated at the desk or resting on the couch.

Or is it? I’m not so sure that building muscle to lose fat is a very good idea…

The first problem is that muscle doesn’t burn 50-100 calories per pound.

In actual fact, research indicates that the resting metabolism of muscle is quite a bit less than the majority think – close to six calories for every pound.

I should also mention that fat is more than simply useless tissue. It releases proteins such as leptin and cytokines, which can alter your rate of metabolism. Fat has a rate of metabolism close to two calories per pound.

If you were to drop a few pounds of fat and replace it with the same amount of muscle, your resting metabolic rate would rise by less than 10 calories per day. That’s insufficient to have any sort of meaningful impact on weight loss.

The approximations of the resting metabolic rate of muscle I’ve just presented do make one particular assumption – a constant rate of protein turnover.

However, strength training will increase protein turnover (which describes a rise in the rate of protein synthesis and breakdown) inside the hours and days after exercise.

In other words, although the rate of metabolism of muscle tissue at rest isn’t as much as a lot of people believe, the metabolic rate of muscle tissue when it’s recovering means that people who have much more muscular mass are likely to use up more calories inside the post-training period.

Another dilemma is that you’d need to gain a large amount of muscle mass to have a significant impact on your rate of metabolism.

To expend an additional ten thousand calories on a monthly basis – enough to shed just about three pounds of fat – you’d have to gain more than 50 pounds of muscle mass.

That’s much more than the average joe is going to put on throughout their training life span.

Basically, the very idea of building muscle to lose fat is a flawed one.

However that doesn’t mean that resistance training is unnecessary if you’re wanting to shed weight. Far from it. Lifting weights will almost certainly improve your body composition in a couple of significant ways.

First of all, lifting weights uses up calories (and fat). Not only during your workout, but – given you work out intensely – after it’s done too.

Second, in the event you don’t do some kind of weight training while you’re dieting, a lot of the weight you drop can come from muscle mass in addition to fat.

It’s also worth stating that the quantity of weight you lose will always be much less significant than exactly where that lost weight originates from. If you drop ten pounds of body fat while putting on three pounds of muscle mass, your weight on the weighing scales will still only have dropped by seven pounds. Yet you’ll appear thirteen pounds different.

Precisely what type of weight training should you be performing?

A good resistance training program ought to be based on squats, deadlifts, rows, chin-ups (or pulldowns) and presses using heavy(ish) weights and low (5-8) reps. Use whatever resistance is available – dumbbells, kettlebells, fixed resistance machines, or perhaps your own bodyweight – to get the job done.